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ABSTRACT
In this essay, I try to answer a few basic questions about George W. Bush’s war rhetoric: (1) How did the president talk about the Iraqi people specifically and Arabs and Muslims generally? (2) How did that vision of Iraqis, Arabs, and Muslims shape the war and its aftermath? Bush did not talk about tyrants and terrorists the same way he did everyday Arabs and Muslims. Tracking the simplified, singular vision of a democratic, freedom-loving Arab and Muslim Other that the Bush administration anticipated, based policy around, and, in the end, failed to find is vital to account for the failures of the war on terror and to differentiate Bush’s imperialism from fin de siècle imperialists, Orientalists, and garden-variety racists before and after his presidency. The Bush administration went to both war and postwar on the basis of a deeply flawed constitutive framework, but where Arabs and Muslims were concerned, that framework failed because of presumed sameness, not difference. Put differently, calamities in war on terror were due to violence done to those construed as savages and violence enabled by a total failure to strategize around difference.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to Rob DeChaine and two anonymous reviewers for their insights as well as their patience. I owe much to John Murphy, Art Walzer, and Jarrod Atchison, all of whom gave feedback moons ago on embryonic versions of this essay.
Notes
1 Ann Coulter, “This is War,” September 13, 2001, National Review, http://old.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter.shtml. Similarly, Phil Beckwith, a former Navy officer, proclaimed after 9/11: “I know just what to do with these Arab people … We have to find them, kill them, wrap them in a pigskin and bury them. That way they will never go to heaven.” In Jeremy Engels, “Floating Bombs Encircling Our Shores: Post-9/11 Rhetorics of Piracy and Terrorism,” Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies 7, no. 3 (2007): 336.
2 Southern Poverty Law Center, “Raging Against the Other,” Winter 2001, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=159.
3 Ibid. See also Ron Suskind, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 79.
4 Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 152–53.
5 Valentina Bartolucci, “Terrorism Rhetoric under the Bush Administration: Discourses and Effects,” Journal of Language and Politics 11, no. 4 (2012): 573–74.
6 Khaled Beydoun, “Islamophobia has Long History in the US,” BBC, September 29, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34385051.
7 Karin Wilkins and John Downing, “Mediating Terrorism: Text and Protest in Interpretations of The Siege,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 4 (2002): 420.
8 Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), xxxiv.
9 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xi.
10 Mark Joseph Stern, “North Carolina Republicans Want to Protect Anti-Gay Christians—and Ban Islam,” Slate, September 29, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/09/29/outlaw_islam_protect_anti_gay_christians_north_carolina_gop_agenda/; Michael Finnegan, “Ben Carson’s Open Bias against Muslims a Sign of Coarse Times,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-politics-carson-trump-bias-20150929-story.html; Max Fisher, “It’s Not Just Ahmed Mohamed: anti-Muslim Bigotry in America is Out of Control,” Vox, September 16, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/9/16/9336967/ahmed-mohamed-islamophobia; Michael Crowley, “GOP Fears of Radical Islam Near 9/11 Levels,” Politico, September 15, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/poll-gop-islam-fears-chicago-council-213617. See also Jenna Johnson and David Weigel, “Trump Calls for ‘Total’ Ban on Muslims Entering the United States,” Washington Post, December 8, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2015/12/07/e56266f6-9d2b-11e5-8728-1af6af208198_story.html; Jonathan Martin, “Without Calming Voice, G.O.P. is Letting Divisive Ones Speak on Muslims,” New York Times, September 21, 2015, http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/us/politics/without-calming-voice-ben-carson-gop-is-letting-divisive-ones-speak-on-muslims.html?referrer=; Lee Pierce, “A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 1 (2014): 53–80; Theresa Ann Donofrio, “Ground Zero and Place-Making Authority: The Conservative Metaphors in 9/11 Families’ ‘Take Back the Memorial’ Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 150–69.
