The Rhetoric of War: Words, Conflict and Categorization Post-9/11 (original) (raw)
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Two major wars have been fought by the United States military since the attacks of 9/11. 1 This article will argue that the major justifications of these actions offered by the administration are based on appeals to both the national interest and, more importantly, a claim about the moral purpose of the nation-of one particular nation: a claim of national morality congruent with, but more significant than, traditional US exceptionalism. The article is divided into three parts. The first examines the justifications made by President Bush for the war in Afghanistan, and the second, his justifications for the Iraq War; the third discusses the implications for the international system of the nature of both sets of justifications. I will argue that they represent a significant shift in presidential discourse since 1990 towards the attempted establishment of a hierarchy based on a particular moral and security doctrine about the role of the United States in world politics. Of course, President Bush had to justify the interventions made in Afghanistan and Iraq to both domestic and international audiences, pointing to values or norms in order to secure legitimacy for the actions undertaken. Justifications for war often take one of two forms. They may point to accepted norms or values held by the audience; or they may be the means by which a political elite seeks to enhance and/or devalue certain norms or values in the eyes of its intended audience. Justifications do not exist in a vacuum and must relate to existing values-in this case, both those held in the United States and those held internationally. As Lawrence Freedman argues, 'Justifications for war habitually draw on normative arguments, on expectations about how governments should behave towards their own people, and on how human beings and states should behave towards each other.' 2 While motivation for any discourse is important (but very problematic to establish), it is the nature of the public statements that is important for this article. Before it can be asked what the motivation is for a particular justificatory discourse, or whether a discourse is restrained by norms already accepted in international * My thanks to input from members of the Chatham House workshop from which this special issue emerged for comments on earlier drafts. 1 This article draws on two of the four chapters of my PhD dissertation, 'Justifications for, and the practice of, war: continuity or change in US military intervention 1990-2003? An English School analysis of the use of force in international relations',
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