Arguing Counterterrorism

New perspectives

Daniela Pisoiu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136179341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a multifaceted, analytical account of counterterrorism argumentative speech.

Traditionally, existing scholarship in this field of research has taken a selective focus on issues and actors, concentrating mainly on US state discourse after 9/11. However, this approach ignores the fact that there was counterterrorism speech before 9/11, and that there are other countries and other actors who also actively engage in the counterterrorism discursive field, both within and outside of the Western world.

Addressing several thematic, chronological and methodological gaps in the current literature, Arguing Counterterrorism offers a dynamic perspective on counterterrorism argumentative speech. Over the course of the volume, the authors tackle the following key issues: first, historical and cultural continuity and change. Second, the phenomenology of counterterrorism speech: its nature, instrumentalisation, implications and interactions between the various actors involved. The third theme is the anatomy of counterterrorism speech; namely its political, cultural and linguistic constitutive elements. Employing a multi-disciplinary framework, the authors explore these issues through a geographically and historically diverse range of case studies, resulting in a book that broadens the perspective of counterterrorism argumentation analysis.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, counterterrorism, discourse analysis, security studies and IR.

Part I

Roots and cultures

1 The rhetorical origins of the US war on terror

Carol K. Winkler

Members of the George W. Bush administration justified the US war on terror on the grounds that their country was facing “a new type of enemy” that warranted a new response (e.g., Bush 2001g: 3). In accordance with such thinking, President Bush oversaw many changes, including the largest government reorganization in the past fifty years, expanded law enforcement powers to spy on citizens both at home and abroad, the creation of military tribunals to adjudicate the fates of suspected terrorists, and the authorization of the CIA to conduct harsh interrogation methods for prisoners that today many consider to constitute torture. However, as executive branch officials sought to build both initial and continuing public support for new powers to respond to the new threat, they turned to the past.

The administration utilized historical rhetorical frames to help justify the war on terror. The analogs offered a set of rhetorical resources that, at least during past threatening situations, had proven useful for unifying public support for the actions of the US commander-in-chief. Today, a healthy debate exists regarding both the conditions and the duration of presidential rhetoric’s influence on the public (see, for example, Campbell and Jamieson 2008; Edwards 2003; Krebs and Jackson 2007). At a minimum, rigorous studies document that the public communication strategies of the executive branch do drive media framing of issues during times of crisis that, in turn, influence public opinion (Bennett et al. 2007). Historical analogs provide a lens for understanding the contours of the administration’s public strategy in the US war on terror, as well as a means of assessing the possible short- and long-term implications of relying on those approaches. By examining the rhetorical origins of the Bush administration’s war on terror, this chapter hopes to provide a starting framework for understanding the public strategies of enemy construction and response formulation of US terrorism discourse in the twenty-first century.

A few previous studies have addressed historical analogs in relationship to the US war on terror. Mueller (2006) compares Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, nuclear anxieties, and the New World Order to the war on terror in regard to US policies and contextual factors without systematically focusing on the rhetorical justifications for garnering public support. Hodges (2011) conducts a limited analysis of Vietnam, exploring how the Bush administration used that analog to appropriate “containment of an ideological threat” as a rhetorical resource for the war on terror. Jackson (2005) offers the most evocative, systemic analysis of historical analogs by focusing on four recurrent meta-narratives identifiable through his content analysis of the administration’s speeches: Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, Civilization vs Barbarism, and Globalization. By integrating several of my previous writings that discuss specific analogs in the war on terror (see Winkler 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008), this study will add to the previous literature by expanding the historical analogs reviewed and their implications, by contextualizing those findings with related archival material from earlier administrations, and by using the analogs to reveal strategic discourse frames in the war on terror.

This chapter will identify rhetorical framing strategies Bush administration officials employed to describe the enemy and the appropriate US response in the war on terror. After initially describing recurrent rhetorical strategies prominent within the enemy and response categories, I will document the approaches used by administration officials in the present day (2013), recall historical uses of the same strategic frame, and draw out implications based on comparable outcomes associated with the strategic choice. This chapter will demonstrate that the rhetoric justifying the war on terror adopted strategic approaches used by leaders in the early republic (i.e., America’s indigenous populations, the Barbary pirates, and the French Revolution), by leaders facing ideologically based threats in the twentieth century (i.e., communism and fascism), and by contemporary Republican presidents responding to terrorism (i.e., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush). The decision to focus on this last set of analogs relates to the tendency of Republican presidents to rely on the founding fathers to bolster their conservative points of view and prior research demonstrating that Republican presidents focus on ideologically focused war narratives, rather than individual centric crime narratives in their public discussions of terrorism (Winkler 2006: 200–8).

Depicting the enemy

The contemporary war on terror strived to defeat global terrorism perpetrated by errant individuals (e.g., Osama bin Laden, Richard Reid), extremist groups (e.g., al-Qaeda and associated movements), and “supportive regimes” (e.g., Iraq, the Taliban). Administration officials publicly vilified such individuals, groups, and states to justify to the public that each threat was an appropriate target in the war on terrorism. Two overarching strategic frames dominated the public framing of these enemies: the erasure of individual identity and the erasure of national identity. The two rhetorical frames together positioned the complicated nature of terrorist threat to be unworthy of due process rights commonly afforded individual citizens and to be denied rights of sovereignty commonly afforded internationally recognized nation-states.