11 Craig R. Smith, “Compromising the Manichaean Style: A Case Study of the 2006 State of the Union Address,” American Communication Journal 13, no. 2 (2011): 23–43; Elisabeth Anker, “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media, and September 11,” Journal of Communication 55, no. 1 (2005): 22–37; Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 215; Kevin Coe, David Domke, Erica S. Graham, Sue Lockett John, and Victor W. Pickard, “No Shades of Gray: The Binary Discourse of George W. Bush and an Echoing Press,” Journal of Communication 54, no. 2 (2004): 234–352; Christina M. Smith & George N. Dionisopoulos, “The Abu Ghraib Images: ‘Breaks’ in a Dichotomous Frame,” Western Journal of Communication 72, no. 3 (2008): 308–28; Robert Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy’s Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005): 55–65. See also Bartolucci, “Terrorism Rhetoric under the Bush Administration,” 570; Douglas Kellner, “Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying: Presidential Rhetoric in the ‘War on Terror,’” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 626.
12 Christian Spielvogel, “‘You Know Where I Stand’: Moral Framing of the War on Terrorism and the Iraq War in the 2004 Presidential Campaign,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 549–70; Jim Garrison, America as Empire: Global Leader or Rogue Power? (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006), 16; Joshua Gunn, “The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology,” Western Journal of Communication 68 (2004): 1–23; Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Constitutive Rhetoric Reconsidered: Constitutive Paradoxes in G.W. Bush’s Iraq War Speeches,” Western Journal of Communication 71, no. 4 (2007): 272–93.
13 John Judis, The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 2004), 195. Scholars also detailed how Bush ginned up the nation with heavy doses of stage-crafted epideictic, saccharine paeans to martial glory, and, stovepiped, cherry-picked, and data-mined evidence of Iraq’s chemical and nuclear threat. See John M. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment’: George W. Bush and September 11th,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (2003): 607–32; Gordon Mitchell, “Team B Intelligence Coups,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 2 (2006): 144–73; Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Justifying the War in Iraq: What the Bush Administration’s Uses of Evidence Reveal” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (2007): 249–73.
14 See George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq from Cincinnati, Ohio,” October 7, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73139&st=&st1=.
15 “Crusade” was, according to Peter Baker, “unthinkingly branded, a “onetime unscripted utterance” by a president with scant knowledge of the actual Crusades. Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), 147. Bush later used the far more confusing and demonizing phrase “Islamo-fascism,” which angered many Muslim leaders. Bush used the phrase sporadically through August and September 2006 before ditching it for less inflammatory descriptors. See Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “‘Islamo-Fascism’ Had its Moment,” New York Times, September 24, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/weekinreview/24stolberg.html?_r=2. Another line that seemed to confirm critics’ worst fears about the imperial administration came from an anonymous official who reportedly told Ron Suskind, “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” There were, however, good reasons to doubt that this line was ever uttered. See Jacob Weisberg, “Don’t Believe Ron Suskind,” Slate, September 22, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_big_idea/2011/09/dont_believe_ron_suskind.html.
16 George W. Bush, “Remarks Following Discussions with President Jacques Chirac of France and an Exchange with Reporters,” November 6, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62940&st=&st1=#ixzz1kgvBpPeG. Bush juxtaposed “a world of fear” with “a world of progress.” Bush, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 12, 2002. He compared “order” and “chaos.” Bush, “Address to the Nation on the War on Terror,” September 7, 2003. He measured “tyranny and murder” against “liberty and life.” Bush, “Remarks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” May 24, 2004. Bush contrasted “civilization” with “terrorism” and “outlaw regimes.” Bush, “Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina,” May 9, 2003; Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln,” May 1, 2003. Finally, Bush was fond of the dualist framing of September 11th, 2001 as a “dividing line” in national history. Bush, “Remarks at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina,” December 11, 2001.
