| Sumario: | As its title indicates, this essay undertakes to conceptualize and to critique attackability—the legitimating logic yet also the underlying weakness of pre-emptive warfare. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have tended to script an inevitability of imperial attack in terms of the putative enemy's incapacity (whether because of enmity, or vulnerability) to avoid being attacked. Yet to the extent that the term “attack” bears within it a sense of attachment, this understanding of warfare involves not just a means of laying claim or seizing control or obliterating, but also an interminable failure to let go, a corrosive compulsion to hold on. The argument investigates the significance of such debilitating dynamics with reference to two films that address, in strikingly different ways, the first US-Iraq war: Sam Mendes's Jarhead (2005) and Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness (1992).
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