Us, Them, and the War on Terror: Reassessing George W. Bush's Rhetorical Legacy (original) (raw)

War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy

At the root of Americans’ collective willingness to so readily fall for the Bush Administration’s propaganda is an overwhelming sense of fear and fatalism stemming from the 9-11 attacks and the government’s successful efforts to inject into the American psyche the threat of random terror. Fear is like a drug; its effect is the production of docile bodies. Terrorized by their government, Americans have stood by passively while the Bush regime expands the police state at home, through such mechanisms as the Patriot Acts, and invaded and occupied two countries. The president and his troops have exploited every opportunity to justify their policy goals on the basis of 9-11. Americans have done little to resist them.

The Clash of Civilizations Rhetoric in George W. Bush's Speeches

The present dissertation demonstrates how the utilization of language is always manipulated to convey the purposes of the speaker in order to have an effect on the listener. Politicians, in particular, comprehend the power of words to explicate and justify acts, as well as to persuade people to support them, even if this support implies a risk to their lives. Based on this understanding, I have analyzed the speeches and declarations of former President of the United States, George W. Bush, starting from September 11, 2001 leading up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, with special emphasis on the way he makes use of metaphors. The aim of the analysis is to reveal the real and essential motivation for Bush’s thinking and actions. Samuel P. Huntington’s idea of The Clash of Civilizations (1993) seems likely to be his foremost (hidden) motivation. Furthermore, I suggest that Orientalism is the most significant ideology standing behind Bush-Cheney’s War on Terror rhetoric. To prove these, I have devoted a considerable attention to metaphors and cognitive metaphor theory based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), metaphor criticism as presented by Lakoff (1991-2003) and Jonathan Charteris-Black (2005-2011). Metaphors are powerful rhetoric strategies as they “tap into shared cultural knowledge and beliefs.” Moreover, they are a very efficient means of presenting acts and actions in a manner that engages the audience and wins its sympathy, as they allow the speaker “to align himself with right and good, and the enemy with wrong and evil.” With the help of metaphors George W. Bush has succeeded in presenting the events preceding the Iraqi war in a vague and often distorted value terms where ‘assaults’ become ‘preemptive defense’, ‘military invasion’ becomes ‘change of regime’, ‘war’ becomes ‘peace,’ and ‘occupation’ becomes ‘humanitarian intervention’.

"WE VS. THEY" AND THE POLARIZING STRATEGY IN BUSH'S WEST POINT SPEECH (JUNE 1, 2002): THE SECURITIZATION OF IRAQI REGIME

This article investigates the manipulation of the pronouns "we" and "they" by President Bush in his West Point speech of June 1, 2002. The US president mobilized these pronominal choices to buttress US claims about Iraqi threat and to legitimize US preventive war against Saddam Hussein's regime whose repercussions culminated in the relinquishment of just war rules. The article focuses on disclosing the ideological implications of these choices through the lens of Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. It more specifically elucidates how President Bush harnessed these personal pronouns to rearticulate and co-construct the US identity as being the incarnation of absolute good in contradistinction with the identity of the other (Iraqi regime in this context) which was depicted as being synonymous of absolute evil.

The War on Terror: The Neo-American Manifest Destiny

Indonesian Journal of Counter Terrorism and National Security

Significant literature has concluded that Islamic-terrorist activity in the Middle East and in Europe had increased drastically since the beginning of the implementation of the Bush Doctrine in 2001 after 9/11, with the rise of ISIS. However, little is known about the causal mechanism that links between the Post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the rise of new terrorist organizations, particularly the Islamic State in Iraq. Hence, the focus of this study is to process trace such mechanism. It will also explain why the War on Terror has produced totally opposite results from those it was originally intended for. Finally, this study is a within-case analysis that might be a microscopic observation of the imperial American behavior in the Middle East. This study relies on explaining outcome process-tracing methodology, and employing oral and historical accounts, archives and statistical data. I argue that the War on Terror, precisely the period of the Bush’s presidency (2001-2009), to be t...

A critical discourse analysis of George W. Bush's 'War on Terror' speech : The rhetoric of (counter)terrorism and the logic of Islamophobia

In this article, I dissect an excerpt from George W. Bush's address to a joint session of Congress and the American people wherein the former President of the United States (POTUS) uttered the (catch)phrase the 'war on terror' (WOT). To accomplish this dissection, I apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) together with Lacanian psychoanalysis among other critical tools. My aim here is to deconstruct/recode the WOT discourse in the hope of opening up possibilities for alternative, and more constructive, counter-discourses on the social problem of 'terrorism' that afford multiple subject positions beyond the (counter)terrorism binary. As an Orientalist ideology, the WOT indexes the larger archive of Amer-ican exceptionalism and can be traced back to the rise of the neo-conservative movement in the 1980s. This analysis is particularly relevant in the context of the current political climate in the United States, where the WOT rhetoric continues to normalise the logic of Islamophobia.

The Language of War: George W. Bush's Discursive Practices in Securitizing the "Western Value System" in the War on Terror

The phrase, 'western values', is a broad one which includes matters such as democracy, freedom, libertarian values (both economic and political) and free speech. The American version of freedom is ambiguous and far from self-evident or straightforward. What is particular about President George W. Bush's rhetoric during the 'War on Terror' is that it has a strong religious element. This paper will examine his securitising speech acts as a means of promoting 'western values'. In order to assess these discursive practices and expose the role of religious rhetoric in securitising the latter, I shall follow the approach of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies.

War legitimation discourse: Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in four US presidential addresses

Discourse & Society, 2011

This article presents an intertextual analysis of legitimation in four ‘call-to-arms’ speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush. Drawing on Thibault’s (1991) account of critical intertextual analysis, I identify key legitimation strategies and thematic formations that underlie the rhetoric of both speakers. In addition, I (re)situate the speeches in their wider social and historical context to demonstrate how both presidents manipulated the public. In the analysis, I first examine how both speakers use polarizing lexical resources to constitute ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ as superordinate thematic categories that covertly legitimate war. Next, I analyze how representations of the past and future also function to legitimate violence across the four speeches. Finally, I examine how both presidents demarcate group membership to discredit opponents of war at home, and legitimate violence against non-aggressors abroad. I conclude that, in spite of popular mythology, Bush is not an aberran...