17 Coe et al., “No Shades of Gray,” 234–352.
18 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
19 Baker, Days of Fire, 370. This timeframe affords three analytical advantages: first, Bush’s characterization of every early phase of the war on terror, from the initial response to 9/11, to the invasion of Afghanistan, to the drumbeat for war with Iraq, and, ultimately, to the Iraq invasion is covered. Second, Bush’s framing of the occupation is covered as well. Finally, this is a diverse array of speeches including four state of the union addresses, two special joint session speeches, one inaugural address, one convention acceptance address, five addresses to the nation, three addresses at the United Nations, nine university addresses including but not limited to commencement speeches, and an assorted variety of policy speeches, anniversary speeches, and speeches on religious holidays or to religious groups. Here is the complete list of speeches I analyzed in chronological order:
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington,” September 17, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63740&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64731&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks Prior to Discussions With Muslim Community Leaders and an Exchange With Reporters,” September 26, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64877&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks Prior to a Meeting With Sikh Community Leaders,” September 26, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62916&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks Prior to Discussions With King Abdullah II of Jordan and an Exchange With Reporters,” September 28, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64217&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64731&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 19, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73475&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina,” December 11, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73494&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr and an Exchange with Reporters,” December 17, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73485&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 29, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29644&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast,” February 7, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58750&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Six-Month anniversary of the September 11 Attacks,” March 11, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63061&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks to Community and Religious Leaders in Moscow,” May 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73306&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York,” June 1, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62730&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio,” June 14, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73033&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Middle East,” June 24, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73320&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 12, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64069&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq from Cincinnati, Ohio,” October 7, 2002.
George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 28, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29645&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner,” February 26, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62953&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on Signing the Authorization of the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002,” October 16, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73153&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 7, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64937&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr,” December 5, 2002, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63216&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq,” May 17, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63713&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida,” March 26, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64980&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Videotaped Remarks to the Iraqi People,” April 10, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=34&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on Operation Iraqi Freedom from Dearborn, Michigan,” April 10, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63514&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq From the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln,” May 1, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=68675&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina,” May 9, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=407&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut,” June 22, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=915&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks to the Troops at Camp at Sayliyah, Qatar,” June 5, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64952&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at Goree Island, Senegal,” July 8, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63055&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on Coalition Activities in Iraq,” July 23, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64466&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the War on Terror,” September 7, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64561&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York,” September 23, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58801&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Iftaar Dinner,” October 28, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=890&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on Signing the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense and for the Reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004,” November 6, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63094&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 20, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29646&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Capture of Saddam Hussein,” December 14, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=738&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” March 19, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72580&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the National Day of Prayer,” May 6, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72621&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks on the Death of Nicholas Berg,” May 12, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72627&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon, Wisconsin,” May 14, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63589&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” May 21, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64361&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” May 24, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72635&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” June 2, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72640&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in New York City,” September 2, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72727&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 21, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72758&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Iftaar Dinner,” November 10, 2004, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72832&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2005, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58745&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Iraqi Elections,” January 30, 2005, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63650&st=&st1=.
George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” February 2, 2005, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58746&st=&st1=.
20 Smith, “Compromising the Manichaean Style,” 24. See also Denise M. Bostdorff, “Epideictic Rhetoric in the Service of War: George W. Bush on Iraq and the 60th Anniversary of the Victory over Japan,” Communication Monographs 78, no. 3 (2011): 306–307; Spielvogel, “‘You Know Where I Stand’.”
21 Philip Wander, “The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 4 (1984): 342. See also Zagacki, “Constitutive Rhetoric Reconsidered,” 272–73.
22 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 2. See also Mark West and Chris Carey, “(Re)Enacting Frontier Justice: The Bush Administration’s Tactical Narration of the Old West Fantasy after September 11,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 380.
