SWARTHMORE, Pa., Oct. 28, 2005 - Like all wars fought in the last half century, the war in Iraq began in ambivalence and is likely to end that way, says Robin Wagner-Pacifici, author of The Art of Surrender, a new book on the history of military surrender. "Violent conflicts don't end with surrenders anymore," says the Swarthmore College sociologist and terrorism expert. "They end in ways that are often ambiguous, jagged and incomplete." Add terrorism to the equation, she adds, and conventional forms of conflict resolution cease to make sense.

An expert on society's response to violent events and terrorism, Wagner-Pacifici is the author of previous books including Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action, about the clashes at Waco and Ruby Ridge, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs. MOVE and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama, about the Italian terrorist group, the Red Brigades.

Wagner-Pacifici notes that most people still talk of military victory and defeat in terms that date to World War II, which she calls the last great surrender. "Surrenders were never a clean end and almost always had suggestions of revenge built in, but they operated with an illusion of clarity and completeness that allowed the parties involved to move on to the next step, to recognize that the former historical period was finished," she says. "Now we're in a period where we don't even have the illusion of clarity. That leaves us in a real dilemma."

In an article she wrote for an upcoming issue of Contexts magazine, Wagner-Pacifici examines the reaction to an advertisement used in John Kerry's presidential campaign, which called the Iraq war a "quagmire" and showed a soldier raising his gun above his head as he sinks into quicksand. Representing the Veterans for Bush, former Senator Bob Dole attacked the ad, calling it "unpatriotic" to show an American soldier "surrendering."

Wagner-Pacifici believes such conclusions come from an outdated view of war and surrender. "The weapons used now are not the kind you walk out of a siege carrying. They include atomic bombs and airplanes flying into buildings," she says. "But we still have these ideas about the humiliation of surrender, the shame and degradation, and Dole was voicing the reflex reaction to that."

Bush's famous line that the U.S. will "never accept anything less than total victory" in Iraq is similarly obsolete, Wagner-Pacifici points out, because the terrorists are not clearly part of recognized political states and are thus doubly difficult to locate and disarm.

In order to figure a way out of the "quagmire" of contemporary warfare, Wagner-Pacifici concludes, we must first understand the nature of the quagmire. The emergence of international terrorism has weakened the historical forms of war. "When you undermine the expectations of war, including the rules of engagement, you end up with uncertainty on both sides," she says. "How do you fight a Ôwar on terrorism'Ñwhich is itself a war on the conventions of fighting wars?"

Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college whose mission combines academic rigor with social responsibility. Swarthmore, with an enrollment of 1,450, is consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.

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