Western coalition

The Western coalition is the military alliance opposing Iraq in the war that had broken out by 6 February 1991. In the narrator’s account, it appears through the language used to present the conflict and through the disasters she fears may follow, making the alliance part of a public crisis against which private uncertainty is measured.

War and its public description

After she resumes writing in February 1991, the narrator notes that the conflict expected between Iraq and the Western coalition has begun. She reports that propagandists describe it as a “clean” war, then sets that phrase against the scale of the bombing: according to that evening’s edition of Le Monde, Iraq had received “more bombs than the whole of Germany during the Second World War”. The disparity between the reassuring label and the reported destruction exposes the political language surrounding the alliance’s war as a contested account, not a neutral description.

Anticipated consequences

The narrator waits anxiously for disasters that have been forecast but have not yet happened. Among them is a land offensive led by the “Allies,” a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein, and a possible bombing at the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris. The alliance is thus present both as a military actor and as the anticipated agent of an escalation: the feared land offensive sits alongside threats of chemical warfare and an attack far from the battlefield.

The narrator’s perspective

Reports from Baghdad intensify the uncertainty. Eyewitnesses are said to have seen children stumbling through the streets like drunkards, deafened by explosions, while the narrator can only wait for the truth about what may come next. She recognizes in this waiting the anxiety and frustrated desire to know that she had felt while living through her passion, but draws a firm distinction between them: war leaves no room for fantasy or imagination. The Western coalition’s presence therefore belongs to a political reality she cannot imaginatively control, rather than to the private uncertainty that had once sustained her desire.