23 A.J. Grant, “Ground Zero as Holy Ground and Prelude to Holy War,” Journal of American Culture 28, no. 1 (2005), 150. See also Beinin, “The Israelization,” 124.
24 Debra Merskin, “The Construction of Arabs as Enemies: Post-September 11 Discourse of George W. Bush,” Mass Communication & Society 7, no. 2 (2004), 157. See also Kundai Chirindo and Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Obama’s ‘New Beginning’: US Foreign Policy and Comic Exceptionalism,” Argumentation and Advocacy 51, no. 4 (2015): 222.
25 Thompson, “Magic for a People Trained in Pragmatism,” 360, 352. See also Gunn, “The Rhetoric of Exorcism,” 19.
26 The war in Iraq, many critics urged, was a recreation of the American occupation of the Philippines after 1898, and Bush was the reincarnation of William McKinley, or Albert Beveridge, or Rudyard Kipling. Paul Krugman found Bush’s rationale for fostering “regime change” in rogue nations similar to McKinley’s. Paul Krugman, “White Man’s Burden,” New York Times, September 24, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/opinion/white-man-s-burden.html. John Judis, too, saw Iraqis and Filipinos born one hundred years apart as united by their common experience of American imperialism. John Judis, The Folly of Empire, 184. Bush, like Kipling, addressed the Other as “‘half devil and half child,’ in need of civilizing by the United States or some other branch of the white race.” Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 50 (2007): 179. See also Farooqi Shahzad-ul-Hassan, “Intertextual Semiosis: An Analysis of Implications of the White Man’s Burden on Speeches of Albert J. Beveridge and President George W. Bush,” Language in India 11, no. 9 (2011): 14, 17.
27 Michael Hardt, “Second Empire; or, The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush,” Radical History Review 95 (2006): 89.
28 Harootunian, “The Imperial Present,” 7. Stephen Hartnett and Jennifer Mercieca describe the Bush administration’s logic of “benevolent US empire” whereby the occupation of Iraq “will fill in the empty gaps, bringing meaning to the meaningless, purpose to those who are lost, salvation to the damned.” See “‘A Discovered Dissembler Can Achieve Nothing Great’; Or, Four Theses on the Death of Presidential Rhetoric in an Age of Empire,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 605. See also Jackson Lears, “How a War Became a Crusade,” New York Times, March 11, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/opinion/how-a-war-became-a-crusade.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
29 Jeff D. Bass, “Imperial Alterity and Identity Slippage: The Sin of Becoming ‘Other’ in Edmund D. Morel’s King Leopold’s Rule in Africa,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 2 (2010): 108.
30 Usamah Ansari, “‘Should I Go and Pull Her Burqa Off?’: Feminist Compulsions, Insider Consent and a Return to Kandahar,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 1 (2008): 258.
31 Deepa Kumar, “Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism During the Bush II Era,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2010): 258. Many post-9/11 imperialist discourses about Muslim women, for instance, were paternalist, misogynist, mocking, vilifying, and objectifying. See Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre, “Portraying the Political: National Geographic’s 1985 Afghan Girl and a US Alibi for Aid,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 4 (2010), 338; Myra Macdonald, “Muslim Women and the Veil: Problems of Image and Voice in Media Representations,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 1 (2006), 9; Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 112–133; Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar, “Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender and the War on Afghanistan,” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 5 (2005), 769; Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 285–306.
32 Some anti-imperialists in these Spanish–American war debates, in fact, opposed colonialism because it violated the universal rights of the colonized. Fabian Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism: Empire and Democracy in the Wake of the Spanish–American War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3, 29. On a larger scale, “The domesticated, subjugated, unenlightened Other as opposed to the liberated, independent and enlightened Western self was used as a moral prop to legitimize colonial power relations.” Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (London: Zed Books, 1999), 15. See also Ayotte and Husein, “Securing Afghan Women,” 118.
33 Quoted in Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearts, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 312.
