Indecent Exposure

Thirty-five years ago, the United States led a coalition of forty-two countries, including Canada, in Operation Desert Storm, the relatively short campaign to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Although I was in elementary school at the time, I vividly remember the months-long buildup of military equipment and personnel before it, along with those illuminated skies over Baghdad when the aerial bombing finally began on January 17.

It would have been shortly after the first bombs fell that my brother and I got our hands on a complete set of Topps Desert Storm trading cards — all eighty-eight of them, featuring the likes of George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, and “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf. There were also EA‑6B Prowlers, CH‑53 Super Stallions, F‑14 Tomcats, and Bradley tanks. The cards came in packs of nine and sold for fifty cents. Of course, we got the clear plastic box to hold them. Weeks later, Topps issued a second set, the Victory Series, which it described as “an encyclopedic record of the Allied Coalition deployment in the Persian Gulf.” I’m sure we picked up some of those at the supermarket as well.

Each card’s verso contained facts and figures about its equipment or military leader. The AH‑64 Apache helicopter, for example, was described as “an indispensable ally,” while Saddam Hussein was the “dictatorial Iraqi President” whose invasion of oil-rich Kuwait “backfired.” Enthusiasts clamoured after the cards, and other companies, including Pro Set, jumped on the bandwagon. “Desert Storm Is Hot,” read one headline about the craze.

A spokesperson for Topps maintained that the cards were meant as “an educational tool, especially for children,” and that much of the information included was provided directly by the Pentagon. (The Associated Press couldn’t help but point out some of the redundant phrasing, such as “wheeled truck” and “gun armaments.”) Our own set would have had limited educational value, as we quickly tired of the conflict and returned to swapping Bo Jackson and Ozzie Smith baseball cards. But a decade later, the U.S. Department of Defense adapted the idea and issued “most wanted” playing cards during its 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hussein featured on the ace of spades; his son Qusay landed on the ace of clubs. I remember seeing the decks for sale at book shops around campus, but I refused to spend money on a war effort I didn’t support.

There’s no need for printed ephemera these days, not when the president of the United States and his secretary of defence have artificial intelligence and social media at their disposal. And gone is any instructional pretense. Now questionable if not blatantly illegal American military operations are celebrated with juvenile jokes. Take Pete Hegseth’s depiction of Franklin the Turtle, the beloved Canadian cartoon character, firing a bazooka at presumed drug smugglers from what appears to be a UH‑1 Iroquois.

Ahead of the recent holiday shopping season, Hegseth encouraged his 1.8 million followers to consider the made‑up Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists picture book for all their gift-giving needs. Two days later, sitting next to Donald Trump in a cabinet meeting at the White House, he suggested he simply hadn’t had the time to oversee a second strike on a small boat that had already been destroyed in international waters on his orders. “As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do,” he said with condescension. Getting back to his iPhone must be high on the list.

When it comes to propaganda, I ask myself, are trading cards and memes different in kind or degree? Setting aside issues of copyright, of which there are many, is Hegseth simply following in the footsteps of the former defence secretary Dick Cheney, whose Pentagon helped to glamorize the first Gulf War for kids like me?

At thirty-five, those trading cards have not increased in value as some collectors surely hoped. Complete sets sell for $15 or less on eBay — including ones in mint condition. Nor have their depictions of Stratofortresses and Patriot missiles aged well symbolically, even if that 1991 campaign was justified in a way the current one against civilians simply isn’t. Like Hegseth’s tweet, there’s something gross about what was marketed to kids back then.

There is a notable difference in kind, however. With Desert Storm and the War on Terror that followed years later, the White House generally attempted to project a sense of sombre dignity when discussing military actions, whether officials were being honest about those actions or not. As we know, serious actors have vanished from the administration’s top ranks, replaced by a clique of puerile toadies who consistently appear to relish the suffering of others even more than they relish the victories they seek. Unfortunately, children everywhere are paying attention — as they always do.