E58: 20 Years of "War on Terror" Rhetoric (w/ Dr. John Oddo)

On today’s show, we are joined once again by Dr. John Oddo, Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, for a retrospective discussion of “War on Terror” rhetoric 20 years after September 11th, 2001. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and national news media have consistently used Us and Them categories of enemy- and threat-construction, drawing on a conceptual metaphor of terrorism as an act of war (as opposed to a criminal act) to justify preventative military action. There have also been some notable shifts in U.S. war rhetoric in recent years: for one thing, references to September 11th as an inciting event have become scarcer as leaders have reframed the fight against global terrorism as an end in itself. And whereas earlier in the war, media and political figures tended to conflate specific terrorist organizations and so-called “state sponsors of terrorism”, they are now more likely to advocate a “targeted” approach: opposing large-scale troop deployments while nevertheless supporting missile attacks, special forces operations, cyberwarfare, and other forms of state violence.

After John walks us through the material and social reasons for these continuities and shifts, we analyze specific examples of post-9/11 war propaganda, comparing Larry P. Goodson’s November 2001 op-ed “U.S. Troops Must Go In” with Ryan Crocker’s August 2021 “Why Biden’s Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster.” We examine their rhetorical strategies and discuss the greater implications of how some key tropes have evolved across texts and time: framing the war as a “clash of civilizations,” using the oppression of women and children as justificatory narratives, employing euphemisms like “patience” in foreign policy strategies, and zooming in on U.S. enemies’ violence while eliding the violence done by our military and its allies.

Lastly, we turn to a discussion of the ongoing drone war in the Middle East and Africa, in which we highlight John’s new research project on media construals of drone strike victims. John concludes with a blistering critique of an enduring problem in U.S. political rhetoric: the metaphor of war deaths as “payments” for which we deserve some return, which obscures how inflicting suffering and killing is always an irrevocable moral act.

Texts Analyzed in this Episode:

Biden, J. (2021, 31 Aug.). Address to the nation on the end of the war in Afghanistan [Speech audio recording]. Transcript, video, and audio available from American Rhetoric: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/joebidenendofafghanistanwar.htm

Crocker, R. (2021, 21 Aug.). Why Biden’s lack of strategic patience led to disaster. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/opinion/us-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban.html

Dowd, M. (2001, 18 Nov.). Liberties; Cleopatra and Osama. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/opinion/liberties-cleopatra-and-osama.html

Goodson, L. P. (2001, 14 Nov.). U.S. troops must go in. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/opinion/us-troops-must-go-in.html

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (1994). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. London: Vintage Books.

Cloud, D. L. (2004). “To veil the threat of terror”: Afghan women and the ⟨clash of civilizations⟩ in the imagery of the US war on terrorism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90(3), 285-306.

Goodby, J.E. & Gross, D. (2010, 22 Dec.). Strategic patience has become strategic passivity. The Brookings Institution. Retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/strategic-patience-has-become-strategic-passivity/

Gopal, A. (2021, 6 Sept.). The other Afghan women: In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them. The New Yorker. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Hodges, A. (2011). The" War on terror" narrative: discourse and intertextuality in the construction and contestation of sociopolitical reality. OUP USA.

Oddo, J. (2011). War legitimation discourse: Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in four US presidential addresses. Discourse & Society, 22(3), 287-314.

Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's UN Address. Michigan State University Press.

Oddo, J. (2018). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State Press.

Safire, W. (1999, 3 Jan.). On language; Not so fast! The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/03/magazine/on-language-not-so-fast.html [Contextual analysis on the evolution of the term “strategic patience” and Strobe Talbott’s original usage]

re:blurb episode on Conceptual Metaphor

Our first episode with Dr. Oddo, in which he articulates his theory of war propaganda

The Watson Institute at Brown University’s “Costs of War” Project