34 U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 33, 704–712. See also Albert Beveridge, “The March of the Flag,” September 18, 1989, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/1898beveridge.html. Beveridge held a range of beliefs common to “civilize and Christianize” imperialists of the day. McKinley, for instance, also declared that Filipinos were naturally “unfit for self-government.” Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, “Preemptive War, Americanism, and Anti-Americanism,” Metaphilosophy 35, no. 3 (2004): 376. Albert Robinson, author of the 1901 The Philippines: The War and the People, echoed the opinions of McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt: “Much will depend on the vigor displayed by the nation and the missionary societies in efforts to civilize and Christianize them. The process will not prove locally popular.” Robinson’s last line was a revealing understatement. Torture was justified “by claims that the Filipinos were savages who fought like savages.” Quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 50, no. 2 (2007): 176–77. The Philippines was part of a global pattern in which non-White Others were demonized, infantilized, exploited, segregated, brutalized, and killed. Larry Prochner, Helen May, and Baljit Kaur, “‘The Blessings of Civilisation’: Nineteenth-century Missionary Infant Schools for Young Native Children in Three Colonial Settings—India, Canada and New Zealand 1820s–1840s,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 1–2 (2009): 85.
35 Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism, 196, 42–48.
36 Ibid., 194.
37 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 63, 65.
38 Ayotte and Husain, “Securing Afghan Women,” 116. See also Mary E. Stuckey and Joshua R. Ritter, “George Bush, <Human Rights>, and American Democracy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 657.
39 Roger Stahl, “Carving up Free Exercise: Dissociation and ‘Religion’ in Supreme Court Jurisprudence,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5, no. 3 (2002), 412. See also Christa J. Olson, “Performing Embodiable Topoi: Strategic Indigeneity and the Incorporation of Ecuadorian National Identity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 3 (2010): 300–323.
40 Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 1969), 423.
41 Ibid., 423.
42 Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2005), 292.
43 See Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 29, 2002; Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq from Cincinnati, Ohio,” October 7, 2002.
44 Bush, “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington,” September 17, 2001.
45 Bush, “Remarks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” May 24, 2004; Bush, “Remarks on Coalition Activities in Iraq,” July 23, 2003; Bush, “Remarks to the Troops at Camp at Sayliyah, Qatar,” June 5, 2003; Bush, “Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast,” February 7, 2002; Bush, “Remarks Prior to Discussions With King Abdullah II of Jordan and an Exchange With Reporters,” September 28, 2001; Bush, “Remarks Prior to Discussions With Muslim Community Leaders and an Exchange With Reporters,” September 26, 2001.
46 Bush, “President Bush’s Weekly Radio Address,” October 6, 2001.
47 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001.
48 Ibid.
49 Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 19, 2001.
50 Bush, “Remarks at the Iftaar Dinner,” October 28, 2003.
51 Bush, “Remarks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” May 24, 2004; Bush, “Address to the Nation on the War on Terror,” September 7, 2003.
52 Bush, “Remarks on the Anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” March 19, 2004.
53 Stuckey and Ritter, “George Bush, <Human Rights>, and American Democracy,” 659.
54 Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner, “Hunting the Devil: Democracy’s Rhetorical Impulse to War,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2007): 585.
55 Dick Cheney, “The Vice President Appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert,” September 16, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20010916.html.
56 Janicke Stramer, “The Language of War: George W. Bush’s Discursive Practices in Securitising the Western Value System in the ‘War on Terror,’” At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries (2010): 40.
57 Robert L. Ivie, “Fighting Terror by Rite of Redemption and Reconciliation,” Rhetoric &Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (2007): 224. See also Robert Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 176; Gunn, “The Rhetoric of Exorcism,” 16.
58 Scott Shane, “Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects,” New York Times, April 19, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/20detain.html?_r=0.
59 Bush, “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington,” September 17, 2001. See also Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr and an Exchange with Reporters,” December 17, 2001.