Erasing individual identity

Administration spokespersons publicly framed terrorists and those supportive of their cause as undeserving of the rights granted to members of a civilized society. A key rhetorical strategy used to accomplish that objective was to erase such individuals from the public arena by denying them any recognizable personal identity. As the following will demonstrate, the rhetorical approach involved three strategies: stripping rank-and-file terrorists and their supporters of demographic and other indicators of personal uniqueness; focusing on group rather than individual motivations; and emphasizing group-based tactics without public consideration of the actions of specific individuals.

Each of these three strategies was prominent in the rhetoric of the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. Official spokespersons denied terrorists and their supporters individual identity by referencing a “global terror network,” which encompassed an amorphous mass of mostly nameless participants worldwide (e.g., Cheney 2002). When discussing rank-and-file members of terrorist organizations, Bush rhetorically stripped individuals considered a threat of any identifying characteristics. Treating the terrorists as an amalgamated, nebulous group, Bush (2001a) noted:

This group and its leader – a person named Osama bin Laden – are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.

Few names of individuals outside of key leadership positions of relevant terrorist organizations became public. John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, and names of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers remain isolated exceptions. Even after military and law enforcement officials captured specific individuals suspected of or supporting terrorism, US leaders chose not to release their names or even their countries of origin for years. When released DOD (Department of Defense) photographs showed the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, masks covered identifiable facial features of the specific individuals held in captivity.

Beyond the removal of identifying names or recognizable demographic characteristics, the strategic frame presented all terrorists and their sympathizers as motivated by a single overarching principle. Bush (2001f) was adamant that terrorists “have a common ideology, and that is, they hate freedom and they hate freedom loving people.” Official spokespersons specified the terrorists’ opposition to free elections, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. By limiting the motivations of terrorists in this way, the nation’s leaders presented the war on terror as a cultural conflict between those who were fighting for and against freedom.

Not only did defenders of the war on terror present all terrorists’ motivations as the same, but they also reinforced a common set of tactics used by the enemy as well. Bush (2003d) observed that, “terrorists rely on the death of innocent people to create the condition of fear that, therefore, will cause people to lose their will.” US officials denounced the methods of the terrorist enemy as “barbaric,” “evil,” “brutal,” “torturous,” and “homicidal.” Terrorists, rendered nameless and committed to destroying freedom through vile, destructive means, emerged as ill suited for the rights and liberties enjoyed by individuals in civilized societies.

The historical roots of the strategy of erasing individual identity markers of the rank-and-file members of the enemy date back to the days of the United States as an early republic. Portraying the nation’s enemies as part of homogenized groups began shortly after the colonists faced indigenous populations upon their arrival in America (Stuckey and Murphy 2001). The final draft of the US Declaration of Independence (1776) demonstrates the approach of treating the enemy as a singular collective when the nation’s founders wrote, “the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and condition.” Such an enemy frame came without nuance for peaceful tribes or individual Indians refusing to participate in acts of violence to defend their lands; instead, all tribal members emerged as part and parcel of a violent collective undeserving of the rights afforded to citizens in the early republic.

The rhetorical strategy of grouping all non-state terrorists’ motivations into a desire for destroying freedom anywhere around the globe, however, did not emerge until Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president. Prior to Reagan’s term in office, US presidents tried to ignore public discussion of terrorists’ motivations altogether, a move even repeated at times during Reagan’s own tenure. Historically, presidents routinely adopted various iterations of the public mantra that “nothing could justify acts of terrorism” (e.g., Reagan 1988a: 1231), in an effort to avoid discussions of potential US culpability. When presidents failed to stem further public inquiry into the cause of a particular terrorist act, they shifted to a strategy of minimizing and isolating non-state extremists and their concerns by publicly limiting their depictions to local concerns. Examples include Jimmy Carter’s response to inquiries about his decision to admit the Shah into the United States as a precipitating event of the 1979–80 Iranian hostage crisis, as well as Lyndon Johnson’s focus on the location of US ships in the 1968 Pueblo crisis.

During Reagan’s first term in office, however, the conventional practice of portraying terrorists’ motivations changed. When first elected to office, Reagan officials publicly framed terrorist acts, particularly those occurring in Central America and Lebanon, as ideological attacks consistent with the parameters of the US Cold War narrative (Winkler 2006: 80–2). The Cold War narrative set the scene in new nations around the globe struggling in the aftermath of World War II to fulfill their promise of self-determination and enhanced freedom. Communists, acting together with terrorists in the narrative, attempted to forestall progress toward freedom, thus necessitating US intervention (Medhurst et al. 1990: 22–8). By Reagan’s second term, the Cold War narrative’s connection to events on the ground became attenuated because high-profile terrorist attacks were occurring, not against fledging democracies, but against US and European personnel (for example, the 1983 attacks on the Marine barracks and US Embassy in Beirut, multiple attacks by Carlos the Jackal in France in the 1980s, and so on). Internal administration polling at the time also showed that a majority of Americans had come to disapprove of Reagan’s handling of terrorism. In response, Reagan shifted from portraying the terrorists’ motivations as support for communism to opposition to freedom around the globe. Reagan illustrated his revised homogenization approach when he noted,

… [W]e must understand that the greatest hope the terrorists and their supporters harbor, the very reason for their cruelty and viciousness of their tactics, is to disorient the American people, to cause disunity, to disrupt or alter our foreign policy, to keep us from the steady pursuit of our strategic interests, to distract us from our very real hope that someday the nightmare of totalitarian rule will end and self-government and personal freedom will become the birthright of every people on Earth.

(Reagan 1985: 899)

The rhetorical shift from the Cold War narrative to a broader attack on freedom eased public skepticism about the linkage between all terrorism and communism.

The rhe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Roots and cultures
• Part II Phenomenology
• Part III Anatomy
• Index