War rhetorics: The national security strategy of the United States and president Bush's globalization-through-benevolent-empire

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 105, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 175-205

  Hartnett, Stephen John ^a   Stengrim, Laura Ann ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950483386     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-105-1-175     Document Type: Review

References (141)

1. President Bush, "State of the Union Address," January 29, 2002, available from the White House; David Brooks, "The Cult of Death," New York Times, September 7, 2004.
2. The National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington: The White House, September 2002), available from the White House (www.whitehouse.gov), hereafter cited in the text as NSSUS;
3. on the Bush administration's WMD propaganda, see Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, " 'The Whole Operation of Deception': A Reconstruction and Critique of President Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction Rhetoric," Cultural Studies and Critical Methodologies 4.2 (May 2004): 152-97.
4. For the "mushroom cloud" speech, see President Bush, "President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat," Cincinnati Museum Center, October 7, 2002;
5. House Joint Resolution 114, dated October 2, 2002 (the president signed the bill into law on October 16, 2002);
6. "President Bush to Send Iraq Resolution to Congress Today," September 19, 2002; on Rice's support during this process, see "Dr. Condoleezza Rice Discusses President's National Security Strategy," October 1, 2002 - all texts noted here are available from the White House.
7. For critiques of the NSSUS, see Carl Kaysen, John Steinbruner, and Martin Malin, "U.S. National Security Policy: In Search of Balance," in War with Iraq: Costs, Consequence, and Alternatives, ed. Carl Kaysen et al. (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002);
8. Foreign Policy in Focus Advisory Committee, "Our Fateful Choice: Global Leader or Global Cop," originally signed on December 11, 2002.
9. President George Bush, "Statement by the President," September 11, 2001, emphasis added.
10. For critiques of the war on terror, see Robert Hariman, "Speaking of Evil," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.3 (Fall 2003): 511-18;
11. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 159-93;
12. Douglas Kellner, From 9/11 to Terror War (New York: Rowman and Little-field, 2003);
13. Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (New York: Olive Branch, 2003);
14. and Lewis Lapham, Theater of War (New York: New Press, 2002).
15. Richard Norton-Taylor, "This Marks the Death of Deterrence," Guardian, October 9, 2002;
16. no author, "Vigilante-Orchestrated War a Dangerous Precedent," (India) Statesman, October 8, 2002, downloaded from LexisNexis;
17. Jay Bookman, "Bush's Real Goal in Iraq: The Global Cop's Beat," (Alberta) Edmonton Journal, October 6, 2002;
18. multiauthor forum, "Is the U.S. a Threat to World Peace?" Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 22, 2002, downloaded from LexisNexis;
19. and see the blistering editorial by Allison Hall, no title, The (Montreal) Gazette, September 25, 2002.
20. President George Bush, "President Bush to Send Iraq Resolution to Congress Today," September 19, 2002.
21. Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, and John Cavanagh, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced? How the Bush Administration Influences Allies in Its War on Iraq (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2003), 3 on Bulgaria, 4 on Guinea and Cameroon;
22. and see William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, "Buying a Coalition," The Nation, March 17, 2003, 4-5;
23. Paul Richter, "Bulgaria, Romania Pin Hopes on U.S.," Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2003;
24. and Bob Herbert, "With Ears and Eyes Closed," New York Times, March 17, 2003.
25. The Central American states feared that a recession in the United States due to the Iraq war would have dire implications on their economies, hence making membership in CAFTA even more important; see Nfer Muoz, "Central America: Experts, Citizens Fear Economic Fallout of Iraq War," CorpWatch, March 21, 2003;
26. Mark Engler, The Trouble with CAFTA (Washington: Foreign Policy in Focus, 2004);
27. and Elizabeth Becker, "Costa Rica to Be 5th Country in New Trade Pact with U.S.," New York Times, January 25, 2004.
28. See Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, John Cavanagh, and Erik Leaver, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced? Part II (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 2003), 3;
29. and Phyllis Bennis and the IPS Task Force, A Failed Transition: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 2004), 13;
30. Colombia's surprise is recounted in Dan Balz and Mike Allen, "U.S. Names 30 Countries Supporting War Effort," Washington Post, March 19, 2003;
31. for lists of coalition troop deployments see Felicity Barringer, "U.S. Is Struggling to Make New Iraq Resolution Matter," New York Times, September 20, 2003
32. State Department report summarized in Anderson, Bennis, Cavanagh, and Leaver, Coalition of the Willing, Part II, 2;
33. on the dubious political systems of many of the coalition members see Erik Leaver and Sara Johnson, "A Coalition of Weakness," downloaded from the Asia Times (www.atimes.com) on April 18, 2003;
34. for a complete list of coalition members and their respective payoffs see Sarah Boyer, "Meet the Coalition!" The (Champaign-Urbana, IL) Public-i (May 2003): 6-7, www.publici.ucimc.org (accessed June 3, 2005).
35. No author, "A Strategy of Hubris," Boston Globe, October 6, 2002;
36. and see Robert Wright, "Contradictions of a Superpower," New York Times, September 29, 2002.
37. Rice, "Dr. Condoleezza Rice Discusses President's National Security Strategy," October 1, 2002;
38. for comments along these same lines, see James Der Derian, "Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," boundary 2 30.3 (2003): 21.
39. This thesis is elucidated in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage, 1987), 302-40;
40. for concise definitions of key terms, including balance of power, see Tom Barry, The U.S. Power Complex: What's New, Special Report #20 (Washington: Foreign Policy in Focus, 2002).
41. Lapham, Theater of War, 32;
42. for recent examples of scholarship that addresses the relationship between presidential rhetoric and deep religious traditions see John M. Murphy, '"Our Mission and Our Moment': George W. Bush and September nth," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.4 (2003): 607-32;
43. John Angus Campbell, "Evil as the Allure of Perfection," and James McDaniel, "Figures of Evil: A Triad of Rhetorical Strategies for Theo Politics," both in Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.3 (Fall 2003): 523-30, 539-50;
44. and Denise Bostdorff, "George W. Bush's Post-September n Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (November 2003): 293-319.
45. President George Bush, "Remarks on Arrival at the White House and an Exchange with Reporters," September 16, 2001;
46. for glowing responses to the president's "Islam Is Peace" speech, see: no author, "Wartime Rhetoric," New York Times, September 19, 2001, which praised the president's "high eloquence,"
47. and Dana Milbank and Emily Wax, "Bush Visits Mosque to Forestall Hate Crimes," Washington Post, September 18, 2001;
48. for a more sober analysis see Peter Waldman, "Some Muslims Fear War on Terrorism Is Really a War on Them," Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2001.
49. Hywel Williams, "Crusade Is A Dirty Word," Guardian, September 18, 2001;
50. all other quotations from Peter Ford, "Europe Cringes at Bush 'Crusade'Against Terrorists," Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2001;
51. and see Rahul Mahajan, The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), 16-19.
52. President George Bush, "President's Remarks at National Day of Prayer and Remembrance," September 14, 2001.
53. On the deep cultural resonance of the religious arguments explored here, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978);
54. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
55. and Peter Yoonsuk Paik, "Smart Bombs, Serial Killings, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism," Postmodern Culture 14.1 (2003);
56. for a blistering attack on how the president's religious rhetoric masks deceit, see Jack Beatty, "The Faith-Based Presidency," Atlantic On-line, March 25, 2004, www.theatlantic.com;
57. for an insider's account of this process, see Ron Suskind, "What Makes Bush's Presidency So Radical - Even for Some Republicans - Is His Preternatural, Faith-Infused Certainty in Uncertain Times," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, 44-51, 64, 102, 106;
58. the speeches referred to here are collected in The President and the Public: Rhetoric and National Leadership, ed. Craig Allen Smith and Kathy B. Smith (New York: University Press of America, 1985), 269-82; we should note that each of these speeches poses its own rhetorical problems and failures - we point here, then, not so much to successful speeches as simply to deliberative political speeches that eschew the religious moves employed by President Bush.
59. President George Bush, "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended," May 1, 2003, available from the White House; the "Top Gun" moment was so overwhelming a propaganda stunt that even the president's usual critics missed the speech's religious overtones
60. see John Prados, "Open Ending," May 2, 2003
61. posted at TomPaine.commonsense, and Julian Borger and Oliver Burkman, "Bush Makes Carrier Landing for TV Address," Guardian, May 2, 2003; Isaiah 17:14 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed.).
62. "Born again" statistics from Melani McAlister, "An Empire of Their Own: How Born Again Christians Turned Biblical Prophecy into Big-Time Profit," The Nation, September 22, 2003, 31;
63. James Arnt Aune, "The Argument from Evil in the Rhetoric of Reaction," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.3 (Fall 2003): 521;
64. Howard Fineman, "Bush and God," Newsweek, March 10, 2003, 2, 6, and 2 of the printout available on LexisNexis;
65. John Sutherland, "Be Rapture Ready! The End Times Are Nigh!" London Review of Books, June 5, 2003, 33;
66. see Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2000), 57-83;
67. on Michael Gerson, the evangelical Episcopalian widely believed to have written the president's speeches, see Mike Allen, "For Bush's Speechwriter, Job Grows Beyond Words," Washington Post, October 11, 2002.
68. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002), 40, and see his comments on neocolonialism on 41, 44-45, 51, and 72.
69. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 20, 30, emphasis added.
70. MedAct, Continuing Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq (London: MedAct, 2003), www.medact.org (accessed June 3, 2005), quotation from 7;
71. Trade and Foreign Investment Opportunities in Iraq, created by the Coalition Provisional Authority, www.cpa-iraq.org/economy/investment-roadshow. pdf (accessed June 3, 2005).
72. Ann Simons, "Free Expression Has Costs," Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2004;
73. and see David Reiff, "The Shiite Surge," New York Times, February 1, 2004;
74. for analyses of the significance of McDonald's to the questions addressed here, see George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (London: Sage, 2000)
75. and Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together - And What This Means for Democracy (New York: Times Books, 1995).
76. Quotation from Ewen MacAskill, "Marines Accuse Baghdad Museum of Hampering Hunt of Treasures," Guardian, May 5, 2003;
77. Eleanor Robson, "The Collection Lies in Ruins, Objects from a Long, Rich Past in Smithereens," The Observer, April 13, 2003
78. which Robson refuted in "Iraq Museums: What Really Happened," Guardian, June 18, 2003;
79. "[B]ollocks" from David Aaronovitch, "Lost from the Baghdad Museum: Truth," Guardian, June 9, 2003;
80. and see Jennie Matthew, "Baghdad Museum Too Afraid to Reopen," Middle East On-line, February 5, 2004, available from Occupation Watch, www.occupationwatch.org;
81. Barry Beir, "Most Iraqi Treasures Are Said to Be Kept Safe," New York Times, May 6, 2003;
82. Alan Riding, "Loss Estimates Are Cut on Iraqi Artifacts," New York Times, May 1. 2003;
83. Philip Shenon, "U.S. Says It Has Recovered Hundreds of Artifacts and Thousands of Manuscripts in Iraq," New York Times, May 8, 2003;
84. and Yaroslav Trofimov and Farnaz Fassihi, "In This Library's Tale, Seeds of Mistrust and Hope in Iraq," Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2003.
85. For tales of destruction in archeological and architectural sites beyond Baghdad and throughout the 1990s, see Ed Vuillamy, "U.S. Troops Vandalize Ancient City of Ur," The Observer, May 18, 2003;
86. Andrew Lawler, "Mayhem in Mesopotamia," Science, August 1, 2003, 582-88;
87. Polly Curtis, "Priceless Artifacts Still Missing in Iraq," Guardian, April 13, 2004;
88. Edmund Andrews, "Iraqi Looters Tearing Up Archeological Sites," New York Times, May 23, 2003;
89. and Martin Gottlieb, "Looters Swarm over Remote Sites, Study Finds," New York Times, June 12, 2003.
90. The 1956 UN law and the September 2003 UNESCO statement are both archived online by those agencies; U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 2009 (Washington: GPO, 2003);
91. see also UNESCO, Iraq - Heritage in Danger, March 13, 2003, www.portal.unesco.org;
92. INTERPOL, Cultural Property: Stolen Iraqi Art (n.d.), www.interpol.org (accessed June 3, 2005);
93. Joanne Mariner, "Looting Antiquity: The Legal Implications for the Pentagon," posted to Counterpunch, April 17, 2003.
94. UN Resolution 1483 is available from the UN; and see Martin Gottleib, "Campaign Starts to Help Iraq Rebuild Cultural Institutions," New York Times, April 30, 2003.
95. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 24, 31;
96. for additional studies of the importance of culture in an age of globalization and empire, seeTyler Cowen, Creative Destruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
97. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 89-135;
98. and David Held, "Cosmopolitanism: Ideas, Realities and Deficits," in Governing Globalization: Power, Authority, and Global Governance, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2002), 305-24;
99. for reports on the cultural situation in occupied Iraq, see Neil MacFarquar, "Humiliation and Rage Stalk the Arab World," New York Times, April 13, 2003;
100. Max Rodenbeck, "Bohemia in Baghdad," New York Review of Books, July 3, 2003, 20-23;
101. Jo Wilding, "The Unbelievable Sadness in This Place," Guardian, March 30, 2003;
102. and Christian Parenti, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New York: New Press, 2004).
103. On the history of such claims, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003);
104. for a rhetorical history of the trope of free markets, see James Arnt Aune, Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness (New York: Guilford, 2001).
105. President George Bush, "President Proposes $5 Billion Plan to Help Developing Nations," March 14, 2002;
106. and for more of the president's thoughts on globalizing free markets, see "President Outlines U.S. Plan to Help World's Poor," March 22, 2002 (a speech given at the Cintermex Convention Center, Monterrey, Mexico) ;
107. for his thoughts on corruption see "President Bush Taking Action to Strengthen America's Economy," January 7, 2003 (a speech given in Chicago).
108. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 83;
109. Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 245;
110. on the crisis of U.S. poverty see David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Knopf, 2004).
111. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 130;
112. see the White House's claims regarding the Millennium Challenge Account at its homepage, under the heading "Helping Developing Nations"; and see Christopher Marquis, "Overhaul by U.S. Will Reroute Aid for Poor Nations," New York Times, February 22, 2004;
113. see also United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2002 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30;
114. for an example of how U.S. foreign policy and financial clout actually enforce corruption, see Peter Waldman, "Washington's Tilt to Business Stirs a Backlash in Indonesia," Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2004.
115. For two classic exposés of the military-industrial complex see Richard Kaufman, The War Profiteers (New York: Anchor, 1972)
116. and Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New York: Viking, 1977);
117. on the U.S. military's standing as the world's most egregious polluter see William Thomas, Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment (Philadelphia: New Society, 1995);
118. on its damaging effects on the areas surrounding U.S. bases see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)
119. and Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 34-64;
120. for an overview see Bryan Taylor and Stephen Hartnett, "National Security and All That It Implies: Communication and (Post-) Cold War Culture," Quarterly Journal of Speech 86.4 (2000): 465-91.
121. A. R. Lacey, A Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Scribner, 1976), 128;
122. on "weak ontology" see Stephen White, The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
123. Allen Scult, "Aristotle's Rhetoric as Ontology: A Heideggerian Reading," Philosophy and Rhetoric 32.2 (1999): 146-59 in full, quoted questions from 148;
124. and see Jamie Morgan, "Addressing Human Wrongs: A Philosophy-of-Ontology Perspective," Philosophy East and West 53.4 (2003): 575-87.
125. President Bush, "The President's News Conference," October 11, 2001, available from The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents at www.frwebgate.access.gpo.gov;
126. President Bush, "Address to the Nation on Homeland Security from Atlanta," November 9, 2001, ibid.;
127. President Bush, "President Delivers the State of the Union Address," January 28, 2002, "President Bush Thanks Germany for Support Against Terrorism," May 23, 2002
128. and President Bush, "President Bush Signs Homeland Security Act," November 25, 2002, all from the White House.
129. Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs 72.3 (Summer 1993): 22-50
130. cited hereafter by page numbers as they appear in the downloaded version from www.alamut.com/-subj/economics/misc/clash.html (accessed June 3, 2005).
131. The book version appeared as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996);
132. for a left-wing critique see Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), 297-310;
133. for a representative right-wing response see Roger Sandall, "The Politics of Oxymoron," The New Criterion: A Web Special (Summer 2003), www.newcriterion.com (accessed June 3, 2005);
134. for more moderate treatments see Michael Elliott, "When Worlds Collide," Washington Post, December 1, 1996.
135. Michael Ignatieff, "Fault Lines," New York Times, December 1, 1996;
136. for similar critiques of Huntington's civilizational categories see John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press, 1998), 121-30
137. and Edward Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," The Nation, October 22, 2001.
138. See Chua, World on Fire, 259-88.
139. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (William Schneider Jr., DSB Chairman), Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, 2004), findings on 45, quotations from 46, 35, 46;
140. for equally damaging information see Robin Wright, "Iraq Occupation Erodes Bush Doctrine," Washington Post, June 28, 2004;
141. regarding Morocco, see Andrew Higgins, "Morocco's Fragile Democracy Tests U.S. Prescriptions for World," Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2004.