60 Bush, “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington,” September 17, 2001.
Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 19, 2001.
61 Bush, “Remarks Prior to a Meeting With Sikh Community Leaders,” September 26, 2001.
62 Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 7, 2002. See also Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr,” December 5, 2002.
63 Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr and an Exchange with Reporters,” December 17, 2001.
64 Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 20, 2004. Bush also leaned on the secular human rights tradition to argue for a national obligation to defend liberty. He argued in 2003, “The founding documents of the United Nations and the founding documents of America stand in the same tradition. Both assert that human beings should never be reduced to objects of power or commerce, because their dignity is inherent.” These founding documents called forth a “moral law” superseding individual whims and national laws. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the War on Terror,” September 7, 2003.
65 Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 6.
66 Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” June 2, 2004.
67 Bush, “Remarks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” May 24, 2004.
68 Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln,” May 1, 2003.
69 Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 20, 2004. For a synopsis of criticisms of democracy in Iraq as “unrealistic,” see Stephen Benedict Dyson, Leaders in Conflict: Bush and Rumsfeld in Iraq (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014), 46.
70 Bush, “Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina,” May 9, 2003. See also Bush, “Remarks on Signing the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense and for the Reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004,” November 6, 2003.
71 Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York,” June 1, 2002. See also Bush, “Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 21, 2004; Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” June 2, 2004; Bush, “Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina,” May 9, 2003. Bush’s stance contrasted sharply with the attitude of many Republicans, to offer just one example, after the October 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. See Ishaan Tharoor, “U.S. Republicans See a Clash of Civilizations. French President Says No.” Washington Post, November 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/16/u-s-republicans-see-a-clash-of-civilizations-french-president-says-no/.
72 See, for example, Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008).
73 Andrew Sullivan, “How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?” Slate, March 18, 2008, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2008/03/how_did_i_get_iraq_wrong_2.html. See also Mickey Edwards, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—and How It Can Find Its Way Back (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); Andrew Sullivan, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get it Back (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
74 Bush, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” November 6, 2003.
75 Bush, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 12, 2002; Bush, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 12, 2002; Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr,” December 5, 2002; Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 7, 2002; Bush, “Remarks on the Celebration of Eid al-Fitr,” December 5, 2002.
76 Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 129, 131, 139. Bush acknowledges Sharansky’s influence directly. See George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 398.
77 Baker, Days of Fire, 370; Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 161.
78 Baker, Days of Fire, 371.
79 Bush, Decision Points, 397. See also Bush, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” November 6, 2003.
80 Bush, “Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” September 21, 2004.
81 Michael Tomasky, “Praise the Message, Blame the Messenger,” Washington Monthly, May 2005, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0505.tomasky.html.
82 Bush, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2005.
83 For the president’s use of this hostage metaphor, see Bush, “Remarks on the Middle East,” June 24, 2002.
84 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” February 2, 2005.
85 Bush, “Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner,” February 26, 2003.
86 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 155. Bush disliked any talk of commissioning a provisional government, installing leaders, guiding governmental decision-making, or suggesting legal arrangements.
87 Quoted in Dyson, Leaders in Conflict, 71.
88 Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” June 2, 2004.
89 Ibid.; Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” February 2, 2005; Bush, “Remarks on Coalition Activities in Iraq,” July 23, 2003. See also Bush, “Remarks on the Death of Nicholas Berg,” May 12, 2004.
90 Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” June 2, 2004.
91 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001. See also Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado,” June 2, 2004.
92 David Hoagland Noon, “Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 3 (2004): 339–66.
93 Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner, “American Exceptionalism in a Democratic Idiom: Transacting the Mythos of Change in the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” Communication Studies 60, no. 4 (2009): 360. See also Jeff Motter, “American Exceptionalism and the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Militarism: The Case of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Relief Effort,” Communication Studies 61, no. 5 (2010): 514.
94 See Bush, “Remarks Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in New York City,” September 2, 2004; Bush, “Commencement Address at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio,” June 14, 2002; Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 20, 2004. See also Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror, 125.
95 National innocence as part of exceptionalist discourses is developed in Donovan S. Conley, “The Joys of Victimage in George W. Bush’s War of Totality,” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 10, no. 4 (2010): 352. See also Kellner, “Bushspeak,” 628; Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror, 151.
96 Bush, “Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service,” September 14, 2001; Bush, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” November 6, 2003.
97 Bush, “Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina,” May 9, 2003.
98 Bush, “Remarks at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida,” March 26, 2003. The “God’s gift” line, as well as much of Bush’s natural rights theology, was penned by Michael Gerson, the president’s chief speechwriter, religious compatriot, and, arguably, the one person in the administration who believed in universal freedom and democracy as much as Bush did. See Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 132. Condoleezza Rice was a late convert to Bush’s universalism. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, fans of American power projection, did not. Even Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, and Douglas Feith, neoconservatives and intellectual architects of the case for global democracy promotion, apparently did not have as much faith in the project as Bush did. See Baker, Days of Fire, 291, 373; Dyson, Leaders in Conflict, 50; Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 115; George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005), 115.
99 Bush, “Remarks at an Iftaar Dinner,” November 7, 2002. See also Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001; Bush, “Remarks on the National Day of Prayer,” May 6, 2004.
100 Bush, “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington,” September 17, 2001.
101 Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, The Aras, and the Iraqis in Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2006), 57.
102 Bush, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” November 6, 2003.
103 See also Bush, “Commencement Address at Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon, Wisconsin,” May 14, 2004; Bush, “Remarks on the National Day of Prayer,” May 6, 2004.
104 Bush, “Remarks at Goree Island, Senegal,” July 8, 2003. See also Martin J. Medhurst, “George W. Bush at Goree Island: American Slavery and the Rhetoric of Redemption,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 3 (2010): 257–77.
105 Bush, “Remarks at Goree Island, Senegal,” July 8, 2003.
106 Ibid.
107 Bush, “Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner,” February 26, 2003, Bush, “Remarks at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida,” March 26, 2003, Bush, “Remarks to Community and Religious Leaders in Moscow,” May 24, 2002; Bush, “Remarks on the Middle East,” June 24, 2002; Bush, “Remarks to Community and Religious Leaders in Moscow,” May 24, 2002; Bush, “Remarks on the Middle East,” June 24, 2002. See also Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” February 2, 2005; Bush, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 2005.
108 Lawrence Kaplan, “Early Exit,” May 26, 2003, The New Republic, 18.
109 Quoted in Draper, Dead Certain, 178. Wolfowitz said on Meet the Press: “It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would to take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.” Paul Wolfowitz, “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview on NBC Meet the Press,” July 27, 2003, transcript http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2909. Richard Perle dismissed by a similar suggestion by a Brookings Institution defense analyst in the same spirit. Ricks, Fiasco, 64–65.
110 Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–2. Many of the policy advisors that poured into Iraq in May 2003 knew much about Bush’s vision of international comity but very little about Iraq. Draper, Dead Certain, 192.
111 Peter W. Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 83. See also Ansari, “‘Should I Go and Pull Her Burqa Off?’” 48–67.
112 Fred Kaplan, “The Coming Collapse of the Middle East?” Slate, March 11, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/03/iraq_war_10th_anniversary_george_bush_s_invasion_of_iraq_has_accelerated.html.
113 Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2005), 301. See also Ricks, Fiasco, 109–110; Kaplan, “The Coming Collapse.”
114 Baker, Days of Fire, 26. Diamond, Squandered Victory, 23. Cheney and Pentagon assistant secretary Douglas Feith had been quite taken with Ahmad Chalabi, the self-styled Iraqi president-in-waiting and director of the Iraqi National Congress who was a source of misinformation to both the administration and the press. Jack Shafer, “The Times Scoop that Melted,” Slate, July 25, 2003, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2003/07/the_times_scoops_that_melted.html. Colin Powell thought he was a “liar.” Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Free Press, 2007), 223. The CIA thought he was a “huckster.” Baker, Days of Fire, 224.
115 Diamond, Squandered Victory, 29. For a different view of the administration’s deliberations about Iraq, see Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).
116 Ricks, Fiasco, 101–107, 111, 290–91.
117 Curiously, Bush approved plans to continue paying Iraq’s soldiers, police, and government officers as well as using the Iraqi army in reconstruction efforts during this meeting. He also approved plans to separate Baathist loyalists to Saddam—estimated at roughly 25,000 people—from the 1.5 million rank and file Baath Party members. Only the Republican Guard and Iraqi special forces would be fully disbanded. Both of these orders were overturned shortly after L. Paul Bremer succeeded Jay Garner, but Bush did not intervene. Baker, Days of Fire, 250–51.
118 Baker, Days of Fire, 272.
119 Diamond, Squandered Victory, 29.
120 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 50, 115. For more on Rumsfeld’s postwar planning failures, see Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story off the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 138–64.
121 Kaplan, “Early Exit,” 18.
122 Judis, The Folly of Empire, 189; Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 158.
123 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 158.
124 Kaplan, “Early Exit,” 18.
125 Baker, Days of Fire, 249.
126 Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, 96.
127 Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln,” May 1, 2003. See also Bush, “Remarks on Operation Iraqi Freedom from Dearborn, Michigan,” April 10, 2003.
128 Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 149. The “flowers and sweets” line is cited in Draper, Dead Certain, 187. See also Judis, The Folly of Empire, 180. Motivated exiles were not the only ones telling the president tales of cross-continental homophily. The intelligence about the Iraqi people presented to senior administration officials prior to the invasion “made Iraq sound much more like an Arab cousin of America.” Draper, Dead Certain, 192. Paul Wolfowitz and other administration officials had been building such a case since the Clinton presidency, a “mirage that ultimately would become the Bush administration’s version of Iraq—a land saturated both with weapons of mass destruction and a yearning to be liberated by American troops.” He testified before Congress that he was “reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators.” Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, 98.
129 Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift, 109.
130 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 50.
131 MacDonald, Overreach, 96; Diamond, Squandered Victory, 303–305.
132 Galbraith, The End of Iraq, 103.
133 Diamond, Squandered Victory, 1–9. See also Kaplan, “Early Exit,” 19. As Thomas Goodnight writes, “Among the Republican speeches were few—if any—discussions of the key costs of the war, the risks of WMD attacks to the troops, immediate postwar plans, regional stability, and the capacity of US troops to fight a war in another theater should they become tied down in policing Iraq.” G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Metapolitics of the 2002 Iraq Debate: Public Policy and the Network Imaginary,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13, no. 1 (2010): 80.
134 Galbraith, The End of Iraq, 104.
135 Dyson, Leaders in Conflict, 65.
136 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 150.
137 Dexter Filkins, “The Other Iraqi Legacy,” The New Yorker, March 20, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-other-iraqi-legacy.
138 Ricks, Fiasco, 166.
139 Kaplan, “The Coming Collapse.”
140 Baker, Days of Fire, 231–32.
141 Bush, Decision Points, 258–59.
142 Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 115.
143 Hartnett and Stengrim, Globalization and Empire, 111.
144 Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror,’” 300.
145 Smith, “Compromising the Manichaean Style,” 39.
146 Quoted in Galbraith, The End of Iraq, 101. One four-star general noted of the administration’s attitude before the war, “They knew that postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East … They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn’t subject their hypothesis to examination.” Quoted in Ricks, Fiasco, 99.
147 Dexter Filkins, “What’s Left in Iraq?” The New Yorker, October 21, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/whats-left-in-iraq.