193 9 • THE CANINE-RESCUE NARRATIVE, CIVILIAN CASUALTIES, AND THE LONG GULF WAR Purnima Bose In recent years, a new genre of memoirs of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq has emerged that foregrounds a sofer side of military intervention, which takes as its primary subject mater a soldier’s strong atachment to a stray dog and the challenges of bringing this canine companion safely back to the United States. Sporting such titles as From Baghdad, With Love: A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava and its sequel From Baghdad to America: Life afer War for a Marine and His Rescued Dog, as well as Welcome Home, Mama and Boris: How a Sister’s Love Saved a Fallen Soldier’s Beloved Dogs, these memoirs represent a variant of the rescue narratives that have provided popular ideological justifca- tions for the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. 1 In this essay, my focus is on the Iraq War. Consisting of a muddled assortment of explanations, the rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq included the false claim by the George W. Bush administration that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the erroneous assumption among some Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the atacks of September 11, 2001, and the perception that Iraqis required sav- ing from their president. Tis last rationale resulted in the widespread sense in the United States that Iraqis would welcome U.S. military intervention in their internal afairs and the toppling of their leader in a version of what we might call the Iraqi civilian-rescue narrative. To this ideological justifcation, we can add the canine-rescue narra- tive, a narrative that renders dogs as highly visible tropes for objects of U.S. In/visible War : The Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America, edited by Jon Simons, and John Louis Lucaites, Rutgers University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/iub-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4789869. Created from iub-ebooks on 2019-01-23 17:49:45. Copyright © 2017. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved.