The Soft Power of War (Benjamins Current Topics)

The Soft Power of War

Benjamins Current Topics Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of special issues have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim to widen the readership and to give this interesting material an additional lease of life in book format.

Volume 3 The Soft Power of War Edited by Lilie Chouliaraki These materials were previously published in Journal of Language and Politics 4:1 (2005)

The Soft Power of War

Edited by

Lilie Chouliaraki London School of Economics

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The soft power of war / edited by Lilie Chouliaraki. p. cm. (Benjamins Current Topics, issn 1874-0081 ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Iraq War, 2003- 2. World politics--1989- 3. Security, International. 4. Iraq War, 2003--Mass media and the war. 5. Language and languages--Political aspects. 6. Rhetoric--Political aspects. I. Chouliaraki, Lilie. DS79.76.S632

2007

956.7044'31-dc22

2007003846

isbn 978 90 272 2233 6 (Hb; alk. paper)

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents About the Authors Introduction: The soft power of war: Legitimacy and community in Iraq war discourses Lilie Chouliaraki The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq Phil Graham and Allan Luke

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Blair’s contribution to elaborating a new ‘doctrine of international community’ Norman Fairclough

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War rhetoric of a little ally: Political implicatures and Aznar’s legitimatization of the war in Iraq Teun A. van Dijk

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The Iraq war as curricular knowledge: From the political to the pedagogic divide Bessie Mitsikopoulou and Dimitris Koutsogiannis

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Computer games as political discourse: The case of Black Hawk Down David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

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Spectacular ethics: On the television footage of the Iraq war Lilie Chouliaraki

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Index

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About the Authors

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She has published extensively on media and the public sphere and her most recent book is ‘The Spectatorship of Suffering’ (Sage 2006). Authors’ address: Department of Media and Communications · London School of Economics and Political Science · Houghton Street · London WC2A 2AE · UK Email: [email protected]

Teun A. van Dijk was professor of discourse studies at the University of Amsterdam until 2004, and is at present professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. After earlier work on generative poetics, text grammar, and the psychology of text processing, his work since 1980 takes a more ‘critical’ perspective and deals with discursive racism, news in the press, ideology, knowledge and context. He is the author of several books in most of these areas, and he edited The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (4 vols, 1985) and the introduction Discourse Studies (2 vols., 1997). He founded 4 international journals, Poetics, Text, Discourse & Society, and Discourse Studies, of which he still edits the latter two. His last monographs are Ideology (London, Sage, 1998), Ideología y Discurso (Barcelona: Ariel, 2003), Dominación étnica y racismo discursiva en España y América Latina (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2003), and his last edited book (with Ruth Wodak), Racism at the Top (2000). He is currently working on a new book on the theory of context. Teun van Dijk, who holds two honorary doctorates, has lectured widely in many countries, especially also in Latin America. For a list of publications, recent articles, resources for discourse studies and other information, see his homepage: www.discourse-in-society.org. Authors’ address: Universitat Pompeu Fabra · Dept. de Traducció I Filologia · Rambla 30 · 08002 Barcelona, Spain Email: [email protected]

Norman Fairclough has recently retired from his Chair in language in Social Life at Lancaster University and is now Emeritus Professor at Lancaster as well as Emeritus Professorial Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Management and Social Sciences. He has published widely in critical discourse analysis,

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About the Authors

including most recently New Labour, New Language? (Routledge 2000) and Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (Routledge 2003). Authors’ address: Bd. N. Titulescu 1 · Bloc A7, Sc4, Ap112 · 011131 Bucuresti · Romania Email: [email protected]

Phil Graham is Associate Professor in Communication at the University of Queensland. His research interests include political economy of communication, new media, and discourse analysis. Authors’ address: University of Queensland · 200 University Ave · Waterloo, ON · Canada N2L3G1 Email: [email protected]

Dimitris Koutsogiannis is Assistant Professor of literacy education in the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Deputy Director of the Portal for the Support of Greek language teachers, Centre for the Greek Language (www.komvos.edu.gr). His areas of special interest include educational linguistics, literacy and technology, literacy education, Elearning and critical discourse analysis. He is the editor of Information-Communication Technology and Literacy: The International Experience (Centre for the Greek Language 2001, bilingual edition). Authors’ address: Department of Linguistics · Faculty of Philology · Aristotle University of Thessaloniki · Thessaloniki 54124 · Greece Email address: [email protected]

Theo van Leeuwen is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney. His main research interests are social semiotics, multimodality and critical discourse analysis. His publications include Reading Images — The Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress), Speech, Music, Sound, and Multimodal Discourse — The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (with Gunther Kress). Authors’ address: Centre for Language and Communication Research · Cardiff University · PO Box 94 · Cardiff CF10 3XB · UK Email: [email protected]

Allan Luke is Dean of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are in educational reform, teachers and teaching in Asia, the move from traditional, educational and institutional formations to emergent ‘new Asian pedagogies’, and, more generally, the development of normative models of education and cosmopolitanism.



About the Authors

Authors’ address: Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice · National Institute of Education · Nanyang Technological University · Singapore 637616 Email: [email protected]

David Machin is Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communications, University of Leicester. His main research interests are media ownership, media and politics, semiotics, media influences. His publications include Ethnographic Research for Media Studies and The Anglo-American Media Connection (with Jeremy Tunstall). Authors’ address: Centre for Language and Communication Research · Cardiff University · PO Box 94 · Cardiff CF10 3XB · UK Email: [email protected]

Bessie Mitsikopoulou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistics, Faculty of English Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research interests are in the areas of critical discourse analysis, educational linguistics, applications of new technologies in education, critical and academic literacies. She is the co-editor of Policies of Linguistic Pluralism and the Teaching of Languages in Europe (with B. Dendrinos, Athens: Metaihmio Publications and the University of Athens, 2004) and Periphery Viewing the World (with C. Dokou and E. Mitsi, Athens: Parousia, 2004). Authors’ address: Department of Language and Linguistics · Faculty of English Studies · School of Philosophy · National and Kapodistrian University of Athens · Panepistimioupoli Zographou · Athens 15784 · Greece Email address: [email protected]

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Introduction: The soft power of war Legitimacy and community in Iraq war discourses* Lilie Chouliaraki London School of Economics

The Iraq war, officially declared in March–April 2003, took place in the midst of a fierce controversy about the reasons for and the possible effects of the US/UK coalition’s decision to invade the country and abolish the Saddam Hussein regime. The legitimacy of the war and, consequently, a consensual view of what the international community is and wants to be were the two crucial stakes of the controversy. Another war, a symbolic one, has been raging around the military operations themselves. This war split the international community, including the European Union, and challenged the status of international institutions, such as the UN, in an unprecedented manner. It is this symbolic war that this book examines. The book consists of six chapters organised in two themes. The first theme is ‘the war in political discourse’, and the second theme is ‘the war in media discourse’. The distinction is obviously analytical rather than substantial. Political discourse is almost always mediatised, and media discourse often has political effects, even though it may not be directly political. It is, however, important to comment on the commonalities and the differences between the two themes.

Soft power. The power of language in politics Both political and media discourse appertain what leading US political analyst Joseph Nye calls soft power, that is the power of “getting others to want what you want” (2004: 5). This is, of course, a rather well-established conception of power since the Sophists’ belief in the capacity of rhetoric to bear material effects upon the world, or since Gramsci’s view of hegemony as power by consensus rather than coercion. But the reference to soft power by one of US’ most influential academics and state officers gives the term an interesting twist. Taking the war in Iraq as one exemplary case through which to demonstrate the changing nature of



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contemporary power, Nye argues that the effective study of international politics depends today upon our understanding of the interplay between hard (military, economic) and soft (symbolic) power. One might say, between the politics of territory, guns or money and the language of narrating the world in coherent and persuasive stories. It is this connection between language and politics that this collection of essays seeks to critically investigate. They all trace down the emergence of new ways of talking and thinking about international relations, about the conduct of war and about the moral principles of contemporary ‘global citizenship’. Bringing together different strands of discourse analysis with social, historical and, to an extent, political analysis, all contributions seek to illustrate the ways in which a variety of public genres, from political speeches to computer games and from educational material to newspaper reports, produce influential knowledge about the war and shape the ethical and political premises upon which the legitimacy of the Iraq war and the ‘vision’ of the emergent world order rests. Indeed, Nye’s question “What is wrong with dominance in the service of sound principles and high ideals?” (2004: 26) clearly underlines the key role that soft power, the power of argument and belief, has played in shifting global public opinion from a position of disapproving a war unauthorised by the UN to supporting the war in the name of global security (Brooks et al. 2003; Lewis 2004).

Soft power in politics and the media If the aim of soft power is solid and concrete, to establish symbolically the legitimacy of war and, with it, the legitimacy of a new world vision, the manner through which soft power operates is multiple and diffused. This is where the distinction between the two types of discourse, political and media discourse, comes into focus. Let us start with politics. The domain of politics can be strictly defined in terms of specific institutional practices, such as parliamentary hearings and public speeches. It is indeed these practices that take up most space in the ‘the Iraq war in political discourse’ section of this volume. Whereas van Dijk discusses the parliamentary discourse of Spanish (now ex‑)PM Aznar in defence of his decision to include Spain in the US/UK coalition, Fairclough draws attention to a range of British PM Blair’s speeches, concerning UK’s vision of the ‘international community’. Graham and Luke’s perspective, however, opens up the definition of politics to include a broader range of meanings that shape not only traditional political institutions, but also, what the authors refer to as, contemporary ‘bodies politic’. In line with Graham and Luke, the definition of media in this volume is broad enough to encompass an array of technologies and discourses that cut across not



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only traditional institutions, such as broadcast and print media or pedagogic curricula, but also popular entertainment. The ‘Iraq war in media discourse’ section, then, includes contributions on the mass media and new media, such as the Internet, computer games as well as film. Chouliaraki argues that television participates in the legitimation of the war not by overt propaganda, but through strategies of aestheticisation that represent the war as a spectacular operation rather than as a political fact with humanitarian implications. In the field of new media, Mitsikopoulou and Koutsogiannis compare the assumptions about the war and the ‘global citizen’ implicit in two different US educational websites, whereas Machin and van Leeuwen’s paper demonstrates how ‘Black Hawk Down’, a US war game and film, draws upon recent history in order to propagate a pro-US perspective for the interpretation of conflict and the conduct of war.

Legitimacy and community. The stakes of soft power Politics and media may be distinct spheres of practice, nevertheless, they are bound by certain interdependencies — a fact that, evidently, has to do with their common function as instruments of soft power. The chapters of this volume examine the interdependencies between politics and the media on two issues, what I earlier called the main stakes of the controversy around the Iraq war. First, there is the issue of legitimacy, which addresses the ways in which political and media discourse construe the war as a legally and morally acceptable project. Second, there is the issue of international community, which addresses the ways in which political and media discourse propose a vision about what the international community is and what it should be, as well as a vision of what the global citizen should be and which civic and political sensibilities this citizen should carry (see Wodak et al. 1999 on the discursive construction of the national community; Butler 2004: 1–18; Calhoun 2003: 531–68 for critical discussions of legitimacy and community in the post September 11th world order).

Legitimacy Concerning the question of legitimacy, there are two arguments to be made. First, political discourse, even when it is formulated as a parliamentary address, is reflexively (though not necessarily consciously) designed in ways that appeal to broader contexts and audiences. Aznar’s parliamentary speeches, as van Dijk argues, strategically employ a set of political implicatures that aspire to rationalise and justify the PM’s decision to join the Iraq war, a decision that met a strong anti-war





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sentiment among the Spanish population. The article reformulates and criticises the presuppositions implicit in Aznar’s parliamentary discourse, yet the overall assumption behind this analysis is that political discourse anticipates its dissemination in the media and therefore reflexively incorporates public counter-discourse and criticism in its own arguments. This is particularly evident in Aznar’s use of the argumentative topos of peace, security and terrorism, where the ideal audience clearly transcends the parliament and encompasses a wider public. In the age of information, as Nye puts it, “politics becomes in part a competition for attractiveness, legitimacy and credibility” so that “the ability to share information — and to be believed — becomes an important source of attraction and power” (2004: 31). According to all contributions in the volume, such quest for legitimacy and credibility in the Iraq war was largely driven by the humanitarian argument. In the absence of a legal basis for the military intervention in Iraq, the pro-war coalition elites sought legitimacy by promoting moral argument. Thus, concerns for peace, security and terrorism organise a broader argumentative regime, in which the suffering of Iraqis under a ruthless dictatorial regime and the threat that the regime’s alleged possession of WMD posed to the rest of the world provide the necessary and sufficient grounds for overthrowing Saddam Hussein from power. As Fairclough argues, there is an intensification of this argumentative process as we approach the war. His paper shows that the increasing association of moral claims with combative action and the justification of the war in the name of the ‘liberation’ of Iraqi people are two key features in Blair’s 2002–2003 speeches. The second point to be made with respect to the legitimacy of the war is that political discourse is not the only nor is it the most effective means to render the war a morally acceptable project. The most effective work of legitimisation takes place through leisure and seemingly ‘innocent’ entertainment. This is the argument of Machin and van Leeuwen’s paper, which shows that pc games and Hollywood cinema, such as the Black Hawk Down production, serve as powerful tools for legitimising US-led military solutions to local conflicts around the globe and for projecting an ideal identity for the global citizen, as a person endowed with (a western sense of) humanity and moral integrity. Although not directly engaging with empirical material about the Iraq war, the Machin and van Leeuwen paper establishes a clear and timely link between the current project of war legitimacy and historical discursive resources that inculcate a firm belief in the superiority of western values. In this sense, the paper usefully contextualises the use of soft power in the Iraq war. The second paper on new media shows that the struggle over the legitimacy of the war appertains not only to home leisure, but also to school pedagogy. Mitsikopoulou and Koutsogiannis’ analysis of on-line educational material that help students and teachers “better understand the country of



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Iraq and the circumstances leading to the current conflict”, is a clear example of how school socialisation combines with new media to powerful effects. Finally, Chouliaraki’s paper on BBC television draws our attention to the project of war legitimacy as an aesthetic project that involves the staging of images at the service of the management of emotions among media publics, rather than a project of the ‘best argument’. On the whole, the volume shows that soft power is central to the question of war legitimacy in two respects. First, legitimacy requires the ongoing, adaptable and strategic use of political discourse in the service of military projects; the hard power of war needs to be framed by the soft values of humanitarian care for the Iraqi people and of global security for the world population. Second, legitimacy does not only rely on old-fashioned methods of propaganda, but also capitalises upon the huge influence of media entertainment, which today acts as one of the most effective devices of soft power — one that theorists like Nye, however, only reluctantly turn to examine.

International Community Concerning the question of ‘international community’, there are again two issues to address. First, the Iraq war threw into new relief the deeply contested nature of ‘international community’. This is a concept that we usually tend to take for granted but, as Fairclough’s comparative discussion of Blair’s 1999–2003 speeches shows, it is in fact a fragile construction. In the case of the Iraq war, it was the clash surrounding the decision of the coalition to go to war without a UN mandate that seriously hindered the discursive struggle to produce a consensual definition of the ‘international community’ — a struggle clearly manifest in the dramatic split of the EU members into pro- and anti-war nations. The key discursive strategy to homogenise difference and overcome disagreement, in political as well as media discourse, is to construe the ‘international community’ around the age-old cultural and political division between ‘us’, the civilised west, and ‘them’, the Islamic threat. As the volume demonstrates, the ‘us’/‘them’ distinction functioned again, in the case of the war, as a powerful device for collective identification and as a matrix for interpreting the new world order through the particular perspective of high morality. This is evident in the political speeches of Blair and Aznar, but it is also a key assumption in the verbal and visual features of the media, such as in computer games and the Black Hawk Down film. From different perspectives and in different vocabularies, the essays of this volume converge around the claim that the enemy, the Islamic threat, is consistently construed through argumentative





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topi such as criminalisation (connecting Iraq with international terrorism), orientalisation (equating western values with universal values and annihilating the cultural weight of the enemy) and (e)vilification (out-casting the enemy as an irrational force with a metaphysical wish for destruction and death; for the three categories see Lazar and Lazar 2004: 230–4). It is this cultural-moral dichotomy that enables the humanitarian argument of liberating Iraqis and removing Saddam’s global threat to occupy a strategic position in the project over the legitimacy of the war that I discussed above. This point leads to the second issue to be addressed with respect to the construal of the ‘international community’ in discourses of the Iraq war. Graham and Luke propose the metaphor of neo-feudal corporatism in order to define the ‘international community’ as a new world order. Neo-feudal corporatism understands key features of the current political discourse, but also of a broad range of other mediated discourses, as a novel articulation of contemporary corporatism with the military basis and ethical code of feudal politics. The mutation, the authors argue, is a powerful ideological hybrid that, in articulating fluently both Christian fundamentalism and Hollywood entertainment, manages to consolidate and increasingly expand the militarisation of bodies politic today. This metaphor for understanding new and subtle aspects of the emerging world order does not only point to the inevitable continuities between politics and the media, but further argues that hard, military power is inextricably linked to soft power. In so doing, the paper also spells out a challenge for critical discourse and political analysts. How should we be analysing new formations of power? And how should we be acting (if we can) within and upon the new socio-political world order?

Contents of the volume Graham and Luke’s paper Militarising the Body Politic: New Mediations as Weapons of Mass Instruction opens up the section ‘The Iraq war in political discourse’. The paper makes the interesting point that neo-feudal corporatism goes hand in hand with the hectic militarisation of contemporary bodies politic the world over. Militarisation, however, primarily reveals itself as a political, economic and cultural force in many societies, and therefore it requires the power of language — soft power. This is because militarisation requires the generation of new, negative evaluations of other, antagonistic bodies politic in order both to safeguard its own legitimacy and to re-define the contours of political communities. Such evaluations of the antagonistic ‘other’ are inculcated by new and multiple mediations of meaning, which, by virtue of their global reach, continuity and intensity



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act as pervasive forms of public pedagogy. The section on political discourse continues with Fairclough’s contribution Doctrine of International Community. Tony Blair’s contribution to an emergent hegemonic discourse of global security. The paper builds upon Graham and Luke’s point that contemporary bodies politic depend upon the power of discourse to rationalise military interventions and re-define international community. What is currently evidenced in the case of Iraq, Fairclough argues, is that old practices and doctrines have been perceived as outdated, and new discourses have emerged as imaginaries of alternative world orders. A struggle for hegemony has opened up, and one way of interpreting what we are now seeing in the case of Iraq is that a would-be hegemonic discourse is being materialised and enacted. Looking at Blair’s contribution to this process over the period 1999–2003, Fairclough critically engages with the emergence, diffusion, and bid for international hegemony of new discourses (and narratives) of international affairs, ‘global security’, and ‘international community’. Teun van Dijk’s paper, War Rhetoric of a Little Ally: Political Implicatures and Aznar’s Legitimatisation of the war in Iraq, examines the speeches by José María Aznar held in Spanish parliament in 2003 justifying his decision to enter the coalition in the war against Iraq. Within a framework of multidisciplinary critical discourse analysis, van Dijk pays special attention to political implicatures, defined as inferences based on general and particular political knowledge as well as on the context models of Aznar’s speeches. He argues that such analysis reveals significant sociopolitical aspects of Aznar’s discourse and gives insight into the broad bank of discursive resources through which the project of war is narrated and legitimised. The section ‘The Iraq war in media discourse’ is divided into the two contributions on new media, education and entertainment, and the paper on the war footage of BBC television. The first paper on new media, Mitsikopoulou and Koutsogiannis’ paper, Teaching the Iraqi War in on-line educational material, discusses educational material from the Scholastic and Rethinking Schools websites, which became available on-line at the wake of the war. These sites offered collections of news reports and other media texts, such as maps and video clips, and they were accompanied by detailed lesson plans with the purpose of integrating ‘breaking news’ into lessons, preparing ‘lessons of war’ and exploring the war impact on students. The authors provide an analysis of this educational material and critically discuss the conflictual ideological positioning it construes for both educators and students. Machin and van Leeuwen’s paper, Computer games as political discourse: The case of Black Hawk Down, presents an analysis of the discourse of war that dominates the genre of contemporary war games. This is a discourse, the authors claim, that is dominated by individual heroes ambushing terrorists, rescuing hostages and so on, when in fact most attacks on terrorists are from the air and do





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not involve SAS type soldiers. Machin and van Leeuwen discuss the way in which these games are localised for the USA (for example, by being made easier, as, according to Sony, Americans do not like to lose), and for Asian markets. Finally, Chouliaraki’s paper, Spectacular Ethics: On the television footage of the Iraq war, argues that the semiotic choices of the footage on the bombardment of Baghdad construe this catastrophic event within a specific aesthetic register. This aesthetic register, the sublime, both effaces the presence of Iraqi people as human beings and sidelines the question of the coalition troops as bombers — rather than liberators — of the Iraqi people. The pro-war bias in this BBC footage occurs precisely through this representation of warfare that denies the sufferer her humanity and relieves the bomber of his responsibility in inflicting the suffering. By rendering these identities irrelevant to the spectacle of the suffering, the footage ultimately suppresses the broad ethical and political issues that lie behind the bombardment of Baghdad and, more generally, the conduct of war in Iraq. All media-related papers meet the Graham and Luke paper on political discourse in full-circle. All four assert the key role of soft power, the power of the media to cast cultural difference and political struggle in the language of military conflict and war. The exercise of hard power, war itself, becomes then a more feasible global project.

The soft power of the polis It is obvious that the selection of papers in this book cannot exhaust the wide spectrum of public discourses that fought for a new hegemony over the legitimacy of the war and over the content and status of the international community today. The aspiration of this book is rather to provide snapshots of this struggle within two fields that are today instrumental in capturing our collective imaginary, politics and the media. Its aspiration is also to illustrate the capacity of soft power not simply to provide a name for, but, in so doing, to also help constitute the contemporary landscape of power and global order. This war is not yet over, even though the military operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ was quickly completed. Still today, coalition troops fight daily to re-gain and re-pacify territories in Iraq, once declared conquered. There is more suffering to bear for the Iraqi people. Estimations on Iraqi casualties between March 2003 and November 2006 range from a ‘modest’ 49.000, according to the ‘Iraqi Body Count’ investigations, up to a shocking 655.000, according to a scientifically valid prestigious but politically controversial study published at ‘The Lancet’. The study concludes: ‘Our data, which estimate that 654.965 or 2,5% of the Iraqi population has died in this, the largest major international conflict of the



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21st century, should be of grave concern to everyone’ (Burnham, Lafta, Doocy and Roberts 2006: 1426). And, indeed, there is for us in the West much more to write and argue for in that war. The greatest aspiration of this volume is to take part in the broader conversation, where questions of true and false, objective and biased, just and unjust, universal and particular are constantly shared, debated and subjected to criticism. As Chilton argues, drawing on Aristotle, it is a very close link between the human faculty of speech and the propensity to live in the polis (2003: 5 and 198). Soft power is not a privilege of military and economic might. It is also the ‘stuff ’ of public life. In Aristotle’s words “Speech…serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state.” (The Politics 1253a7: ibid)

References Burnham, G., Lafta, R., Doocy, S., and Roberts, L. 2006. ‘Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey’ in The Lancet - Vol. 368, Issue 9545, 21 October 2006, pp.1421–1428. Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Brooks, R., Lewis, J., Mosdell, N., and Threadgold, T. 2003. Embeds or In-beds? The Media Coverage of the War in Iraq. Report commissioned for the BBC. Cardiff: Cardiff School of Journalism. Calhoun, G. 2003. ‘Belonging’ in the cosmopolitan imaginary. Ethnicities 3(4), 531–68. Chilton, P. 2003. Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routledge. Lazar, A. and Lazar, M. 2004. The discourse of the new world order. Discourse & Society 15 (2–3), 223–43. Lewis, J. 2004. Television, public opinion and the war in Iraq: The case of Britain. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 16(3): 295–310. Nye, J. 2004. Soft Power. The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., and Leibhart, K. 1999. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.



The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq Phil Graham and Allan Luke University of Queensland / Nanyang Technological University

Beginning from recent critical work on globalisation, many critical scholars have extended the analytic vocabulary of ‘advanced’, ‘fast’ and ‘postmodern’ capitalism to explain the geopolitics of the Iraq War. This chapter offers a counterclaim: that current geopolitical economy can be more usefully characterised as a form of neofeudal corporatism. Using examples drawn from a 300,000 word corpus of public utterances by three political leaders — George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard — we identify and explicate defining characteristics of this system and how they are manifest in political language about the invasion of Iraq.

Introduction “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. … But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.” Dwight Eisenhower (1961)

Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 ‘farewell address’ is a significant and prescient commentary fraught with historical ironies. It is a statement by a military strategist and national hero whose credentials as such were never questioned by media

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or political pundits, a statement by the modern patriarch of an internationalist Republican leadership who reigned over McCarthyism and the Cold War — a post-war lineage that leads us forty years later to the pronouncements of Bush’s war cabinet. It was delivered just months after the Quemoi and Matsu dispute between Taiwan and China, shortly before the Bay of Pigs, and the escalation of Vietnam under the Kennedy administration. Without highlighting historical parallels, it would suffice to say that it was a crucial and, indeed, unprecedented moment in US geopolitical engagement. Yet it is a profoundly ambivalent statement coming from a President/General, noting that the “defense establishment” exceeded, while contributing to, the scope of domestic corporations like GM and GE — even before the term ‘multinational’ was in common usage. Note Eisenhower’s description of “economic, political, even spiritual” influences on “the very structure of our society”. We take these comments as a nascent but explicit recognition that this particular post-war nation-state was crossing an imaginary threshold: past an adjunct or responsive military capacity, past budgetary conventions of ‘peacetime’ national investment in armaments to a new kind of political, cultural and, indeed, “spiritual” and affective order. This was a new warrior corporatism of production, consumption and, indeed, affiliated ideologies of desire and destruction. Elsewhere we have characterised the system as ‘neo-feudal corporatism’ (Graham and Luke 2003). Our use of the term ‘feudal’ is at once an anachronism, a polemical metaphor and an attempt at description of new social and discourse relations. We use it to foreground our assertion that a qualitatively new set of social relations has gained predominance – not a return, but rather a reinvention of an embodied and lived warrior state. The naming and renaming of political economy, like the naming of epoch and culture, race and space, is often a retrospective matter. This is a key part of our argument. Those who lived in systems characterised by historians as ‘feudal’ would most certainly have never described themselves as such (Brown 1974). Major discourses around feudalism first appeared in the mid-eighteenth century as “an early essay in comparative jurisprudence” (Maitland 1888 in Brown 1974: 1064). Neither feudalism nor mercantilism had theorists that called themselves ‘feudalist’ or ‘mercantilist’. Nor did anybody living in those historical periods expressly theorise a system they called ‘feudalism’ or ‘mercantilism’. Without venturing into the various arguments about whether feudalism did or did not exist, and the exact historical moment of its constitution in discourse, it is worth noting that comparatively few political economic systems have been as self-conscious and self-appellative as those that defined the twentieth century. This is at least in part because of the key role of dominant modes of mass



The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq

information in the establishment of self-legitimacy, which is our concern in this analysis. Not just intellectuals and politicians, but also citizens, workers, and students throughout the twentieth century have sought and found identity, purpose and community by explicit reference to the various ‘isms’ that have been touted as labels for political economic systems as readily as they might have done the work of identity construction through religious and transcendental discourses. These include capitalism, National Socialism, communism, fascism, but also less overtly legitimated and normalised systems such as collectivism, communitarianism and so forth. As much as such categorical affiliations can mark out difference, they can function in obfuscatory ways, naming, misrecognising and misrepresenting a global system of relations that may not count as capitalism per se, whether as ideal type or historical version. Our question here is whether we are indeed living in a ‘capitalist order’, the vaunted ‘free market’ of individual enterprise and will, of free markets and flows of exchange — or indeed whether we have, as Eisenhower’s comments anticipated, crossed into a geopolitical economy that is materially, relationally and discursively different in kind and intensity, social relations and material consequences.

Contemporary arguments for and against capitalism Capitalism, the contemporary wisdom of trade paperbacks and that which talk shows insist on, has triumphed. Whether claiming to be ‘left’ or ‘right’, progressive or conservative, scholars, politicians, and public pundits of all persuasions express the view that the political economic system we live in can accurately be termed ‘capitalism’ (Fukuyama 1995; Harvey 2001; Hutton and Giddens 2000; Jessop 2002; Soros 2000). The undergirding narrative of cultural and economic globalisation goes something like this: since the end of the Cold War and Fall of the Wall, since the rise of multinationals and ‘branded’ consuming cultures, multinational capitalism has emerged a clear victor over competing forms of state formation and economic organisation. Here is a typically hyperbolic statement about the state of capitalism: “Capitalism has become the universal social and economic order of our time. Throughout the twentieth century it has been challenged from right and left, but with the fall of the Communist Soviet Union, it has emerged triumphant and stronger than ever before. This new capitalism differs from that of previous eras, however it is truly global, aided by extraordinary advances in technology and communication, and by unfettered global financial markets. Capitalism has a speed, inevitability and force that it has not had before.” (Giddens 2000)

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In public and academic discourse, there is a diversity of nuanced versions: ‘new capitalism’, ‘multinational capitalism’, ‘fast capitalism’, ‘global capitalism’, ‘hypercapitalism’, ‘postmodern capitalism’ and, even, ‘virtual capitalism’. Taken together, they have the effect of reinforcing the claim of ascendancy and monopoly, and they reify what is, necessarily, a complex set of formations, conditions and consequences.1 These material and discourse relations include, we argue here, emergent ruling relations. Yet the current tendency to unproblematically reify capitalism has a number of unhelpful effects. The most deleterious is that it tends to overwrite alternative political economic understandings and analyses. In such a situation, all that is left to contention is whether the singular phenomenon of capitalism is good or bad, whether it makes things worse or better, its localised and generalisable conditions and effects, and so forth. So, depending on one’s attitude towards capitalism in globalised conditions, when arguments about political economic systems are put forward, the scripted arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’ are trotted out and played, over and over, like a badly scratched record, repeatedly leading to the inevitable conclusion that capitalism is unstoppable and universal, for better or worse, and that we must therefore embrace, fight, or adapt to the system, depending upon site, locality and cultural history. This is the oft-cited illusion, for better or worse, that there is no place outside of capitalism or no system other than capitalism is extant. Hence, however intentionally, many critical scholars deconstruct and critique the current system without querying the conditions and contradictions of its naming and its very existence — without considering the possibilities that current conditions may, indeed: (a) not be ‘capitalism’ per se, and, relatedly, (b) critical arguments against capitalism may be self-annulling by perpetuating a seamless veneer of comprehensiveness, cohesiveness and historical inevitability. That is to say, many current arguments about capitalism — for or against — constitute the assumption that capitalism is the extant universal, global system of political economic relations. But what of an alternative naming and explication? In deploying the term ‘neo-feudal corporatism’ we wish to reject any characterisation of the current system as capitalism per se, and to foreground certain aspects of the current system that reveal its underlying character, especially those aspects that have become most apparent in the pronouncements of Bush, Blair and Howard in the events since September 11, 2001. These events consisted of buildings in the US being damaged or destroyed after they were hit by hijacked commercial airplanes, thereby causing the deaths of 2,882 people, most of whom were civilians. Those acts were indeed horrendous. Yet the number of deaths itself is not large in comparison with everyday violence in the US, particularly when viewed against the backdrop of near continual wars and everyday public health problems



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throughout the developing world since ‘decolonialisation’.2 Following these events, amplified and reframed as they were by a global mass media system, the US and its allies responded by first invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. New policies were drafted and passed, ostensibly to protect people from further terrorism. The Patriot Act is one such policy (de Beaugrande 2004). ‘Homeland Security’ Ministries and Departments were developed throughout the world, especially among ‘the coalition of the willing’, led by the new corporatist comitatus (of which more below). In consequence, the ubiquitous flows of globalised capital, information, goods, services and bodies have been repartitioned, realigned and redirected, and the resurgent nation-state has once again become the focus of political dialogue. Here is an example of text from George Bush that in effect redefines the parameters and participants of any new globalism: (1) “This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens — leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections — then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction.” (gwb09: 1213)3

In text (1) we see why the heretofore naturalised discourses of economic and cultural globalisation have been disrupted in the current context. This is discourse uttered by the head of the world’s most powerful army, and it frames and promotes antagonism and violence between opposed nation-states organised into blocs. The ‘evil’ other is an amorphous entity presented in agnate movements from a regime, to States like these that have terrorist allies, to an axis of evil comprised of terrorists with state sponsors. The axis of evil is bent on hurting the United States, its allies — our coalition. The world is once again divided into ‘for’ and ‘against’ everything the US allegedly ‘stands for’, as if it were a free-standing semiotic. But chillingly, the binary opposition pivots around the notion of a “civilized world” and its ostensive other, the uncivilised. In this regard, the move here is not to construct self/other in relations that have been familiar in analyses of contemporary capitalism (e.g., between ‘free markets’ and ‘regulation’, ‘globalism’ and parochial versions of the ‘nation’, or even between ‘democracy’ and ‘oppression’, as has occurred during the current electoral campaigns in the US and Australia). Instead, Bush’s comments

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harken back to an earlier historical discourse of empire, colonisation and, indeed, their original normative grounds: the civilisation and domestication of barbarity.

Processes of militarisation and the character of political forms Rather than via the historically durable means of impressment, force or coercion, seizure of chattel or lands, in the last century mass media campaigns and public discourse became the stock and trade of the militarisation and mobilisation of bodies politic (Graham and Luke 2003). We find prototypical moves in the Creel Committee’s efforts during World War I. George Creel was charged with ‘preparing’ the United States for the First World War through the Committee on Public Information (hereafter, CPI) (Creel 1920, 1941; Larson and Mock 1939; Lasswell 1927; Lutz 1933; Steele 1970). At the time, the US was expressly, if not actually, an isolationist nation. The CPI’s success in galvanising popular support for the US to enter the war in Europe was remarkable, if only for its contribution to the reversal of widespread isolationist sentiment. In successfully selling war to the US public, Creel manufactured a first approximation of a militarising American polis coordinated through mass mediation. Despite the lack of instantaneous electronic mass media at the time, the CPI successfully reached and influenced a massive cumulative audience, with quantity of production, saturation, distribution and quality assurance substituting for speed and replicability. If current media are characterised by ‘wall to wall’ messaging, textual and ideological branding and ‘choice’ masquerading as diversity — early media campaigns were Fordist in their conception: focusing on integrity of initial design, uniformity of product and message, replicability, and strong local networking/dealership/franchising. The domestic section of the CPI was explicitly a discoursal weapon — it “had for its aim the instruction of the public for entering the war and historical matter of an educational nature” (Larson and Mock 1939: 14). This was achieved largely by volunteer “writers, educators, and translators”, who, within only two years, disseminated “more than 75,000,000 pieces of literature” (1939: 14).4 The CPI enlisted every available communications technology for organising public opinion: press, film, and theatre; civic organisations such as the Boy Scouts, “women’s organizations, churches, and schools”; cartoonists, photographers, painters, and other artists; “novelists, writers, and professors”; and immigrant organisations comprised of ‘the foreign born’ all became media for the militarising function of the CPI (1939: 12–16). The messages were staged to cut across popular and ‘high culture’, mass and elite, formal and informal outlets. As Creel put it then:



The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq

“There was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board — all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms. All that was fine and ardent in the civilian population came at our call until more than one hundred and fifty thousand men and women were devoting highly specialized abilities to the work of the Committee, as faithful and devoted in their service as though they wore the khaki. […] What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business and every task a common task for a single purpose.” (Creel 1920: 5)

Creel’s ‘Four-Minute Men’, comprised of 75,000 “locally endorsed speakers”, gave prepared speeches four minutes in length “on behalf of war aims at a theatre or other meeting place”, reaching a total audience in excess of 300 million people (Larson and Mock 1939: 14–15). At the same time, in an effort that predated the emergence of broadcast mass media in the interwar period, more than forty films were made in the glorification of the war effort (Creel 1920). In this way, Creel’s approach combined a locally-based, putatively ‘grassroots’ push (local soapboxes) with a centrally developed and replicable apparatus of multimedia production. A notable example of the latter was the personification of the US body politic in James Montgomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam, which first gained recognition in the I want you army recruitment poster (Library of Congress 2002). The poster had a print run of four million during the 18 months of the CPI’s activities and made such a successful and lasting impression that it was used throughout WWII for recruitment. It remains a powerful and recognisable icon of the militarised US body politic, the object of caricatures fifty years later in the Anti-War Movement, and to this day a symbol of the draft, the US Army and Uncle Sam. The establishment of a nationally organised and centralised body for the propagation of warlike attitudes in the US — and for the suppression of pacifist ones — was a milestone in strategic mass communication. In the space of two years, without the aid of electronic mass media, through thousands of newspapers, magazines, periodicals, and civic organisations, in pictures, words, slogans, and legislative acts, in what Creel called “a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising” (Creel 1920), the CPI built a militarised public consciousness often, if not continually, remoulded into

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what he termed white-hot instinct of … determination. This was achieved in a far less centralised, asynchronous, and unruly media blend, with nothing like current patterns of corporate ownership, board and CEO control, media convergence and cross-media marketing and messaging. The precedent of Creel’s work tells us a great deal about the information and discourse practices visible and durable in the US, especially since the events of September 11, 2001. Ironically, less than twelve months prior to the CPI, Wilson had narrowly won the 1916 presidential election with the slogan ‘He kept us out of war’, just as Bush had promised to bring US troops home in a debate with Al Gore prior to the 2000 elections. Creel successfully assaulted public memory and significantly contributed to the historical construction of the most powerful militarised body politic in history. At the same time, he created a set of symbols and attitudes, and strategies for deploying these, which have been used to militarise the US body politic ever since. He created an elaborate symbolic apparatus which, when set in motion, excites a multitude of historical sentiments, parts of which are quite ancient and, indeed, embodied in memory and habitus. To paraphrase Bourdieu (1990), the body remembers, and it is this very body that is being recalled and remoulded, across generations, political parties and contexts, at present. These residual traditions are evident in the following words spoken by George W. Bush: (2) “I strongly believe that America is going to change one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time. Because the spirit of this country, a selfless spirit, is alive and well. There are thousands of people all across New Orleans and Louisiana and all across America who understand the responsibility of being an American. It’s more than just making a living. The responsibility of a true patriot is somebody who’s willing to serve something greater than themselves, serve their country. And one way to best serve your country is to love your neighbor just like you’d like to be loved yourself. No, there was tremendous evil done to America, but out of the evil is a new spirit, a vitality of the American spirit, perhaps best represented by the folks on Flight 93. The story, in my judgment, is going to be one of the profound stories of the September the 11th, 2001, tragedy. It captures what I know is the strength of our country. People were flying across the land and they heard the airplane they were on was going to be a weapon. Imagine what went through their minds. They eventually got their thoughts together, they called their loved ones and said goodbye and I love you. History will show that a prayer was said. One guy said, ‘Let’s roll.’ These citizens took the plane into the ground to save lives, to serve something greater than themselves. That spirit of America is so strong and so alive, it allows me to boldly predict that, out of the evil done to this country, is going to come incredible good, not only a peaceful world, but a more compassionate and hopeful and decent America for every citizen who’s lucky enough to live in this country.” (gwb16: 3441)



The language of neofeudal corporatism and the war on Iraq

Ancient sacrifice and new technologies; an appeal to the spirit of patriotism, civic responsibility, and Christianity; incredible good and great evil; the heroic individual and the victory of the nation; and, of course, the promise of a coming utopia are all opposed, juxtaposed, and conflated in text (2) in order to promote a militarised public consciousness. These, we argue, are archetypal, well-practiced discourse strategies, those of epic poems, aristocratic privilege and mass media campaigns alike.

Creel and the development of corporate comitatus “The President’s Management Agenda, announced in the summer of 2001, is an aggressive strategy for improving the management of the Federal government. It focuses on five areas of management weakness across the government where improvements and the most progress can be made.” (Office of Management and Budget 2004)

The comitatus, a group of warriors whose political organisation was based on personal loyalties to a chief or king, was at the core of the feudal political system (Koehl 1960; Stephenson 1941, 1943: 245). The comitatus “was essentially a public relationship: the followers swore fealty to their leader, gave him warlike service, and were subject to his judicial control” (Stephenson 1941: 792). It was also “fundamentally aristocratic”, being comprised of free men “who considered the bearing of arms a distinction and companionship with a famous warrior a source of honor” (1941: 796). Under Charlemagne and his successors, out of an urge to create a Europe-wide system of political organisation, land and other tenures were granted to leading members of the Charlemagne’s comitatus (1941: 793). A system of tenure called vassalage thus emerged. It was organised around the institution of “the feudum or fief ”, the basis of tenure being “essentially military because the original vassalage was a military relationship” (1941: 797–8). It was also a personal relationship, reliant upon the dual acts of homage and fealty by the vassal to the lord (Bloch 1961). The comitatus of feudal society is a prototype of today’s neofeudal corporatist system. The system is global in reach; relies on personal loyalties, tenures, benefices, religious sentiment, and the arbitrary exercise of executive power. Above all, it is now quite overtly reorganised and mobilised around militaristic and militarising pursuits. Here (3) is an exemple of neofeudal corporatist discourse: (3) “No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. That is entirely

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the wrong way to go about it … If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to … piece together clever diplomatic solutions … but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well. Our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” (Richard Perle 2001, as cited in Dixon 2001)

Besides holding an influential defence policy role in the US administration, Perle has a long involvement in defence industries. He remains a partner in Trireme, a company that invests in homeland defence, and “serves as a director of a company doing business with the federal government: the Autonomy Corporation, a British firm that recently won a major federal contract” (Hersh 2003). ‘Total war’ is an attractive financial scenario for people in defence industries. But note the claims here: that partiality and anything less than ‘totality’ will not do, and that “Our children will sing great songs about us years form now”. Contrast the claims and key metaphor in Perle’s comments with the statement below: “Total war is the demand of the hour. … The danger facing us is enormous. The efforts we take to meet it must be just as enormous. The time has come to remove the gloves and use our fists. … We can no longer make only partial use of the war potential at home and throughout Europe. We must use our full resources, as quickly and thoroughly as it is organizationally and practically possible. Unnecessary concern is wholly out of place. … Those who today do not understand that will thank us tomorrow on bended knees that we courageously and firmly took on the task.” (Goebbels 1943/44: 167–204)

National Socialism was a distinctly feudal form of political organisation (Koehl 1960). As Koehl puts it, the National Socialists “quite consciously turned to feudal and medieval models for political relationships” (1960: 921). Consequently, the “comitatus (Gefolgschaft) for the Nazis was the natural political unit, the model for all political relationships … National Socialists denied allegations that the ‘leadership principle’ was equivalent to unrestrained and arbitrary tyranny … Far from extolling naked force, the Führerprinzip was ‘the rediscovery of the basis of political power: loyalty.’ And behind that loyalty lay the ‘full and honest acceptance of responsibility’ by the strong. Thus the National Socialist ideology made much of ‘Germanic’ feudalism and condemned the modern state both for its autocratic and its bureaucratic elements.” (Koehl 1960: 922)

This is not to say that the current global system we are calling neofeudal corporatism is modelled on National Socialism. Such a claim would be facile. We could argue, though, that in its militarism and expansionism, use of media and symbols, and in the formation of its ruling relations, National Socialism was an incipient and crude form of neofeudal corporatism. That is to say, rather than being the his-



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torical aberration in the apparently seamless political development of democratic and capitalist Anglo/European nation-states that it is often portrayed as, it may well be the case that National Socialism modelled a form of political ‘progress’ in the West that is ascendant, a ruling state/corporate military complex based upon an overarching and comprehensive set of discourse strategies and unprecedented manipulation of dominant, technological modes of information. The latter point was, indeed, at the heart of the Frankfurt School suspicion over mass culture and media such as radio and television (Adorno 2001). This was something more in kind and intensity than the ‘print capitalism’ (Anderson 1991) affiliated with the emergence of the European nation-state three centuries before. The elements of neofeudal corporatism that we identify above are present in political language about the invasion of Iraq. Personal bondage between representatives of the bodies politic that comprise ‘the coalition of the willing’ is evidenced throughout the language of their political leaders, and there are recognisable hierarchies of allegiance expressed within such language. George Bush: (4) “Prime Minister Blair … He is a friend, he is a strong leader, we are bound by the strong conviction that freedom belongs to everybody and that we have got to work together to make the world a more peaceful place. … In order to achieve peace all countries in our region must take responsibility to do their best to fight off terror, and I know the Prime Minister joins me as we mourn the loss of life.” (gwb_tb01: 56)

This is well in keeping with the spirit of comitatus: Blair is a friend to Bush, a strong leader — a companion in war. Bush and Blair are bound by a common code and a common purpose, the rightness of which is apparently unquestionable. The pact of comitatus is echoed by Blair in response: (5) “Once again let me thank President Bush for coming here. Let me say, as well as our own pride in our own forces during the course of this conflict, we have watched with immense admiration the skill and tenacity and professionalism of the American forces. This is a strong alliance, we are strong allies and I think day by day the proof of the wisdom of that alliance grows.” (gwb_tb06: 982)

Along with a reaffirmation of the bond between Blair and Bush, there is a clear deference to US military power evident in Blair’s words. While he naturally feels pride for British force, he has immense admiration for the US military, particularly for its professionalism, the key word of corporatist business here applied to organised and massive violence. Yet at the same time this is homage to his most honoured liege (see also Fairclough, this volume). John Howard, Australia’s Prime Minister who once referred to his nation as America’s ‘Deputy-Sheriff ’ in the Asia-Pacific region, pays homage to both Blair and Bush. This is most marked by his deference to their leadership.

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(6) “I do want to record my respect for the leadership displayed by President Bush. It’s easy to attack the President of the United States. The United States is the most powerful country in the world, they’re an easy mark for all the critics and all the people who have grumbles. And I think he’s shown a very strong commitment to a set of attitudes and to an outcome and he’s given very impressive leadership. And can I also say as a fellow participant in a parliamentary system of government how much I admire the leadership of Tony Blair on this issue.” (jh14: 2,443)

Howard pays public respect to the leadership of Bush and expresses his admiration for the leadership of Tony Blair. Once again there is a reference to a set of attitudes, a code of valour. Typical of the corporatist register, the invasion and destruction of an entire country is reduced and sanitised to become merely an issue that can be solved through strong leadership, which in the current context refers to management strategies. Australia’s political leader goes a step further in establishing a relation of vassalage: (7) “America has given very strong leadership to the world on the issue of Iraq. […] Alliances are two-way processes and our alliance with the United States is no exception and Australians should always remember that no nation is more important to our long-term security than that of the United States.” (jh40: 502)

Once again, the issue of Iraq is presented as a management problem that has been solved through strong leadership. Howard takes the opportunity to remind Australians that they owe allegiance to the US because the Australian body politic is its vassal, and its long-term security depends on doing service to the US at its bidding (compare with van Dijk, this volume).

Corporate raiders of the US body politic Yet, the hegemon to whom Howard pays homage and tribute is not ‘the United States’ or ‘Americans’ per se. It is the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against, a corporate and corporatist constituency that has no national roots, or at best only ostensive ones, with a quiet, backstage presence in geopolitics. It provides the kind of stage and set management for geopolitical and military action, constituting a massive service and supply network that may, indeed, often wind up providing support to opposing sides of an armed conflict. Richard Perle, for example, maintains a residence in Provence (Russell 2003). What is required to be a defence advisor for the US government, advocating perpetual war whilst in one’s residence in Provence, is difficult to comprehend. Yet it was a noted function of ‘globalisation’ to disperse corporate ownership and membership whilst simultaneously separating ownership from control and



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distancing administrative activities from productive ones, regardless of the particular domains in which a corporate entity operates (cf. Roe 2000; Saul 1997). Whether commercial or theological; media or military; legislative, executive, or judicial in function, the corporate constituents of the new hegemon are globally dispersed yet systematically interdependent parts of a global administrative, service, outsourcing, and primary supply complex. DynCorp is an exemple. In 2003 it was recruiting ‘rent-a-cops’ for the newly ‘liberated’ Iraq, just as it has done in other places around the world, including Bosnia, Afghanistan, Colombia, and the US, where it “reviews security clearance applications of military and civilian personnel for the Navy” (Chatterjee 2003). DynCorp’s advertisement for new positions in Iraq conveys a sense of the complex and confusing relationships that have been forged in the new environment: “On behalf of the United States Department of States, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd. (DAOL), a CSC Company, is seeking individuals with appropriate experience and expertise to participate in an international effort to re-establish police, justice and prison functions in post-conflict Iraq. Interested applicants must be active duty, retired or recently separated sworn police officers, correctional officers or experienced judicial experts. US citizenship is required.” (DynCorp 2003)

An ‘aerospace operations’ company purporting to be located in the United Kingdom recruiting a private-sector police force for the US Federal government to impose order on a country in the Middle East and requiring employees be US citizens is, on a prima facie basis, confusing. Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), DynCorp’s new owner, was the first software company to be publicly listed (in 1964) and has operated since 1959 — its major clients include Raytheon (makers of Patriot missiles and significant amounts of other military hardware), the United States Marines, D&B (formerly Dunn & Bradstreet), and BT (British Telecom) (CSC 2003). While its corporate headquarters are in California, it has operations in 69 countries (CSC 2003). At June 2002, CSC had 119,340 globally dispersed shareholders, many of whom are themselves publicly listed corporations (CSC 2002: 61). For shareholders of CSC, and those of other corporations awarded ‘massive’ contracts (predicted to be worth more than $US100 billion) for ‘dynamic reconstruction’ in ‘post-conflict’ Iraq, corporate ‘nationality’ is entirely irrelevant (cf. World Trade Executive 2003). In fact, a direct function of globalisation has been the de-territorialisation, dispersion, and distancing of ownership, commercial, financial, administrative, and productive functions. Allegiance to particular national or regional labour forces has become, at best, a commercial liability (Klein 2000; Saul 1997). In this global order, to participate in an international effort to

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re-establish police, justice and prison functions, all that is needed is the requisite skill sets, job competences, and the proper national citizenship/immigration/social security status — Creel’s ‘white hot intensity’ to hit the trenches of the First World War appears to be optional. The close links between transnational corporations, the White House, and the Pentagon in the current US administration are well documented. Many members of the cabinet have intimate ties to transnational corporations, the largest of which have military connections (Centre for Responsive Politics 2003; Kellner 2002). Vice-President Dick Cheney received a million dollars per year in ‘deferred compensation’ payments from Halliburton since retiring as the corporation’s CEO immediately after his nomination as Bush’s running mate in 2000 (CBS Broadcasting 2003; Cable News Network 2000). Halliburton has received “billions of dollars worth of reconstruction contracts” in ‘post-war’ Iraq (Jehl 2003). People such as Perle function as corporate lobbyists — courtesans — who now have direct control of the world’s most powerful military force.

Benefice, booty, and the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq A defining feature of feudalism was the distribution of benefices, the rewards of loyal military service usually granted in the form of land or entitlements to draw revenues from the produce of a land and its people. The Bush administration parcelled out reconstruction contracts, such as those given to Halliburton and Bechtel, before the Iraq war had even begun (Center for Responsive Politics 2003b). For the corporations involved, it is a ‘win-win’ situation. There are revenues from weaponry and military facilities, and from the damage those weapons and facilities cause. Here is how the various benefices of neofeudal corporatism are expressed in Bush’s political language: (8) “From the outset, I have expressed confidence in the ability of the Iraqi people to govern themselves. Now they must rise to the responsibilities of a free people and secure the blessings of their own liberty. Our strategy in Iraq will require new resources. We have conducted a thorough assessment of our military and reconstruction needs in Iraq, and also in Afghanistan. I will soon submit to Congress a request for $87 billion. The request will cover ongoing military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which we expect will cost $66 billion over the next year. This budget request will also support our commitment to helping the Iraqi and Afghan people rebuild their own nations, after decades of oppression and mismanagement. We will provide funds to help them improve security. And we will help them to restore



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basic services, such as electricity and water, and to build new schools, roads, and medical clinics. This effort is essential to the stability of those nations, and therefore, to our own security.” (gwb35: 1,661)

Bush’s benefices here are said to be parcelled out to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. He firstly bequeaths them the blessings of their own liberty, but they must rise to secure those. The $87 billion he is requisitioning from the taxpayers of the US is, of course, to be paid mostly to corporate contractors to repair the damage of mass bombing campaigns. However, he shifts the blame for the need for reconstruction on decades of oppression and mismanagement, as if oppression were not a form of ‘mismanagement’, as if the campaign of destruction that the government itself branded ‘Shock and Awe’ were not a primary cause of reconstruction needs. Blair’s account follows. Responding to widespread public criticism about the way the US administration awarded reconstruction contracts, he says this: (9) “All this stuff in the media about the Americans giving out the contracts, all that has happened is this. American aid, legally under American law, is tied to American trade and commerce. So the actual American aid that America is giving to Iraq, they let the contracts for their own companies. That is a completely different thing from the reconstruction contracts for Iraq itself that will be let by the interim Iraqi authority and it will be up to them to decide, not the Americans, or the British, or anybody else to decide, but for them to decide who gets those contracts. So again a lot of these stories are not actually correct. There is no question of us trying to tie up British or American commercial interests with this.” (tb21:1,937)

Now common knowledge confirmed by various branches of the US government, the corporations that were awarded the major reconstruction contracts in Iraq are transnational, with the largest contractor being a subsidiary of Halliburton. Under Cheney’s leadership, “the number of Halliburton subsidiaries registered in tax-friendly locations”, such as the Cayman Islands, “ballooned from nine in 1995 to 44 in 1999”, thus resulting in a “dramatic drop in Halliburton’s federal taxes, which fell from $302 million in 1998 to less than zero — to wit, an $85 million rebate — in 1999” (Huffington 2002). It is true but misleading of Blair to identify American aid with American trade and commerce. American aid is certainly tied to a national body politic: it is paid for by American taxpayers. Yet in an ironic way, Blair’s attempt to distance the flows from American national benefices is accurate. The American trade and commerce that Blair refers to is ‘American’ in name only, with a significant proportion of its operational profits and revenue flows flowing moving offshore to tax-havens (Huffington 2002). Blair’s statement there is no question of us trying to tie up British or American commercial interests with this is factually accurate — for it is a requirement of US

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law that contracts funded by US aid must go to US companies, regardless of where they pay taxes. In other words, there is a legal requirement for corporate benefice in the structure of US Federal law. Weapons, prisons, oil mining and refining, sea port management, electricity and water supplies, policing and other security functions — practically every ‘essential’ service in the US is provided by a member of its corporate comitatus, a corollary of Reaganomic era ‘privatisation’ and, indeed, the extension of the corporate complex identified by Eisenhower. The most influential members of the comitatus populate the US cabinet and presidential advisory boards, and they have done so for many decades (cf. Saul 1997; Moore 2003), and a broad range of philanthropic, national and transnational NGOs (this is to say nothing of the intrication of university boards, research organisations and agencies, particularly in corporatised universities seeking defence and intelligence contracts, in these same networks). Consequently, the comitatus can now plan and launch a war; parcel out reconstruction contracts for essential services; control the extraction of precious minerals and metals; establish and sustain a broad array of affiliated research and development activities to sustain these activities, and, through global media networks, present this process via infotainment to the world as of great benefit to the people whose land has been occupied by force. In the matter of benefice, Howard is far more subservient and far less expectant than Blair. (10) “Well ladies and gentlemen as you know I’ll be going shortly to the United States where I’ll see President Bush and I’ll have the opportunity of spending some time with him and Mrs Bush at the Bush family ranch in Texas. We’ll talk about the bilateral relationship, reconstruction, the challenge ahead in Iraq, the possible progress on a free trade agreement between Australia and the United States, circumstances in our own region and most particularly North Korea and it will be an opportunity of course with the fairly extensive amount of time for bilateral discussions to cover each of these issues in some detail.” (jh11:177)

The lure of a free trade agreement between Australia and the US appears to have been a deciding factor in Australia’s involvement in the ‘coalition of the willing’ (Davidson 2003). Yet here is a heavily modalised expectation that such an agreement will eventuate — it is merely possible progress towards such an agreement. For Howard, merely to be in the presence of the US President is an opportunity, especially since the meeting is to take place in the Bush family ranch, the heart of the nobleman’s fief. There are no expectations here, only hopes for beneficence. The reference to reconstruction is worth comment. When it was announced in Australia that the US administration would only allow US corporations to bid for reconstruction contracts, representatives of the Australian corporate sector were publicly outraged (Inbaraj 2003). Since making this statement, both the free trade



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agreement and Australian business involvement in the reconstruction ‘Bonanza’ in Iraq have been secured by the Australian government, yet leaving the traditional Australian rural sectors to cry foul over the effects of the agreement. Since the second age of feudalism, few political forms have achieved such degrees of distance between ruling elites and the ruled, confusing distinctions between property rights, proprietary discretion, executive privilege, and military force (cf. Bloch 1961: 345–354). Like ‘second age’ feudalism, the feudal aspects of our current age are characterised by contractual allegiances underwritten by an intense religiosity and militarism; systematic corporate subjection (or the subjection of one group to another) through ties of political and economic interdependence; “the rigorous economic subjection” of the great majority of people “to a few powerful men”; “the identification of wealth … with power”; and the highest of economic priorities being placed on the maintenance of a professional military class. Far from reflecting a new totalising force of the state, it arises from and accelerates a “profound weakening of the State” (1961: 441–452).

Neofeudal corporatism and the militarised body politic The most overt similarity between our current age and that of feudalism proper is the social logic of a ‘permanent arms economy’ — the very phenomenon which Eisenhower described in his farewell remarks (White 1962). In feudal societies, excess agricultural production was promoted for the seasonal maintenance of a professional military class. Most historians accept that “feudalism was essentially military, a type of social organization designed to produce and support cavalry” (White 1962: 3). The currently dominant form of social organisation is ‘designed’ (in the same loose sense) to produce and support high-tech, massive, globally operative, corporately owned military institutions. Today, the largest item of trade in tangible things is the trade in arms (Saul 1997: 21). But the predominance of militaristic values only begins with armaments. Research, military personnel, government personnel, public relations campaigns, intelligence services, and multi-million dollar movie budgets can all be put under the banner of military expenditure (Herman and Chomsky 1988/1994). When added to the increasingly outsourced and corporatised security budgets more generally — police, jails, private security firms, border protection forces, multilateral peace-keeping forces — along with the various and invariably large bureaucratic, ministerial, and administrative organisations associated with these combined parts of the disciplinary industrial complex, the expenditure on organised legitimate violence and the suppression of organised illegitimate violence,

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both domestic and transnational, is staggering. It would appear that the military industrial complex identified by Eisenhower now has grown to include both its Creel-like modes of information and a transnational service industry devoted to the amelioration, mollification and ‘mopping up’ of its human, physical, ecosystemic and discoursal effects. Hence, national budget deficits stand like medieval levies to raise armies and support the vassal. The global mediations of corporate militarism reach into practically every level of consumer society. The density and reach of corporatist mediations make it impossible to delineate militaristic mediations along public-private lines, or, within that, between individual and collective interests, or between general activity and specifically military activity. Among the largest corporate manufacturers of military hardware and software can be found some of the world’s largest personal finance companies (General Electric, General Motors); telecommunications and IT companies (Siemens, Texas Instruments, IBM, NEC, Toshiba); media and entertainment companies (CBS, NBC, HMV, EMI); aerospace manufacturers (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, British Aerospace), household appliances (Samsung, General Electric); and car makers (General Motors, Rolls Royce, Ford, Mitsubishi, Fiat, Daimler-Benz). Consumers and investors consequently cannot help but subsidise military research, development and manufacturing, however directly or indirectly. Consumers (‘commoners’) thus are now woven into a global network of militarised corporate mediations at almost every level of existence; if not by direct consumption, or by direct or indirect taxation, then by investments, pension funds, mortgages and insurance. Militarism is also a pervasive production value for corporatist culture industries. As one commentator notes: “The special history of the United States has given us a very unique mythology of violence. We tend to regard certain forms of violence — violence that pits advanced against primitive peoples, whites against non-whites — as violence that produces good things, produces progress, produces moral advancement, produces civilization.” (Slotkin 1994, in CDI, 1994)

It would be one thing if such ‘entertainments’ were merely a by-product of a social consciousness which had emerged from total immersion in militaristic forms of life. But militaristic production values are direct, strategic, and purposive. As we shall see just below, the Center for Defense Information (CDI) details almost a century of direct and conscious involvement by the military in the production of movies, which was designed to impress upon the public the virtues of military ideals and technologies (CDI 1997). This is a practice that began with Creel. As Arnold Pacey (1999/2001) points out, the fact that extreme and explicit violence is a staple theme in the mass entertainment economy should give pause for concern.



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The roots of US feudalism and their continued re-emergence It is worth remembering that the Europeans first came to the Americas at the height of feudalism. Not surprisingly, “far from starting life anew”, the settlers of the New World “carried with them their typical medieval institutions and continued the same processes” (Mumford 1964: 7; see also White 1965). The seed crystals of neofeudal corporatism were transported to the Americas in incipient form. Upon settling the New World, “all America … became a bloody arena, in which Europeans fought out their ancient rivalries” (Ellis 1966: 13) between nations, races, religions and tribes, all at a fatal toll to indigenous communities and ecosystems. Even the most modern aspects of the US — its extensive technological dynamism — can be attributed to the feudal spirit: the “dynamic project of Western technology, the defining mark of modernity, is actually medieval in origin and spirit” (Noble 1997: 9). The New World was thought to be the ‘new Eden’, a place that was to become the promised Heaven on Earth, a conceit reiterated time and time again by early Protestants, resurrected in Ronald Reagan’s frequent invocation of Puritan ‘Shining city on the Hill’ (Fitzgerald 1986) and reflected in later US attitudes to war, religion, and technology (Mumford 1964; Noble 1997). Again, Bush’s discourse is redolent with intertextual references to high feudal sentiment. Bush is hailed as “God’s President” by the Christian Right (Conason 2002). His discourse resonates with the millenarian consciousness that has infused technocratic elites throughout the West since at least the twelfth century (Noble 1997). The weight of Christianity’s evangelical history, according to this Chief Executive, is the joint burden of Americans and God. (11) “On this Thanksgiving, our nation remembers the men and women of our military, your friends and comrades who paid the ultimate price for our security and freedom. We ask for God’s blessings on their families, their loved ones and their friends, and we pray for your safety and your strength, as you continue to defend America and to spread freedom. Each one of you has answered a great call, participating in an historic moment in world history. You live by a code of honor, of service to your nation, with the safety and the security of your fellow citizens. Our military is full of the finest people on the face of the earth. I’m proud to be your Commander-in-Chief. I bring greetings from America. May God bless you all.” (gwb06: 600)

Here, in (11), the historical depths of the feudal comitatus relationship are summarised and drawn upon: sacrifice of life in the glory of the greater good; unquestioning loyalty; historical consequence; the unbridled praise of military service above all else (the finest people on earth); the code of honor; are all invoked by the priest-king-warrior who asks for God’s blessings upon his military cohort as he

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sends them to propagate freedom throughout the lands of the infidel. This is nothing less than a narrative of the divine right of regents, crusades and barbarians. But it must be remembered that it is only a mere 140 years since the most devastating civil war tore the country apart. Even now, the US is far from homogeneous, perhaps less so than it ever was. According to the person whose job it was to unite public opinion at the turn of the twentieth century, the nation was “torn by a thousand divisive prejudices, stunned by the voices of anger and confusion, and muddled by the pull and haul of opposed interests. These were conditions that could not be permitted to endure. What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will, the will-towin, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business and every task a common task for a single purpose.” (Creel 1920)

At the inception of its westernisation, North America was, as Ellis (1966) points out, a miniature of mediaeval Europe — fractured, fragmented, and violently antagonistic. This is a fact that remains evident to anyone who has toured the US to any extensive degree. It is a patchwork quilt of cultures and subcultures, religious and political differences, so much so that Creel’s efforts have had to be repeated, time and time again — the body politic has to be remediated into existence. Bush, too, must address and overcome the same divisions as Creel: (12) “Beyond all differences of race or creed, we are one country, mourning together and facing danger together. Deep in the American character, there is honor, and it is stronger than cynicism. And many have discovered again that even in tragedy — especially in tragedy — God is near. In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we’ve been called to a unique role in human events. Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential. Our enemies send other people’s children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life.” (gwb09: 3,838)

The welding of America into Creel’s ‘white-hot mass instinct’ was an achievement of discourse, an exercise in the production of mass mediated meanings designed to unite the nation symbolically and attitudinally. It remains. The activities of the CPI helped to build, and clearly heralded, a future of evercloser collaborations between public and private organisations, between state and



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community, between department and non-government organisation. These activities have continued through to the present. Creel relied on corporations, commercial and otherwise, to propagate and enforce his policies of censorship and militaristic image building. Today, the CDI documents extensive, ongoing, and direct military involvement in major Hollywood ‘blockbusters’ (the name of a bomb), including direct censorship tied to “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of subsidies, and scripting decisions over major productions designed to inculcate faith in military ideals among the public (CDI 1997). According to a US Department of Defence (DOD) spokesperson, “‘Top Gun’ … prepared the American people for the Gulf War. Before the completion of the rehabilitation [of perceptions about the US military post-Vietnam PG], the American people had more or less decided the United States military couldn’t do what it said it could do. ‘Top Gun’ showed that we could shoot down airplanes, that our aircraft carriers could go anyplace, and that our pilots were the best. And so, when the Gulf War comes along, there’s no reason for any American civilian to believe that we can’t beat Saddam Hussein.” (Philip Strub, in CDI 1997)

Whether named ‘Public Relations’, ‘Propaganda’, ‘Strategic Communication’, or ‘Integrated Marketing Communication’, the techniques and strategies referred to in the above comments by Strub have their roots in the activities of the CPI. Yet Urban II, who launched the first crusade in 1095, used essentially similar strategies (Graham, Keenan, and Dowd 2004). The particulars of these general strategies for militarising bodies politic necessarily change with the ‘societal order of discourse’ (Fairclough 1992). They are achieved by means of the most effective forms of mediation available and enacted by the most legitimate speakers of the day. Creel trail-blazed the close collaborations between government, corporations, artists’ guilds, and scholarly organisations in the prosecution of war. The CPI’s propaganda was written “by the country’s foremost publicists, scholars, and historians”, with “the various universities lending their best men and the National Board of Historical Service placing its three thousand members at the complete disposal of the Committee” (Creel 1920: 6). His advertising campaign was translated into “many languages other than English” and “went to every corner of the world, carrying [America’s] defense and … attack” (1920: 6). His instigation of modern discoursal warfare emphasised “the importance of the spoken word” and included a ‘speaking division’ that “toured great groups like the Blue Devils, Pershing’s Veterans, and the Belgians, arranged mass-meetings in the communities, conducted forty-five war conferences from coast to coast, co-ordinated the entire speaking activities of the nation, and assured consideration to the crossroads hamlet as well as to the city.” (1920: 6–7)

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The CPI’s ‘photography division’ distributed “more than two hundred thousand” photographs “at no cost”. It also “conceived the idea of the ‘permit system,’ that opened up our military and naval activities to civilian camera men” and “handled … the voluntary censorship of still and motion pictures in order that there might be no disclosure of information valuable to the enemy” (1920: 9). During the invasion of Iraq, beginning in March 19, 2003, the photography division’s ‘permit system’ legacy was evident in the use of ‘embedded reporters’, journalists licensed by the US military to officially ‘cover’ the war. Not surprisingly, “[r]esearchers found that although reporters who accompanied the British and US military were able to be objective, they avoided images that would be too graphic or violent for British television. Some of the coverage resembled a ‘war film’. ” (Wells, 2003)

Enough So much more could be said about the neofeudal character of the current age, especially in the US. It is not just the discursive glorification of war with the bulk of excess production going to fund a warrior class of corporations that we have documented here; but as well, the extreme cost of training and arming US soldiers, thus leading to the army’s marketing slogan, ‘An Army of One’, so redolent of the armoured knight; the raising of local funds by parents and communities to provide body armour for their sons and daughters sent to war; the deep and cynical use of religious fundamentalism as a war tool; the facile division of the world into Good and Evil; the unquestioning loyalty that is expected of those in corporate, military, and government bureaucracies; the ferreting out of staff, even in outsourced organisations three or four times removed from the court, who show verbal or even bodily signs of dissent — the similarities are striking. Our point is this: that any part of humanity should still be engaged in feudal pursuits — funded by political and economic monopolies — is appalling. It should not continue. At the same time, we should realise that the current expression of feudalism differs from the last in one very distinct and important aspect: it is largely discourse-driven, amplified and accelerated by systems of mass mediation. The current feudal impulses are in large part the product of discoursal efforts, such as those by Creel. Language, discourse and image, marketing and entertainment are at the core of neocorporate feudalism. They are therefore its most vulnerable organs and the focus for any system of checks. Creel’s propaganda methods, which became the study of Goebbels, Lasswell, Bernays, and many other highly successful propagandists, provide the historical



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antecedents and precedents for a brutally militaristic attitude that is now being realised with an intensity and reach that they could not have imagined. But it is important to remember that the disciplinary and training regime acting upon the US body politic at this moment is not the United States or Americans. The understandable levels of anti-Americanism are, in our analysis, naïve and misleading. At issue here is an internationally organised cohort of corporate courtesans who have hijacked the symbolic resources developed by Creel and his later counterparts. This warrior class of professional manipulators of public discourse has come to represent the US, its peoples, lands and chattels. And while it is folly to suggest that the corporate comitatus could be removed from power by discoursal means alone, these will play a large part in any remedies to the current situation. To return to our initial premise: to call this ‘capitalism’ is misleading. Without offering a naïve defence, textbook capitalism looks like a positively favourable set of circumstances in comparison with the present circumstance. Textbook liberal capitalism calls for an entirely different set of social relations. In small, medium and even large regional businesses people owned means of production and tended to have more responsibility, with more at stake in a very personal and necessarily local way. Their sense of civic duty, moral and institutional responsibility was tied very directly into agentive choices related to their capital interests in pursuit of mobility, wealth and ‘the good life’. And the function of ‘small government’ in such a schema is to enable, with as little intervention as possible, means for the fair flow and open exchange of goods, services, resources and, indeed, discourse. In other variations, we find metaphors of ‘free trade’, even the now infamous ‘trickle-down’ metaphors. Eisenhower’s ambivalence was well founded. In the world we have described here, personal initiative, responsibility, benefit and accountability, at the heart of liberal capitalism, is a myth — that is, the very meaning of ‘proprietary limited’. The idea of the corporation was invented to remove accountability, responsibility, risk, and competition (Saul 1997). Corporatism and capitalism are entirely different relations of production. The corporation, the comitatus, and the committee are collective means of elite control designed to remove the need for personal responsibility, entrepreneurship and civic choice and to replace it with loyalty, secrecy, and bondage. For the wars to come, we live the risk of the extension of corporatism to totalitarianism. The feudal spirit — with its roots so deep in western culture — has re-emerged. It is the stuff of children’s tales. And its appeal is in a context where large segments of the population retreat into consumerist narcissism, popular psychologies or near-cult religious community — it has a kind of mystical power that perhaps only Weber fully anticipated.

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As a system that was forged by means of discourse and mass mediation, we would like to think it could be fought by similar means. Whether or not remains to be seen. But it is incumbent on analysts of political language to deploy counterdiscursive strategies against neofeudal corporatism before it becomes even more destructive than it is at present, while at the same time finding, inventing and using those affirmative discourses that enable us to rebuild those other institutions that, quite literally, are at risk in such a world (Luke 2004). We can start by renaming it and its protagonists.

Notes 1.  John Ralston Saul (1997) is a notable exception. 2.  In 2000, 29,350 committed suicide in the US: “of this number, 57% (16,586) were completed using a firearm. … In 1998, 30,708 people in the United States died from firearm-related deaths — 12,102 (39%) of those were murdered; 17,424 (57%) were suicides; 866 (3%) were accidents; and in 316 (1%) the intent was unknown. … For every firearm fatality in the United States, there are two non-fatal firearm injuries.” (Brady Campaign 2004). It is also worth noting that while the West mass-mourned the deaths of less than 3,000 people in New York and Washington, 12 million people in Africa were starving to death (World Health Organization 2002). 3.  Texts are referenced by corpus code word numbers. We used Wordsmith Tools to analyse the texts. 4.  May 1917–June 1919.

References Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Adorno, T. 2001. The Culture Industries. 2nd Ed. London: Brunner-Routledge. Bloch, M. 1961(1940). Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Independence. Vol. 1. Trans. L. A. Manyon. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Polity. Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 2004. Firearm Facts. http://www.bradycampaign.org/ facts/factsheets/?page=firefacts. Accessed April, 2004. Brown, E. R. A. 1974. The tyranny of a construct: Feudalism and historians of medieval Europe. The American Historical Review 79(4), 1063–1088. CBS Broadcasting. 2003, April 18. Taking aim at war deals. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/18/politics/main549944.shtml. Accessed May 11, 2003. Center for Defence Information (CDI). 1994. Media and the images of war. [Documentary Transcript]. Washington, DC: American Defense Monitor. Available at http://www.cdi.org/ adm/724/transcript.html.



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CDI. 1997. The military in the movies [transcript of a documentary]. Available online at http:// www.cdi.org/adm/Transcripts/1020/. Accessed June 2002. Centre for Responsive Politics. 2003. The Bush administration: Corporate connections. http:// www.opensecrets.org/bush/cabinet.asp. Accessed February 20, 2003. Centre for Responsive Politics. 2003b. Rebuilding Iraq — The contractors. http://www.opensecrets.org/news/rebuilding_iraq/index.asp. Accessed December, 2003. Chatterjee, P. 2003, April 9. Dyncorp rent-a-cops may head to post-Saddam Iraq. San Francisco, CA: Corpwatch. http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=6328. Accessed May 1, 2003. Creel, G. 1920. How We Advertised America. New York: Harper & Brothers. Available at http:// www.historytools.org/sources/creel.html, 3–9. Creel, G. 1941. Propaganda and Morale. American Journal of Sociology 47(3), 340–351. Cable News Network. 2003, May 11. Boxer suggests ‘hanky-panky’ in Halliburton contract. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/11/sprj.nilaw.halliburton/. Accessed May 11, 2003. CSC. 2002. Annual Report 2002. El Segundo, CA: CSC. CSC. 2003. CSC Fact Book: February 2003. El Segundo, CA: CSC. Davidson, K. 2003, October 27. Will a US free trade agreement be good for us? Available at http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/26/1067103266149.html. Accessed December 16, 2003. de Beaugrande, R. in press. Critical discourse analysis from the perspective of ecologism: The discourse of the ‘New Patriotism’ for the ‘New Secrecy’. Critical Discourse Studies 1(1). Dixon, N. 2001, December 12. United States: ‘We have Iraq on the radar screen’. Green Left Weekly. Available at http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2001/475/475p19.htm DynCorp. 2003. International mission information source: Iraq mission. Fort Worth, Texas: DynCorp International Police Program. http://www.policemission.com/iraq.asp. Accessed May 10, 2003. Eisenhower, D. D. 1961. Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961. Kansas: The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. Available at http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/farewell.htm Ellis, E. R. 1966. The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History. New York: Kodansha. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fitzgerald, F. 1986. Cities on a Hill. New York: Simon and Schuster. Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Giddens, A. 2000. On the edge: Living with global capitalism. [Press release for a book by the same name edited with Will Hutton]. Available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/OntheEdgePR.htm. Accessed February 17, 2004. Goebbels, J. 1943/1944. “Nun, Volk steh auf, und Sturm brich los!” Rede im Berliner Sportpalast, Der steile Aufstieg. Trans. R. Bytwerk. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP. Available at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb36.htm Graham, P., Keenan, T., and Dowd, A. 2004. A call to arms at the end of history: a discoursehistorical analysis of George W. Bush’s declaration of war on terror. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 199–221. Graham, P. and Luke, A. 2003. Militarising the body politic. New media as weapons of mass instruction. Body & Society 9(4), 149–168. Harvey, D. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. London: Routledge.

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Hersh, S. M. 2003. Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi? The New Yorker. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact Huffington, A. 2002, August 6. Corporate crackdown: Will Cheney be held accountable? Tallahassee Democrat. Available at http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/opinion/3804622.htm. Accessed December, 2003. Hutton, W. and Giddens, A. (eds). 2000. On the Edge: Essays On a Runaway World. London: Jonathan Cape. Inbaraj, S. 2003, April 7. Australian firms eye spoils of war in post-Saddam era. Inter Press Service. Available online at http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/tncs/2003/0407aussie.htm. Accessed August, 2003. Jehl, D. 2003, December 11. Pentagon finds Halliburton overcharged on Iraq contracts. The New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/11/international/middleeast/ 11CND-PENT.html?ex=1076907600&en=03d90fc5385c58e5&ei=5070# Jessop, R. 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity. Jones, W. 2003. “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle demands “regime change” of UN Charter. Executive Intelligence Review 30(13). Available at http://www.larouchepub.com/other/ 2003/3013perle.html Kellner, D. 2002. Theorizing September 11: Social theory, history, and democracy. Available at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/theorizing911.htm. Accessed July 30, 2002. Klein, N. 2001. No Logo. London: Flamingo. Koehl, R. 1960. Feudal aspects of National Socialism. The American Political Science Review 54(4), 921–933. Larson, C. and Mock, J. R. 1939. The lost files of the Creel Committee of 1917–19. Public Opinion Quarterly 3(1), 5–29. Lasswell, H. D. 1927(1971). Propaganda Techniques in World War I. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press. Library of Congress. 2002. The Most Famous Poster. American Treasures of the Library of Congress. Washington DC: Library of Congress. Available http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm015.html. Accessed December 12, 2002. Luke, A. 2004. Notes on the future of critical discourse studies. Critical Discourse Studies 1(1), 149–156. Lutz, R. H. 1933. Studies of war propaganda, 1914–33. The Journal of Modern History 5(4), 496– 516. Mumford, L. 1964. The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Noble, D. 1997. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Office of Management and Budget. 2004. President’s Management Agenda. Washington DC: Whitehouse Publications. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budintegration/ pma_index.html Roe, M. 2000. Political preconditions to separating ownership from corporate control: Working paper no. 155. NY: Columbia Law School Center for Law and Economic Studies. Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=165143 Russell, A. 2003, November 17. ‘Neo-cons’ unfazed despite war in Iraq. The Telegraph. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/17/nbush117.xml Saul, J. R. 1997. The Unconscious Civilization. Victoria, Australia: Penguin.



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Soros, G. 2000. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. New York: Public Affairs. Steele, R. W. 1970. Preparing the public for war: Efforts to establish a National Propaganda Agency, 1940–41. The American Historical Review 75(6), 1640–1653. Stephenson, C. 1943. Feudalism and its antecedents in England. The American Historical Review 48(2), 245–265. Stephenson, C. 1941. The origin and significance of feudalism. The American Historical Review 46(4), 245–265. Wells, M. 2003. Embedded reporters ‘sanitised’ Iraq war. The Guardian. Available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1078652,00.html. White, L. 1965. The legacy of the middle ages in the American wild west. Speculum 40(2), 191– 202. World Trade Executive. 2003. Business Intelligence for Reconstruction in Iraq. Concord, MA: World Trade Executive Inc. Available at http://www.wtexec.com/irr.html. Accessed May 20, 2003.

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Blair’s contribution to elaborating a new ‘doctrine of international community’ Norman Fairclough Lancaster University

This chapter examines the recent move towards a new regime of international relations and international security from a discourse analytical perspective, focusing on speeches by Tony Blair. I shall discuss how Blair has contributed to the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse of international relations and international security in speeches given between 2000 and 2003.

Introduction My focus in this paper is the emergence of a new regime of international relations and especially of international security and the use of force, as evidenced recently in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I shall be discussing specifically the discourse moment of this process, efforts to develop and diffuse a new hegemonic discourse of international relations and international security, and in particular the contribution of one key ‘player’ in this process: Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister. I shall look at how the new discourse emerging in Blair’s speeches has shifted in the period 1999–2003. The data I shall draw upon includes ‘doctrinal’ speeches which elaborate policy: particularly speeches delivered in April 1999 (‘Doctrine of international community’, Chicago), and April 2002 (George Bush Senior Presidential Library), but also more briefly a speech delivered in January 2003 (Foreign Office Conference), and one of a number of ‘occasional enunciations’ in response to practical political contingencies of the Iraq war: the ‘Address to the Nation’ of March 2003 (others of the same period include Blair’s ‘Vision for Iraq’ which was published in the Arabic press, and his Interview for British Forces Broadcasting Service). I have included extracts from the April 1999 and April 2002 speeches in an appendix.

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Four moments of the dialectics of discourse: Emergence, hegemony, recontextualization, operationalization Discourse is a crucial and irreducible dimension of processes of social change which are currently referred to by such terms as ‘globalization’, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘new capitalism’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning society’, and so forth. The processes of change which are represented, and constructed, in terms of categories such as these can be seen as partly actual and partly imagined responses to socioeconomic crisis. Schematically, we can sum up the role of discourse in such situations of crisis as follows (see Jessop 2002): 1. There is a crisis in the existing social order, and competing strategies on the part of different groups of social agents emerge to resolve it. 2. New discourses emerge in response to the crisis, as facets of strategies, which constitute ‘imaginaries’ for a new economic and political ‘fix’, a new order. 3. There is a process of contestation between discourses, leading potentially to the diffusion of a new hegemonic discourse across social fields and scales. 4. If a discourse achieves hegemony, it is enacted in new ways of acting and interacting, inculcated in new ways of being (forms of identity), materialized in new ‘hardware’ (architecture, machinery, technologies etc.). Examples include the emergence and international diffusion of ‘neo-liberalism’ as a political project and set of policies tied to a form of (economic) globalization (on neo-liberalism as a hegemonic project, see e.g. Kagarlitsky 2000), ‘new public management’ in social governance (e.g. the governance of welfare), the ‘knowledgebased economy’ and the ‘learning society’, and (my present concern in this paper) a new regime of international relations and international security. In all these cases, we are dealing partly with discourses which are elements of strategies. Thus, these and other momentous changes in contemporary social life are partly changes in discourse, but not just changes in discourse. It is just as important to avoid a reduction of social change to discourse as it is to recognize discourse as an element or dialectical ‘moment’ of social change. Moreover, more general processes of change are often ‘led’ by changes in discourse, which actually amounts to changes in relationships between discourses, new articulations of elements of existing discourses (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). But caution is needed: the relationship between changes in discourse and more general processes of change is often opaque and complex — partly because the former may obfuscate the latter, in the sense of making it difficult to distinguish between mere changes in discourse which may be rhetorically motivated, and real social change which is in part change in discourse. ‘Globalization’ is a case in point.



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On the basis of the schema above, we can distinguish four elements or ‘moments’ within the dialectics of discourse (Harvey 1996): – Emergence: the ‘translation’, ‘condensation’ (Harvey 1996) and ‘simplification’ (Jessop 2002) of complex realities into discourses; the construction of new discourses through the articulation of elements of existing discourses. One question which arises here is how to account for certain discourses and not others emerging in particular circumstances (e.g. why has a discourse of ‘globalization’ emerged in the past few decades, when the process of globalization has arguably gone on for centuries, Held et al. 1999). – Hegemony: relations of contestation between discourses, as part of relations of contestation between strategies and between groups of social agents, which may lead to particular discourses (and strategies) becoming hegemonic. – Recontextualization: the dissemination of discourses across structural boundaries (e.g. from one social field — such as business — to another — such as education) and scalar boundaries (e.g. from ‘global’ organizations to nationstates and to particular localities, or vice-versa); the recontextualization of discourses in new organizations, institutions or fields, or at new scales. – Operationalization: the enactment of discourses as new ways of (inter)acting, their inculcation as new ways of being, or identities, their materialization in features of the physical world. Enactment and inculcation are partly ‘intrasemiotic’ processes, i.e. discourses being enacted as genres, and inculcated as styles (Fairclough 2003). (See further Fairclough 1992, 1995, Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, Fairclough 2000, Fairclough and Thomas 2004.)

‘Doctrinal’ speeches I shall focus on a comparison of the April 1999 and April 2002 speeches. In both of these speeches and a good many others, we can see Blair as arguing from ‘is’ to ‘must’, from descriptions (narratives) of the world and world change to prescriptions for policy, from actualities to imaginaries. I shall consider in particular the following questions: 1. How does Blair narrate the world and world change — what has happened, and what is happening? 2. How does Blair narrate more particularly international security — what has happened, and what is happening?

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3. How does Blair envisage — imagine — international affairs and the ‘international community’? 4. How does Blair envisage — imagine — more specifically international security, and the intervention (especially military) by the ‘international community’ in the affairs of sovereign states? There are also various other questions which invite investigation, including how Blair justifies and legitimizes such intervention, which also raises the issue of how he argues from ‘is’ to ‘must’. In the course of discussing these questions, I shall also touch upon the following text analytical questions: 1. What aspects (let’s call them ‘themes’) of those parts of the world that are represented are included (and given greater or lesser salience), or (significantly) excluded? 2. How concretely or abstractly, specifically or generally, are they represented? How are the complexities of reality reduced and condensed? 3. How are included themes represented? What other available ways of representing them are there? Note that representations include implicit meanings — assumptions, presuppositions. 4. Taking themes and the ways they are represented together, what discourses (relatively durable ways of representing particular parts of the world) are drawn upon, and how are they combined? What available alternative discourses are significantly not drawn upon? 5. What linguistic (semantic, grammatical, lexical) characteristics realize particular discourses, and the texturing together of different discourses?

Narrative of world change in the speech of April 1999 World change is represented as ‘globalization’, a nominalization, and a highly abstract representation of actual processes, which necessarily subsumes a huge diversity of processes, and can be regarded as mystifying actual diversity by giving it the simplifying appearance of homogeneity (on the complex character of ‘globalization’, see for instance Held et al. 1999). Moreover, ‘globalization’ is attributed agentive capacity: “globalisation has transformed our economies and our working practices”. ‘Globalization’ is also assumed to be a specifically contemporary and indeed very recent ‘phenomenon’: “Twenty years ago we would not have been fighting in Kosovo. We would have turned our backs on it. The fact that we are engaged is the result of a wide range



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of changes — the end of the Cold War; changing technology; the spread of democracy. But it is bigger than that I believe the world has changed in a more fundamental way. Globalisation has transformed our economies and our working practices.”

Blair draws very selectively from a range of current discourses of globalization. This is suggested with respect to agency in Jessop’s observation that “far from globalization being a unitary causal mechanism, it should be understood as the complex, emergent product of many different forces operating on many scales … Hence nothing can be explained in terms of the causal powers of globalization.” (Jessop 2002: 114)

It is also evident with respect to periodization: other discourses of globalization represent it as a centuries-old process (the word may be new, but the process is not, see Held et al. 1999). And it is evident with respect to themes, in that themes associated with other discourses of globalization are absent — e.g. the increasing gap between rich and poor. Two themes are salient in Blair’s speech: (a) the global impact of local events (as in some sociological accounts such as that of Giddens 1991); (b) globalization as a threat rather than an opportunity — a set of problems to be overcome. For instance: “Many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world. Financial instability in Asia destroys jobs in Chicago and in my own constituency in County Durham. Poverty in the Caribbean means more drugs on the streets in Washington and London. Conflict in the Balkans causes more refugees in Germany and here in the US. These problems can only be addressed by international co-operation.”

Hay and Rosamond (2002) have commented on the diverse, rhetorically motivated, discourses of globalization which are to be found in the language of New Labour, noting that there are systematic differences between domestic and international policy contexts. In this case, the threats demand a new approach to international affairs and security, which it is Blair’s purpose to set out in the speech. Blair’s particular contribution to a new doctrine of international security is framing security within ‘globalization’, as an aspect of ‘globalization’ alongside the more familiar economic and political aspects. Thus, the speech is structured by his own particular tripartite classification of globalization processes — ‘economic, political and security’: “But globalisation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon.” This excludes what many representations of ‘globalization’ include: ‘culture’. Blair talks a lot about ‘values’, but within his imaginary for changed international relations (see below). ‘Values’ seem to be one thing, ‘culture’ another:

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one of the most internationally widespread anxieties about globalization is that it is a threat to cultural diversity.

Narrative of world change in the speech of April 2002 In this speech, in contrast with the earlier one, ‘globalization’ is not referred to as such in the narrative of world change — though it is in the context of refuting antiglobalization arguments (“What the poor world needs is not less globalisation but more”). The same themes from the range of discourses of globalization are salient here as in the 1999 speech — the global impact of local events, and globalization as a threat. The difference is that the global threat from local events is a more prominent theme in this speech, and that prominence is linked to September 11, which is represented as the exemplary instance. The threatening character of local events is accentuated, and the need for the ‘international community’ to take action against it. Compare two sentences which have a comparable position in the two speeches in introducing the theme of global effects of local events: “Many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world” (1999) “In truth, it’s rare today that trouble in one part of the globe remains limited in its effect” (2002).

The former is a passive sentence without an agent but with a locational adjunct — the location of problematic local events is (vaguely) represented. But the events themselves are not, only their effects (‘problems’) are represented. In the latter, the events are represented, as ‘trouble’, a term which has been widely used in the British press for industrial disputes or sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and a category which suggests that the forces of law and order are needed. It is threats to security, rather than economic threats, that are accentuated in the speech of 2002.

Narrative of international security in the speech of April 1999 Blair constructs a bifurcation of the world into protagonists (‘us’) and antagonists (including Saddam, Milosovic), in which the antagonists terrorize their own people and threaten international security. One task for textual analysis is to see how antagonists are represented as malign. This is a matter of what critical linguists (Fowler et al. 1979) have called ‘overlexicalization’, i.e. antagonists are lexicalized in a variety of ways (‘dictators’, ‘crime’, ‘evil’), a sort of lexical ‘overkill’. This can be seen as articulating together what we can loosely call ‘discourses of malignity’ from several



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social domains — politics (‘dictators’), law and order (‘crime’), and religion (‘evil’). Another task for textual analysis is to see how the protagonists are represented as benign. The malignity of the antagonists is relatively explicit, the benign character of the protagonists is by contrast assumed, presupposed. For instance: “This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.”

‘We’ act on the basis of values, and resist evil unstintingly; ‘we’ are the progeny of the anti-fascist alliance of the 1930s and 1940s (implicit in ‘us’ having learnt about ‘appeasement’, and in the echoes of the political oratory of Churchill, “we must not rest” … “blood and treasure” etc). ‘Our’ armed forces have been ‘busy’ (which resonates with ‘getting on with the job’, a favored way of representing military action in Iraq and elsewhere on the part of politicians, the military, and ‘vox pops’) doing good. In particular, the US is represented as benign in quite a remarkable (one might say sycophantic) eulogy — for instance, they ‘shoulder burdens and responsibilities’. One might compare this for instance with Chomsky’s many less flattering analyses of US foreign policy since World War II (e.g., Chomsky 1991).

Narrative of international security in the speech of April 2002 There is as in the 1999 speech a bifurcation of the world into protagonists and antagonists (once referred to in a Bushian way as ‘the bad guys’), with threats to security and stability (as well as human rights abuses) emanating from antagonists. The bifurcation is accentuated by the language of ‘alliances’ and ‘coalition’ which I discuss below. The construal of the antagonists is different from in the earlier speech, however. It is ‘terrorism’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and countries that ‘sponsor’ them, that ‘threaten us’. One important shift in the would-be hegemonic discourse in the period since September 11 is the constitution of a relation of equivalence between ‘terrorism’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as co-members of the class of ‘threats’. ‘Terrorism and/or weapons of mass destruction’ has become a high frequency collocation. This shift in discourse has, one might argue, been decisive in justifying the extension of the ‘War on Terrorism’ to attacks on ‘rogue states’ in what Bush has called the ‘axis of evil’. Of course weapons of mass destruction are only a threat in the hands of the ‘bad guys’ — ‘our’ weapons of mass destruction are not alluded to. (Perhaps the widely used acronym WMD helps in narrowing the focus to ‘bad’ weapons of mass destruction.)

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The ‘threat’ posed by terrorism and countries which ‘sponsor’ WMD is more fully elaborated, and overlexicalized, as ‘instability’, ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’, and salience is given to the threat to the economy — to business ‘confidence’ and ‘progress’. There is claimed to be an international ‘craving’, ‘struggle’, for ‘stability’, and a ‘recognition’ that the world needs ‘order’. Relations of equivalence (co-membership of a class) are textured between ‘stability’, ‘security’ and ‘order’ on the one hand and ‘instability’ and ‘disorder’ on the other, and relations of difference between these two classes: “Instability is contagious and, again today, more than ever, nations, at least most of them, crave stability. That’s for a simple reason. Our people want it, because without it, they can’t do business and prosper. What brings nations together — what brought them together post September 11 — is the international recognition that the world needs order. Disorder is the enemy of progress. The struggle is for stability, for the security within which progress can be made.”

Imagining international affairs and ‘international community’ in the speech of April 1999 A contrastive relation is set up between ‘International cooperation’ and ‘isolationism’, a term which has historical resonance as a tendency in US foreign policy. The term ‘internationalist’ also has historical resonance in the socialist movement, but is used here in a radically different sense, with respect to the ‘international community’. Blair explicitly extends the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘partnership’ from a national to an international scale. Advocacy of ‘communities’ and ‘partnerships’ is salient in the ‘third way’ policies of ‘New Labour’ in the UK, and this has been seen as an appropriation of a communitarian discourse (Fairclough 2000). As at the national level there is a ‘rhetoric and reality’ issue — are current international relations really those of ‘community’ and ‘partnership’, or is this an obfuscatory and one might argue ideological misrepresentation? Analysis can focus on how textual elements with a provenance in different discourses are textured together — how a new discourse is being constituted through an articulation of existing discourses. For instance: “Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community — the belief that partnership and cooperation are essential to advance self-interest — is coming into its own”. My sense of provenance (corpus studies could help to substantiate such ‘feel’) is that ‘community’ emanates from political philosophy but also grassroots politics, ‘partnership’ from business, and ‘self-interest’ from representations of individual(ism)s, in contrast with the normal political term ‘interests’. ‘Community’, ‘partnership’ and



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‘cooperation’ are textured as equivalent, co-members of a class; at the same time the expectable relation of difference and contrast between these and ‘self-interest’ is textually subverted.

Imagining international affairs and ‘international community’ in the speech of April 2002 Blair explicitly alludes to the 1999 speech and the doctrine of ‘international community’ — there is continuity in that respect. There is also development: “we seek one integrated international community, sharing the same values, working to the same goals”. ‘Integration’ is new, and evokes debates within the EU. This is quite a remarkable and one might say alarming statement and imaginary: can difference be so radically eliminated other than through violent imposition? Another significant change is that internationalism is now construed in terms of ‘international alliances’ and ‘international coalition’ as well as ‘international community’, “a series of interlocking alliances with a common agenda on issues of security, trade and stability”, based upon an alliance between America and Europe. Taking these together, there is an ambivalence which is reminiscent of my analysis of the vague and shifting membership of the ‘international community’, ‘us’ in the 1999 speech (Fairclough 2000) — ‘international community’ sounds fully inclusive, but tends to be reduced down to the powers which constitute G7 (now G8) and NATO. The implied universality of the ‘international community’ is at odds with the implied exclusivity of ‘alliances’.

Imagining international security in the speech of April 1999 This is the crux of Blair’s contribution to the construction of a new doctrine — and discourse — of ‘international community’. The grounds on which “the principle of non-interference must be qualified” are not made explicit, but they are implicit in Blair’s allusion to ‘undemocratic’ regimes, ‘barbarous’ regimes, and “threats to international peace and security”. The first two are represented as ‘moral’ grounds, the third as a matter of ‘self-interest’. What is distinctive about Blair’s position is the claim that “values and interests merge”. This is very much a ‘third way’ position which is reminiscent of e.g. “enterprise as well as social justice”, “responsibilities as well as rights” in New Labour discourse in the UK. This is a rhetoric of ‘not only but also’ (Fairclough 2000) — policies, principles, and from a discourse analytical point of view, discourses which had been seen as politically incompatible

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are construed as compatible in ‘third way’ discourse (and extensively textured together with such conjunctions as ‘not only … but also’, ‘as well as’, ‘yet’). What is proposed is ‘establishing’ and, crucially, ‘spreading’ values as a strategy for achieving security (‘self-interest’). These are ‘our’ values, and that raises the issue of who ‘we’ are. Blair invites — and has received — the objection that ‘our’ values are western values, that ‘spreading’ them is cultural imperialism. He addresses this in the speech of January 2003 — claiming that ‘our’ values are ‘universal’ values (see below). There is a central ambivalence here: if these values are ‘universal’, why do they need to be ‘spread’? One might take Laclau’s position (Laclau 2000) that claims to universality are always to be taken as hegemonic bids for ‘universal’ status for specific particulars. The values listed are: “liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society”. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Fairclough 2000), the values which Blair lists tend to change. Other elements in lists in the material I’m referring to include ‘justice’ (sometimes in the sense of ‘social justice’, not just ‘the rule of law’), and ‘democracy’ (more specific than ‘an open society’, which presumably also includes what he elsewhere formulates as “tolerance and respect towards others”). More fundamentally, even if the words are shared in common, the meanings notoriously may not be — parts of the ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ celebrated on the right and now center-left in the USA and Britain might be perceived as selfishness and selfindulgence by many Muslims, for instance. As with lists generally, one should be sensitive to the texturing of relations of equivalence between different discourses, as a process of classification. ‘Liberty’ and ‘the rule of law’ are well-established in liberal discourses, whereas ‘human rights’ discourse is very new — human rights legislation was only enacted in the UK within the past decade — and ‘open society’ is directly attributable to Karl Popper.

Imagining international security in the speech of April 2002 Whereas a case is made for qualifications of the principle of non-intervention in the speech of 1999, here the option of intervention is simply taken as given. The first reference to military intervention — actual rather than imaginary — is Kosovo, and it is justified retrospectively in terms of its claimed good effects, not at all in terms of its legitimacy. The grounds for intervention are more explicit and focused than in the earlier speech: “where terrorism or Weapons of Mass Destruction threaten us”. ‘Self-interest’ grounds — ‘security’, ‘stability’, ‘order’ — are markedly more salient than moral grounds, though the latter are still here. There has been a covert but significant shift from responsive to pre-emptive intervention,



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intervention motivated by a perceived possible future threat. We have again the strategy of serving self-interest, and stability, by ‘promoting’ and ‘defending’ and ‘standing up for’ and ‘fighting for’ ‘our’ values. But the collocations have significantly shifted: ‘promote’ is less missionary than ‘spread’, and there is a new emphasis on ‘defense’ of values, and ‘our’ values being under attack. Yet, at the same time there is the imaginary of ‘one integrated international community, sharing the same values’ I referred to earlier. Here is one specific comparison: “Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish… If we can establish and spread the values … that is in our national interests too” (1999) “I advocate an enlightened self-interest that puts fighting for our values right at the heart of the policies necessary to protect our nations” (2002) “I am arguing that the values we believe in are worth fighting for; they are in the ascendant and we have a common interest in standing up for them. We shouldn’t be shy of giving our actions not just the force of self-interest but moral force.” (2002)

The claim to ‘moral force’ in 2002 is based more on combative assertion (‘fighting for’, ‘standing up for’) of ‘our’ values than in the 1999 speech.

Imagining international security: Values in the speech of January 2003 Let me bring one brief extract from the January 2003 speech into the picture with respect to ‘values’: “In the end, all these things come back to one basic theme. The values we stand for: freedom, human rights, the rule of law, democracy, are all universal values. Given a chance, the world over, people want them. But they have to be pursued alongside another value: justice, the belief in opportunity for all. Without justice, the values I describe can be portrayed as ‘Western values’; globalisation becomes a battering ram for Western commerce and culture; the order we want is seen by much of the world as ‘their’ order not ‘ours’. The consensus can only be achieved if pursued with a sense of fairness, of equality, of partnership.”

‘Our’ values are here asserted to be universal values. This assertion is elaborated not as for instance “the world over, people believe in them”, but “given a chance … people want them”. One might ask whether values which people ‘want’ (“given a chance”) are truly ‘universal’. There is an implicit recognition that ‘our’ values are in fact widely seen as ‘western values’. The issue then is how “consensus can…be

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achieved” — yet if these values are truly ‘universal’, surely that implies that there is consensus? In short, this is profoundly contradictory, as Blair’s speeches quite often are (Fairclough 2000).

The ‘Address to the Nation’ Let me comment briefly on one of what I referred to earlier as Blair’s ‘occasional enunciations’, his ‘Address to the Nation’ at the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003. This is a justification for action rather than an elaboration of ‘doctrine’ or policy, but one question we can ask is to what extent and how the ‘doctrine’ of the ‘doctrinal’ speeches is appealed to in justifying action in these ‘occasional’ pieces. In this case, there is just one element of the ‘doctrine’ of especially the speech of April 2002: this ‘new world’ needs ‘order and stability’ to meet ‘challenges’. Military action is justified because ‘brutal states’ such as Iraq which have WMD, and ‘terrorist groups’, threaten ‘disorder and chaos’. The threat is especially from the convergence of terrorism and WMD — though this is not categorically asserted but hypothetical (“should terrorists obtain these weapons”), and subjectively modalized (“my fear is that these threats come together”, “my judgement is that this threat is real”). In contrast with the ‘doctrinal’ speeches, ‘values’ are not explicitly thematized, though there is an undertaking to “help Iraq towards democracy”, and “removing Saddam” is claimed to be “a blessing” (a rather unfortunate Christian term in the circumstances) “to the Iraqi people”. As is typically the case in these ‘occasional’ pieces, the more fully elaborated ‘doctrine’ of the ‘doctrinal’ speeches is selectively drawn upon according to rhetorical needs. Thus, again in the ‘Vision for Iraq’ published in the Arabic press, the theme of the coincidence of values and self-interest is not surprisingly absent, and the emphasis is on the ‘liberation’ of the Iraqi people.

Discussion What the analysis I have carried out in this paper indicates is the contribution of one major international politician to an ongoing process of re-imagining ‘international community’. Blair of course is not the only ‘player’ in this game — there are other significant contributors, especially Americans, including George Bush. The discoursal process of re-imagining ‘international community’ is an essential element in the political project of re-constituting international relations. What the comparison between the two major speeches of 1999 and 2002 shows is that the



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process of re-imagining is not a one-off process, but a process which develops and shifts in response to changing events and circumstances, while at the same time sustaining its identity as the discoursal facet of this particular strategic project through the continuities I have pointed to. This is essentially the same conclusion I reached about the discourse of the ‘third way’ in British politics (Fairclough 2000): it is not a political imaginary that was formed and reached closure at some point in the trajectory of ‘New Labour’, it is a discourse and a politics which has been ongoingly sought for. More generally, hegemony is not sought and won once for all, it must be ongoingly sustained and struggled for under shifting circumstances and shifts in the competitive field of hegemonic projects. With respect to the four ‘moments’ of the dialectics of discourse which I distinguished in the introduction to the paper, my analysis has directly addressed ‘emergence’, the textual construction, or ‘texturing’, of a new discourse through articulating together elements of existing discourses, and the shift of these textured relations, and of the discourse, over time. One can to a degree see a new discourse of international affairs and international security in the process of its formation in these texts (though of course I have analyzed only two of a larger body of relevant texts). The analysis also bears to some degree on the moment of hegemony, in that it touches upon relations of contestation between discourses, and in that Blair is a major international statesman and opinion-former, but one would need to look at a wider range material over a longer period of time to get a sense of hegemonic struggles over international relations and international security. I have not discussed ‘recontextualization’. Let me briefly indicate what that would entail with respect to the context I am currently working in, the ‘transitional’ societies of Central and Eastern Europe, many of which have recently been admitted into NATO. It would be a matter of investigating how the emergent hegemonic discourse of international relations and international security both ‘colonizes’ and is appropriated within government policy texts, media texts, and so forth, in these countries. Recontextualization is a colonization/appropriation dialectic (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). The concept of ‘appropriation’ accentuates the fact that even in the process of ‘colonizing’, a new discourse enters new and potentially transformative relations with existing discourses in the recontextualizing context. Investigating recontextualization would be a matter of charting the diverse and ultimately unpredictable trajectories of the emergent hegemonic discourse in its structural and scalar dissemination. The most complex ‘moment’ of the dialectics of discourse to research is ‘operationalization’. This is the point at which one is faced with the difficult problem of specifying the effects of discourse on other elements of the social. The military and diplomatic strategies of nations and alliances of nations, the organization

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and structure of institutions of international security and defense, international meetings and exchanges, the identities of politicians on the international stage, military systems and technologies, are all operationalizations of discourses. But tracing how precisely a change in hegemonic discourse is operationalized in new strategies, institutions, exchanges etc. is a highly complex matter. One fruitful approach might be detailed case studies of processes of policy formation and implementation (such as those carried out by Iedema 2003), possibly combining CDA with ethnographic methods (Chouliaraki 1995, Pujolar 1997, Wodak 1996). For instance, studies of the process of decision making and implementation in the procurement of new military hardware might allow us to see how discourses of international relations and international security are operationalized in specific practical contexts.

Conclusion Blair’s ‘third way’ politics, and more specifically his attempts to elaborate a new doctrine of ‘international community’, have attracted considerable criticism based in alternative discourses. One might ask whether the world really is as ‘new’ as he suggests, or whether this is a rhetorically motivated exaggeration of ‘newness’, whether it is ‘new’ in the ways he suggests — or whether there are geopolitical processes and agendas (including the politics of oil) which cannot be publicly acknowledged, whether the ‘moral’ agenda is merely a cover for the real agenda, whether states like Iraq really do threaten the security of states like the USA and Britain (and, of course, whether there ever were WMDs in Iraq), whether we can take ‘terrorism’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ at face value, or as merely a cover for a pre-existing geopolitical agenda, and whether military intervention in for instance Iraq decreases or increases risks to international security.

References Chomsky, N. 1991. Deterring Democracy. London: Verso. Chouliaraki, L. 1995. Regulation in ‘progressivist’ pedagogic discourse: Individualized teacherpupil talk. Discourse & Society 9(1), 5–32. Chouliaraki, L and Fairclough, N. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. 2000. New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge.



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Fairclough, N. and Thomas, P. forthcoming. The globalization of discourse and the discourse of globalization. In: C. Hardy et al. (eds). Handbook of Organizational Discourse. London: Sage. Fairclough, N. 2003. Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fowler, R. et al. 1979. Language and Control. London: Routledge. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Hay, C. and Rosamond, B. 2002. Globalization, European integration and the discursive construction of economic imperatives. Journal of European Public Policy 9.2. Held, D. et al. 1999. Global Transformations. Cambriadge: Polity Press. Jessop, B. 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kagarlitsky, B. 2000. The Twilight of Globalization. London: Pluto Press. Laclau, E. 2000. Identity and hegemony; the role of universality in the constitution of political logics. In: J. Butler et al. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London: Verso. Pujolar, J. 1997. De Que Vas Tio? I Llengua en la Cultura Juvenil. Barcelona: Editorial Empuries. Wodak, R. 1996. Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.

Appendix 1. Extract from the speech of April 1999 Kosovo While we meet here in Chicago this evening, unspeakable things are happening in Europe. Awful crimes that we never thought we would see again have reappeared — ethnic cleansing. systematic rape, mass murder. I want to speak to you this evening about events in Kosovo. But I want to put these events in a wider context — economic, political and security — because I do not believe Kosovo can be seen in isolation. No one in the West who has seen what is happening in Kosovo can doubt that NATO’s military action is justified. Bismarck famously said the Balkans were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian Grenadier. Anyone who has seen the tear stained faces of the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming across the border, heard their heart-rending tales of cruelty or contemplated the unknown fates of those left behind, knows that Bismarck was wrong. This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later. (Section omitted) Global Interdependence Twenty years ago we would not have been fighting in Kosovo. We would have turned our backs on it. The fact that we are engaged is the result of a wide range of changes — the end of the Cold War; changing technology; the spread of democracy. But it is bigger than that.

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I believe the world has changed in a more fundamental way. Globalisation has transformed our economies and our working practices. But globalisation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon. We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations. Many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world. Financial instability in Asia destroys jobs in Chicago and in my own constituency in County Durham. Poverty in the Caribbean means more drugs on the streets in Washington and London. Conflict in the Balkans causes more refugees in Germany and here in the US. These problems can only be addressed by international co-operation. We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other counties if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure. On the eve of a new Millennium we are now in a new world. We need new rules for international co-operation and new ways of organising our international institutions. After World War II, we developed a series of international institutions to cope with the strains of rebuilding a devastated world: Bretton Woods, the United Nations, NATO, the FU. Even then, it was clear that the world was becoming increasingly interdependent. The doctrine of isolationism had been a casualty of a world war, where the United States and others finally realised standing aside was not an option. Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction this doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour. Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community — the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self-interest — is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo. Global financial markets, the global environment, global security and disarmament issues: none of these can he solved without intense international co-operation. As yet, however, our approach tends towards being ad hoc. There is a global financial crisis: we react, it fades; our reaction becomes less urgent. Kyoto can stimulate our conscience about environmental degradation but we need constant reminders to refocus on it. We are continually fending off the danger of letting wherever CNN roves, be the cattle prod to take a global conflict seriously. We need to focus in a serious and sustained way on the principles of the doctrine of international community and on the institutions that deliver them. (Section on ‘Globalisation’ — economic globalisation — omitted) International Security The principles of international community apply also to international security. We now have a decade of experience since the end of the Cold War. It has certainly been a less easy time than many hoped in the euphoria that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Our armed forces have been busier than ever — delivering humanitarian aid, deterring attacks on defenceless people, backing up UN resolutions and occasionally engaging in major wars as we did in the Gulf in 1991 and are currently doing in the Balkans.



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Have the difficulties of the past decade simply been the aftershocks of the end of the Cold War? Will things soon settle down, or does it represent a pattern that will extend into the future? Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men — Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Both have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community. As a result of these destructive policies both have brought calamity on their own peoples. Instead of enjoying its oil wealth Iraq has been reduced to poverty, with political life stultified through fear. Milosevic took over a substantial, ethnically diverse state, well placed to take advantage of new economic opportunities. His drive for ethnic concentration has left him with something much smaller, a ruined economy and soon a totally wined military machine. One of the reasons why it is now so important to win the conflict is to ensure that others do not make the same mistake in the future. That in itself will be a major step to ensuring that the next decade and the next century will not be as difficult as the past. If NATO fails in Kosovo, the next dictator to be threatened with military force may well not believe our resolve to carry the threat through. At the end of this century the US has emerged as by far the strongest state. It has no dreams of world conquest and is not seeking colonies. If anything Americans are too ready to see no need to get involved in affairs of the rest of the world. America’s allies are always both relieved and gratified by its continuing readiness to shoulder burdens and responsibilities that come with its sole superpower status. We understand that this is something that we have no right to take for granted, and must match with our own efforts. That is the basis for the recent initiative I took with President Chirac of France to improve Europe’s own defence capabilities. As we address these problems at this weekend’s NATO Summit we may be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the Cold War. But now we have to establish a new framework. No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. As John Kennedy put it “Freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved who is free?” The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts. Non -interference has long been considered an important principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or forment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security”. When regimes are based on minority rule they lose legitimacy — look at South Africa. Looking around the world there are many regimes that are undemocratic and engaged in barbarous acts. If we wanted to right every wrong that we see in the modern world then we would do little else than intervene in the affairs of other countries. We would not be able to cope. So how do we decide when and whether to intervene. I think we need to bear in mind five major considerations.

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First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe. I am not suggesting that these are absolute tests. But they are the kind of issues we need to think about in deciding in the future when and whether we will intervene. Any new rules however will only work if we have reformed international institutions with which to apply them. If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar. But we need to find a new way to make the UN and its Security Council work if we are not to return to the deadlock that undermined the effectiveness of the Security Council during the Cold War. This should be a task for members of the Permanent Five to consider once the Kosovo conflict is complete. 2. Extract from the speech of April 2002 (Introduction omitted) The only purpose of being in politics is to strive for the values and ideals we believe in: freedom, justice, what we Europeans call solidarity but you might call respect for and help for others. These are the decent democratic values we all avow. But alongside the values we know we need a hard headed pragmatism — a realpolitik — required to give us any chance of translating those values into the practical world we live in. The same tension exists in the two views of international affairs. One is utilitarian: each nation maximises its own self interest. The other is Utopian: we try to create a better world. Today I want to suggest that more than ever before those two views are merging. I advocate an enlightened self interest that puts fighting for our values right at the heart of the policies necessary to protect our nations. Engagement in the world on the basis of these values, not isolationism from it is the hard-headed pragmatism for the 21st Century. Why? In part it is because the countries and people of the world today are more interdependent than ever. That calls for an approach of integration. When I spoke about this issue in Chicago in 1999 and called it a doctrine of international community, people hesitated over what appeared to be Panglossian idealism. At the time, the major international crisis we faced was Kosovo, where a brutal dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, was embarked upon a programme of ethnic cleansing of innocent people — in this case, Muslims — the likes of which Europe had not seen since the Nazis. Yet we were told: it’s not our fight, why bother? there’s nothing we can do; if we try to stop him, the region will explode; we will strengthen his hand, he will win; or he’ll lose but be succeeded by someone worse. Sound familiar? Today thousands of refugees have gone back. Kosovo has held its first elections. Montenegro and Serbia are being reconciled. Milosevic is on trial charged



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with war crimes. There is a democratic government in Belgrade and the whole region, despite the massive problems which still exist, is on a path, albeit slowly, towards the EU. It’s still costing us time, effort and money, but it’s a lot less than if we had turned our back and let the Balkans plunge into civil war. In truth, it is very rare today that trouble in one part of the globe remains limited in its effect. Not just in security, but in trade and finance — witness the crisis of 1998 which began in Thailand and ended in Brazil — the world is interlocked. This is heightened by mass communications and technology. In Queen Victoria’s time, reports of battles came back weeks or months after they were won or lost. Today we see them enacted live on the BBC, Sky or CNN. Their very visibility, immediate and in technicolour, inflame feelings that can spread worldwide across different ethnic, religious and cultural communities. So today, more than ever, “their” problem becomes “our” problem. Instability is contagious and, again today, more than ever, nations, at least most of them, crave stability. That’s for a simple reason. Our people want it, because without it, they can’t do business and prosper. What brings nations together — what brought them together post September 11 — is the international recognition that the world needs order. Disorder is the enemy of progress. The struggle is for stability, for the security within which progress can be made. Of course, countries want to protect their territorial integrity but few are into empire-building. This is especially true of democracies whose people vote for higher living standards and punish governments who don’t deliver them. For 2,000 years Europe fought over territory. Today boundaries are virtually fixed. Governments and people know that any territorial ambition threatens stability, and instability threatens prosperity. And of course the surest way to stability is through the very values of freedom, democracy and justice. Where these are strong, the people push for moderation and order. Where they are absent, regimes act unchecked by popular accountability and pose a threat; and the threat spreads. So the promotion of these values becomes not just right in itself but part of our long-term security and prosperity. We can’t intervene in every case. Not all the wrongs of the world can be put right, but where disorder threatens us all, we should act. Like it or not, whether you are a utilitarian or a Utopian, the world is interdependent. One consequence of this is that foreign and domestic policy are ever more closely interwoven. It was September 11 that brought these thoughts into sharper focus. (Section omitted) The most obvious lesson is indeed our interdependence. For a time our world stood still. Quite apart from our security, the shock impacted on economic confidence, on business, on trade and it is only now with the terrorist network on the run, that confidence is really returning. Every nation in the world felt the reverberation of that fateful day. And that has been well illustrated by the role which the United Nations — under Kofi Annan’s excellent leadership — has played since September 11. So if we didn’t know it before, we know now: these events and our response to them shape the fate not of one nation but of one world. There is no escape from facing them and dealing with them. But what are the policy positions that should guide us in doing so? First, the world works better when the US and the EU stand together. There will be issues that divide — issues of trade, most recently over steel, for example. But on the big security issues, the common interests dwarf the divide. Forget the talk of anti Americanism in Europe. Yes, if you

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call a demonstration, you will get the slogans and the insults. But people know Europe needs America and I believe America needs Europe too. We have so many shared values. We are strong democracies. If we stand together, no one else feels they can play us off against each other. Complaining about each other is fashionable in some circles. But the only people really rejoicing at a falling out, are the bad guys. Together, we can forge a new relationship with President Putin’s Russia. He is in my view a bold and immensely capable leader, moving his country into a new and co-operative partnership with us. NATO is the cornerstone of the transatlantic US/EU relationship. Now we envisage a new Russia/NATO relationship where certain questions are determined at 20, by the 19 NATO members and Russia. In Afghanistan we worked with Russia in a way that would have had the old hands of the Cold War days frozen in disbelief. But the truth is Russia today has as much interest in defeating terrorism as we have. In our different ways, but compatibly, we can develop relations with China and India, two nations about whom the only question is not whether they will be huge powers in the world, but how huge, and how that power will be used. And we both already have strong ties with Japan. We need to use those ties both to encourage Japan towards vital economic and structural reforms and also to bind the EU, the US and Asia closer together. It is fascinating too, to see both the US and the EU strengthening enormously their political as well as economic links with South America. The point I am making is simply this. There are no Cold War battles to play to. ‘Spheres of influence’ is an outdated concept. A series of interlocking alliances with a common agenda on issues of security, trade and stability should replace old rivalries. The international coalition matters. Where it operates, the unintended consequences of action are limited, the diplomatic parameters better fixed. The US and EU together is a precondition of such alliances. But it needs hard work, dialogue and some mutual understanding. As long as I am British Prime Minister I will work to secure it. Secondly, we must be prepared to act where terrorism or Weapons of Mass Destruction threaten us. The fight against international terrorism is right. We should pursue it vigorously. Not just in Afghanistan but elsewhere. Not just by military means but by disrupting the finances of terrorism, getting at the middle men, the bankrollers of the trade in terror and WMD. Since September 11 the action has been considerable, in many countries. But there should be no let up. If necessary the action should be military and again, if necessary and justified, it should involve regime change. I have been involved as British Prime Minister in three conflicts involving regime change. Milosevic. The Taliban. And Sierra Leone, where a country of six million people was saved from a murderous group of gangsters who had hijacked the democratically elected government. Britain is immensely proud of the part our forces have played and with the results but I can honestly say the people most pleased have been the people living under the regime in question. Never forget: they are the true victims. I’ll always remember driving through the villages near Freetown in Sierra Leone seeing the people rejoicing — many of them amputees through the brutality from which they had been liberated — and their joy at being free to debate, argue and vote as they wished. We cannot, of course, intervene in all cases but where countries are engaged in the terror or WMD business, we should not shirk from confronting them. Some can be offered a way out, a route to respectability. I hope in time that Syria, Iran and even North Korea can accept the need



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to change their relations dramatically with the outside world. A new relationship is on offer. But they must know that sponsoring terrorism or WMD is not acceptable. As for Iraq, I know some fear precipitate action. They needn’t. We will proceed, as we did after September 11, in a calm, measured, sensible but firm way. But leaving Iraq to develop WMD, in flagrant breach of no less than nine separate UNSCRs, refusing still to allow weapons inspectors back to do their work properly, is not an option. The regime of Saddam is detestable. Brutal, repressive, political opponents routinely tortured and executed: it is a regime without a qualm in sacrificing the lives of its citizens to preserve itself, or starting wars with neighbouring states and it has used chemical weapons against its own people. As I say, the moment for decision on how to act is not yet with us. But to allow WMD to be developed by a state like Iraq without let or hindrance would be grossly to ignore the lessons of September 11 and we will not do it. The message to Saddam is clear: he has to let the inspectors back in, anyone, any time, any place that the international community demands. Third, we should work hard to broker peace where conflict threatens a region’s stability because we know the dangers of contagion. The plight of the Middle East ……… (Section omitted) I want to pick out the issue of trade. We’re all moving on it but we could move further. I want the WTO round started in Qatar last December to be a success. And it’s time we took on the anti-globalisation protestors who seek to disrupt the meetings international leaders have on these issues. What the poor world needs is not less globalisation but more. Their injustice is not globalisation but being excluded from it. Free enterprise is not their enemy; but their friend. In all these areas, we seek one integrated, international community, sharing the same values, working to the same goals. (Section omitted) My basic argument is that in today’s interdependent world, we need an integrated approach, a doctrine of international community as I put it before, based on the values we believe in. I am not suggesting, incidentally, that nothing is done without unanimity in the world. That would be a recipe for the lowest common denominator — a poor policy. I am arguing that the values we believe in are worth fighting for; they are in the ascendant and we have a common interest in standing up for them. We shouldn’t be shy of giving our actions not just the force of self-interest but moral force. And in reality, at a certain point these forces merge. When we defend our countries as you did after September 11, we aren’t just defending territory. We are defending what our nations believe in: freedom, democracy, justice, tolerance and respect towards others. What makes America great is not its GDP alone or its military might. It is its freedom, its enterprise, its rejoicing in its different colours and cultures, the fact that someone of humble beginnings can aspire, work hard, succeed and be applauded for their success. And can disagree. When I pass protestors every day at Downing Street, and believe me, you name it, they protest against it, I may not like what they call me, but I thank God they can. That’s called freedom. Usama bin Laden’s philosophy is not just a security threat to us. It’s an assault on our hearts and minds. It represents extremism, cruelty, intolerance of different cultures and lifestyles. It can’t be fought just with guns. It must be fought by moderate Islam against extreme Islam, by the virtues of religious and political tolerance triumphing over bigotry. Likewise, what happens in Africa offends every criterion of justice and decency we believe in.

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Fighting for these values is a cause the world needs. The great paradox of our modern world is that we have the unlimited possibility of scientific and technological advance, the prospect of prosperity my father could never have dreamed of as a child. Yet we also have the capacity to destroy ourselves. The very interdependence we have, can be for good or ill. What makes the difference is the values that govern it. All this has been latent in world politics for some time. September 11 brought it into sharp relief. When an event of such magnitude occurs only a fool fails to reflect and consider. It does change everything. (Section omitted)

War rhetoric of a little ally Political implicatures and Aznar’s legitimatization of the war in Iraq Teun A. van Dijk Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

In this chapter we examine some of the properties of the speeches by former Prime Minister José María Aznar held in Spanish parliament in 2003 legitimating his support of the USA and the threatening war against Iraq. The theoretical framework for the analysis is a multidisciplinary CDA approach relating discursive, cognitive and sociopolitical aspects of parliamentary debates. It is argued that speeches in parliament should not only be defined in terms of their textual properties, but also in terms of a contextual analysis. Besides an analysis of the usual properties of ideological and political discourse, such as positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation and other rhetoric devices, special attention is paid to political implicatures defined as inferences based on general and particular political knowledge as well as on the context models of Aznar’s speeches.

Introduction In this paper we examine some properties of the belligerent parliamentary rhetoric of Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar in support of military action of the USA and its allies against Saddam Hussein in 2003. One of the interesting contextual features of Aznar’s speeches in the Cortes was that they defied a vast popular majority, of more than 90%, against a war in Iraq without UN-backing, even among his own party, the Partido Popular. Aznar totally ignored both the biggest demonstrations ever held in Spain (more than a million people in Barcelona alone), as well as the opposition of all other parties, including his own coalition partners, and thus risked to lose many votes in the approaching municipal elections of May 2003. Although he was not personally up for re-election at the next general elections in 2004, why would a prime minister thus commit political

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suicide by slavishly following President George W. Bush as a small-time ally-at-war who is barely taken seriously internationally? Because of the conservative ideology shared with the current U.S. administration? Because of genuine worries about the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein allegedly had? Or perhaps in order to enlist Bush’s support for the local fight against the terrorist organization ETA? This paper will not engage in these or other political speculations about Aznar’s decisions to support the war against Iraq, but more concretely examine some of the properties of the speeches that are the discursive expressions of Aznar’s public reasons. I shall do so against the background of broader questions about the legitimization of state violence and war, especially after the attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001, and the international anti-terrorist hysteria that followed it. More specifically, I shall focus on what I shall call the political implicatures of Aznar’s speech, that is, the specific political inferences that participants in the communicative situation, for instance MPs in a parliamentary debate, may make on the basis of (their understanding of) this speech and its context. My general framework is a multidisciplinary brand of critical discourse analysis (CDA) that tries to ‘triangulate’ social issues in terms of a combined study of discursive, cognitive and social dimensions of a problem (Van Dijk 1993, 2003). Thus, in our case, we are interested not just in describing some interesting properties of political rhetoric, but in order to explain them, we need to relate them to such sociocognitive representations as attitudes, norms, values and ideologies, e.g., those that Aznar shares with his party, as well as to the sociopolitical context of his speeches in contemporary Spain. That is, Aznar’s political discourses and their properties are ultimately to be treated not only as texts, but also as expressions of political cognition and political actions in political processes, such as party propaganda and parliamentary decision making at the national level, as well as diplomacy, coalition building and power politics at the international level. This is especially true for political discourse, whose analysis should not be limited to structural features of text and talk, but should also account for their conditions and functions in the political process. Our corpus consists of four interventions by Aznar held during parliamentary sessions on February 5, 19, and March 5 and 29, 2003. However, I shall cite examples only from his first speech of February 5, and focus only on his own contributions, and ignore, in this paper, the contributions of other politicians and the discursive interactions of the debate.



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Theoretical framework Parliamentary debates Against the background of earlier work in CDA in general, and on political discourse in particular, the theoretical framework of this study first of all focuses on the structures and functions of parliamentary debates. Such debates are forms of institutional verbal interaction as well as a specific genre of political discourse, and their general properties may thus be analyzed in the broader frameworks of these discourse categories. As a genre of political discourse, parliamentary debates are local manifestations of the global political acts of legislation, governing and control of government. More specifically, such debates feature speeches of MPs and members of government that pragmatically function as presenting and legitimating government decisions and policies, supporting the government and engaging in opposition. Relevant analyses of parliamentary debates should therefore focus on these global functions, and it will thus be assumed that also the structures of the speeches in these debates may be described as implementing local moves in the overall realization of these global political functions. It is within this framework that I shall define and use the notion of ‘political implicature’ below. Parliamentary debates have a number of formal properties that shall largely be ignored in my analysis, such as speaker and turn-taking control by the Speaker or President, order and change of speakers according to membership of government or opposition parties, ritualized form of address (e.g., ‘Su Señoría’ in Spanish) and the formal lexical and syntactic style of prepared addresses and official reactions to previous speeches. Also because our data are taken from the official record, there are hardly any spontaneous forms of speech and interactions, such as overlaps, repairs, false starts and incomplete sentences. Politically more interesting in this case, and hence more relevant in a CDA framework, are the semantic and rhetorical properties of Aznar’s speech. Thus, in a speech legitimating Spain’s participation in the war in Iraq, we may not only expect the usual global strategies of legitimation, such as the legal, moral or political justification of such participation, but also the well-known global semantic strategies of positive self-presentation of Us and negative other-presentation of Them. As is the case for many other political discourses after September 11, We represent the western democracies that fight against terrorism or ‘rogue states’, and They are the terrorists or states that threaten us, in our case specifically Saddam Hussein. Such semantic polarization may be rhetorically emphasized in the usual way, e.g. by hyperboles and metaphors about our good things and their bad things. Although there are few general semantic constraints on parliamentary debates, which after all may be about many different topics, these overall semantic

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and rhetorical strategies of ingroup and outgroup polarization are quite general and also dependent on the political functions of such debates. That is, governments and the MPs that back them will typically present their own policies and actions in a positive light and opposition MPs will do, by definition, the ‘opposite’: negatively describe, condemn or attack such actions and policies. In my analysis I shall merely summarize some of the specific forms this semantics and rhetoric takes in the speech of Aznar.

Context models There is another fundamental aspect of parliamentary debates: context. That is, many of the formal, semantic and rhetorical aspects of parliamentary debates are hardly specific, and may be found also in other formal encounters or in other political discourse. This means that most of the unique properties of this genre of political discourse are contextual: Who are speaking and listening, what are their roles, what kind of actions they engage in, with what intentions and so on. As suggested above, it is here that we must observe the political functions of the debates, as interactions between MPs, as engaging in specific political actions and with specific political goals. This formulation of the contextual dimension of parliamentary debates is however rather informal. Theoretically, it should be emphasized that there is no direct relationship between text and context when context is defined in terms of these aspects of the political situation: MPs and their roles, actions and goals. Rather, contexts can only influence what people say or understand when defined in terms of subjective, participant constructs. It is not the social or political situation itself that influences text or talk, but rather the way individual participants represent, understand or otherwise construct the now-for-them-relevant properties of such a situation. Thus, contexts are not objective, or ‘out there’, but subjective constructs of participants. In terms of contemporary cognitive psychology, this means that contexts are mental models represented in episodic memory: context models. These context models control many of the properties of the production and comprehension of discourse: speech acts, style, lexical selection, formats, rhetoric, semantic strategies and so on. Although unique in each communicative situation, while representing each participant’s ad hoc construction of the communicative situation, the format of context models is necessarily more general, though culturally variable. MPs need not invent each time the standard categories of the structure that organizes their context models of the debates they participate in.



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Political implicatures The features of Aznar’s speech I would like to focus on are the political implicatures of his speech. These implicatures must be defined within the framework of the theory of context briefly summarized above, that is, in terms of the participant’s context models of their own political identities, roles, goals, actions and beliefs. I have chosen the term ‘implicature’ rather than ‘implication’ because the inferences involved are not semantic but pragmatic or contextual. Aznar’s speech, of course, also has many semantic implications, for instance when he describes the ‘bad’ behavior of Saddam Hussein. Most of these semantic implications are, in our case, about Iraq and Spain’s policy. That is, they are inferred from the topics talked about as well as from the general knowledge we have about Spain, terrorism, international policy, Iraq and so on. Much of the understanding of the speeches in this debate involves the production of these semantic inferences, some of which quite general, others more personal and variable. Thus, when Aznar in the beginning of his speech defines the situation in Iraq as a “crisis that confronts” the international community, then the (political) implication is that Iraq is a threat for ‘us’. Implicatures on the other hand are usually defined as weak semantic implications or pragmatically in terms of contexts (Atlas 2000; Gazdar 1979; Grice 1989; Levinson 2000). My use of the term will be limited here to the pragmatics of context and I shall thus define political implicatures as implicatures that are specifically based on the political context. For example, if Aznar emphasizes that despite his support for the war in Iraq, his policy is a peaceful one, he not only makes an assertion about the war in Iraq and his policies — to be analyzed in semantic terms — but this assertion should also be understood as the defense of government policy of the Prime Minister, of the leader of the government party Partido Popular (PP), reacting to critique from citizens and the opposition parties with the political aim to legitimate highly controversial decisions. Thus, each fragment of his speech may also be analyzed in terms of its functions in the current political interaction, locally within parliament in the current debate and more globally in the current political situation, such as legitimating his own policies and delegitimation of the opposition, among other strategies. Political implicatures are assigned by the participants as inferences from three sources: i. participants’ representations of the structures of the discourse and its meanings (such as their mental model of the situation in Iraq), ii. participants’ context model of the current communicative situation, iii. participants’ more general knowledge about the political situation in the world and in the country.

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In the examples below, I shall show in more detail how such implicatures may be derived. This will be done more or less informally, but it should be stressed that in a theoretically more explicit account, we would need to spell out in detail the contents of the context models, as well as the strategies of inference that allow participants — in this case MPs — to make such inferences. Approaches in CDA, conversation analysis and political discourse analysis that ignore a cognitive component either need to disregard such ‘unobservable’ implicatures or reduce them to properties of discourse or undefined contexts. Also, a satisfactory account of (pragmatic) political implicatures presupposes an explicit theory of context, as briefly summarized here. That such implicatures are actually relevant for political discourse analysis is not only obvious for participants and analysts alike if they share the relevant political knowledge of the current political situation, but more specifically may also be explicitly signaled by the participants in their reactions to previous speeches. This is, however, not a necessary condition of our analysis — political implicatures may also be assessed indirectly by later interviews of participants or by other methods — and need not be signaled explicitly in a speech of participants. Indeed, they are routinely understood and only presupposed in later talk and text. Later commentary in the media on parliamentary debates often precisely focuses on these tacit political implicatures of such debates. Political implicatures explain that and why political participants say the things they do. They define the fundamental political point of parliamentary debates in the first place, such as ‘doing’ government and ‘doing’ opposition and more generally the institutional and political power play enacted in parliaments. Through an analysis of political implicatures, thus, we show why ongoing political discourse is relevant for the political process.

Method In my analyses below I shall select a number of characteristic fragments of Aznar’s speech as they implement the usual properties of political discourse as we know them from the literature, such as positive ingroup and negative outgroup descriptions as well as other strategies of parliamentary debates. This selection and brief characterizations show how Aznar is engaging in political discourse and its wellknown structures and strategies and more specifically in the case of the debate about the war in Iraq. At the same time, these examples and their (largely semantic) analysis should provide insight in a political issue, namely how political leaders manage the legitimation of controversial policies. There is no explicit discovery procedure for these political discourse structures, and hence for the selection of



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the fragments analyzed, otherwise than those predicted by theories of political discourse in general and theories of parliamentary debates in particular. Besides these brief standard analyses, the analysis will focus more in detail on the political implicatures of each fragment, thus accounting for the political functions and rationale of this debate in the Spanish Cortes. I suggest that this is probably the way MPs and other observers, as well as by the knowledgeable public at large, understand the debate. Obviously, a complete analysis of all political implicatures of this speech would require hundreds of pages of detailed description, so we shall limit ourselves to a limited number of characteristic examples.

Defining the situation Many types of discourse, such as editorials and also speeches in parliament, feature an initial schematic category that might be called Defining the Situation. Such a category is sequentially relevant in discourses whose main aim is to make comments on a social or political situation, to recommend specific actions, or to justify or legitimate actions. Thus, if one wants to explain or justify why one acted in a specific (usually criticized) way, it makes sense to describe a situation in which such acts appear necessary, logical, comprehensible, unavoidable or otherwise acceptable. Typically, there are normative rules (and international law) that in specific cases allow people or states to defend themselves when they are attacked — and U.S. politicians, scholars and military have justified the Iraq war on such grounds (for analysis of such forms of legitimation, see, e.g., Borch and Wilson 2003; see also Chomsky 2003; Christopher 2003; Daalder and Lindsay 2003; Dinstein 2001; Falk 2003; Gareau 2004; Newhouse 2003; Nye 2000; Rodin 2002; Walzer 2004). Thus, if Aznar is required to defend his very unpopular Iraq policy, he first needs to lay out a political situation that makes such a policy understandable, reasonable and legitimate. This is indeed what he does, as from the first words of his intervention, in which he defines the situation as a crisis:

(1) “El señor PRESIDENTE DEL GOBIERNO (Aznar López): Señora presidenta, señorías, al comenzar el periodo de sesiones, comparezco esta tarde ante la Cámara para informar a SS.SS. de la posición del Gobierno ante la crisis que enfrenta a la comunidad internacional con Irak.”

Since politicians, parliaments and especially governments need to take action when there is a ‘crisis’, this is a persuasive way to define the initial situation. Indeed, also the opposition no doubt describes the current situation as a crisis, if only because of the looming war threatened by the USA and the UK. Note though that even in this very first sentence, Aznar does not blame the crisis on those who started it

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with their war plans, such as the USA and the UK, but on Iraq. The obvious political implication of his first definition of the situation, thus, is that it is Iraq that is responsible for the crisis, and the choice of the word ‘enfrenta’ (confront) further confirms that ‘we’ are the victims of this confrontation. Secondly, the crisis is not defined as facing Aznar’s government alone, but as a crisis that affects the whole international community. Such a formulation, and its (weak) implications, is one of the ways in which arguments that claim that this is a conflict only as defined by the USA and its allies, and not by the international community, can be opposed. Besides these (semantic) implications, there are however also a number of political implicatures of this speech. From the start and throughout, Aznar shows that he is acutely aware of his own position, that of his party, as well as of the opposition and the population at large, in the question of Iraq. In the current situation in parliament, thus, it is crucial that not only the ‘content’ of his speech be an efficient contribution to the general strategy of legitimation of his policies, but that he be seen and accepted as a good, responsible party leader and prime minister and that, hence, the opposition has no ‘point’. Thus, instead of directly starting with his report of the government’s policy in Iraq, Aznar prefaces his statement with an explicit deictic formula describing his own ‘appearance’ in parliament. Such performatives may just be a more or less formal way of speaking, but in this case they also have specific political implicatures: Aznar had been accused by the opposition as well as by the media and other elites of ignoring parliament and public opinion by not informing them about government policy on Iraq. Thus, by making his own ‘appearance’ and ‘report’ for the MPs explicit in the very first sentence of his speech, he politically implicates that (i) he is doing his job as MP, (ii) he listens to the opposition and the country and hence is a good democrat, (iii) that the earlier critique against him is not or no longer relevant and (iv) that those who formulated the critique — such as the oppositional PSOE — have no point. These and possibly other political implicatures may be seen as part of one of the forms of contextual polarization and face management, that is, of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation and of course of political counter-attack. At the same time, Aznar politically implicates that his government is part of us, that is, the ingroup of the ‘international community,’ an implicature that has a whole series of other political implicatures, namely that his policies are in line with the international community, and therefore legitimate, and that the opposition, which does not want to join the war (and which when they came to power in March 2004 immediately decided to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq), is not part of the international community and hence less legitimate in its claims. Indeed, following the political logic of President George W. Bush, one might further infer that if the opposition is not with the ‘international community’ (that is, the



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USA, the UK and some other countries), then it is against them and possibly even playing in the hands of the enemy, Saddam Hussein. As suggested before, the formulation of these implicatures is informal, but will have to do for the purposes of this paper. A more formal account would have to make explicit the precise context models of Aznar and the MPs, so that it can be shown how previous political knowledge, the representation of the situation, and the mental model representing the semantic interpretation of this fragment all provide the information necessary to derive these plausible political inferences. After this initial, and hence thematic or global definition of the situation (as headlines do at the beginning of a news article) and its overall contextual implicatures, Aznar needs to provide specifics of the situation of crisis and further arguments that allow him to define the situation as a crisis in the first place and that also explain the position of his government in this crisis. This is indeed what he does, by now explicitly attributing the crisis to Iraq:

(2) “La crisis es consecuencia del reiterado incumplimiento por parte de Irak de sus obligaciones internacionales y de las resoluciones del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas. A poco que hagamos memoria, vemos que no es más que un nuevo episodio del problema surgido en 1990, cuando el régimen iraquí invadió Kuwait. (Rumores.)”

Note that Aznar here does much more than merely accuse Iraq as the cause of the crisis. Among other things, he says, does and implies the following: a. By modifying non-compliance of Iraq with the word “repeated”, he semantically emphasizes the seriousness of non-compliance, and hence the seriousness of the crisis, thereby adducing further grounds to accuse Iraq and to legitimize the war. Such a rhetorical emphasis presupposes the normative or legal inference that if a negative act (such as non-compliance) is not unintentional or exceptional, and does not occur for the first time, its repeated nature makes it intentional and the perpetrator more guilty. b. By referring to international obligations and the Security Council of the United Nations, he emphasizes that Iraq is defying the world’s highest authority and official earlier resolutions. Again, this emphasizes the ‘official’ guilt of Iraq, as well as the legitimacy, if not the obligation, to condemn Iraq and take action against it. c. In the second sentence, Aznar refers to the (first) Gulf War, in which Iraq’s (Saddam Hussein’s) aggression was obvious because of its invasion of Kuwait. By calling the current situation a continuation of that invasion, Aznar politically implies at least two other things: That Iraq, despite the fact that it did not invade another country now, is still guilty of provoking an international crisis and

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secondly that in the same way as in 1990, international (armed) action against Iraq is legitimate. That this implication is understood, but rejected as a legitimatization of war now, is obvious from the protests of other MPs (described here as “rumores” — noise — in the transcript of the Diario de las Sesiones). This further definition of the situation as a crisis provoked by Iraq, at the same time emphasizes the seriousness of the crisis as well as the guilt of Iraq, as a challenge to the highest authority in the world, as a form of politically aligning Aznar with such authority (the Security Council and the United Nations) and finally to legitimate international action because of the repeated and continuous challenges to the U.N., which already begun with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In other words, the initial definition of the situation is one that Aznar carefully articulates in a way that is consistent with his own policy. That is, his speech not only provides a description of an international crisis and not only is formulated in such a way that the mental model of the event it expresses and conveys is the one preferred in this process of persuasion. At the same time, the implications of this definition provide as many arguments for the political legitimatization of his own policies: to define the current situation as a crisis, to accuse Iraq as being non-compliant and hence as in breach of international resolutions, to define this challenge as a continuation of the aggression against Iraq, and hence to legitimately confront Iraq with armed intervention as was the case in the Gulf War. Indeed, since there are many other dictatorships in the world, the fact that Saddam Hussein oppresses the people of Iraq is as such no international legitimization for war against him, so that it is imperative to marshal any evidence or argument that finds him guilty of current breaches of international law, or that defines his current position as the same as the one that provoked the earlier (legitimate) war. We see that Aznar carefully follows this legitimatization strategy in his speech. Although these implications are local legitimatizations of his own policy, they are at the same time international in scope and overlapping with those of U.S. and UK foreign policy. But Aznar is not only aligning himself internationally with Bush and Blair, but in parliament he needs to defend such policy against fierce opposition and against a nearly unanimous popular condemnation. This means that we should also draw the political inferences of his speech in terms of the relation with the stance of the parliamentary opposition and public opinion, that is in terms of contextual implicatures. In other words, Aznar does not only speak about Iraq or about his government policy, but also needs to manage his power in parliament and the country. He does so, implicitly, through a polarization according to which he associates himself with the Good Guys, and those who oppose the war as supporting Saddam Hussein, the enemy. Again, this move is part of the ideological strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. By doing so, he not



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only legitimizes his own policy, but also delegitimizes those who oppose the war, and especially also the political opposition parties, such as the PSOE, the Socialist Party of Spain. As suggested above, such political implicatures are inferred from a combined general knowledge of politics and a more contextual understanding of the current political situation, for instance in Spain. The sequence of political inferences might in that case be something like this: – – – – – – – – –

I am doing what I am supposed to do according to the rules. (Therefore) I am doing my job as prime minister. (Therefore) I follow the rules of our democracy. (Therefore) I am a democrat. (Therefore) I am a good politician. (Therefore) There is (now) no reason to criticize me or my government. (Therefore) The criticism of the opposition (or others) is unfounded. (Therefore) The opposition is not doing its job well. (Therefore) The opposition is no good.

Empirically, such inferences are warranted when consistent with the way competent political participants actually do understand Aznar’s statements in this way, an understanding that may become manifest in the way they react to his speech.

Positive self-presentation As we have seen also for Aznar, speakers prefer to describe themselves in positive terms. This tendency is part of the well-known interactional and sociocognitive strategy to present oneself in a positive light, or at least to avoid a negative impression and in general to manage the impression on our interlocutors. The same is of course true in most forms of public discourse, where making a good impression may even be more important than in informal everyday life conversations, for instance because of the more serious impact on a larger audience, as well as the possibility of professional or political damage that may be the result of a ‘wrong’ presentation of Self. This is particularly important in politics, where especially opposition politicians, as well as the media, and indirectly the public at large are critically listening, and where a faux pas may cost votes at the next elections. We may therefore expect that also Aznar will engage in extensive and varied forms of positive self-presentation, especially given the devastating critique his position on Iraq received in the media from most other political parties as well as from the vast majority of the population at large. Probably on few topics in recent Spanish history, opposition against government policy had been so pervasive. In other words,

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Aznar has some serious image repair to do. Let us examine some of these moves. Here is a first example, right at the beginning of his speech:

(3) “Esta comparecencia continúa la información proporcionada a SS.SS. por el Gobierno anteriormente. En concreto, el Gobierno ha informado sobre la situación de Irak por medio de la comparecencia de la ministra de Asuntos Exteriores en un total de cinco ocasiones, la última el viernes pasado ante la Comisión correspondiente. Yo mismo he comparecido para dar cuenta de la posición del Gobierno en otras dos ocasiones. El Gobierno también ha contestado por escrito a diversas preguntas que se le han formulado sobre la cuestión. A la comparecencia de hoy seguirán otras mías o de los ministros de Asuntos Exteriores y de Defensa, en función de los acontecimientos y según la forma que requiera la evolución de esta crisis, conforme al Reglamento de la Cámara.”

Why would Aznar enter in so much detail about his repeated ‘appearances’ in parliament? The rather obvious answer is in terms of its relevance in relation to the (presupposed) critique of the opposition, the media and others, namely that Aznar, unlike Tony Blair, hardly tried to explain or justify his policies about Iraq, and thus had shown his arrogance in the face of massive public opposition to the war. That is, in order to show that he is not arrogant, but democratic, listens to the people, and follows (as he says explicitly) the rules of parliament, he emphasizes his repeated compliance with the democratic rules. He need not explicitly say that he is democratic and otherwise respecting the wishes of parliament, but this passage politically implicates such meanings for a politically knowledgeable audience. At each point of his speech, Aznar carefully measures the possible political implications of what he is saying, emphasizing the points that show that he (or his party) is complying with basic political rules of democracy, as well as with more general social norms and values — and conversely, justifying or de-emphasizing in many ways those elements of his words and his policies that might be interpreted negatively, thereby aiming to avoid or to challenge a bad impression. Throughout his speeches, Aznar engages in many other forms of positive selfpresentation. Let us examine some other examples:

(4) “El Gobierno, señorías, desea la paz y está trabajando activamente para asegurarla.” (p. 11250).



(5) “España ha mantenido siempre una actitud constructiva en el conflicto de Oriente Medio.” (p. 11253).



(6) “Señora presidenta, señorías, soy bien consciente de que lo que esta tarde tratamos en la Cámara es algo que afecta de manera profunda a los sentimientos, también a las convicciones y también, por supuesto, además,



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a la razón. Siento el mayor respeto por todas las posiciones que se puedan manifestar en esta sesión… (Rumores.). (…) Nadie tiene el monopolio de la razón, como nadie tiene el monopolio de los buenos sentimientos. Comprendo que lo que tratamos son decisiones difíciles y que ninguno querríamos estar en la situación que estamos.”

These are three different types of self-presentation, namely when the speaker speaks for his group or organization (here, the government), as in example 4, when the speaker speaks for his country (example 5), and when the speaker speaks for himself, as in the last and most significant example. Whereas the first two kinds of self-praise are typically political, the last one is personal, and intended to emphasize the good character of the speaker. In all cases, these forms of self-congratulation are interactionally occasioned and respond to real or possible criticisms of his opponents — as they define the political context of Aznar’s speech. Example (5) is the most obvious case, since Aznar and his government have been widely accused of warmongering, so he needs to emphasize that he and his government are (of course) in favor of peace — a self-evident and well-known topos, widely used even to legitimize war and aggression, and part of the overall strategy of positive selfpresentation and negative other-presentation: We are peaceful and merely defending ourselves, whereas They are aggressive and warmongering. We shall see later that in this and many other passages, however, Aznar always adds that this peace should be peace “with security”. The second case is more general, and responds to the real or possible critique that by joining the USA in a war against Iraq, Spain may lose its credit with the Arab states. The third form of self-presentation, which may also be described as the first part of a (complex) disclaimer, namely as a form of apparent empathy, is intended to show that he is not the ruthless statesman who disregards the feelings, opinions and reasons of all those who are against the war — namely the vast majority of the Spanish population and all political parties in parliament except his own. Disregarding these feelings and beliefs would not only allow the conclusion that he personally lacks feelings and consideration, but perhaps even more crucially that he is not democratic by not considering the opinions of all those who oppose the war. Indeed, respect is one of the major values both in everyday interaction as well as in politics. It is important that he emphasizes these characteristics, especially in the face of multiple critiques among other politicians, the media and the population at large that his pro-war policy ignores the opinion of the vast majority of the people in Spain. In the last part of example (6), he continues this important section of his speech with a topos of equality, formulated in the form of a repeated negation and parallelism to emphasize its effect. This fragment may also be interpreted as (part of) a standard disclaimer, namely as an apparent concession (“I may be wrong, but…”),

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but given the political context, the interpretation should rather be that Aznar does not accept that the “good feelings” are only on the side of the opposition. However, in the rest of the sequence, as well as in the speech as a whole, Aznar nevertheless disregards these feelings of “comprehension” and asks for a “responsible” (and hence not emotional) support of his policies, so that his positive moves may be interpreted as the first part of a long disclaimer. Indeed, as suggested, in another move of positive self-presentation that also has a function as a legitimization of his policies, Aznar then adds that a “firm and resolute” response to Saddam Hussein is a “responsible” policy, because only in this way the best interests of Spain are served:

(7) “Y la que le corresponde tomar a un gobierno español que atienda a los intereses permanentes de nuestro país.” (p. 11254).



(8) “Creo sinceramente que hoy estoy cumpliendo lo que reclamé cuando encabezaba la oposición, lo que me comprometí al ser elegido presidente del Gobierno, lo que creo más razonable y lo que creo que conviene mejor a España y a los españoles.”

Note that in these examples, which are the final words of this speech before thanking the president of the Cortes, he interestingly combines various forms of positive self-presentation, such as a eulogy of his government, with an emphasis on personal commitment, reasonableness and sincerity. Politically most relevant, of course, is his claim that the policy of his government is good for the country. Personally and interactionally however, it is more important that he comes across as credible and honest. The analysis of these few examples is not merely another illustration of the well-known strategy of positive self-presentation and its functions in political speeches. My point, and the rationale for this article, is that the informal analysis of various types of positive self-presentation and facework provided above highlights a series of political implicatures that cannot simply be described in a semantic analysis, but presuppose detailed contextual knowledge of the current political situation in Spain and the world (the Iraq crisis), at a more global level, and the communicative and political situation in the Cortes during the speech, at the local level. There are many ways and levels to ‘understand’ this speech, and a politically relevant one is what Aznar’s political concerns are, and why each move in his speech also has a very specific function in the political process. These functions are relevant and understood by all knowledgeable participants but are seldom made explicit and are embodied in the political implicatures that participants derive at each point of a political speech.



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Negative other-presentation In political and other ideologically-based discourse, positive self-presentation is usually combined with negative other-presentation, or derogation, following the well-known social psycho-logic of ingroup–outgroup polarization. Thus, in speeches that are intended to justify or legitimatize war, derogation of the ‘enemy’ is of course crucial, as we also have seen in the speeches of Bush, Blair and those who support them. Although first considered and supported as an ally (e.g., against Iran), especially since the occupation of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was generally portrayed as the West’s preferred villain, both in politics and the media (Martín Rojo 1995). So it is not surprising that in the wake of the sudden interest of Bush & Co for ‘rogue states’ and ‘global terrorism’ after the September 11 attacks, Saddam Hussein soon became the number one rogue, when Osama Bin Laden could not be captured after the attacks. This and related backgrounds and legitimatizations of the war against Iraq of course also play in the discourses of the allies of the USA, namely the UK and Spain, and we may therefore expect extensive derogation of Saddam Hussein also in Aznar’s speeches. Moreover, these arguments are strong not only because Hussein was undoubtedly a dictator who had savagely oppressed the people of Iraq, but also because these arguments could, as such, hardly be challenged by a leftist opposition that could not agree more. Thus, bashing Saddam is perfectly consistent with a humanitarian, leftist perspective and therefore strategically an excellent ploy. If the war against Saddam Hussein was not strictly legal, there was at least a good argument for its legitimacy if the argument were purely humanitarian. However, as we know, in order not to break international legal conventions, the threat of weapons of mass destruction had to be alleged as the official motive for the war and not because Saddam Hussein was a dictator or violating human rights — since that argument would apply to many other countries and dictators. It is not surprising therefore that Aznar emphasizes the negative characteristics of the enemy, Saddam Hussein, such as in the following passage

(9) “El de Sadam es un régimen de terror que no ha dudado en emplear armas de destrucción masiva en las guerras que ha promovido contra sus países vecinos y contra su propio pueblo.”

An analysis of this and other passages is consistent with earlier work on political rhetoric in general and on Saddam Hussein in particular, and will not further detain us. Thus, we find the usual forms of hyperbole, extreme case formulations, and a specific set of lexical items (such as “terror”, “armas de destrucción masiva”) among many other forms of negative person and group characterization. My main point in this paper is not merely the usual description of political rhetoric and

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legitimation, but a study of some of the contextual functions of such strategies in the current political situation and the political process. Why is it politically relevant and important now to repeat and emphasize that Saddam Hussein is a very bad guy? After all, there is no disagreement about this at all with the opposition or public opinion at large, so there is no particular point for an argument or a form of persuasion here. So, what are the political implicatures of Aznar’s current derogation of Saddam Hussein? Let us spell out a few of them: – If the socialist opposition (mostly the PSOE) does not want to go to war against Saddam Hussein, then they are in fact playing in the hand of Saddam Hussein. Since we all know that he is an appalling dictator, the opposition are nevertheless supporting him, even against the interests of the Iraqi population. This is obviously inconsistent with the humanitarian and social values of the (socialist) opposition. So, by not supporting the war against Saddam Hussein, and hence our policies, the socialist opposition is betraying its own principles and hence cannot be trusted. – On the other hand, since Aznar does want to support a coalition that wants to fight such a terrible dictator as Saddam Hussein (because he is a danger for the world and his own people), then Aznar is doing his duty as responsible prime minister. – By describing and emphasizing those characteristics of Saddam Hussein as they were highlighted also by the USA, such as the invasion of Kuwait, his earlier breaches of UN resolutions, the alleged weapons of mass destruction and the links with terrorist organizations, Aznar shows the alignment of his government and party with those of a powerful ally. That by itself may be seen as a legitimate policy, but also shows the political ‘family resemblance’ between Aznar and Bush, as fellow conservative politicians. For the same reason, there is much less emphasis on the serious violations of human rights by Saddam Hussein — which would be much more typical for the opposition. – By emphasizing the danger ‘for all of us’ of the possibility that the weapons of mass destruction may be used by terrorists, through their alleged links with Saddam Hussein, Aznar shows his legitimate concern as responsible leader and at the same time politically implies that the opposition obviously does not have that concern and hence disregards its social responsibilities. Of course several other implicatures may be formulated, but the point is clear that what Aznar says about Saddam Hussein has little to do with his personal or ‘real’ opinions about the dictator, but rather with the overall strategy of legitimating a war against such a tyrant. The political implicatures of such a negative otherpresentation of the dictator is thus again a way of positively presenting his own



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position and policies, and hence those of his party and government, while at the same time disparaging those of the opposition. A detailed, negative description of the horrible violations of human rights by Saddam Hussein would not have satisfied these political functions: they would be inconsistent with the main arguments of the USA, against international rules (that do not allow removal of terrible dictators), and too consistent with the attitudes of the opposition. Indeed, awkward questions may then be asked about the earlier support of Saddam Hussein by the USA, e.g., by the supply of toxic gas and other weapons, when the dictator was their ally against Iran. In other words, negative other-presentations in political discourse are not just a description of a bad guy, but rather a politically relevant selection of, and emphasis on, what the currently politically relevant ‘bad’ things that need to be highlighted in discourse are. The analysis of political implicatures makes such tacit ‘tactical’ reasons explicit.

Peace, security and terrorism Aznar’s slogan in this debate, as is the case more generally, is “paz y seguridad”, peace and security, a slogan that is repeated in many forms in his speech, as in the following examples. (10) “Primero, el Gobierno está trabajando por restablecer la paz y la seguridad. El interés del Gobierno es obtener una situación de paz con seguridad.” (11) “Desearía que convinieran conmigo en que una postura firme y resolutiva para desarmar a Irak en un plazo inmediato es lo responsable, lo lógico e inteligente para las aspiraciones de paz y seguridad de la comunidad internacional, que también son las de nuestro país.”

The first part of the binomial expression is in line with a major value, and shared by the majority of his opponents, even when these are not exactly pacifists, but only oppose this war. It is the kind of value, aim and principle that is unassailable. However, it is the combination with the second concept that makes the slogan interesting, and characteristic of his conservative government, also in questions of immigration, and in line with similar slogans in the USA and Europe: security has become the keyword of the post September 11 politics, also in domains that have little to do with terrorism. In many countries, citizens are manipulated into believing that society has become increasingly insecure, and mobilized to support a sometimes draconian curtailment of their civil rights. Terrorist attacks are selectively (and gratefully) focused upon, both in politics and the media, to sustain that continuous fear. That many more citizens die of other avoidable causes that could

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be combated with much less money and less limitations of freedom, is of course no issue in such belligerent ideologies and policies. Thus, if we read the slogan as it is really intended, Peace, but security, it takes the more transparent form of a wellknown disclaimer, that of the Apparent Concession, in which the first part is the part that satisfies the strategy of positive self-presentation (‘we want peace’, ‘we are peaceful’), comparable to the well-known counterpart in racist disclaimers (‘we are not racists’). The crucial, second part then becomes the essential condition and the principal aim of the discourse, consistent with the overall strategy of well-known security text and talk of the national security state. No further analysis is needed here why terrorism serves Bush, his party, the Pentagon budget, the curtailment of civil liberties, and especially the businesses involved in war and security. Such analyses have been provided repeatedly by other authors. Besides the general semantic and political analysis of the disclaimer, relevant for us are the political implicatures of such a slogan: why does it serve Aznar here and how? Again, we witness that the fundamental contextual strategy is one of positive political self-presentation for the public or the voters at large, on the one hand, and the derogation of the opposition, on the other hand. In the same way as Law and Order is the slogan to combat crime and emphasize and implement conservative values, Peace and Security serves to appeal to the fears of people who feel insecure and need a strong government that will primarily satisfy the fundamental needs of security. Aznar, Bush and Blair know that most citizens — no more than they themselves — are not really worried in their daily life about what happens in Iraq or the Middle East, or about weapons of mass destruction, and maybe not even about lack of peace somewhere else in the world. Hence, to legitimate power policies and wars, it is essential to use the vague general concept that does matter for many people: feelings of (in)security. In (10) therefore, the slogan is not just that Aznar and his government want Peace and Security, but are actively engaged in trying to establish it (“trabajando”). At the same time, the corollary is the political implicature that if the opposition only wants peace, they are not offering what people want most: security. Thus, Aznar is implicitly able to disqualify the leftist opposition as mere pacifists. These implicatures also function locally — that is, they are relevant in the local political context in Spain — when Aznar indirectly and sometimes directly links Iraq and Saddam Hussein with international terrorism and international terrorism with local terrorism of ETA. Peace in such a context may be a less appropriate term, but security of course is. In other words, the slogan at the same time functions politically as a way to emphasize the positive role of the conservative government in the fight against ETA, as also several other passages in his speech show:



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(12) “(…) este Gobierno ha querido desempeñar un papel activo en esta crisis internacional pensando en la nueva amenaza que hoy supone el terrorismo, especialmente si tiene a su alcance medios de destrucción masiva.” (13) “… el Gobierno entiende que hay un riesgo gravísimo y un vínculo amenazador entre la proliferación de armas de destrucción masiva y el terrorismo. Sé bien que no es agradable precisar estos riesgos, pero sé muy bien que no estamos hablando,señorías, de ninguna fantasía. No son hipótesis de ciencia ficción. Hemos visto hace pocos días en Londres y también, por desgracia, en Barcelona que hay grupos terroristas dispuestos a atacar causando el mayor daño y destrucción posibles y que cuentan con sustancias que podrían causar centenares, si no miles, de muertos. Después del 11 de septiembre ningún gobernante responsable, ante su conciencia y ante su país, puede ignorar esta realidad.” (14) “La lucha contra el terrorismo es el principal objetivo, apoyado por las fuerzas parlamentarias, de la política exterior española. Hemos impulsado la lucha contra el terrorismo y contra la proliferación de armas de destrucción masiva en nuestras relaciones bilaterales y en todos los foros internacionales.” (15) “España ha impulsado con toda sus fuerzas estas políticas y vemos con satisfacción cómo la lucha contra estas lacras ha escalado posiciones en la agenda de la comunidad internacional hasta convertirse en objetivo básico de ésta. Sabemos que ello nos ayudará — ya lo está haciendo — en nuestra lucha contra el terrorismo de ETA y creemos que es un deber específico de España ofrecer su cooperación a otros países señalados por el terrorismo. Creo que la pasividad ante estas nuevas amenazas es nuestro mayor peligro.”

These examples barely need further contextual and political analysis. International terrorism has become the main argument for the security policies of Bush, Aznar and other leaders, especially when associated with weapons of mass destruction. But although that alone is a sufficient legitimation for them to go to war, Aznar locally needs to do more than that. So he repeatedly emphasizes the local relevance of this struggle by constructing a link with local terrorism of ETA. Since the public at large as well as the socialist opposition share the main aims of the struggle against ETA assassinations, Aznar strategically uses this argument to argue for a broader, international struggle against terrorism by asserting that this will also be relevant locally. That international terrorism, and of course Iraq, has nothing to do with the actions of ETA, is of course irrelevant for such an argument — they simply have the concept of ‘terrorism’ in common — a well-known move of amalgamation. Another political implicature is to accuse the opposition of inconsistency: If you are against ETA terrorism, you should also actively fight international terrorism.

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In the last sentence of (15) he actually makes this implicature somewhat more explicit: the danger consists in not taking action. Interestingly but typically, by the well-known move of conversion, it is pacifism and not terrorism that is the main problem for Aznar. Note, finally, that the topic of terrorism threat is thus becoming a standard argument that needs no further proof, that is a topos, that can be used in any argument, for instance to increase defense spending, engaging in war and to curtail human rights — all in order to enhance security. When international terrorism finally also hit home, as it did one year later, on March 11, 2004, with the train massacre in Madrid, causing 190 deaths, Aznar seems to get the ‘proof ’ he wants — namely that international terrorism is also locally relevant. Ironically, however, again for the same local reasons mentioned above — the alleged amalgam of international (‘Islamist’) terrorism and ETA terrorism — Aznar at first wanted to make the media and the public believe that the attacks were perpetrated by ETA, for the obvious reason that this would even more vindicate his aggressive anti-ETA policy and get him votes. However, the public and the media resented such obvious manipulation just two days before the national elections and voted him out of office. Independently of the public response, however, what we can learn about the political implicatures of Aznar’s speech of February 5, 2003, is important. Namely, we learn that it is always crucial to sustain international policies with local policies and strategies to get votes and to delegitimate one’s political opponents. Hence, the link established with ETA and the focus on national security, and the feelings of safety of the citizens. Indeed, this is basically the same strategy Bush followed in the USA to legitimate the war against Iraq.

Other strategies With these examples of Aznar’s political rhetoric not only have we witnessed some of the common properties of political discourse and legitimation, such as the strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, but also some principles underlying the contextual interpretation of such discourse in terms of political implicatures. The other global and local strategies of Aznar’s speech function in a similar way and may thus be summarized more briefly.

Internationalism Aznar repeatedly refers to the UN and the international community, first of all in order to legitimate the war and his support for it as beneficial for the whole world (see also Fairclough, this volume) — which, in the words of Bush, Blair & Co, will



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be “safer without Saddam Hussein”, and secondly to hide that the war in Iraq was precisely not supported by the UN or the Security Council: (16) “El Gobierno ha mantenido desde el comienzo de esta última crisis una postura coherente con la legalidad internacional, la defensa de los intereses de la nación y sus obligaciones internacionales, por este orden.”

The political implicatures of this example are quite explicit by Aznar’s emphasis that not only his policy is legitimate — and hence the aims of the opposition inconsistent with international ‘legality’ — but also that the government is primarily thinking of the national interest and hence that an international action is actually in favor of Spanish citizens. This again politically implies that those who oppose that policy are not working in the best interest of Spanish citizens. Indeed, here and elsewhere Aznar actually emphasizes that the opposition is placing itself outside the international consensus — a well-known move of conversion when he knows that it is the war policy of Bush and himself that is nearly universally condemned. Hence, his support for UN resolutions is mere political lip service. At the same time, emphasizing the interests of the nation is also a counterweight against possible critique, also in his own party, that ‘internationalism’ may be inconsistent with ‘nationalism’, on the right, and the interests of the people, on the left.

The number game A well-known ploy of argumentation is the number game, which we also know from the rhetoric against immigration. In Aznar’s speech, the number game has several functions, such as to convey objectivity and precision, and hence credibility, and specifically to emphasize the truth about Saddam Hussein’s non-compliance with international resolutions. The number game is also a rhetorical move of emphasis and hyperbole: (17) “No ha dado cuenta del agente nervioso VX producido y no declarado (Rumores.); no ha explicado el destino de 1.000 toneladas de agentes químicos que conservó tras la guerra con Irán; no ha dado cuenta de 6.500 proyectiles para carga química; no ha demostrado la destrucción de 8.500 litros de ántrax; no ha detenido la producción de misiles con un radio de más de 150 kilómetros: no ha revelado el destino de 380 propulsores de misiles con agentes químicos que fueron introducidos de contrabando en el país el mes anterior.”

Obviously, the precise numbers do not matter here — and the fact that almost four years after the occupation of Iraq none of all this has been found shows that these numbers were largely speculative or relative to innocent chemicals. The political point and implicature of the number game however is its rhetoric of objec-

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tivity and credibility — Aznar shows that he is well-informed, that he has done his homework. The opposition in this case has less of case against him and cannot use numbers to support its pacifist policy. At the same time, Aznar of course uses these ‘facts’ as proof about the bad character of Saddam Hussein, which is again one argument in the legitimation of the support of the war. Hence, the number game is an example of a more general type of strategy that may be called ‘facticity’. This strategy not only plays a role in argumentation and legitimation, but also in the context of political interaction, namely to signal truth and precision and hence competence and credibility. The facts as such matter little, the political point is to appear credible. The same is true for much media discourse.

Consensus A well-known political move is that of Consensus, that is asking for or affirming that policies are not partisan but in the national interest and hence should be supported by the opposition. Thus, Aznar uses this ploy to emphasize the relevance of the unanimity of Resolution 1441 of the UN, which is now brought to bear in a request for support for action against Iraq. But as is also the case for immigration policies both in Spain as elsewhere, ‘threats’ from outside are typically met with a call for national consensus. This also happens here, when Aznar requires national unity in the fight against terrorism. The political implicature of this move is that opposition, and lacking support for government policies, in fact means acting against national interests and against political common sense — thereby discrediting the opposition. A somewhat stronger version of this move is that of Necessity: We have no other way than to honor our international obligations. This is not only a well-known and effective semantic strategy of argumentation and hence a valid form of legitimation, but again also has the political implicature that Aznar is taking his international ‘obligations’ seriously and hence is a honorable statesman — whereas the ‘pacifist’ opposition on the other hand does not do so. There are many other moves in his speech that have similar functions, but the examples given above should suffice as illustrations of the nature of the war rhetoric and legitimation by Aznar in the Iraq crisis, as well as the relevance of the notion of political implicature.

Concluding remark Although this paper cannot possibly do justice to all the structures, moves and strategies of Aznar’s speeches in parliament about Iraq, we now have a first glimpse



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of some of the main characteristics of these speeches. There are few surprises, in the sense that the large majority of the moves and strategies are quite classical in political and ideological text and talk, such as positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, as well as a number of familiar rhetorical and argumentative ploys, such as the use of statistics/numbers, consensus, internationalism, authorities, comparisons and examples to justify current policy and action. Theoretically more interesting, however, is the notion of ‘political implicature’, based on inferences from combined general political knowledge and models of the current political situation. For Spain, this means not only that participants need to share knowledge about the current political situation in Spain as represented in their episodic mental models, but also of the context models that control the very speech of Aznar, including setting, participants, aims and so on. These implicatures are the political ‘subtext’ of the speeches, and the way he wants that his audience understands him. These political implicatures are what define also the political functions of the speech in the political process and focus especially on Aznar’s role as prime minister, party leader, as well as the legitimacy of his government and its international policies. At the same time, the implicatures have the function to derogate and attack the opposition in the public sphere. It is this political analysis of the speech that may be a contribution to the study of the political function of the speech in the political process.

References Atlas, J. D. 2000. Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. New York: Oxford University Press. Bayley, P. 2004. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Borch, F. L. and Wilson, P. S. 2003. International Law and the War on Terror. Newport, R.I.: Naval War College. Chilton, P. A. 2004. Political Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. Chomsky, N. 2003. Hegemony or Survival. America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books. Christopher, P. 2003. The Ethics of War and Peace. An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Daalder, I. H. and Lindsay, J. M. 2003. America Unbound. The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Dinstein, Y. 2001. War, Aggression, and Self-Defense. Cambridge [England] New York: Cambridge University Press. Falk, R. A. 2003. The Great Terror War. New York: Olive Branch Press. Gareau, F. H. 2004. State Terrorism and the United States. From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press. Gazdar, G. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press.

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Geis, M. L. 1987. The Language of Politics. New York: Springer. Goodin, R. E. and Klingemann, H. D. (eds). 1996. A New Handbook of Political Science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Iyengar, S. and McGuire, W. J. 1993. Explorations in Political Psychology. Durham: Duke University Press. Lau, R. R. and Sears, D. O. (eds). 1986. Political Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martín Rojo, L. 1995. Division and rejection: From the personification of the Gulf conflict to the demonisation of Saddam Hussein. Discourse & Society 6(1), 49-79. Martín Rojo, L. and Van Dijk, T. A. 1997. “There was a problem, and it was solved!” Legitimating the expulsion of ‘illegal’ immigrants in Spanish parliamentary discourse. Discourse & Society 8(4), 523-567. Newhouse, J. 2003. Imperial America. The Bush Assault on the World Order. New York: Knopf. Nye, J. S. 2000. Understanding International Conflicts. An Introduction to Theory and History. New York: Longman. Rodin, D. 2002. War and Self-Defense. Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. Tetlock, P. E. 1984. Cognitive style and political belief systems in the British House of Commons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46, 365-375. Van Dijk, T. A. 1993. Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse & Society 4(2), 249-83. Van Dijk, T. A. 1998a. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London, England UK: Sage Publications. Van Dijk, T. A. 1998b. What is political discourse analysis? In: Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen (eds). Political Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 11-52. Van Dijk, T. A. 2000. Parliamentary debates. In: R. Wodak and T. A. van Dijk (eds). Racism at the Top. Parliamentary Discourses on Ethnic Issues in Six European States. Klagenfurt, Austria: Drava Verlag, 45-78. Van Dijk, T. A. 2001. Multidisciplinary CDA: A plea for diversity. In: Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 95-120. Van Dijk, T. A. 2002. Political discourse and political cognition. In: Paul A. Chilton and Christina Schäffner (eds). Politics as Text and Talk. Analytical approaches to political discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 204-236. Van Dijk, T. A. 2003. Knowledge in parliamentary debates. Journal of Language and Politics 2(1), 93-129. Van Dijk, T. A. 2004. Text and context of parliamentary debates. In: P. Bayley (ed.). Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 339–372. Wilson, J. 1990. Politically Speaking. Oxford: Blackwell. Wodak, R. (ed.). 1989. Language, Power, and Ideology. Studies in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Wodak, R. and Menz, F. (eds). 1990. Sprache in der Politik — Politik in der Sprache. Analysen zum öffentlichen Sprachgebrauch. (Language in Politics — Politics in Language. Analyses of Public Language Use). Klagenfurt: Drava. Wodak, R. and Van Dijk, T. A. (eds). Racism at the Top. Parliamentary Discourses on Ethnic Issues in Six European States. Klagenfurt, Austria: Drava Verlag.

The Iraq war as curricular knowledge From the political to the pedagogic divide Bessie Mitsikopoulou and Dimitris Koutsogiannis National and Kapodistrian University of Athens / Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

The chapter deals with educational discourse concerning the recent Iraq war in an attempt to explore how broader political issues, such as war, are materialised in everyday classroom practices. It analyses lesson plans, aimed to be used by US educators of primary and secondary schools, from two Internet sites: one supporting the official position of US to go to war and the other taking a position against the war. The chapter suggests that the lesson plans in the two sites constitute materialisations of two general approaches to education, the dominant and the critical, which do not simply adopt opposing views concerning the war but which, most importantly, contribute to the construction of different pedagogic subjects: in one case, there is an attempt towards ‘compulsory patriotism’, whereas in the other an attempt towards a ‘compulsory’ challenging of the war. The ideals which are in fact recontextualised here are those of nation and justice, the pedagogisation of which seems to raise more questions than to provide answers.

1. Analysing on-line materials In the wake of the Iraq war, educational material was made available on Internet sites of associations such as the National Geographic, Scholastic, and National Council of Teachers of English that informed students about Iraq and the circumstances leading to war. Collections of resources such as reports, news reports and other media texts, maps, video clips accompanied by detailed lesson plans were offered with the purpose of integrating ‘Breaking news’ into lessons, preparing ‘lessons on war’, and exploring the impact the war had on students. Differing views were voiced by American educators as to whether to discuss their country’s involvement in the war with students. The events of 11 September had already prompted discussion in the classrooms (Apple 2002). Among the on-line

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sites which offer educational materials on the 2003 Iraq war are NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools. NewsHour Extra is an electronic magazine hosted by PBS portal, a private, non-profit making, media enterprise owned and operated by the US public television stations. Its mission statement includes the following aim: “PBS uses the power of non-commercial television, the Internet and other media to enrich the lives of all Americans through quality programs and education services that inform, inspire and delight”. Through combining online and television media, pbs.org creates and distributes interactive programming for educational purposes. It hosts supersites for children, parents and teachers offering information on subjects such as history, arts, science and technology, and it also includes several online sites with classroom resources, lesson plans and activities. NewsHour Extra draws part of its materials from the 60-minute evening television news programme by awardwinning journalist Jim Lehrer. Rethinking Schools, a proactive, non-profit making organisation which publishes educational materials, is directed by volunteer editors and editorial associates and has subscribers in the United States, Canada and other countries. It is a strong supporter of public education and it deals with issues such as critical classroom practice, educational reform, and race and equity in education. Its online portal includes information about its publications, an on-line newsletter, an on-line journal and educational materials for teachers. Rethinking Schools openly adopts an anti-war position and its site on the Iraq war contains links for lesson plans, suggested reading, background documents, maps and geography activities and various resources for teachers. This study reports on an analysis of on-line lesson plans based on the Iraq war material from NewsHour Extra (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers/iraq/) and Rethinking Schools (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/war/ideas/index.shtml). The corpus was retrieved on 21 May 2003 and is comprised of 24 lesson plans from NewsHour Extra that appeared between 21 March and 21 April 2003, and 10 lesson plans from Rethinking Schools most of which appeared in the Spring of 2003. The two sites were originally selected on the basis of the following three criteria: a. both sites adopt the view that the issue of the war should be explicitly dealt with in the classroom, b. both sites provide a wealth of resources for teachers including lesson plans and supporting material such as further sites for exploration, which are defined by topic, printed articles, maps, suggestions for further activities, c. they adopt different perspectives: while NewsHour Extra is pro-war and is supportive of the US government’s decision to go to war, Rethinking Schools openly adopts an anti-war position.



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Taking into account their different views concerning the Iraq war, we wanted to investigate how these opposite positions are handled pedagogically by the two sites. However, our interest in these two sites is not limited to the different positions they hold concerning the war, since these two sites are characteristic examples of two important educational discourses: the dominant and the alternative. Thus, we primarily wanted to explore the extent to which the different positions concerning the war are related to the construction of different ‘imagination’/pedagogic subjects (Bernstein 1996: 47) and ultimately look into the ways in which broad political issues, such as the Iraq war, are materialised in more everyday practices such as the planning, conduct and evaluation of classroom teaching. Implied then in this paper is the view that political discourse may not at all be just a matter of what we find in the news but also, and perhaps more importantly, a matter of how we organise the socialisation of children through the massive socio-cultural institutions of our society (see Machin and van Leeuwen, this volume).1 As we live in a country in South East Europe which is far away from the United States and yet greatly affected by changes in the Middle East, we did not view the war-time events in the way that the American people might have, so our understanding and interpretation of the situation is necessarily somewhat different. This distance, on the other hand, may add to the advantages of this study. In addition, having had to experience the effects of our own centralised educational system, we were intrigued by the wealth of educational materials available on the Internet after 11 September 2001, materials which deal with current political issues and military conflicts such as the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war. 2. The war as pedagogic discourse A view of war as curricular subject matter, legitimate school knowledge and object of pedagogy results in the war as pedagogic discourse. Assuming that “pedagogic discourse selects and creates specialised pedagogic subjects through its contexts and contents” (Bernstein 1996: 46), we turned our analysis to the ‘contexts and contents’ of these sites investigating the ways they are constructing pedagogic subjects in an attempt to answer the question: what discourses are selected and recontextualised by the two electronic sites in their attempt to ‘teach’ the war from their different perspectives? The discourses of other curricular subjects, for instance physics, are drawn mainly from the discourse of Physics. What happens, though, in the case of war as school subject matter, since this has not traditionally been an object of knowledge for schools? Moreover, how are the media and other discourses transformed into pedagogic discourse during the recontextualisation process? Considering that each different theory of instruction “contains within it-

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self a model of the learner and of the teacher” (Bernstein 1996: 49), which theories of instruction are embedded in war-related pedagogies and what models of learners and teachers do they imply? In the next sections, we present some of the main elements of the war-related pedagogies, which develop in the context of the lesson plans and the suggested materials of the two websites. We look primarily at the contents and methods proposed, their ‘what’ and ‘how’, with the purpose of identifying their potential for the construction of pedagogic subjects. The collection of lesson plans in NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools together with other resources (newspaper articles, various texts from historical and political discourses, interviews, graphs, maps etc.) available on the sites comprise, in our view, a kind of an informal curriculum on the subject of the Iraq war. As is the case with other types of curricula, the curricula of NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools have implied in them knowledges, skills, meanings and values which are ideologically specific (cf. Kress 1996). What is included or excluded in each curriculum is, as we shall see, determined to a certain extent by adopted pedagogic approaches, and, most importantly in this case, by assumed positions on the Iraq war.

3. Teaching the Iraq war in NewsHour Extra 3.1 ‘Critical analysis’ of war NewsHour Extra lesson plans focus primarily on reading comprehension activities that ask learners to identify the main idea(s) and supporting arguments. The purpose of this ‘critical analysis’, as this approach is referred to in the beginning of some lesson plans, is to enable learners to analyse some texts in order to understand the arguments about the necessity of this war, while developing at the same time some knowledge concerning aspects of the war. The texts used are drawn primarily from media discourse, political discourse (e.g. President’s speeches), administrative discourse (e.g. US official documents) and historical discourse (primarily concerning US involvement in WWI and WWII). The pattern is the same in most cases: a warm-up activity with a few initiating questions introduces the topic and helps the teacher identify how much students know about it, a main activity in which students read an article drawn from the hosting portal and answer reading comprehension questions, and a discussion part in which students relate the discussed topic to their own experiences and knowledge. The following extract of a plan concerns the story US Forces Capture Eight Iraqis Pictured on “Most Wanted” Playing Cards, 4/21/03:



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“Initiating Questions: 1. What is the latest information about Iraq? Who is in charge? What is the status of Saddam Hussein’s regime? 2.  What do you know about playing cards? How are they organized? Reading comprehension questions: 1. How many Iraqi officials from the ‘most wanted’ list have been captured so far? 2.  How are the ‘most wanted’ cards organized? 3.  What card is Saddam Hussein? Why? 4. List and explain the ways in which the military has used similar playing cards in the past? Discussion questions: 1.  Does this use of cards trivialize the US mission in Iraq? Why or why not? 2. Why might this method be effective in searching for members of the Saddam Hussein regime? Explain.”

General techniques such as pairwork or groupwork are frequently suggested and learners are trained in transferable skills (e.g. learning how to analyse something in groups and report back to class). Looking at the types of activities used in NewsHour Extra lesson plans, we were intrigued by the types of activities which involve students in political decision and policy making. For instance, in the following activities, students are invited to work individually or in groups in order to decide upon issues concerning Iraq’s payment of debts: “Have each group reflect upon the following question for the reconstruction of Iraq: Should Iraq have to pay back billions of dollars in debts incurred by Saddam Hussein? Keep in mind the fact that Iraq has enormous potential economic resources, if the oil embargo is lifted.” (“Reconstruction of Iraq: A lesson of historical precedents”)

the role of the United Nations: “As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently stated, after the fall of Hussein’s regime the UN should be more involved in the dispensing of humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq than in the rebuilding of their government (see Online NewsHour article). In light of this, should the United Nations primarily be oriented towards humanitarian efforts? Due to recent complications such as those in the governing of Kosovo, should the UN be kept out of political or military campaigns altogether?” (“The role of the United Nations in postwar Iraq”)

or, the most appropriate person to become the future leader of Iraq “Have interested students research the lives of Ahmed Chalabi, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakral-Hakim, Massoud Barzani of the KDP and Jalal Talabani of

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the PUK and report to the class. Have the class write an essay on which leader appears to be more qualified to lead.” (“Who should rule the Interim government in Iraq? What should be their priorities?”)

In these and other similar activities, high school students, equipped with a few reading texts and some background information provided by the teacher, are invited to discuss and eventually take up a position on complex issues concerning governmental policies and international politics. In fact, these activities take place within the context of what is suggested to be a ‘critical analysis’, an approach widely known as ‘critical thinking’ which has been quite popular since the beginning of the 1980s in US language education from primary to college level. In this tradition, the purpose of ‘critical thinking’ is to enhance clarity and comprehension through close reading. Harris and Hodges (1981: 74) define critical thinking as the process of making judgments in reading, “evaluating relevancy and adequacy of what is read”, while Ellis (1997) and Halpern (1996) argue that critical thinking skills involve identifying author’s intent, main arguments and supporting evidence; distinguishing between fact and opinion; making detailed observations; uncovering assumptions; and, generally, making assertions based on sound logic and solid evidence. This view of critical thinking is often considered synonymous to logical thinking since, according to its proponents, it is concerned with reason, intellectual honesty and open-mindedness, as opposed to emotionalism, intellectual laziness, and closed mindedness (Kurland 1995). At this point it is worth noting that Atkinson (1997), Martin (1992) and Walters (1994), among others, criticised this model of critical thinking for its exclusive and reductive nature, arguing that it is a highly normative and ‘logistic’ model which claims objectivity and rationality. The ‘critical thinking’ approach has also been criticised for its insistence upon the development of gereralised and transferable thinking skills which are assumed to be universal and thus can be used beyond their original domains of application, a point that Atkinson (1997) elaborately refutes showing that thinking skills do not appear to transfer effectively beyond their narrow contexts of instruction. In the same way that the model of ‘critical thinking’ is applied to freshman composition courses or courses which develop academic study skills (e.g. Ellis 1997), it is also used in lessons which deal with analysis of current events and the teaching of the Iraq war: students are asked to read a text and express their opinion on an issue of their academic life in the same way they are asked to decide who will be the most appropriate leader of another country, or the role of the United Nations. However, in this task, it is clear that students are not left unguided. A careful reading of such activities reveals a strong regulation which directs students’ answers. Notice the following examples, “taking into account Iraq’s wealth from oil, should Iraq pay back its debts?” or “due



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to recent complications such as those in the governing of Kosovo, should the UN be kept out of political or military campaigns altogether?” 3.2 The war as episodes in a TV series NewsHour Extra lesson plans closely follow the progress of war from its beginning until its official ending. The war is construed as a kind of a TV series which progresses day by day. As stated on the initial web page, two new lesson plans are added every week, which, in the form of new episodes, invite students to discuss most recent events, to predict, to assess new situations, to find analogies with the past or to calculate the cost of the war. This is one of the two key elements of these lesson plans whose main purpose becomes to construe subjects who are well aware of the progress of war and who vigorously support the government’s decision to go to war. This tendency is also apparent in the title often used on pages, “teaching the Iraq war”, in which the Iraq war becomes the Goal in a material process (Halliday 1994) instead of the unmarked circumstantial element in “teaching about the Iraq war”. Quite interestingly, we soon realised this was not only a lexico-grammatical construction. Students were actually ‘taught the war’ by being involved in activities which asked them to research weapons of mass destruction: “Ask your students what they already know about the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein is thought to have. Give them the following background as necessary. – mustard gas — blisters / burns exposed tissues, fatal if untreated – nerve agents (such as sarin and tabun) — can cause convulsions, unconsciousness, and death if untreated immediately Extension Idea: Select a particular weapon of mass destruction (anthrax, nuclear weapons, nerve agents such as sarin, mustard gas, etc.). Research its development and/or discovery, its history and usage, and where it is now believed to exist.” (“Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”)

analyse war strategies: “Map activities: In order to determine whether the Doctrine is being observed, have the students closely examine maps of the region that highlight the ongoing war strategy, bombing campaigns and troop deployments. Various maps can readily be found in daily newspaper coverage of the war as well as on most news websites.” (“The Powell Doctrine”)

or, compare military technologies:

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“Write a report comparing and contrasting the use of military technology in the following conflicts: World War II, the Vietnam War, and the current war in Iraq.” (“War expectations”)

This perspective narrows dramatically the context (Chilton 2002) within which discussion can be conducted in class and from which teaching materials are selected. For instance, it excludes any discussion about the necessity of the war or its ethics and focuses exclusively on current events. Granted the site presents a positive stance towards the war, the construction of war as a TV series has the following effects. First, it restricts discussion from the general to the specific and inevitably locates any kind of ‘critical analysis’ within this limited context. For instance, discussion concerning freedom of speech in the press centres on limited themes such as the ethics of embedded journalists or the ethical dilemma which resulted from CNN’s decision not to report on Saddam’s atrocities prior to war. The war is taken as a given, and there is no challenge concerning its necessity in the first place. Second, it allows the use of articles from the daily press for educational purposes. In fact, following the progress of the war is largely facilitated by the use of current news articles from the hosting portal. A second main characteristic of the NewsHour Extra lesson plans is the reproduction of the dominant discourse and its argumentation concerning the necessity of the war and the construction of a national consciousness. The step-by-step following of the war becomes the starting point for class discussion of wider issues which aim to achieve the aforementioned aims. For instance, when discussing the US attempt to establish an ‘interim authority’ in Iraq, discussion also centres on democracy; when discussing “the recent rescue of Private Jessica Lynch”, the topic of women in the American army and their invaluable contribution to the nation is also discussed. In this context, the teaching material is carefully selected aiming to inspire certainty of the victorious outcome, trust in the justification for going to war, national pride and alertness. There are some remarkable similarities with traditional patriotic cinema films or TV series (compare with Chouliaraki, this volume).2 In this context, the democracy theme is quite popular: ‘we have democracy and we are trying to restore democracy in a non-democratic country’. For instance, in one case, students are given an extract from Thomas Jefferson’s first Inaugural Address and are asked: “Are there aspects of this vision that are uniquely American? Why or why not?” (“Getting to democracy”). In another lesson plan, through stressing the importance of respecting international conventions in a democratic country, students discuss the Geneva Convention: “1. Introduction: Begin by discussing the overview of the Geneva Convention… 2. Next, have the students analyze the Iraqi media’s use of images of the prisoners of war (POWs) to determine whether it is contrary to the tenets of the Convention, particularly Article 13.



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3. Lastly, ask the students to compare the use of the Al Jazeera images of American prisoners to recent media images of Iraqi prisoners held by U.S. soldiers.” (“The rules of engagement: The Geneva convention”)

Comparison with previous wars is quite prominent in NewsHour Extra and serves mainly two purposes. First, it is used to stress the positive role of the US in critical moments in history: “Following the end of WWII, much of Europe, both victor and vanquished, was ravaged. Infrastructures had been destroyed, millions killed, cities levelled. However, rather than punishing the German aggressors with billions of dollars in war reparations, the United States engaged in a massive campaign to rebuild Germany from the ground up. Germany is once again a world leader, and boasts one of the strongest economies and democracies in Europe.” (“Reconstruction of Iraq: A lesson of historical precedents”)

Second, it is employed to identify differences with previous wars. In the case of the Vietnam war, the focus is on the knowledge then gained for the US and on outlining that war’s differences from the Iraq war, due to rapid technological developments and the present supremacy of US army: “Discuss with the class the tenets of the Powell Doctrine. Help them to see that the Doctrine was an outgrowth of US involvement in previous military campaigns (such as Vietnam and Korea) that were ambivalent, tentative and poorly planned.” (“The Powell doctrine”) “After the students have gained a solid foundation on the war strategy, have them respond either in essay or discussion format to… the following: ‘How might this war be different from previous ones with which you are familiar, such as the Persian Gulf War, Vietnam, World War I and World War II? How are they all similar?’” (“Military strategy”)

4. Teaching the Iraq war in Rethinking Schools 4.1 Critical pedagogy The purpose of the Rethinking Schools lesson plans is repeatedly stated to be the development of an alternative perspective to education: “Our pedagogy has to be more political. We need to invite students to consider alternatives — we need to invite them to become part of making alternatives” (“Defeating despair”). In order to raise students’ critical awareness, educators often stress the need for relevant teaching materials:

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“As I sat down recently to figure out how I was going to teach about the impending war against Iraq, I was struck by how much information was available and yet how little curriculum… This is not the time for educators to hole up in our classrooms and play curricular lone rangers. The issues are too complicated, the pedagogical challenges too stiff.” (“Teaching Gulf war II”)

In Rethinking Schools lesson plans, students are involved in a variety of activities such as pairwork, groupwork, simulations, role play and project work using a variety of resources such as Internet sites, war statistics, maps, videos, articles and books. Some of the materials are offered through hyperlinks, while for some others reference information is provided (e.g. electronic address, publisher). Generally, new technologies are extensively employed in these lessons. In addition to anti-war documentaries and war films, the Internet is regularly used as a source of information for both teachers and students since “the Internet makes it possible for us to seek out different perspectives from non-corporate, alternative media, and from media of other nations” (“Drawing on history to challenge the war”). The texts used are primarily drawn from literary discourses (anti-war literature, e.g. poetry, novels, short stories and extensive use of songs), historical discourses (particularly concerning Gulf War I, Vietnam, and Afghanistan) and political discourses. The suggested activities generally encourage students to “think about the frameworks that the media fashions for us — the purely bad guys and the purely good guys, the cleansing role of violence, the contempt for nonWestern cultures, etc. … to recognize how we are often led to organize information about today’s global conflicts, especially those in the Middle East, into these frameworks” (“Teaching Gulf war II”), “think about social events as having concrete causes, constantly asking ‘Why?’ and ‘In whose interests?’” (“Rethinking the teaching of the Vietnam war”), “look back at the history of US relations with Iraq in order to better understand US objectives today” (“Predicting how the US Government will respond to the Iraqi Government”).

To this purpose, language analysis of texts is quite often employed: “I pointed out the mechanics of Priest’s use of questions, followed by a list of images. Students underlined the images that made them see or hear war” (“Entering history through poetry”). In an article entitled “Rethinking Our Classrooms”3 from the Rethinking Schools Journal (Fall 2003), the editors outline the main elements of their adopted ‘critical pedagogy’, according to which a “critical curriculum should be a rainbow of resistance. Through critiques of advertising, cartoons, literature, legislative decisions, foreign policy choices, job



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structures, newspapers, movies, consumer culture, agricultural practices, and school life itself, students should have opportunities to question social reality”.

However, it is also noted that a critical curriculum should encourage students to “see themselves as truth-tellers and change-makers” since “part of a teacher’s role is to suggest that ideas have real consequences and should be acted upon, and to offer students opportunities to do just that”. In this context, the main purpose of the suggested lessons is to change students’ attitudes towards the war, and this may be the reason why changes of students’ views are frequently reported: “When the video ended, they jumped right into an angry critique of the rhetoric surrounding the present war. One indignant student asked, ‘If our companies gave Hussein weapons of mass destruction, why are we going to bomb him because he might still have some?’” (“Drawing on history to challenge the war”) “One student wrote: ‘To me, this cartoon is saying that we (the US, portrayed by Popeye) can do whatever we want to other people in other cultures, because we’re always right. Violence is alright and gives you power and control’. ” (“Teaching Gulf War II”)

In another case, students prepare an educational session to teach their fellow students about Iraq, and in another part of the same lesson a student is reported to take up an active role attempting to persuade others: “I was so proud to know how to argue with my dad. I told him. I’m telling you realities. You think what they want you to think” (“Drawing on history to challenge the war”). However, it should be noted that the preoccupation with developing an alternative pedagogy is focused on the presentation of anti-war argumentation and not on a multi-faceted and disinterested presentation of the Iraq war. As a result, it leaves out of discussion any arguments of the opposite side. In our analysis of lesson plans, we came across only one instance in which students were asked to research both mainstream and alternative press in order to record argumentation of both sides. Even then, however, the ideological context was given to students since the purpose of the analysis was to show that the opposite position was wrong. In most other instances, the attempt to develop students’ critical awareness generally ignored the arguments of the opposite side, perhaps assuming that since this was the prevailing view, it was well known to all students. 4.2 Challenging the war In Rethinking Schools, the day by day progress of war is ignored. Topics discussed focus on challenging the war’s necessity and calling for the investigation of its deeper causes. Instead of dealing with current events, these lessons focus on the

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general, the underlying and the global as their titles indicate: “Drawing on history to challenge the war”, “Entering history though poetry”, “The world up close”, “Whose terrorism?”. Actually, the topics discussed in the classroom often do not relate directly to the current war, the name of which is systematically avoided, and on the opening page, the collection of lesson plans is placed under the heading “The war” with no reference made to Iraq. Four of the lesson plans on the site were written prior to the war (e.g. Winter 2000/2001, Winter 2001/2002), whereas the other six appeared in the Spring of 2003. As stated in the introductory page of the site: “This collection includes lesson plans and teaching ideas created by the editors of Rethinking Schools, as well as teaching materials created by other teachers around the country who are trying to come to grips with the issues raised by the war”. For instance, in “World up close”, “A fifth grade teacher aims to help his students explore issues of war and terrorism as they look at the war in Afghanistan” and in “Songs with a Global Conscience” songs are used “to build international understanding and solidarity”. In the lesson plans of Rethinking Schools, the term ‘coalition’, so frequently used in NewsHour Extra, is avoided, and the US is presented as a powerful super power with financial and geopolitical interests. A great number of the lesson plans aim to illustrate this powerful position of the US and to provide answers to ‘why war’ by closely examining the wars that the US has been involved since WWII: “The most important question wanders in and out of these lessons but still remains to be confronted directly in my classroom: Why? Why is the United States so intent on overthrowing Saddam Hussein? Why now? Why not other oppressive regimes, like China? Why not other nations in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, like Israel? Why not other nations which, unlike Iraq, are known definitively to possess weapons of mass destruction, like Pakistan? Why not other nations with alleged links to terrorists, like Saudi Arabia?” (“Teaching Gulf War II”)

Moreover, to illustrate the determining role of the US, Rethinking Schools lesson plans often attempt to connect the present with the past, yet in a different way from that employed in NewsHour Extra: “The second day, I showed the first part of Hidden Wars. The video opens with crucial history about US activities in the Middle East, history that our mainstream media ignores. To control Mideast oil, from WWII to 1988, the US encouraged war, helped install dictators (Hussein and the Shah), and supplied them with billions of dollars of weaponry. In the 1980s, US corporations supplied Iraq with biological, chemical, and nuclear components.” (“Drawing on history to challenge the war”) “A video I’ve found useful in prompting students to explore a bit of the history of Vietnam and the sources of US involvement…offers an overview of Vietnamese



The Iraq war as curricular knowledge

resistance to French colonialism (which began in the mid–19th century) and to the Japanese occupation during World War II.” (“Rethinking the teaching of the Vietnam war”)

Analogies between past and current situations are frequently drawn on in order to encourage students to challenge the war, not to justify it. Role-play activities are extensively used to this purpose. In one case, students get involved in an activity, simulating members of the Congress in 1964, and in another case they become members of the Viet Minh and the French government invited to a meeting with President Truman to present their position on the question of Vietnamese independence. Through these activities, students are expected to develop an alternative perspective to historical events and are encouraged to search for deeper reasons and motives. If some lesson plans aim at equipping students with knowledge concerning this and the previous wars and at raising anti-war consciousness, some others aim at sensitizing them to issues concerning the brutality of the war, and at promoting the global peace movement. Anti-war poetry and songs are heavily drawn in this case: “Poems are not a substitute for information. Students need to investigate why this war is happening. Poetry is not social analysis. Students’ poems won’t help them figure out the role of oil in this war… However, the poetry will help students understand the human consequences of those decisions. And by humanizing the war, students may care enough to join our investigation into its causes.” (“Entering history through poetry”) “I want my students to be comfortable expressing their fears about war and terrorism. This allows for emotional release and also provides insight into my students’ thoughts on topics such as stereotypes, Islam, immigration, or grief about loss of a family member.” (“A world up close”)

Through a number of different activities students are encouraged to express their feelings and emotions: for instance, they write their own poems, they prepare bulletin boards with photos, maps and student writing or they prepare a poster on landmines with pictures of victims, maps, essays and facts.

5. The genre of lesson plans in NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools also differ in the ways each site realises the genre of lesson plans. On the one hand, NewsHour Extra lesson plans have elements of traditional lesson plans which are descriptive and procedural, follow a strict format resembling that of a technical document, and have formal and ‘objective’ language. On the other hand, Rethinking Schools lesson plans are very differ-

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ent and have elements of the reflective lesson plan (Richards and Lockhart 1994). They have been written mostly after a particular class has been conducted, and in this sense they are retrospective. Instead of the formal language adopted in NewsHour Extra, in Rethinking Schools lesson plans teachers present materials directed to other teachers for use in the classroom, and they discuss their personal experience, including personal evaluations, uncertainties, failures as well as successes. Viewing after Volosinov (1986: 23) genre realisations not as simply moments of the choice, assembly and reproduction of forms and techniques, but as sites where “differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community” intersect, contest and struggle, we approach the genre of lesson plan as “a nexus for struggles over difference, identity and politics” (Luke 1996: 317). We thus consider the differential manifestations of the genre of lesson plans in NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools as articulations of their different ideological positions which are, as we shall see, about the Iraq war as much as they are about wider pedagogic and educational matters. 5.1 The genre of NewsHour Extra lesson plans The lesson plans in NewsHour Extra all follow the strict format of a traditional lesson plan which consists of Overview/Background, Materials, Procedure, Extension Ideas/Homework and National Standards sections. The section on National Standards is not part of the traditional lesson plan format, but its incorporation is related, as we shall discuss below, to a significant component of US education in the last decade. The fact that the same format is generally followed in all lesson plans leads to the assumption that some general specifications are followed as to how each section is to be organised. The lesson plans are quite detailed, usually ranging from three to five printed pages, and they also adopt the formal language usually found in traditional lesson plans. Emphasis is placed on objectives and a detailed description of activities to be handled in class in a pre-specified order. The Overview/Background section generally provides useful background information concerning the topic to be dealt with in the specific lesson plan, specifies the objectives, the time required for the completion of the suggested lesson (ranging from an individual activity which requires 20–30 minutes to a complete lesson or series of lessons), and the target group (varying from primary to high school and university students and covering a variety of areas: English, mathematics, journalism, history, world history, government). The information may all be included in one paragraph or may be separated in more sections, as in the following example:



The Iraq war as curricular knowledge

“Overview: President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair met in Ireland Tuesday to discuss who should run the interim government of Iraq. This lesson plan asks students to consider whether the United Nations, the US and British, members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party or Iraqi exiles should make major decisions in the interim government and what the priorities of that government should be (transportation, hospitals, schools, police force, sanitation, etc.). Objectives: – Students should look at the potential groups and individual leaders and decide who should have power in postwar Iraq. – Students should consider the priorities of the new government. – Students should understand who the potential leaders are and the issues they will confront.” (“What should be their priorities?”)

The Materials section describes what will be needed for the completion of the suggested lesson. In addition to NewsHour Extra articles and downloadable handouts (with activities, definitions of terms, quotes, transcripts with extracts from discussions, interviews etc.), a wealth of electronic materials is available to the teachers such as maps of Iraq, articles from other sources and various public documents. Less frequently, teachers are invited to collect their own materials (e.g. copies of local, regional and national newspaper articles). In addition, computers with Internet access, notebooks and pens are noted among the materials needed. The Procedure section provides a detailed description of the steps to be followed for the completion of the activities in the classroom. It is the largest part of the lesson plan, usually extending from one to three printed pages, and it consists of numbered parts which address the order to be followed. The next section, Extension Ideas/Homework, describes in detail further activities (e.g. project work or writing tasks) to be used for homework. The last section of the lesson plan, whose length varies from a few lines to a page, is entitled “National Standards”. Reference is made to the specific national standards the suggested lesson adheres to, and occasionally includes the content of each national standard: “National Standards: National Council for the Social Studies Standard V: Individuals, Groups and Institutions Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of interactions among individuals, groups, and institutions. Standard VI. Power, Authority and Governance Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of how people create and change structures of power, authority, and governance.” (“Reporting on war in the 21st century”)

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Actually, National Standards hold a prominent position in NewsHour Extra lesson plans. In addition to their placement at the end of each lesson plan, there is a hyperlink entitled “Correlation to National Standards” (in bold letters), placed as a separate section after Materials and before Procedure sections, which leads to the last section of the lesson plan directly. The language employed in NewsHour Extra lesson plans is formal and impersonal, appropriate to the ‘objectivity’ that a technical document is endowed with. Imperatives are used in the attempt to describe ‘what’ as well as ‘how’ to teach. ‘How’ is described in detail in the form of instructions to be followed: “Distribute copies of today’s NewsHour article (Handout #1). Have students read it silently. Provide students with a copy of the Hague regulation from 1907 (Handout #2) and have them read that silently. Then provide students with an excerpted copy of the NewsHour transcript “Days of Disorder” (Handout #3) that discusses the issue of responsibility for restoring Iraq. Have students read it silently for background information.” (“Choices in war: what would you save first?”)

Interesting also is the categorical tone when describing the purpose of the lesson plan: “Students will understand that the United States hopes to set up an ‘interim authority’ in Iraq that will aid the country in establishing self-rule” (from the Overview, “Getting to Democracy”). Median and high modality (Halliday 1994) are constantly employed: “This lesson may be used to discuss with your students President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq soon after that decision has been made. It should take 20–30 minutes, although you may choose to extend your discussion or have students write responses to the quotes given below. This lesson is most appropriate for use in a government or history class but may be used in any social studies class.” (“The decision to go to war”)

5.2 The genre of Rethinking Schools lesson plans The genre of lesson plans in Rethinking Schools is quite differently realised. Here we do not encounter the typical format found in the NewsHour Extra plans, since each lesson plan is written in the form of continuous text with sections which vary depending on the issue discussed. For instance, in “Teaching Gulf War II”, the lesson plan is divided into the sections Creating the ‘enemy’, Bush’s blank check, Silent war of sanctions, Why war?. In “Whose terrorism?”, the sections are entitled Lesson on terrorism, Defining terrorism, Economic terrorism, Terrorism’s ghosts. No lesson plan follows the strict typical format of the first set. Perhaps the most prevailing characteristic of the Rethinking Schools lesson plans is their close connection to the classroom, through the use of narrative



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accounts of lessons which have been already tried out along with a detailed description of what happened in the classroom. Instead of the use of imperatives and high modality to describe steps to be followed, extensive use of past tenses narrating classroom events is employed: “I introduced the cartoon by telling students that I wanted them to think about the images … I read aloud a quote… I told them …I wanted them to think about aspects of the secret education children were exposed to. On the board I wrote: …. After the video, students wrote … before we talked.” (“Teaching Gulf war II”)

The objective account of an authoritative voice is here replaced by the subjective tone of a teacher talking to other teachers, often in first person singular, not only about procedural matters as in the above extract, but also about personal experiences. In another part of the same lesson plan we read: “And there I am, feeling my way along, trying to piece together a curriculum that urges students to think critically about the antecedents to the coming war.” Personal information is also included: “As I’m on leave this year, my colleague invited me into her classroom to teach this lesson to her 11th grade Global Studies students” (“Whose terrorism?”). It was, in fact, surprising to find accounts of failures: “Frankly, when I’ve tried to design lessons to get students to imagine overarching social alternatives, these have not been compelling” (“Defeating despair”); teacher uncertainties: “I didn’t know for certain, but my hunch was …” (“Whose terrorism?”); comments on future improvements: “The next time I teach this unit, I’d like to increase the focus on international media.” (“Drawing on history to challenge the war”); and teachers’ own evaluations of activities. Moreover, quite surprisingly for a lesson plan, student voices are frequently recorded: “It was Sept. 12 when Rafael, one of my fifth graders, pointed out the window and asked, ‘What would you do if terrorists were outside our school and tried out to bomb us?’” (“A world up close”). On the basis of the above analysis, one may wonder whether these texts are actually lesson plans. They certainly do not look like any of the typical lesson plans teachers are generally trained to prepare, rather they are more like diaries of teacher experiences, similar to the ones teachers, mostly novice ones, are encouraged to keep in the tradition of reflective teaching. In language education, reflective accounts of lessons have primarily been explored either as a way to enhance teachers’ professional development (Richards and Lockhart 1994) or as methods of data collection in classroom research (Wallace 1998, McDonough and McDonough 1997). For instance, Holly (1984) discusses teacher diaries as a narrative genre which includes three main themes: an account of what the teacher did in the classroom, a description of what students did and how they responded and an account of interactions.

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Although in analysing these texts we recognised most of the parts of a typical lesson plan such as background information, descriptions of objectives, target groups and procedures, these texts did not have the typical form found, for instance, in the NewsHour Extra lesson plans. The part which varied considerably was the Procedures section. Whereas some lesson plans describe procedures in detail (e.g. “Drawing on history to challenge the war”, “Teaching Gulf War II”, “Rethinking the teaching of the Vietnam war”), some others (e.g. “Entering history through poetry”, “Teaching with protest songs”, “A world up close”, “Songs for global conscience”) have less explicit reference to the steps to be followed in the classroom. Overall, in contrast to the objective account of the traditional lesson plan, we could say that the Rethinking Schools lesson plans provide a subjective alternative, voicing students and teachers needs, and thus suggesting a more student-centred pedagogy. 5.3 National Standards Another point of difference between the two sets of lesson plans concerns formal evaluation and adherence to national standards. Contrary to NewsHour Extra, Rethinking Schools lesson plans do not include any kind of student assessment based on the suggested activities. In fact, assessment as a separate procedure does not exist, either in the form found in NewsHour Extra (e.g. through completion of reading comprehension questions) or in any other way, nor any reference as to how the suggested lesson plans adhere to the aims of the national standards. To understand the significance of the extensive reference to national standards in the NewsHour Extra lesson plans and their absence from the Rethinking Schools lesson plans, it is useful to look briefly at the history of the standards and some of the issues which have been raised during their implementation. National curricula and standardised testing were at the centre of educational reform in various English-speaking and other countries during the 1990s (Tyler 1999). Discussion about national standards in the US originated in early eighties when policy makers primarily called for national intervention in education (Kirst and Guthrie 1994: 159). World-class content standards and a set of achievement tests in five core subjects were announced by President Bush in 1990, a position which was followed by the Clinton administration in the later years. ‘National standards’ and ‘performance assessment’ became the buzz words of the 1990s in US education. Educators, administrators and policy makers were to decide whether and how they would incorporate national standards into their program of study, but more often than not there was disagreement among them as to what quality standards are (Rhoads, Sieber and Slayton 1996).



The Iraq war as curricular knowledge

Apple (1993, 1996) views national standards as part of the neo-conservative agenda which aims to centralise control over ‘official knowledge’, and of the neoliberal agenda which aims to turn schools into places whose primary function is to meet the needs of the economy, viewing students merely as future employees. On the other hand, national curricula have been seen as a defensive and protective device of an ‘imagined national past’ (Tyler 1999), which reaffirms national shared knowledges and values and produces subjects with a national identity (cf. Dendrinos 2001). Drawing on the above, it is not surprising that NewsHour Extra lesson plans, which voice the official view of the country on the topic of the Iraq war, also follow closely the official position of incorporating national standards in education. Therefore, through their content as well as their form (genre), these lesson plans support the US official programme in every possible way: both at the political and at the educational levels. On the other hand, it is not surprising that the Rethinking Schools site, which promotes an alternative view to education and which strongly supports the public nature of education, as stated in its introductory page, does not include any reference to national standards, in agreement with the aforementioned criticism. It would not then be unrealistic to suggest that the incorporation of the National Standards section in the NewsHour Extra lesson plans and their total absence from the Rethinking Schools lesson plans is perhaps related to the position adopted by site editors concerning this complex issue in the history of US education. Eventually, as Street (1995: 125) argues, “the pedagogized literacy… becomes an organizing concept around which ideas of social identity and value are defined; what kinds of collective identity we subscribe to, what kind of nation we want to belong to”.

6. The great divide and the grand narratives From the above analysis it becomes clear that the two sites do not merely present two different views on the war but, perhaps most importantly, aim at construing different pedagogic subjects. On the one hand, NewsHour Extra clearly attempts to manage pedagogic discourse in the line of the official US politics concerning the war. It may be seen as an articulation of ‘compulsory patriotism’ (Apple 2002: 305) recontextualised in lesson plans, and this may be the main reason why the opposite side is not voiced. The lesson plans of NewsHour Extra attempt to restrict the possibility of the creation of what Bernstein (1996: 44) called a ‘potential discursive gap’. They do so through meanings which “create and unite two worlds”: in this case, the students’ and teachers’ world with the world of the official US administration. Teachers are construed as professionals who produce and consume technical

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documents, who are willing to promote national standards and, at moments of crisis, such as this one, they help their student “follow the aftermath of war”. Their task is restricted though to the implementation of pre-specified steps: information and materials needed for the completion of the lesson are all provided, as well as detailed instructions concerning how to use them. No initiative is left to the teacher. Professionalism is based on objective accounts of the teaching situation, and there is not any reference to the effects of teaching. Students are expected to respond to the suggested activities according to the pre-specified lesson plan objectives and to develop skills in attaining national standards. Moreover, they are good patriots and they are proud of their country’s glorious past and present. On the other hand, the lesson plans in Rethinking Schools promote the creation of a ‘potential discursive gap’ aiming at differently thinking pedagogic subjects. They develop a critical stance towards the official US politics concerning the war, and through the lesson plans they suggest an alternative pedagogy, urging students towards the ‘yet to be thought’ in Bernstein’s words (1996: 44). In this realm, teachers are construed as active participants in the pedagogic practice who are invited to select their own teaching materials from a variety of available resources. Here, the opposite side exists only to be refuted, and the context is given: both students and teachers are assumed to adopt an anti-war position and to become missionaries or activists who restore truth and reverse misplaced views developing students’ critical awareness. Generally, students seem to be easily convinced to adopt the suggested alternative explanation of events, and there is little account of their reservations or resistance. A further difference between the two sites refers to the way each site adopts a global and local perspective (Apple 2002). In the case of NewsHour Extra, despite frequent references to ‘coalition forces’, the war is seen from a local point of view, as a US-Iraq war. There is no reference to the rest of the world or any attempt to discuss cultural, religious or other aspects. In Rethinking Schools there is a systematic attempt to connect the local with the global, the current situation with previous situations in the past, the Iraq war with broader US foreign affairs and interests. It is clear that the wider political conflict on the issue of the Iraq war finds its pedagogic equivalent in the two pedagogies described above, the ‘dominant’ and the ‘critical’. The divide is great in this case too in most of the aspects that have been examined in this text. Our purpose has not been to question these pedagogies — this has already been covered extensively (see, for instance, Apple 1993, 2002, Koutsogiannis 2004, Lankshear 1997, Muspratt et al. 1997, Penny­cook 2001) — but to foreground their deeper political nature (Gee 1996).



The Iraq war as curricular knowledge

Closing, we would like to account for yet another reading of the above findings. It seems that in the late-modern period of fragmentation (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999), the grand narratives of nation, on the one hand, and (international) justice, on the other, are coming back — have they ever faded away? — and, quite surprisingly, by different pedagogies. Despite much theoretical discussion on the matter, any attempt to pedagogise issues related to nation and justice seems to raise more questions than provide answers. Apple’s account of dealing with 11 September in the classroom is indicative of this controversy: “I also had strong teacherly dispositions that this was also not the time to engage in a pedagogy of imposition. One could not come across as saying to students or the public, ‘Your understandings are simply wrong; your feelings of threat and anger are selfish; any voicing of these emotions and understanding won’t be acceptable’. This could be among the most counter-productive pedagogies imaginable.” (Apple 2002: 302–303)

Notes 1.  The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for this comment. 2.  We have in mind Greek patriotic films and TV serials of the ’60s and early ’70s whose stories aimed at promoting national ideals and celebrating the uniqueness and significance of Greek culture. Several of these films were promoted in Greek primary and secondary schools during the dictatorship years, 1967–1974, for obvious reasons. 3.  Available at http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/18_01/roc181.shtml

References Apple, Michael W. 1993. The politics of official knowledge: Does a national curriculum make sense? Teachers College Records 95(2), 222–241. Apple, Michael W. 1996. Being popular about national standards: A review of National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 4(10). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n10.html (retrieved 6/11/2003). Apple, Micheal W. 2002. Pedagogy, patriotism, and democracy: On the educational meanings of 11 September 2001. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 23(3), 299–308. Atkinson, Dwight. 1997. A critical approach to critical thinking in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 31(1), 71–94. Bernstein, Basil. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. London: Taylor & Francis. Chilton, Paul. 2002. Do something! Conceptualising responses to the attacks of 11 September 2001. Journal of Language and Politics 1(1), 181–195.

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Chouliaraki, Lilie and Fairclough, Norman. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dendrinos, Bessie. 2001. European discourses of homogenization in the discourse of language planning. In: Bessie Dendrinos (ed.). The Politics of ELT. Athens: The University of Athens Publications, 30–42. It also appears in Macedo Donaldo, Dendrinos Bessie and Gounari Panayota. 2003. The Hegemony of English. Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 45–59. Ellis, Dave. 1997. Becoming a Master Student. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gee, James P. 1996. Social Linguistics and Literacies. London: Taylor & Francis. Halliday, Michael A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Halpern, Diane F. 1996. Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Harris, Theodore L. and Hodges, Richards E. 1981. A Dictionary of Reading and Related Terms. Newark, NJ: International Reading Association. Holly, Mary L. 1984. Keeping a Personal-Professional Journal. Deakin: Deakin University Press. Kirst, Michael W. and Guthrie, James W. 1994. Goals 2000 and a reauthorized ESEA: National standards and accompanying controversies. In: Nina Cobb (ed.). The Future of Education: Perspectives on National Standards in America. The National Center for Cross-Disciplinary Teaching and Learning: College Board, 157–173. Koutsogiannis, Dimitris. 2004. Critical techno-literacy and ‘weak’ languages. In: Ilana Snyder and Catherine Beavis (eds). Doing Literacy Online: Teaching, Learning and Playing in an Electronic World. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 163–184. Kress, Gunther. 1996. Representational resources and the production of subjectivity: Questions for the theoretical development of Critical Discourse Analysis in a multicultural society. In: Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (eds). Texts and Practices. London and New York: Routledge, 15–31. Kurland, Daniel J. 1995. I Know What it Says…What does it Mean? Critical Skills for Critical Reading. CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Lankshear, Colin. 1997. Changing Literacies. Buckingham: Open University Press. Luke, Allan. 1996. Genres of power? Literacy education and the production of capital. In: Ruqaiya Hasan and Geoff Williams (eds). Literacy in Society. London and New York: Longman, 308–338. Martin, Jim R. 1992. Critical thinking for a humane world. In: Stephen P. Norris (ed.). The Generalizability of Critical Thinking. Multiple Perspectives on an Educational Ideal. New York: Teachers College Press, 163–180. McDonough, Jo and McDonough, Steven. 1997. Research Methods for English Language Teachers. London and New York: Edward Arnold. Muspratt, Sandy H., Luke, Allan and Freebody, Peter (eds). 1997. Constructing Critical Literacies. New Jersey: Hampton Press. Pennycook, Alastair. 2001. Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Richards, Jack C. and Lockhart, Charles. 1994. Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rhoads, Melanie, Sieber, Ron and Slayton, Susan. 1996. Examining national standards. http:// horizon.unc.edu/projects/issues papers/National_Standards (retrieved 6/11/2003)



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Street, Brian. 1995. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London and New York: Longman. Tyler, William. 1999. Pedagogic identities and educational reform in the 1990s: The cultural dynamics of national curricula. In: Frances Christie (ed.). Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness. London and New York: Cassell, 262–289. Volosinov, V. N. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallace, Michael J. 1998. Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walters, Kerry 1994. Critical thinking, rationality and the vulcanization of students. In: Kerry Walters (ed.). Re-thinking Reason: New Perspectives on Critical Thinking. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1–22.

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Computer games as political discourse The case of Black Hawk Down David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen Leicester University / University of Technology, Sudney

The chapter analyses how the March 1993 American intervention in Somalia is represented in the movie Black Hawk Down and the computer game of the same name. Using a discourse historical approach, the chapter combines three methods: (1) analysis of the ‘special operations discourse’ that underlies both film and game, and social actor analysis of the way the parties involved in the conflict are visually and verbally represented; (2) the political history of the conflict represented in the two entertainment products, and the history of the ‘special operations discourse’ itself; and (3) an account of the collaboration between the US military and entertainment industry in the production of both film and game.

Introduction The link between entertainment and propaganda goes back at least as far as the 1930s when Goebbels (1948: 122) wrote that “argument is no longer effective” and looked towards popular song, humour and movies as key media of propaganda: “With films we can make politics too. It is a good expedient in the struggle for the soul of our people” (quoted in Bramstedt 1965: 278). In this paper we explore how the March 1993 American intervention in Somalia is represented in the movie Black Hawk Down (US, Ridley Scott 2002) and the computer game of the same name (US, Novalogic 2003). It is important for critical discourse analysts to pay attention to entertainment texts of this kind. Today’s most important and influential political discourses are found, we believe, not in newspapers, and certainly not in parliamentary debates and political speeches, but in Hollywood movies and computer games. The texts we will analyse in this paper are a good example of this. Both were produced post September 11th. Though not dealing directly with the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, they powerfully aligned audiences with the priorities of US global politics at the time of production. And though not directly state produced, the producers worked, in

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both cases, in close collaboration with the US Government. Ridley Scott, the director of the Black Hawk Down movie, told CNN that the Pentagon proved “very, very, very user-friendly” over the film, as long as “what you are actually trying to do is present the [military] in the right and proper light”. The result, he said, was an “almost page by page process of negotiation” with Pentagon officials over the screenplay (Peterson 2002). Novalogic, the producer of the Black Hawk Down game, a specialist in ‘special operations’ titles such as the Delta Force series, is in part an arm of the US military. It has a subsidiary called Novalogic Systems which is geared towards military simulation needs and works with the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command Analysis Centre on the high profile Land Warrior System. It also has close relations with Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems making flight simulations for its military aircraft. It donated a percentage of the profits from Black Hawk Down to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which provides scholarships for children of army personnel killed on duty. Our approach is based on Wodak’s ‘discourse historical method’ (Wodak et al. 1990, 1994). This approach “centers on political issues and seeks to integrate as many of the genres of discourse referring to a particular issue as possible with the historical dimension of that issue” (Van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999: 91). We therefore combine a discussion of the history of US involvement in Somalia and its ‘Special Forces’ with the analysis of our two texts. In this analysis, we will use ‘social actor’ analysis (Van Leeuwen 1996, 2000) and the ‘recontextualisation of social practice’ approach to discourse analysis (cf. Van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999: 93–99) to analyse how the texts present what we will refer to as a ‘special operations discourse of war’, and how they link this discourse to the events they recontextualise.

The US and Somalia In the early 1970s, Somalia, after years of Italian rule, was supported by the Soviet Union, which supplied arms and military support in return for the use of bases. The US had the same relationship with neighbouring Ethiopia. Thus, both the Soviets and the US supported dictators who needed military assistance to suppress annexed populations and maintain superiority over internal rivals (Lefebvre 1991), while at the same time looking after their own interests, securing the military bases they needed for the control of oil territories. At the end of the 1970s, a Moscow-supported anti-US military coup in Ethiopia removed the US-friendly Emperor Selassie, declaring the country a MarxistLeninist State. President Carter responded by cutting aid to Ethiopia, citing human rights abuses as the reason (Gorman 1981). The US now started to support



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the deeply authoritarian Barre regime in Somalia. From the late 1970s to 1991, under US patronage, thousands of civilians died in a range of civil rights abuses. There was a death penalty for belonging to any political organisation. In the early 1980s, Barre invaded Ogaden, an Ethiopian territory inhabited by ethnic Somalis. The US said it would stop providing arms unless Barre withdrew from Ogaden. Moscow intervened with arms and Cuban troops who pushed Barre’s army back over the border, along with several hundred thousands of ethnic Somali refugees. But Barre attacked again, and the Reagan administration, fearing increased Soviet influence, rushed more arms to Mogadishu. Between 1980 and 1989 the US gave Somalia some $400 million worth of military aid along with another $200 million in cash arms sales funded with Saudi Arabian assistance. Barre’s attempts to gain complete control of the country were ruthless. Aid agencies accused him of genocide on clans opposing his rule (in Somalia everyone belongs to one of five clans). As well as using arms, his forces poisoned wells, slaughtered farm animals, and carpet-bombed urban areas. Around 60 000 people were killed at this time (Africa Watch 1990; Schraeder 1990). By the early 1990s, the fighting had escalated into a civil war, with civilians being massacred in the streets and looting the only form of livelihood. There was no food, but automatic weapons and grenade launchers were everywhere. A UNICEF report (UNICEF 1989) revealed that in these times of starvation and poverty, Barre was spending about one fifth of his government’s expenditure on the military. The country was heading for disaster. Unfortunately for Somalia, this was also the time of the build up to the Gulf War. The US had just secured strategic military bases in Saudi Arabia and, as a result, Somalia was no longer of interest to them, and they pulled out. The next year, up to six million people died in the famine. It has been widely argued that had the US not funded Barre’s regime, this situation would not have come about (Shalom 1993). Although Congress was initially reluctant to provide more aid (Lewis 1992), later that year the US did back the UN and sent relief specialists. In doing so they needed the support of the warring factions. This they found in the US-friendly Ali Mahdi who had started the wave of conflict by attempting to push his rival Mohammed Farah Aidid out of Mogadishu. Aidid of course feared that the UN’s presence would consolidate the position of his enemy, as had been the case with Barre (Post et al. 1992; Perlez 1992a, 1992b). The US planned to send troops to drop food supplies from helicopters. But the Red Cross, which had provided most of the relief during the famine, was against this. They had already liaised with clan leaders to create food distribution networks and were concerned that the presence of the military would create further instability (Perlez 1992c). The US started to carry out the airlifts nevertheless. The

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Red Cross, meanwhile, continued to work with the clan leaders, even though the US military presence caused further massive movements of population, and, many felt, made things much worse — there is evidence that things were a good deal more peaceful in unoccupied areas (Maren 1994). It was at this time, with the worst of the famine already over (Perlez 1992d), that Bush decided to send troops to Somalia. Why did he make this decision? To protect US economic interests in the region, as some have argued? It is true that geological surveys had only recently estimated that there was about a billion barrels worth of oil in fields under both Somalia and Yemen. The race was on to develop Somalia, not just amongst the US oil companies but also amongst companies from China, Taiwan and Malaysia (Finnan 1993). Others, however, have argued that the whole enterprise was a publicity vehicle for the Pentagon. At this time, the end of the Cold War had seen reduced budgets for the Pentagon. Yet, there was a growing sense that US supremacy continued to rely on its military power. One way to ‘sell’ increases in military expenditure to the public could be through humanitarian intervention. As Bush told the US people, “Only the US has the global reach to place a large security force on the ground in such a distant place quickly and efficiently and thus save thousands of innocent lives” (Transcripts of President’s Address on Somalia, New York Times December 5, 1992: 4). And Colin Powell commented that Operation Restore Hope was a “paid political advertisement” for maintaining the military budget (Washington Post Weekly December 14, 1992). But if this was the case, then why were the troops not sent at the height of the famine? When the US Seals arrived, under the spotlights of a pre-planned media circus, the Red Cross urged them to at least get to the affected areas as quickly as possible, as delays could cause further casualties. Instead, the Marines made a dramatic and needless amphibious landing and did not get to the worst areas until a week after their arrival (Waller 1992). Footage showing them giving out food was taken earlier in areas where there were fewer problems (Shalom 1993). Arguably, Operation Restore Hope had only served to disrupt some of the stability created by agreements between the clans and the Red Cross, and to create panic amongst clan leaders who felt the US were against them, especially Aidid, whose importance the US probably overrated (Sciolino 1993). Operation Restore Hope showed that quick fix solutions, both in terms of airlifting food and military occupation, can not replace complex long term work. Today, Somalia remains in disarray. According to aid agencies, half a million people are short of food, and hundreds of thousands are displaced. But, according to Médécins Sans Frontières, international aid has dropped 90% since the 1990s.



Computer games as political discourse

Special operations The US troops appearing in the Black Hawk Down game and movie are ‘Special Forces’. In the orchestrated media frenzy around the landing in Somalia, much was made of the presence of Rangers and Seals. Why was it not sufficient to send in the regular army? What is it about the Special Forces? Special Forces, or what we now think of as ‘elite soldiers’, are nothing new. They came into their own during WWII, for guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Much was made of the heroics of the SAS, even though their overall contribution to the war was relatively minor. SAS soldiers were portrayed as individual heroes, risking all on next to impossible missions (John Newsinger 1997). After WWII, when the League of Nations was replaced by the UN, it became less easy for countries to use open military action in other countries. But this did not end war. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the US carried out secret operations, especially in Latin America, in order to bring about regime change, using the experience gained in WWII counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare. The Green Berets and the Seals were created for precisely this purpose. Mostly only small numbers of US personnel were involved, to train and arm much larger groups of indigenous people. Throughout the 1960s, this counterinsurgency warfare, remaining largely hidden from the American people and, some argue, to a degree from the President himself, became a kind of science, elaborated in manuals which can now be accessed, for instance, in the Kennedy Presidential Library. A document titled “US Department of the Army, Operations Against Irregular Forces” (FM 31–15) (May 1961) pages 6–7, for instance, lists the following activities as appropriate strategies: (a) meeting engagements, (b) attacks, (c) defence, (d) ambushes, (e) raids, (f) pursuit actions, (g) interception actions, and … (h) terror operations. The same manual lists procedures such as: “terror by assassination, bombing, armed robbery, torture, mutilation and kidnapping; provocation of incidents, reprisals, and holding of hostages; and denial activities, such as arson, flooding, demolition, use of chemical or biological agents…sabotage…assassination, extortion, blackmail, theft, counterfeiting, and identifying individuals for terroristic attack”

In a manual from 1969, called “Civil Affairs Operations” (FM 41–10) (McClintock 2002), we read: “The murder of a village chief or a tax collector can serve the insurgent cause in several ways. First, it demonstrates its power to kill selected individuals of its choice, which may help to persuade people that safety lies with adherence to the insurgent cause. Second, each such act weakens the government…Third, it causes fear in other functionaries…Mass terror is used to demonstrate the weakness of the government, its inability to protect its people”

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Already in the 1960s the American people were familiar with the idea of miscellaneous evildoers around the world being portrayed as their enemies. Kennedy had spoken of Free World security “being slowly nibbled away at the periphery” by world terrorists and subversion (Barber and Neale Ronning 1963: 31), and said that “We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence” (McConnell 2001). In due course, this discourse would become second nature to American political thinking, for instance in the legitimation of Operation Restore Hope and in the Bush administration’s post Sept 11 document “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism”, which lays out a vision for a new world order based on the need to keep an eye on the ‘enemies of freedom’. In the 1970s, President Carter had wanted to make human rights central to US foreign policy. His 1974 Human Rights Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act 1961 (Section 502B) stated that no assistance was to be provided to countries whose government grossly violated human rights. But later events allowed Carter’s policies to be portrayed as weakness. His failure to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980 allowed Ronald Reagan to proclaim the need for America to be strong again in the face of the world threat, and to pump money into the defence budget, much of it going to Special Forces (apart, of course, from the massive amount spent on nuclear weapons). What Reagan had in mind was not an all-out war, such as the Vietnam War, but ‘low intensity wars’, such as the wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Chad and Nicaragua, in which Special Forces would play a major role. On the 3rd of April, 1984, he signed the National Security Decision Directive 138 approving pre-emptive attacks on terrorists, a term by now indiscriminately used to refer to political protesters, drug traffickers and home grown psychopaths alike. Yet counterinsurgency did not acquire a fully overt and legitimate public face until after a succession of events in the 1980s — the bombing of US embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Americans, and, later, the two Trade Tower bombings (McClintock 2002). The response? A renewed emphasis on the rhetoric of a ‘strong America’ and new elite units such as Delta Force to carry out raids on terrorist groups. In his acceptance speech as Republican leader, Reagan declared, “I would regard my election as proof that we have renewed our resolve to preserve world peace and freedom. This nation will once again be strong enough to do that” (http://www.rightwingnews.com/speeches/destiny.php). Today, the existence of networks of terrorism forms the key justification for the use of military force in the Third World. The term ‘terrorism’, as Herman (1982) has shown, is never used to describe brutality on behalf of Western states. As we have seen, counterinsurgency manuals clearly regard as legitimate all the same actions for which terrorists are branded as evildoers. Terrorists are terrorists, not because of what they do, but because they act against Western interests, or, in



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terms of Bush’s “National Strategy For Combating Terrorism”: “The world must respond and fight this evil that is intent on threatening and destroying our basic freedoms and our way of life” (2001: 1).

Global reach of the computer game industry The documents and speeches we have cited are not widely available to the public. Movies and war games, on the other hand, are — and they are powerful vehicles for promulgating the ‘Special Operations’ discourse of war whose emergence we have just described. In the US alone there are approximately 162 million computer game users who spend $1200 million annually on game rental. Research estimates that 60% of Americans play on a regular basis. Of these 45% are under 18, 36% between 18 and 35, and 19% over 36. The US games industry last year grew at an astounding 43 percent to $9.4 billion in 2001, allowing it to eclipse movie box-office receipts of $8.3 billion, according to NPD (Game Research 2003 http://www.gameresearch.com). American computer games are distributed across the globe, although methods of distribution differ according to territory. Some territories will take UK stock, whereas in others it is delivered as a CD and then repackaged. The software for the game remains the same for all territories, but may be localised in a range of languages. Black Hawk Down, for instance, apart from the Western European versions, is available in Canadian French, South American Spanish, Korean, Polish and Russian. In other countries, such as China, the only localisation is through manuals and covers. In some countries, distributors in fact prefer to keep the English version of US-based war games, because the American voices are thought to contribute to the atmosphere of the game. This is especially the case with games such as Vietcong, also produced by Novalogic, and Black Hawk Down (interview with Lucinda Searle from Novalogic). The only actual change to the game itself is done for the German market, where blood is coloured grey. Black Hawk Down has sold one million copies worldwide since its launch in April 2003, bringing in around $30 million, and remaining at the top of the charts for several months. However, from the amount of pirated copies, we can only guess at the actual sales. Our researchers inquired with shop keepers in game stores in China and Vietnam who said that the game, in pirated form, had sold very well indeed. Even in Europe it is common to find people without any official versions. The Black Hawk Down movie was produced and distributed by Sony, and made at Columbia studios. On its release it made new records for its first weekend of US box office takings. The American people, with September 11th still fresh in their minds, and with soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, were keen to see their elite soldiers out there taking US style truth and freedom to the world.

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The documentary anchorage of entertainment war discourses How are the events we have summarised above represented in the Black Hawk Down movie and game? As a first step towards answering this question, we look at the documentary style introductions which relate both the game and the movie quite explicitly to the real world events they are based on. The game opens with a short film, using newsreel footage and a factual style voice over commentary to explicitly legitimate the war. According to the commentary, the efforts of the multinational UN peacekeeping force to deliver food relief were obstructed by Aidid. Delta Force was deployed “with the sole purpose of capturing Aidid”. The implication is that ‘capturing the tyrant’ will suffice to protect the UN’s efforts in delivering humanitarian aid. A role call of the soldiers who were killed in the operation is also included. The images include a close shot of an American soldier and a smiling Somali boy (shot 11) as well as a series of shots demonstrating the combat skills of the elite soldiers (shots 20–27), accompanied by stirring music. It is worth transcribing the sequence in full (Table 1). Table 1.  Transcription of Black Hawn Down 1. NOVALOGIC presents

Lamentful string music with ‘Eastern’ feel

2. VLS Dusty Mogadishu street, camera tracking forwards. Super title: 1991

Music continues as voice over starts: Somalia is reeling from years of famine and constant fighting..

3. MS High Angle. Women filling food bowls from large pot

…between clans

4. LS Woman walking on deserted country road with basket

Voice over: 300,000 are reported dead.

5. MLS woman standing in centre of courtyard with children seated around her. She carries two bowls, hesitates who to give it to

(music)

6. LS Street with crowd of people walking toward camera

Voice over: There is no central government

7. VLS Camera pans along with army plane on runway. Super title: 19 December 1992

Voice over: The US Army 10th Mountain Division deploys…

8. MLS Two US soldiers, one carrying a bag of rice, the other a gun, camera tracking with them as they move L-R

…to the region as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.

9. VLS Truck as bags of rice are loaded from ship into truck.

(music)



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10. MLS Two Somali porters carrying bags of rice via gangplank

(music)

11. MCS American soldier and smiling Somali boy. Zoom in

(music)

12. CS Aidid addressing crowd. Super title: 5 June 1993

Voice over: Mohamed Farrah Aidid, militia leader of the Habr Gadir clan orders an attack…

13. VLS High Angle. Somali people running for cover. Zoom in

…on a UN relief shipment, killing…

14. MLS Masked militia man with gun sitting atop pile of bags of rice

24 Pakistani soldiers…

15. MS Militia man swivelling rocket launcher around

…In response to the…

16. LS Militia man with gun

…continued Habr Gadir threat…

17. MLS Militia man with rifle mounted on car. Car reverses

…task force rangers…

18. MLS Militia man on car with rifle. He waves

…enter Mogadishu…

19. MS Militia man on car. He waves

…with the sole purpose of capturing Aidid.

20. VLS Black Hawk helicopters flying over desert. Super title: 26 August 1993

(music)

21. MLS Two US soldiers about to crash in door

(music)

22. LS Two US soldiers crouched on street, signalling to each other

(music)

23. MLS sideview group of soldiers aiming rifles

(music)

24. MLS Two US soldiers lying down with guns aimed

Voice over: This force is comprised …

25. MLS Two US soldiers moving forward

.. of .US Army Rangers and…

26. LS US soldiers crossing road and moving towards building

…operators from the First Special Forces…

27a LS Humvee driving towards camera. Camera tilts up to

…operational Detachment Delta, an elite fighting unit also known as…

27b LS Black Hack helicopter overhead

…Delta Force

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The movie of Black Hawk Down also has a documentary style introduction, but through reconstructed rather than authentic footage. Blue-tinted monochrome images provide a documentary ‘feel’, and factual titles, rather than a voice over commentary, tell the story. The wailing music powerfully affects the emotions, first establishing a sense of sad desolation as we view famine victims, then changing to an energetic drum roll as the first Black Hawk helicopter comes into shot. The story, as conveyed by the superimposed titles, is almost identical to that of the documentary introduction of the game. Again the role of the Red Cross, and its relation to the Somali clans, is omitted — but this time only in the words. The images show a ramshackle truck with a Red Cross flag (shot 9) and, later, a tattered Red Cross flag on a dilapidated building in the background. The Red Cross is thus shown as ineffective in fighting the famine and in as much of a state of disrepair as Somalia as a whole. And although we do see the consequences of the famine, we never learn how and why it came about. The sequence as a whole is shown below: 1. Title on black: “Based on actual events” Lamentful music enters mixed in with ‘wind’ sound 2. Title on black: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Plato DISSOLVE TO 3. Blue-tinted black and white images. Camera tracks over sand towards Medium Shot Somali, seen from behind as he wraps a corpse in a shroud. Singing voice enters 4. Medium Shot Shrouded corpse, tied to chair. Camera tracks back to reveal Long Shot Man squatting in background CROSS FADE VIA BLACK TO 5. Very Long Shot Truck on dusty road, driving towards camera. Superimposed title Somalia, East Africa, 1992 FADE TO BLACK 6. Title on black: Years of warfare among rival clans caused famine on a biblical scale FADE IN 7. Long Shot Ancient looking truck with tattered Red Cross flag, Somali man standing up in the back. Camera tracks with it revealing Long Shot Woman pushing wheelbarrow, and then the man who is wrapping the corpse. Superimposed title: 300,000 civilians died of starvation FADE OUT



Computer games as political discourse

8. Title on black: Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the most powerful of the warlords, rules the capital Mogadishu FADE IN 9. Medium Shot Somali man as he and another man lift the shrouded corpse. Camera tracks with them as they carry it towards the truck. Superimposed title: He seizes international food shipments at the ports. Hunger is his weapon. At the end of this shot the singing stops and the music continues instrumentally CROSSFADE VIA BLACK 10. Medium Close Shot White man in white shirt giving Somali man a drink. Low angle. Camera lifts down to his feet and tracks with him as he walks away, revealing emaciated corpses. Superimposed title: The world responds. Behind a force of 20,000 US Marines, food is delivered and order is restored. Camera continues to track past bodies of famine victims lying on the sand. Superimposed title: April 1993 Aidid waits until the Marines withdraw, and then declares war on the remaining UN Peacekeepers FADE OUT 11. Title on black: In June, Aidid’s militia ambush and slaughter 24 Pakistani soldiers, and begin targeting American personnel FADE IN 12. Medium Shot Somali man sitting and staring apathetically. Delapidated building with tattered Red Cross flag in background. Camera tracks past him to reveal a Medium Shot of an equally apathetic woman. FADE TO BLACK 13. Title on black: In late August. America’s elite soldiers, Delta Force, Army Rangers and the 160th SOAR are sent to Mogadishu to remove Aidid and restore order. Sound of helicopter mixes in with music. FADE IN 14. Camera tracks backwards into a room, revealing a bed, and, through the window, the outskirts of a town, with apartment buildings. Superimposed title: The mission was to take three weeks, but six weeks later, Washington was growing impatient. Sound of helicopter increases in volume 15. Title on black: BLACK HAWK DOWN

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Music changes to more energetic drum bangs. Helicopter sound continues 16. Full colour image. Aerial shot of helicopter flying over town. Superimposed title: Saturday, October 2, 1993 17. Close Shot of Sanderson (Josh Hartnett), who will be the main hero, looking down at the scene from helicopter (The scene that follows shows a raid on a UN food relief operation, ending with a challenge by the leader of the raid to the Black Hawk helicopter)

Once the introduction is over, the style shifts from documentary to drama or game. A dialogue between two of the characters in the Black Hawk Down movie expresses this shift — a shift which, in different ways, will also be experienced by the movie audience and the game players. Soldier A: You don’t think we should be here? Soldier B: You know what I think? Doesn’t matter what I think. Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that shit goes right out of the window.

But the transition experienced by the movie audience differs from that experienced by the game player. Movie audiences are addressed individually and imaginarily identify with the heroes. As we will see in more detail below, the elite soldiers are not only attractive young Hollywood stars, they are also shown as individuals. The film takes time to introduce them as people with a past, with loved ones back home, with feelings, and individual character traits. Their emotions, especially when fellow soldiers are hurt, are shown in close up. We experience the war with and through them. None of this applies to the other side. In the game, on the other hand, players participate vicariously in the war, looking at the game’s images along the barrel of their guns, involved, not in an emotive experience, but in the adrenaline-rush action. In other words, while the movie exploits the emotions of the audience for propagandistic purposes, the game exploits its users’ natural pleasure in concentrated, skilled eye-to-hand co-ordination.

Representing the participants We now take a closer look at the way the main participants in the conflict are represented — the US soldiers, Aidid, the Habr Gedir militia and the Somali civilians. Not all the parties that actually participated in the events we have described above are represented. It is not recognised, for instance, that all Somalis belong to one of five clans. In the movie and the game there is only one clan, represented as a rogue



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force with a despotic leader. Other Somalis are ‘civilians’. The role of the Red Cross is also excluded, except for its brief appearance in the documentary style introduction of the movie. To discuss how these participants are represented, we will use the categories of ‘social actor’ analysis, which have the advantage that many of them can be realised both linguistically (cf. Van Leeuwen 1996) and visually (cf. Van Leeuwen 2000).

Individuals and groups Participants can be referred to as individuals or en groupe. Which of these two options is chosen can make a significant difference to the way events are represented. Linguistically, ‘collectivisation’ is realised by plurality or by means of mass nouns or nouns denoting a group of people (e.g. clan, militia). Visually, it is realised by group or crowd shots, and the members of such a group or crowd can be ‘homogenised’ to different degrees, for instance by wearing the same clothes, striking the same poses, or performing the same actions. ‘Individualisation’ is realised linguistically by singularity, and visually by shots that show only one person. Visual individualisation is a matter of degree. It can be diminished by distance, which makes individual traits less easy to observe, or by not representing or obscuring individual traits and focussing on the generic features that make people into ‘types’ rather than individuals, as for instance in the generic representations of ‘terrorists’ in computer games. In terms of this distinction, the Black Hawk Down movie linguistically represents the US soldiers both as individuals and as a group. On the one hand, they have to be shown as individual heroes, so that we can identify with them; on the other hand, their team spirit must also be emphasised. The same applies to the visuals. Close shots foreground the individuality of individual members of the team, action shots foreground their close coordination and team spirit. These features are absent from the documentary introductions, where US soldiers are always represented as a collective, both linguistically (a force of 20,000 marines, task force rangers), and visually (with just one exception). In other words, the movie personalises and dramatises what in the introduction is represented as a conflict between more impersonal forces. In the game, the players are themselves soldiers, interacting with other members of the team. Linguistic reference is therefore dialogic and realised by first and second person reference (in the movie there is of course also dialogic interaction, especially between the soldiers). Visually this is realised by the ‘first person’ point of view shot that dominates the game (although players can also choose to see ‘themselves’ in a ‘third person’ close shot). Such other US soldiers may be

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individualised, but through images in which they are represented generically, rather than that they acquire individual features. Aidid on the other hand is always individualised, both in the movie and the game, both linguistically and visually, through close ups that enhance his demonic features, and both in the movie and in the game, and both in the documentary introductions and in the movie itself. Within the games he is not referred to. Thus, the enemy is strongly personalised, except within the game, where only anonymous militia men are encountered as enemies. It is interesting that there is no such personalised leader for ‘our side’. The Habr Gedir militia is linguistically always collectivised, but in the documentary introduction of the game they are visually more often individualised than the US soldiers. This emphasises that they are not a regular army, but a motley collection of individuals, all differently dressed and armed. However, the shots are too distant and too brief to allow us to perceive individual traits. Within the game it is also possible, from time to time, to view individual militia members, for instance after they have been ‘killed’, but they remain generic and never become individuals in the sense of having specific, individual facial and bodily characteristics. Civilians, finally, are collectivised throughout in the game. In the beginning of one game, we can see some civilians walking through a village as we set out to rescue a UN convoy that is stranded in the desert, but there is no time to observe them in detail. Doing so would risk being ‘shot’ before the game has even started. In the documentary introduction of the film, on the other hand, we do see individual famine victims, and in the film itself there are also a few shots of individuals, one of an old man carrying a dead child across the road, and one of a woman and her children, cowering as US soldiers storm through her house. But they are shown from some distance, and only briefly, and their suffering is nowhere near as graphically depicted as that of wounded US soldiers.

Names and titles Another aspect worth mentioning is the use of names and titles. Who is named, and who remains anonymous? This feature is of course only realised linguistically. The pattern is clear and simple. US soldiers and Aidid are named, both in the movie and in the documentary introduction to the game, while other Somalis remain anonymous members of the crowd.

Categorisation The linguistic and visual representation of participants can also categorise them, regardless of whether they are also ‘individuated’ or ‘collectivised’. The two types



Computer games as political discourse

of linguistic categorisation that are most important in the texts analysed here are classification and functionalisation. Functionalisation occurs when social actors are referred to in terms of what they do, for instance in terms of an occupation or a role. It is typically realised by suffixes such as -er, -ant, etc. (e.g. soldier, ranger, militia leader), or by compounds such as fighting unit. In the case of classification, social actors are referred to by means of terms which, in a given society or institution, differentiate between categories of people. Key categories in Western societies include age, gender, provenance, class, wealth, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and so on. In the domain of warfare, the category of civilian is an example. Visual categorisation is either ‘cultural’ or ‘biological’ (the two may also be combined). Cultural categorisation is realised through standard attributes of dress, hair style, body adornment etc. Biological categorisation is achieved through stereotyped physical characteristics. Such categorisation may be intended to invoke negative connotations, as in the case of racist stereotypes, but it may also be meant to invoke positive connotations, as in ‘Action Man’ type stereotypes of masculinity or ‘Barbie’ type stereotypes of female attractiveness. In both the film and the game, US soldiers are frequently functionalised, linguistically through terms such as elite soldiers, operators, etc., and visually through the attributes of their role as soldiers. In the game they are, in addition, ‘biologically’ characterised, through ‘Action Man’ style square jaws and solid build. In the documentary introductions of both the film and the game, Aidid is also functionalised, as a militia leader and warlord. The demonic militia leader who, in the film, shoots at civilians during a Red Cross food relief operation (it is not clear whether he is meant to be Aidid or one of his henchmen), is also ‘biologically’ categorised, as a burly black man who fits traditional racist stereotypes (cf. Nederveen Pieterse 1992). The militia men are linguistically functionalised, but visually categorised, not so much by specific attributes as by the lack of the attributes that characterise a regular army. They differ from the civilians, who wear traditional dress (and who include older people, women and children) by wearing Western clothes, so that they are not ‘authentic’ locals. And they differ from US soldiers by being badly dressed, badly armed, without order and discipline, a motley collection of individuals. Both differences are important elements of the contemporary legitimation of war. As Colin Powell has recently said, in relation to the Iraq war, “We have not been attacked by an army, but by rebel groups that do not represent the people of Iraq” (Le Monde 2003). The civilians, therefore, do ‘represent the people’ on whose behalf the war is fought, however much they are backgrounded in the representation. They are represented as ‘authentic’ Somalis who, in happier times, would dutifully add couleur locale for visiting tourists.

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To summarise, – US soldiers are initially represented as a collective. In the film they are then also individualised, and named, but not as Chuck Norris style individual heroes. Once the action starts, however, they are rarely seen alone. They always co-ordinate with the team and follow orders. In the game, the introduction is followed by a change from 3rd person to 1st person. But here, too, teamwork is emphasised. Even in ‘single play’ there is constant dialogue with an invisible voice that commands, issues warnings, gives admonitions, compliments, and so on. – The enemy is represented as a motley collection of individual ‘rebels’, with a larger-than-life anti-hero as their leader (there is no such larger-than-life leader on the other side). In the film, this demonic anti-hero continues to play a role, but in the game, the enemy, still individualised in the introduction, becomes anonymous, de-personalised, and part of a collective. – Civilians are initially statistics, faces in the crowd. In the film, there are a few fleeting moments where they can be seen individually, but in the main they remain distant, and do not acquire specific individual characteristics, just as is the case in the ‘professional Western’, where, by contrast to the ‘classic’ Western, the ‘society’ protected by the heroes is increasingly backgrounded, to the point that it becomes little more than a backdrop (Wright 1975). The same applies to the other group that the elite soldiers are purportedly protecting, the UN Peacekeepers, who are represented as weak and unable to defend themselves. Although the moral legitimation is there, what is foregrounded is the fight against ‘rebels’ by the elite soldiers, with their superior skill, superior co-ordination, and, above all, their spirit of teamwork and concern for each other. As one of the soldiers says in the film: “They won’t understand why we did it. They won’t understand it is about the man next to you. That’s all it is.”

The special operations discourse A ‘special operations’ discourse of war is a particular way of representing what goes on in a war. It underlies both the film and the game of Black Hawk Down — and, we believe, many other movies and games, as well as accounts in other genres, e.g., news and current affairs. And it is remarkably similar to the schema of the ‘professional Western’ described by Wright (1975), which features a band of hardened men ‘doing a job’ to protect a weak ‘society’, relying on superior ‘professional’ skills, and motivated, more by their loyalty towards each other than by concern for those they are protecting. It is ironical that it was Reagan, with his



Computer games as political discourse

background as an actor in Hollywood Westerns, who played such a key role in importing this fictional scenario into the arena of real warfare. The ‘special operations’ discourse underlies both the game and the movie, but in different ways. Literary theory has introduced the difference between ‘fabula’ and ‘syuzhet’, between the events of the story told and the events of the telling of the story. Similar distinctions are made in the field of linguistic discourse analysis, where they are extended to non-narrative genres, e.g. the distinction between ‘field’ and ‘genre’ (Van Leeuwen 1993). This distinction can be used to describe a key difference between the film and the game. In the film, the discourse realises the fabula, in the game it realises both fabula and syuzhet, both field and genre. It underlies, not just the way war is represented, but also the way the game itself is played. The player enacts, rather than ‘receives’ the discourse. As we have seen, in both the film and the game, the actual representation of the events of the war is preceded by a documentary style introduction which anchors the fiction in reality and legitimates the war. In the film, however, there is legitimation also at the end — but on the basis of ‘professionalism’ and ‘group solidarity’ only, in the dialogue between two soldiers we have already quoted: “It’s about the man next to you”. Moral legitimation no longer matters. The war is a ‘professional’ job: “Nobody wants to be a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way”. Within this legitimatory frame, the events themselves are depicted, moving through the stages charted in Table 2. Table 2.  Special Operations discourse of war: Elements of the schema Statement of goal. A ‘special operation’ always has a specific, circumscribed goal, such as rescuing hostages, capturing (or killing) a specific individual, destroying a specific building, and so on. Typically, this takes the form of a ‘mission briefing’. In the film this is realised by a scene in which General Garrison explains the mission to the soldiers, complete with map and photos of “the men we’re after”. A detailed scenario for the operation is provided: “15.45 Force Delta will infiltrate the target building. Rope in at 15.46. Extraction…(etc.)”, and the soldiers are reminded of the ‘rules of engagement’: “Make no mistake. You are in a completely hostile neighbourhood. Remember the rules of engagement. No one fires unless fired upon…” In the game, the mission briefing is a specific screen:

“Mission 1 Marka Breakdown Date: February 16, 1993, 1530 hours Location: Marka Village, Jubba Valley Situation: A UN Convoy carrying food and supplies has broken down in the valley just north of Marka. It is suspected the militia might try to raise the convoy and take the shipment for themselves. Board the waiting Humvee and proceed to their location. Protect the convoy and escort it to its destination.”

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Technological support. ‘Technological support’ refers to the fact that the technological means for the operation are an indispensable element of the discourse. In the film this is realised by a scene in which the soldiers test and pack their equipment, in the game by an illustrated menu allowing players to select a ‘primary weapon’, a ‘secondary weapon’ and an ‘accessory’ (e.g., a hand grenade). Objectives. The operation itself is divided into stages with specific objectives — the bracketed sections in Table 1 schematise one stage, and the ‘n’ indicates that it can be repeated any number of times. All stages contribute towards the achievement of the overall goal of the operation. In the film, a new stage may be triggered by an enemy action such as the downing of a helicopter, which may require a revision of the action plan and a new objective, a new directive from HQ (“I want ground force to move and secure a new perimeter round that crash site”). Thus, the unfolding of the film’s story exhibits narrative causality, while the game is more episodic and procedural — all the enemy can do is kill you, in which case you will have to start from scratch (although some games attempt to build in other obstacles and allow the enemy a modicum of strategic planning). Approach. The approach is the approach of the heroes towards the location where engagement (e.g. exchange of fire) will take place. Engagement. The engagement is the exchange of fire, the taking of a room, a rescue, or some other key stage of the operation. Setback/Partial achievement of mission/Achievement of Goal. The engagement may result in the achievement of a particular stage of the operation, or of the operation as a whole. In the former case, a new objective will be formulated; in the latter, the operation as a whole has succeeded. It may also be that the operation has not succeeded. In the film, this leads to a new objective, as shown above, a counter-move to regain the upper hand. In the game it signals the end of a game, and the player will have to start from scratch.

The key element of this discourse is its stress on the qualities of the elite forces: high combat skills, superior technology and team work, the absolute priority of looking after wounded members of the team, and a stress on the speed, the meticulous timing, of the operation and the quick and efficient ‘insertion’ and ‘extraction’ of the force. The enemy, meanwhile, is represented differently, as under the sway of a despotic warlord, tyrant or super-terrorist, and as ill-disciplined and ill-equipped by comparison to the US soldiers. As we have shown, the origins of this discourse lies in the history of counterinsurgency generally, and Reagan’s doctrine of the quick, effective operation and creation of ‘Delta Force’ specifically. We are now used to the idea that this is a reasonable account of events and people in the world. The US not only sells arms and know-how to carry out this kind of warfare all around the planet, they also sell the discourses that lay out the rules of the game and provide its justification. Even computer games that do not support the US adopt the ‘special operations format’,



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for instance games produced in Arab countries, such as Underash, a recent Syrian game about the Israeli occupation which we are currently studying. But real wars do not necessarily happen in the way in which they are represented here. The role of aerial bombardment is excluded or backgrounded, for instance, and so are the civilian casualties involved (see Chouliaraki this volume). As we have seen, the role of the special forces is not necessarily as vital as we are made to believe, and the idea of the ‘quick fix’, too, does not always work in the way it is presented here. As for the evil motives of the ‘rebels’, Maren (1994) has noted that when he returned to Somalia, visiting some of the areas where the most aggressive fighting had taken place, he found that former fighters from different clans were now farming and trading with each other. When there is no ‘foreign assistance’ of the kind the US gave to Barre, he concluded, peace returns.

References Africa Watch. 1990. Somalia: A Government at War with Its Own People: Testimonies about Killings and the Conflict in the North. London: Africa Watch. Barber, W. F. and Neale Ronning, C. 1963. International Security and Military Power: Counterinsurgency and Civic Action in Latin America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bramstedt, E. K. 1965. Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda 1925–1945. Michigan: State University Press. Caputo, P. 1977. A Rumour of War. London: Macmillan. Cohen, M. 2001. Somalia, the cynical manipulation of hunger. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ cssn-list/2001. Finnan, M. 1993. The oil factor in Somalia: Four American petroleum giants had agreements with the African nation before its civil war began. Los Angeles Times January 18. Goebbels, J. 1948. Diaries 1942–1943. Trans. L. P. Lochner. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gorman, R. F. 1981. Political Conflict on the Horn of Africa. New York: Praeger. Herman, E. S. 1982. The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda. Boston: South End Press. Lefebvre, J. A. 1991. Arms for the Horn: US Security Policy in Ethiopia and Somalia 1953–1991. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Le Monde. 2003. Semaine sanglante en Irak. http://www.LeMonde.fr. Lewis, P. 1992. Security Council weighs role in Somali civil war. New York Times 18 March, 9. Maren, M. 1994. Leave Somalia alone. New York Times, July 6 (http://www.netnomad.com/ Leave_Somalia.html). McClintock, M. 2002. Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism 1940–1990. New York: Pantheon. McConnell, J. 2001. The counrerterrorists at the Fletcher School: The Reagan administration’s new terrorism policy. Boston Review, October/November issue. Médécins Sans Frontières. 2002. Somalia Briefing Document.

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Nederveen Pieterse, J. 1992. White on Black — Images of Africans and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Newsinger, J. 1997. Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture. London: Pluto. Perlez, J. 1992a. Armed UN troops arrive in Somalia. New York Times 15 September, 10. Perlez, J. 1992b. Chaotic Somalia starves as strongmen battle. New York Times 4 October, 1. Perlez, J. 1992c. US says airlifts fail Somali needy. New York Times 31 July, 9. Perlez, J. 1992d. Hungry Somalis still die but crops grow too. New York Times 23 October, 1. Peterson, S. 2002. Black Hawk Down — good box office but bad history. http://www.telegraph. com. Post, T. et al. 1992. How do you spell relief? Newsweek 23 November, 38. Schraeder, P. J. 1990. The Horn of Africa: US foreign policy in an altered Cold War environment. Middle East Journal 46(4), 573–74. Sciolino, E. 1993. Somalia puzzle: What is the American strategy? New York Times 5 October, 3. Shalom, S. R. 1993. Gravy train: Feeding the Pentagon by feeding Somalia. Zmagazine February 1993, http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/shalowsomalia.html. UNICEF. 1989 The State of the World’s Children. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Leeuwen, T. 1996. The representation of social actors. In: C. R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds). Texts and Practices — Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 32–70. Van Leeuwen, T. 1993. Genre and field in critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 4(2), 193–225. Van Leeuwen, T. 2000. Visual racism. In: M. Reisigl and R. Wodak (eds). The Semiotics of Racism — Approaches in Critical Discourse Analysis. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 333–350. Van Leeuwen, T. and Wodak, R. 1999. Legitimizing immigration control: A discourse-historical analysis. Discourse Studies 1(1), 83–119. Waller, D. 1992. Everyone is sniping at the marines. Newsweek 29 December, 39. Wines, M. 1992. Aides say US role in Somalia gives Bush a way to exit in glory. New York Times 6 December, 14. Wodak, R., Pelikan, J., Nowak, P., Gruber, H., De Cillia, R. and Mitten, R. 1990. ‘Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter’. Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Wodak, R., Menz, F., Mitten, R. and Stern, F. 1994. Sprachen der Vergangenheiten. Frankfurt: Surhkamp. Wolff, T. 1995. In Pharaoh’s Army. London: Picador. Wright, W. 1975. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Spectacular ethics On the television footage of the Iraq war Lilie Chouliaraki London School of Economics

This chapter argues that the BBC World footage of the bombardment of Baghdad, March–April 2003, manages to take sides in the controversy over the Iraq war, without violating the principle of objectivity — a principle necessary for the credibility of public service broadcasting. Making use of the ‘analytics of mediation’, I show that the semiotic choices of this footage construe the bombardment of Baghdad in a regime of pity, whereby the aesthetic quality of the spectacle effaces the presence of Iraqi people as human beings and sidelines the question of the coalition troops identity either as benefactors or bombers. This combination is instrumental in aestheticising the horror of war at the expense of raising issues around the legitimacy and effects of the war. The taking of sides in the BBC ‘update’ occurs precisely through this aestheticised representation of warfare that denies the sufferer his/her humanity and relieves the bomber of his responsibility in inflicting the suffering. By rendering these identities irrelevant to the spectacle of the suffering, the footage ultimately suppresses the emotional, ethical and political issues that lie behind the bombardment of Baghdad.

Television and the Iraq war The legitimacy of the war in Iraq has been a stake before, during and after the invasion of the coalition troops in Iraq, March 2003. This is evident in the unprecedented manner by which the justification for this war divided the international community and undermined trust in the capacity of international institutions, such as the EU and the UN, to manage crises in the current world order. It is also evident in the ongoing controversy about the validity of scientific documents and military reports that ultimately led both the UK and USA to the decision to declare war against Iraq.

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A crucial player in the struggle over the legitimacy of war (and as we shall see, this war more than any other) is television. This is because television is a form of public sphere, which presents and debates current affairs, providing media publics with the opportunity to make judgements and deliberate over issues of common interest (Barnett 2003). Even though we may challenge the idea that the global reach of television, with channels such as BBC or CNN, construes a single public sphere, it is difficult to deny that the power of television to provide images and information is crucial in the shaping of public opinion. In the case of the war in Iraq, the British public opinion appeared to shift from an anti-war position, registered in polls and demonstrations before March 2003, to a pro-war position, as a consequence of the government’s “various rhetorical devices and a complicit media” (Baines and Worcester 2003: 16). This research confirms the role of the media in shaping public opinion, but the idea that the media are ‘complicit’ with government may suggest that television operated as an instrument of propaganda, at the service of the military project of the coalition. Despite the relevant controversy, this has not been the issue in the case of the war in Iraq. Rather than journalists taking “the decision to abandon impartiality”, the pro-war swing of public opinion, in April 2003, was in fact shown to be shaped by “routine decisions about news values and practices” in the media (Lewis 2004: 309; also Brooks et al. 2003). These pieces of research suggest that the place to look for the pro-war bias in western television footage is not a behind-the-scenes co-ordination between government and journalists, but the assumptions already implicit in the routine professional choices that stage and narrate the war in television. The critical question, then, is to examine how television seeks to construe the legitimacy of the war, by operating not as a technology of propaganda but as a technology of democracy; that is to say as a public sphere that legitimises the taking of sides in the conflict without abandoning the principle of objective presentation and deliberation over the stakes of the conflict.

Television as a space of appearance I examine this critical question of how television legitimises the project of the Iraq war in the context of an objective public sphere, by analysing the BBC World footage on the bombardment of Baghdad (Rageh Omaar’s report April 8th, 2003). Together with the embeds programme, that is reports by journalists embedded in coalition military units fighting in Iraq, the bombardment of Baghdad provided the global spectatorship with unprecedented footage from the battlefield. As a result of bringing home images of high news value, otherwise unavailable to western



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audiences, this television war coverage was hailed as the most transparent ever (for a criticism of this argument see Brooks et al. 2003). By virtue of this celebrated transparency, the Iraq war footage simultaneously throws into relief a crucial but neglected quality of the public sphere of television. The quality of television as a ‘space of appearance’. The term ‘space of appearance’ seeks to define the public sphere of television not only as a space of language and deliberation, but also as a space of image and visibility. Butler makes use of the term the ‘space of appearance’ to tell us that the public sphere of television is about spectacle, a site of what is seen as well as heard, but also to emphasise the fact that this public sphere is about emotions as well as argument — it is about what is ‘felt’ as well as what is ‘known’:1 “To produce what will constitute the public sphere […], it is necessary to control the way in which people see, how they hear, what they see. The constraints are not only on content — certain images of dead bodies in Iraq, for instance, are considered unacceptable for public visual consumption — but on what ‘can’ be heard, read, seen, felt and known” (Butler 2004: xx).

In this quote, both spectacle and emotion are constitutive of the public sphere of television and, therefore, they are also seen as objects of strict regulation. In order to be acceptable for ‘public visual consumption’, spectacle and emotion on television need to be constrained and managed in certain ways. This reference to emotion is particularly relevant when we talk about the BBC footage of the bombardment of Baghdad, which inevitably is a spectacle of violence: images of attacking, firing, killing and destroying. How does television manage the spectator’s emotions in the face of such (potentially) fierce spectacle of suffering? The question, apart from its evident psychological dimension, also entails a crucial political dimension that touches upon the very legitimacy of the war in Iraq. The coalition sought to gain legitimacy over the war in Iraq mainly through the humanitarian argument of relieving the Iraqis from the oppressive Hussein regime. Yet the coalition also appeared on our television screen as aggressors that daily bombed the city of Baghdad for three consecutive weeks. Christian Amanpour, CNN’s senior international correspondent, formulated the problem of the coalition troops precisely in these terms: “the problem”, she said, “is that the coalition troops want to be seen as benefactors not just as bombers” (CNN March 29th, 2003). The dilemmatic identity of the troops on screen as, at once, benefactors and bombers, is therefore instrumental not only in managing the spectator’s emotions vis-à-vis the spectacle of Iraqi suffering, but crucially in managing the political task of taking sides in the conflict and thereby of establishing or withdrawing public consent to the legitimacy of the war.

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Even though there is space to nuance the argument for legitimacy, for example by claiming that the troops are bombing now only to liberate tomorrow, the power of television to make visible such a compelling spectacle of destruction and suffering to a sceptical public does beg for the temporary, immediate management of emotion on screen. This means that, on entering television’s space of appearance, the coalition troops must necessarily be represented either in the image of the liberator, the benefactor of the Iraqi sufferer who the media public approves of and supports, or of the bomber, yet another persecutor of a perpetually suffering Iraqi who the media public disapproves of and denounces. How does the BBC deal with this, essentially political, question of distributing the potential for emotion in the spectacle of a city blasted with missiles every night, by its own liberators?

The analytics of mediation In order to address this question, I introduce the analytics of mediation (for the Foucauldian term ‘analytics’ see Flyvebjerg 1999; Rose 1999; Barnett 2003; for the ‘analytics of mediation’ see Chouliaraki 2004a, b; 2006). The analytics of mediation is a framework for the study of television as a space of appearance that presents the war, and broadly human suffering, within specific regimes of pity, that is within specific semantic fields where emotions and dispositions to action vis-à-vis the suffering ‘others’ are made possible for the spectator.2 The analytics of mediation thus conceptualises the BBC footage as a semiotic accomplishment, which combines camera work and voiceover, or television’s multi-modality, in order to establish a degree of proximity between the spectator and the scene of suffering and to propose certain possibilities of action upon the suffering.3 The assumption behind the ‘analytics of mediation’ is that choices over how suffering is portrayed, where, when and with whom the suffering is shown to occur always entail specific proposals to the spectator for engaging with the sufferer, independently of our own evaluative judgement on these proposals as undesirable or desirable (Boltanski 1999). The value of the analytics of mediation, in this respect, lies in its capacity to re-describe the semiotic constitution of suffering and, in so doing, to explicate the moral implications and political agendas that inform this constitution. In multi-modality, I look into aspects of the moving image and of the verbal text (narration, description and exposition), and I discuss how their combination creates effects of objectivity and aesthetic appreciation. In space‑time, I look into the perspective from which we experience the bombardment (cinematic proximity, analytical temporality) and into the effects of this perspective on the spectator’s



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own sense of engagement with the event. Finally, in agency, I investigate how the figures of pity (here, the sufferer and the persecutor) are verbalised and visualised in ways that suppress the production of emotion for the Iraqi sufferer. My argument is that the semiotic choices of this footage construe the bombardment of Baghdad in a regime of pity, whereby the aesthetic quality of the spectacle effaces the presence of Iraqi people as human beings and sidelines the question of the coalition troops’ identity either as benefactors or bombers.4 The taking of sides in the BBC ‘update’ occurs precisely through this representation of warfare that denies the sufferer his/her humanity and relieves the bomber of his responsibility in inflicting the suffering. By rendering these identities irrelevant to the spectacle of the suffering, the footage ultimately suppresses the emotional, ethical and political issues that lie behind the bombardment of Baghdad.

The Baghdad bombardment on BBC The bombardments of Baghdad, one of the most visually arresting and emotionally compelling pieces of warfare on television, were broadcast live on the BBC at approximately 19.00 CET, and they were, subsequently, inserted as regular ‘updates’ in the channel’s 24‑7 footage flow. The piece under study is the next-morning update of the April 8th night bombing, shown on April 9th, 2003 at around 09.00 CET, immediately followed by a live report from the city of Basra. I begin with the multi-modality of the ‘update’ before I move on to its space-time and agency properties.

Multi-modality The mode of presentation of the ‘update’ is moving image (the edited video of the previous night’s footage) accompanied by running voiceover, which comments on the image and occasional pauses to allow for the harsh sounds of the bombardment to take over. On the visual plane, the point of view of the filming is from afar and above with a steady camera, probably from a terrace of the ‘Palestine’ hotel where foreign journalists stayed during the war. The camera captures Baghdad in its visual plenitude. The introductory sequence of the ‘update’ is filmed at night, turning the screen into a dark surface animated by green flashes at the sound of bombing fire. The visual effect is that of a digital game, endowing the spectacle with a fictional rather than a realist quality — a similar quality to the Gulf War visuals that made Baudrillard famously conclude that the war never happened. The ‘update’ quickly

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shifts into morning shots of the bombardment, where bright light and the camera zooms make bombing action visible in its detail. Following the verbal narrative, the camera abandons the long shot and closes up on specific bombing acts four times. It frames a large compound burning; a Tigris bridge on fire; a plane manoeuvring on air ready to attack; and, finally, the building attacked by the plane now ripped by missiles. Bombing and rattling sounds systematically interrupt the verbal narrative, throughout the ‘update’, investing the visual sequences with powerful sound effects and maximising the realism of the scene of action. In the closing sequence, the journalist appears on a frontal medium shot at the left hand side of the screen addressing directly the audience; by that moment, the bombardment was over. Overall, this pictorial composition conveys a strong sense of unrelenting action, with the harshness of repeated rattles and blasts turning the bombardment of Baghdad into a spectacle of rare audio-visual power and intensity. On the verbal plane, the spectacular quality of the screen is framed by a complex narrative, which accomplishes three main functions at once. I would claim that the voiceover of the ‘update’ is a hybrid text that combines description with narration, and also entails sporadic elements of exposition.5 Whereas description is the ‘this-is-what-we-see’ narrative type that uses language referentially to put words onto and illustrate visual action, narration introduces in the voiceover elements of story-telling proper, such as opening and closing conventions of the ‘once-upon-a time’ type. Finally, exposition carries the evaluative element of the voiceover, implicitly articulating a moral stance vis-à-vis the visual text, such as “isn’t-this-horrific, extraordinary or sad?” Let us now see how these narrative types of the voiceover fuse with one another and interact with the visual mode. Narration organises the voiceover of bombing action from beginning to end. The opening sequence, in night vision, establishes an ‘as-if ’ continuity with action that had been occurring before the recording of this footage: With barely a pause in the early hours of the morning, they were on the attack again. Both circumstantial attributes, with barely a pause and again, hint to this continuity and turn the spectacle on screen into a little glimpse of a broader trajectory of action. This is emphasised by the fact that the subject of the scene of action remains unspecified, as-if already known: they were on the attack. In this way, the voiceover introduces the spectator to a larger, ongoing story with familiar plot and characters. The visual shift from night to day is managed through another story-telling feature, chronological continuity: By morning the buildings were still ablaze. Chronological coherence further sustains the main part of the verbal text, as in Then we heard…we looked up…above us a buster…it swooped down…And it blasted. This part is simultaneously organised around the narrator’s point of view; notice the use of first person plural in we heard, we looked. Chronology, the human perception of time,



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together with the use of the personal point of view, we, in perception verbs such as hear and look, construe the voiceover as a particular type of story-telling: the testimony of an eye-witness. As the personal narration of facts, however, testimony cannot rely on subjective story-telling. It needs to fuse with the reporting of objective reality. In the ‘update’, it is description that establishes this factual correspondence between the person and the outside world, by connecting verbal with visual text. This is obvious in the verbal references that systematically follow the camera zooms I mentioned earlier. For example, the buildings were still ablaze and still under attack is a declarative statement anchored on the visual evidence of a camera zoom on the burning compound. The effect of factuality gets stronger in Then we heard a terrible deafening sound as though…, or …let loose a ferocious barrage. Both references to the hearing sense of the witness are followed by strong sound effects that validate his subjective perception. In a similar manner, the sentence, Then we looked up […], referring to vision, is followed by an upwards move of the camera. Finally, the voiceover reference to anti-missile flare spewing out of its wing is followed by a zoom on the plane releasing fire. These statements take the moving image to be the external reality which language refers to, singles out and illustrates. Description, in this sense, works to create an indexical relationship between the nominal use of deafening sound, ferocious barrage or antimissile flare and the audio and visual recordings as they appear on screen. The narrative type of description is, in this sense, instrumental in establishing objectivity, the quality of broadcasting necessary to legitimise the television footage as a public sphere genre. The multi-modality of the footage presents us with, what Peters (2001: 709) calls, the ‘two faces of witnessing’: the passive face of seeing, which is accomplished through the mechanical eye of the camera, and the active face of saying, which is accomplished through the combination of subjective narration and factual description. The spectator is called both to consume images of reality and to engage with the impressions of the person that witnesses — the we of the journalist and his cameraman. It is perhaps this combination that keeps under control, exposition, the third of Chatman’s narrative types that typically provides a point of view, a value judgement on the television spectacle. In the footage, the aura of testimony allows only sporadic elements of exposition to be dispersed across sentences: a terrible deafening sound as though the earth was being ripped open… …anti-missile flare spewing out of its wing…, let loose a ferocious barrage. Such quasi-literary use of adjectives, together with the metaphors spewing and let loose and the simile as though the earth, seek to convey a sense of the horrific and the extraordinary that the sight of the bombardment impressed upon the eye-witness.

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In the final sequence, however, the testimonial perspective is abandoned in favour of a more expository narrative. First, the narrator’s first person is not part of the verbal but of the visual text, as Omaar frontally addresses the spectator, in a face-to-face communicative gesture. As a consequence, the perspective of the narrative also shifts from witnessing a specific event to an overview of air war: American force are pushing relentlessly…continue to take ground… everything is there for their taking. The intensity of the singular act is now replaced by the contemplation of the big picture. Although no explicit ethical or political perspective is articulated, this conclusion does manage to set out the sides of the war in Iraq in terms of the asymmetry between a powerful coalition, in fact American forces, and some defending positions with hardly any resistance. Which regime of pity is enacted in this particular combination of subjective narration with objective description and traces of expository talk? Which effect does the multi-modality of the ‘update’ bear upon the sense of proximity that the spectator has to the scenes of bombardment she witnesses? And how does the ‘update’ shapes the spectator’s inclination to feel towards the suffering Iraqis?

Space-time The presence of camera in the city of Baghdad and the sheer visualisation of warfare bring the western spectator closer to the scene of this suffering than ever before in any previous war coverage. The spectator does not only hear, read about or skim through snapshots of bombed buildings, but she/he can actually witness the bombardment as a reality unfolding in front of her own eyes. Nevertheless, the point of view of the camera is from afar-and-above, providing the spectator with panoramic views of the city. Despite the total visibility that this point of view offers, or precisely because of this, the spectator of the ‘update’ is simultaneously kept resolutely outside the scene of action. She/he is an onlooker, who is watching from a safe distance. The quality of proximity that this ‘detached’ overview provides to the spectator is cinematic, a witness position that turns the reality of the war into a spectacular panorama that fills the television screen. Furthermore, as a consequence of the use of steady camera, the ‘update’ remains constantly a panorama. It does not move through the streets of Baghdad, in the homes of Iraqis or in hospitals and, therefore, it is unable to shift the position of the spectator from the ‘detached’ overview to an ‘involved’ observation of suffering in proximity (as for example Al Jazeera did). The temporality of the ‘update’, narrated for the most part in time past, reinforces the emotional distance that cinematic proximity imposes upon the scene of the bombardment. This is the temporality of testimony, of describing facts that are



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already finalised: we heard […] deafening sound…we looked […] ferocious barrage. The shift towards the present tense, in the concluding sequence, presents longerterm facts that still sustain the distance to Baghdad: the city-target of a ferocious bombardment is not a scene of suffering but a terrain for the study of the logistics of warfare. In summary, the combination of cinematic proximity with analytical temporality shapes a regime of pity where suffering is construed as an object to watch and comment on, rather than to arouse emotion or a demand for action on the part of the spectator. Under these conditions of representation, what happens to the figures of the sufferer and the bomber that organise the spectator’s potential for emotion in the face of suffering?

Agency I look mainly into the two agency categories in the ‘update’, the sufferer, who is the passive recipient of the bombing acts, and the persecutor, who is the bomber of the city of Baghdad. The sufferer of the bombardment is represented in non-human terms. Specifically, the sufferer is verbalised as buildings, twice, Ministry building, [Iraqi] positions and defending positions, [Iraqi] leadership’s seats of power. These are all non-living targets of coalition fire; naturally, such targets are also visualised by camera zooms onto concrete blasts and explosions in the Baghdad cityscape. The sufferer is also verbalised as a diffused entity, in formulations such as on the eastern side of the Tigris River, anything [that could be an Iraqi position] and everything [is there for their taking]. This diffused verbalisation of the sufferer is parallel to the visual effect of the long shot as they both offer a panorama of the city, with the cost of failing to evoke proximity, geographical or emotional, between the spectator and the sufferer. Finally, the sufferer is altogether deleted from the narrative either through nominalisation, hardly any resistance, or through the use of intransitive verbs that take no object, such as [The American forces are] pushing on (who?, we may ask) and take ground (whose ground?). Even though these formulations acknowledge the asymmetry of warfare and signal the incapacity of the Iraqi side to defend itself, this vague reference to powerlessness has no concrete recipient. There is no reference to the Iraqi as a human being, either in language or in image. In fact, the ordinary Iraqi, for whom the operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ was launched in the first place, is a significant absence in the footage of the bombardment of Baghdad. The persecutor of the scene of action is represented in non-human terms, too. This happens through verbal references such as explosions and heavy fire or anti-missile flare — which are simultaneously visualised on screen — or through

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pronouns such as they [were on the attack again] and it [swooped down or blasted]. The persecutor is also deleted in passive constructions, such as [buildings] were still ablaze and still under attack; [Anything that could be an Iraqi position] was targetted. This reluctance to semiotise the persecutor as a human force or a single individual performs a similar semiotic work as the diffusion of the sufferer does. It avoids to name the existence of the bomber, the figure that inflicts the suffering on the inhabitants of Baghdad, and, in so doing, it does not help to focalise the emotional potential of the spectator in a denunciatory disposition against the bombardment (Boltanski 1999: 59–67). Indeed, the only reference that could be interpreted as evoking a human persecutor is that to The American forces are pushing on relentlessly. To be sure, the reference to the American forces already formulates some form of causal link with the Baghdad bombardment. But how is this link semiotised? First, it is a linguistic link that lacks the power of pictorial presence. We do not see American troops on screen. Furthermore, it is a reference connected to the material processes pushing on or continue to [take ground and pound defending positions], which cleanses the agency of the troops of any sense of aggression (compare to bomb or attack) and construes them primarily as successful operators: push on, take ground, pound positions. In summary, the ‘update’ on the bombardment of Baghdad contains no visualisation of human beings, but only a panorama of military action. At the same time, the linguistic choices that verbalise the sufferer and the persecutor deprive these figures of any sense of humanness. The sufferer is mostly a collective entity or a non-living being, and the persecutor is either diffused in the activity of air war or erased from the narrative. By cancelling the presence of the persecutor and the sufferer, the footage presents the bombardment of Baghdad not a scene of suffering, but a site of intense military action without agency.

The war footage as a space of aesthetic appearance The regime of pity constituted through the semiotic features of the ‘update’ is characterised by a hybrid multi-modal text that invests the panorama of air war with factual description, dramatic narration and elements of exposition. This combination authenticates the event of bombardment as an objective reality and, at the same time, it invites the spectator to study the event as a spectacle. This occurs within a spacetime of cinematic proximity, which is devoid of human agency but full of the spectacularity of striking action. I have argued elsewhere that these features of the footage construe suffering within a ‘sublime’ regime of pity (Chouliaraki 2004a, 2004b). The sublime is a specific regime of pity that constitutes distant



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suffering less through emotions towards the sufferer and primarily through aesthetic appreciation derived from the horror of suffering itself. This insight into the representation of the war in the BBC footage returns us to the critical question of my Introduction. The question was to examine how television construes the legitimacy of the war, not through propaganda but through regulating the war footage as a space of appearance: the public space where the taking of sides occurs without abandoning the principle of objectivity. There are two dimensions of the space of appearance that I would now like to comment on. First, obviously, the effacement of antagonistic human figures, the sufferer and the bomber, from the eye-witness account of the bombardment produces the effect of objectivity in BBC television. Without a sufferer or a bomber, the ‘update’ does not appear to take sides in the Iraq conflict and, in this manner, it considerably strengthens its testimonial claim to represent the war without bias. What the ‘update’ appears to do instead is to invite the spectator to engage with the scene of suffering through reflexive contemplation. As the sublime register suggests, reflexive contemplation is an arrangement which turns the scene of the bombardment into a passive object of the spectator’s gaze and the spectator into a gazing subject aware of her own act of seeing, a ‘meta-describer’ (Boltanski 1999: 19). Doesn’t the testimonial character of the voiceover draw the spectator’s attention to the horrific detail of the television spectacle as a passive object to be seen, and simultaneously to the act of seeing itself as it is narrated by the journalist/meta-describer? As a consequence of this reflexive mode of engagement, the BBC footage lives up to its role as a global news channel that disseminates information without partiality and operates within the premises of public legitimacy. However, this very claim to objectivity goes hand-in-hand with the taking of sides in the footage. The taking of sides, as Lewis mentions in my Introduction, is related less to a conscious media complicity and more to the news values associated with journalistic choices about how to represent the war on television. In the bombardment of Baghdad, which, by definition, places the scene of suffering and violence at centre-stage, the journalistic choice has been to employ the style of testimony. The testimony confronts the spectator with the horrific spectacle of the bombardment and turns her into a witness that contemplates on the aesthetic composition of this spectacle. Again, doesn’t the combination of cinematic proximity with quasi-literary commentary such as … a terrible deafening sound… …flare spewing out…swooped down…ferocious barrage and with powerful sound effects cultivate precisely this aesthetic grasp of the reality of war, through which the sublime aspires to capture the essence of suffering? This aesthetic register of the war footage, valuable as it may be in prompting media publics to reflect upon the witnessing of destruction and death on screen,

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nevertheless suffers from a serious restriction. This leads me to the second dimension of the footage as a space of appearance that I wish to comment on. As a specific journalistic choice, the aesthetic register simultaneously provides a specific ‘normative scheme of intelligibility’, as Butler calls it, through which the spectator encounters and appreciates the reality of war. The choice, that is to say, to visualise military action but neither to visualise the sufferer nor to verbalise his/her as a human being is, at once, an exercise of the normative power of television to subject human life in Baghdad to ‘radical effacement’ (Butler 2004: 147).6 Radical effacement is a form of power that television exercises in order to constitute the public realm of appearance on the basis of exclusion, be this linguistic exclusion or, even more tellingly, exclusion of the imagery of suffering. Unlike many other reports on suffering that portray human beings, strongly appealing to the spectator’s emotion and action, the Iraqi sufferer enters the space of appearance in the BBC footage only on the condition that her very humanity is cancelled. And, with it, what is also cancelled is the potential for emotion and engagement with the sufferer that the spectator may have had the potential to feel. The taking of sides in the Iraq footage, then, has to do with the way in which this journalistic grid of intelligibility renders the identity of the Iraqi population — suffering under the coalition fire — invisible to the spectator, whereas, by the same token, it also renders the identity of the troops as bombers irrelevant to the representation of the bombardment itself. To conclude, let us recall that this register of representation, the aesthetics of testimony, is not alone in shaping the coverage of the Iraq war overall. In the course of the 24‑7 footage flow, there has been a continuous alternation of regimes of pity, and it is this alternation that, ultimately, decides how the aesthetic register participates in the broader process of legitimising the war in BBC television. The ‘update’ of the bombardment under study is, for example, immediately sequenced by a regime of care that foregrounds the role of the coalition forces as benefactors of the Iraqi population. From the ‘update’ of the air-strikes, we move swiftly to a reportage in the city of Basra, where a small crowd of Iraqis is filmed side-byside to American soldiers. An American soldier is speaking Arabic to the Iraqis, a fact that signals proximity, and they are all interacting and walking together. The voiceover informs us that Escorted by US soldiers, a group of Iraqi former teachers enter the compound of Basra’s technical college to take their belongings. Put otherwise, from a regime of representation, which suppressed the possibility of pity when Baghdad was being blast to pieces, we shift to a regime where the coalition forces are reported to be fully active as a benefactor, already at week three into the invasion. Thanks to the sequencing of the footage, the contemplative spectator can now sigh in relief as the US soldiers take care of the ordinary Iraqis. It appears then



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that the dilemma benefactors or bombers, in Amanpour’s words, is constituted ongoingly through the alternating regimes of pity that the footage involves, and it is provisionally resolved in the transition points between sequences and the shifts between regimes.

Conclusion In this paper, I made use of the analytics of mediation in order to study how television regulates “how people hear and what they can see” on screen, without violating the principle of objectivity — a principle necessary for the credibility of public service broadcasting. The analysis of the BBC footage, April 2003, shows that the catastrophic spectacle of the Baghdad bombardment is narrated as the testimony of a witness and filmed so as to be contemplated at a distance and without a human presence. This combination is instrumental in aestheticising the horror of war at the expense of raising issues around the legitimacy and effects of the war. In the light of this analysis, I would suggest that the televisual sublimation of suffering constitutes a form of regulation of the public sphere that does not simply impact upon what we actually see or hear but, as Butler further claims, poses a deeper constraint upon “what can be heard, read, seen, felt and known” (2003: xx). It is this constraint on how it is at all possible to represent the war on television that is thrown into relief by the inscription of the testimony of the bombardment in the sublime register. The sublime register helps to ‘even out’ the unresolved or, more precisely, the irresolvable tension in the identity of the coalition forces as benefactors or bombers, by subjecting the identity of the Iraqi people to radical effacement. In this manner, the sublime becomes instrumental in taking sides in the conflict not by regulating the actors on screen, but by rendering their identities irrelevant in the public sphere of television. In a scene of suffering without a sufferer, the presence of the persecutor is also unnecessary. Without overtly campaigning for the good, not even regulating the presence of good and bad on screen, the sublime plays upon absences. It plays upon the fact that human misfortune can be staged in different ways, seeking to shape variously our emotions and attitudes vis-à-vis the distant sufferer. This effectively means that the question of how television participates in the legitimisation of the war becomes more amenable to political and ethical criticism when seen under the light of the semiotic aestheticisation of suffering, than when it is confined in the general denunciation of ‘news bias’ and in the pursuit of an abstract objectivity.

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Transcript of voiceover, April 8th, 2003 With barely a pause in the early hours of the morning, they were on the attack again. Explosions and heavy fire tore into buildings on the eastern side of the Tigris river [Night vision. Green/dark screen with white flashes. ‘Digital’ visual effect] All this in the Iraqi leadership’s seats of power. By morning the buildings were still ablaze and still under attack [Day light. Zoom on building in flames. Sound effects.]. Anything that could be an Iraqi position was targeted [Zoom on bridge in fire]. Then we heard a terrible deafening sound as though the earth was being ripped open [Long shot of building. Sound effect]. We looked up [Camera moving upwards]. Above us a 8/0/0 buster, anti-missile flare spewing out from its wing [Zoom on plane manoeuvring and firing in cloudy sky]. It swooped down and let loose a ferocious barrage [sound effect]. And it blasted this Ministry building for a second time [Zoom on building being ripped by missiles. Sound effect]. Rageh Omaar standing now at left side of the screen The American forces are pushing on relentlessly. They continue to take ground and pound defending positions. And given that they seem to be coming up against hardly any resistance, it seems that everything is there for their taking. Visual shift to Basra where small crowd of Iraqis is filmed side-by-side to American soldiers; they are standing together, interacting and walking together. US soldier speaks Arabic to them. Screen bar: Basra. An agitated crowd. Voiceover: Escorted by US soldiers, a group of Iraqi former teachers enter the compound of Basra’s technical college to take their belongings.

Notes 1.  For relevant notions of the public sphere see also Boltanski (1999: 1–19); Chartier (1999: 20–37). 2.  For the connection between pity and citizenship see Boltanski (1999: 20–34); Arendt (1973/1990: 59–114); for the connection between private and public disposition see Peters (1999: 214–225); and for the connection between the communication of the private self in the public sphere of television see Scannel (1991: 1–9). 3.  For semiotic analyses of suffering see van Leeuwen and Jaworski (2002) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Perlmutter and Wagner (2004) on the violent conflicts under the G8 Summit in Genoa; for the language of mourning in public and, specifically, media discourse see Butler (2003); for the language of mourning concerning the September 11 events see Martin (2004);



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for the analysis of spacetimes see Chilton (2003). Finally, for Discourse Analysis of discourses of pity in the context of migration see Reisigl and Wodak (2000). 4.  Elsewhere, I examine a similar process of the aestheticisation of suffering in BBC reports during the early days of the bombardment, the so-called ‘Shock and Awe’ operations (Chouliaraki 2005b). Lewis (2004) and Brooks et al. (2003) also discuss the fictionalisation of the spectacle of war, due both to the long-shot filming and to front-line reporting that often portrayed the events as a war film (Brooks et al. 2003: 84). They further link this criticism to other features of journalistic discourse in the war coverage. Namely, the celebratory discourse of Iraqi liberation that aligned the Iraqi population as a whole with anti-Hussein feelings and tendencies; and the celebratory discourse employed by studio anchors to refer to the advancement of coalition troops towards Baghdad (in contrast to the embeds’ reports that were more contradictory and sceptical). 5.  I am here adapting Chatman’s discussion of the standard school genres/styles of narrative, description, exposition, persuasion (1991). 6.  Silverstone (2004) also discusses the effacement of the distant ‘other’ as a textual practice of annihilation, which places the sufferer at a different existential order to the spectator and thus beyond the reach of the spectator.

References Arendt, H. 1990(1973). On Revolution. London: Penguin Books. Boltanski, L. 1999. Distant Suffering. Politics, Morality and the Media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, C. 2003. Culure and Democracy. Media, Space and Representation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brooks, R, Lewis, J., Mosdell, N. and Threadgold, T. 2003. Embeds or In-beds? The Media Coverage of the War in Iraq. Report Commissioned for the BBC. Cardiff: Cardiff School of Journalism. Butler, J. 2003. Precarious Life. The Powers of Death and Mourning. London: Verso. Chatman, S. 1991. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell. Chartier, R. 1999. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Chilton, P. 2003. Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routlege. Chouliaraki, L. 2004a. Watching September 11: The politics of pity. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 185–198. Chouliaraki, L. 2004b. Shock and Awe: The Aestheticisation of Suffering in Iraq War Footage. (Working paper available at MediaDemos website http://www.cbs.dk/ikl/mediahub) Chouliaraki, L. 2006. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage. Flyvebjerg, B. 1999. Making Social Sciences Matter Cambridge. Cambridge: University Press. Lewis, J. 2004. Television, public opinion and the war in Iraq: The case of Britain. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 16(3), 295–310. Martin, J. 2004. Mourning: How we are aligned. Discourse & Society 15(2–3), 321–44.

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Perlmutter, D. and Wagner, G. 2004. The anatomy of a photojournalistic icon: Marginalisation of dissent in the selection and framing of ‘a death in Genoa’. Visual Communication 3(1), 91–108. Peters, J. D. 2001. Witnessing. Media Culture and Society. London: Sage. Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. 2000. Discourse Analysis: Discourse and Discrimination; Rhetorics of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. London: Routledge. Scannel, P. 1991. Broadcast Talk. London: Sage. Silverstone, R. 2004. Mediation and communication. In: G. Calhoun et al. (eds). The Sage Handbook of Sociological Analysis. London: Sage. van Leeuwen, T. and Jaworski, A. 2002. The discourses of war photography: Photojournalistic representations of the Palestinian-Israeli war. Journal of Language and Politics 1(2), 255– 76.

Index

A Aestheticisation, 3 Aesthetics of testimony, 149 Agency categories, 137 Alliances, 45 Analytics of mediation, 129, 132, 141 Antagonists, 44, 45 Anti-Americanism, 33 Appropriation process, 51 Aristotle, 9 Atkinson, D., 90 Aznar’s speech contextual features of, 61 political implicatures of, 62 self presentation of, 72 semantic implications of, 65 B Bernstein, B., 87, 103 Blair, T., 4, 5, 21, 25 Boltanski, L., 132, 138, 139, 142 Bush, G. W., 15, 18, 21, 25, 30 Butler, J., 3, 131, 140–142 C Capitalism, 11, 13–15, 33 effects of, 14 Categorization, 123 CDA, see Critical Discourse Analysis CDI, see Center for Defense Information Center for Defense Information, 28, 31 Chilton, P., 9, 92, 143 Chomsky, N., 27, 45 Civil affairs operations, 113 Coalition of the willing, 15, 21, 26 Code of honor, 29 Collectivisation, 121 Colonizing process, 51 Comitatus, 19, 21, 26, 33

feudal comitatus relationship, 29 feudal society, comitatus of, 19 Committee on Public Information, 16 activities of, 30 photography division, 32 propaganda, 31 Community, notion of, 46 Consensus, 82 Context, 61, 64–66, 69, 83 contextual polarization, 68 contextual strategies, 76, 78 implicatures, 70 models, 7, 64–66, 69, 83 CPI, see Committee on Public Information Creel, G., 16–18, 30–32 Criminalisation, 6 Critical analysis, 90 Critical Discourse Analysis, 7, 62 Critical thinking, 90 Current age feudal aspects, 27 neofeudal character of, 32 D Debates, political functions of, 64 Defense establishment, 12 Dijk, V., 2, 3, 7, 62 Discourse analysis, 2, 7, 62, 66, 110, 125, 143 changes in, 40 dialectics of, 51 educational, alternative, 87 educational, dominant, 67 historical method, 110 history, 109, 110 operationalisation of, 52 pedagogic, 87 political, 3, 4, 62–63 of war, 115

146

Index

E Eisenhower, D., 11 Elite soldiers, 113, 120 Ellis, E. R., 29, 30, 35, 90 Embedded reporters, 32 Emergence, 7, 40–41, 51 Enfrenta, 68 ETA terrorism, 79 (E)vilification, 6 F Facticity, 82 Fairclough, N., 4, 5, 7, 41, 46, 47, 50, 51 Feudalism, 12, 24, 27, 29, 32 current expression of, 32 defining feature of, 24 Free trade agreement, 26 Functionalisation, 123 G Genre realizations, 98 Giddens, A., 13 Globalization, 40, 42–43 discourses of, 43 function of, 23 Goebbels, J., 20, 109 Graham, P., 6 Grand narratives, 103, 105

Internationalist, 46 Iraq, crisis of, 69 Iraq war, 1–8, 11, 24, 50, 67, 85, 93, 95, 97, 123, 129 Isolationism, 46 J Jessop, R., 40, 43 K Koehl, R., 19–20 L Legitimation properties of, 80 work of, 4 Lesson plans, 88, 91, 95–97 educational materials, 86 on-line, 86 traditional, 98, 102 Liberal capitalism, 33 Linguistic discourse analysis, 125 reference, 121 representation of participants, 122 Luke, A., 2, 6, 8, 12, 16, 31, 34

H Halliday, M. A. K., 91, 100 Habr Gedir militia, 122 Harris, Th. L., 90 Harvey, D., 41 Hay, C., 43 Hegemony, 1, 7, 8, 40, 41, 51 Hersh, S.M., 20 Hodges, R. E., 41 Huffington, A., 25 Hybrid multi-modal text, 138

M Martin, J., 90 McClintok, 113 Media, 3, 16 definition of, 2 role of, 130 BBC footage of, bombardment of Baghdad, 131, 139 Mediation, analytics of, 132, 141 Mercantilism, 12 Militarisation, 6 Militarism, 28 Military–industrial complex, 22, 28 Military intervention, 48 Mumford, L., 29

I Implicatures, 65 Individualisation, 121 Integrated Marketing Communication, 31 Integration, 47 International alliances, 47 International community, 3, 5, 46–47, 68

N Narrative genre, 101 National socialism, 20–21 National standards, 99–103 correlation to, 100 formal evaluation, 102 history of, 102



performance assessment, 102 National strategy, for combating terrorism, 114 Negative other-presentation, 75 Neo-feudal corporatism, 12, 14, 20 elements of, 21 Neo-liberalism, 40 Networks of terrorism, 114 Number game, 81, 82 implicature of, 81 political point, 81 Nye, J., 1–2, 4 O Occasional enunciations, 50 Operation Restore Hope, 112 Orientalisation, 6 Overlexicalization, 44 P Patriot Act, 15 Pedagogic subjects, 85, 87, 88, 103, 104 Pedagogized literacy, 103 Pedagogy critical, 104 dominant, 104 Permanent arms economy, 27 Perle, R., 20, 22 Peters, S., 135 Political implicatures, 7, 61, 65, 71, 78, 81, 83 Political inferences, sequence of, 71 Propaganda, 31 Protagonists, 44, 45 Public relations, 31 R Radical effacement, 140 Rosamond, B., 43 Reconstruction contracts, 25 Red Cross, 121 Regime of pity, 133, 136, 138 Re-imagining process, 51 S Security, values for, 48, 49 Self-interest grounds, 48

Index

Self-presentation positive, 72, 75, 78 forms of, 74 types of, 73 Situation, definition of, 70 Soft power, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9 aim of, 1 Social actors, 123 Space of appearance, 131, 139 Special operations discourse, 109, 110, 124, 125 key element of, 126 origins of, 126 Stephenson, C., 19 Strategic communication, 31 Sublimation of suffering, 141 Systematic subjection, 27 Syuzhet, 125 T Television footage, 129, 130, 135 Textbook capitalism, 33 Textual analysis, 44 Texturing, 42, 48, 51 Total war, 20 Transferable skills, 89 V Vassalage, 19 Visual representation of participants, 122 W Walters, K., 90 War footage, 139 aesthetic register of, 8, 140 War, legitimacy of, 4, 5 in Iraq, 129. See Iraq war role of media, 130 role of television, 130 issue of, 3 in media discourse, 1 in political discourse, 1 struggle over, 4 War on terror, 45 Wells, M., 32, 111 Wright, W., 124

147

In the series Benjamins Current Topics (BCT) the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 10 Liebal, Katja, Cornelia Müller and Simone Pika (eds.): Gestural Communication in Nonhuman and Human Primates. ca. 300 pp. Expected July 2007 9 Pöchhacker, Franz and Miriam Shlesinger (eds.): Healthcare Interpreting. Discourse and Interaction. 2007. viii, 155 pp. 8 Teubert, Wolfgang (ed.): Text Corpora and Multilingual Lexicography. x, 161 pp. Expected June 2007 7 Penke, Martina and Anette Rosenbach (eds.): What Counts as Evidence in Linguistics. The case of innateness. ix, 298 pp. Expected June 2007 6 Bamberg, Michael (ed.): Narrative – State of the Art. 2007. vi, 271 pp. 5 Anthonissen, Christine and Jan Blommaert (eds.): Discourse and Human Rights Violations. 2007. x, 142 pp. 4 Hauf, Petra and Friedrich Försterling (eds.): Making Minds. The shaping of human minds through social context. 2007. ix, 275 pp. 3 Chouliaraki, Lilie (ed.): The Soft Power of War. 2007. ix, 147 pp. 2 Ibekwe-SanJuan, Fidelia, Anne Condamines and M. Teresa Cabré Castellví (eds.): Application-Driven Terminology Engineering. 2007. vii, 203 pp. 1 Nevalainen, Terttu and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds.): Letter Writing. 2007. viii, 160 pp.