Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

2004

Slavoj Žižek

We al know what the Hitchcockian “MacGuffin” is: the empty pretext which just serves to set the story in motion, but has no value in itself; in order to illustrate it, Hitchcock often quoted the following story. 

Two gentlemen meet on a train, and one is truck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, ‘What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?’ The other man replies, ‘That is a MacGuffin.’ ‘What is a MacGuffin?’ asks the first man. The second says, ‘A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.’ Naturally the first man says, ‘But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.’ ‘Well,’ says the second, ‘then that’s not a MacGuffin, is it?’

Do not the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit the profile of the MacGuffin perfectly? (Incidentally, one of the most famous Hitchcockian MacGuffins is a potential weapon of mass destruction – the bottles with “radioactive diamonds” in Notorious!) Are they not also an elusive entity, never empirically specified? When, a couple of years ago, the UN inspectors were searching for them in Iraq, they were expected to be hidden in the most disparate and improbable places, from the desert (a rather logical location) to the (slightly irrational) cellars of the presidential palaces (so that, when the palace was bombed, they would poison Saddam and his entire entourage?), allegedly present in large quantities, yet, as if by magic, manually moved around all the time y teams of workers. The more these weapons were destroyed, the more omnipresent and omnipotent their menace seemed, as if the destruction of the greater part of them supernaturally augmented the destructive power of the remainder. As such, by definition, they can never be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous … Now that none have been found, we have reached the last line of the MacGuffin story: ‘ “Well,” said President Bush in Septmber 2003, ‘ “then that’s not a MacGuffin, is it?”‘