From Post-9/11 Melodrama to Quagmire in Iraq: A Rhetorical History

Abstract

This essay offers a dilemma-centered rhetorical history of the Iraq debacle, beginning with the president's melodramatic crisis narrative in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, continuing with the unraveling of that narrative in the run-up to war and during the prolonged occupation of Iraq, and culminating in situational entrapment, or quagmire, wherein the Bush administration's reputation for "staying on message" has lost its rhetorical glow.

For most Americans the 9/11 bombings were a tragedy; for neoconservatives bent on invading Iraq they were also an opportunity, providing what David Zarefsky calls a kairotic moment. The administration's rhetoric fueled and channeled the fury already aroused by the attacks themselves. As both Robert L. Ivie and Carol Winkler maintain in this issue, the president's hype was not unlike the rhetoric of past presidents responding to past crises. President Bush was right when he said that 9/11 was a turning point in American history. Given that history, given the shock and severity of the attacks, given America's distinctive position as the world's sole surviving superpower, given the political advantages to the president of meeting fire with rhetorical fire, the administration's vitriolic response was surely understandable. We may ultimately conclude that it was also regrettable.

As Sue Lockett John and colleagues and Ivie observe, the president's post-9/11 rhetoric provided the basic melodramatic binaries in terms of which the "war on terror" was launched and then morphed into the war in Iraq. Its short-term effectiveness conferred enormous power upon the president, which he has been able to use not just to persuade, but also to intimidate, [End Page 183] coerce, and control. Periodic reminders of 9/11 have served as well to trump concerns about usurpations of power by the Bush administration and to override criticisms even by appointed commissions and counterterrorism experts. In the weeks and months following 9/11, Americans were particularly vulnerable to projections of future threats from Middle East pariahs, however ill-founded and unsubstantiated the claims.

From the outset, it seemed, consideration of invading Iraq occasioned more debate than usual. This debate, said George Packer, was because it was a war of choice, without any visible evidence of an imminent threat to America or the United Kingdom from Iraq.[1] In addition to the war of words, verbal battles have also been fought over words about words—disputes over whose words were "mere rhetoric" and whose were credible, over who said what when and with what ulterior motives, over what should have been said but wasn't, and over meanings of politically sensitive words like democracy, patriotism, terrorism, and torture.[2] Along with the words and words about words have been the stark and unforgettable television images of violence, themselves powerful influences but also fought over rhetorically as evidence for this or that claim about the war.[3]

Rhetorical analysis serves importantly as a vehicle for understanding rhetorical choices and the strategic considerations giving rise to them. It helps explain why, for example, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 bombings, the administration chose to evade the hard questions of motivation for the attacks and to respond instead with a sanitized, melodramatic framing of the crisis, coupled with the launch of a vaguely defined, seemingly unlimited "war on terror." It also helps to explain why the press, the Democrats, and the Republicans in Congress deferred to the administration, adding their own exaggerations, evasions, and outright distortions to those of the administration in the aftermath of 9/11, and how the rhetoric of antiterrorism led from the Trade Towers and the Pentagon to the bombings of Baghdad. The still-troubled occupation of Iraq provides further evidence that what worked rhetorically in the short run has been a source of subsequent difficulties.

The case for invading Iraq had been made ever since the Gulf War ended in 1991 with Saddam Hussein still in power,[4] but it took a giant leap forward ten years later with the 9/11 attacks. Active discussion took place shortly after the attacks in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's war council about using the terrorism in building a case for removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power.[5] A major television speech by the president to the Congress on September 20, 2001, was a step in that direction.[6] There he framed the 9/11 attacks as an assault on America's sacred virtues of freedom and democracy and launched his "war on terror." In the wake of 9/11, the news media spoke as one in their condemnation of the attacks and in support of the president, [End Page 184] helping send his approval ratings from below 50 percent before 9/11 to nearly 90 percent, a record high, after September 20.[7]

The 9/11 attacks and the melodramatic crisis rhetoric that followed in their wake made the invasion of Iraq politically feasible. No sooner had the president completed his televised "Address to the Congress" on 9/20 than the pundits joined as one in concluding that the president had demonstrated extraordinary leadership ability.[8] Threat-induced crisis rhetoric routinely has that effect. Says Denise M. Bostdorff, who has studied the genre, it has enabled American presidents to show leadership, grab headlines, exhibit toughness, and demand unity. It also gains them policy support on unrelated issues, increases their party's electoral power, accrues symbolic reserves, and helps them weather untidy endings.9 Crisis rhetoric, says Elisabeth Anker, is often melodramatic, presenting conflict in the simplistic terms of pure good versus pure evil.[10] The events of 9/11 in particular seemed to cry out for a hyperbolic, decontextualized account of what had occurred, akin to cowboy westerns and children's fables.

The two-dimensional characters of fictional melodrama and the use of exaggeration and polarization for dramatic effect find their way into political crisis rhetoric by way of a valorized "us" and a dehumanized or demonized "them."[11] Victims, villains, and heroes are joined together in a sanitized narrative, shorn of moral complexity. "We" have an urgent mission to perform. We must act, not just out of fear but from a clear sense of moral purpose. Good must triumph, and good will triumph, but victory will not be easy. The enemy is wily, clever, and will stop at nothing. It has already threatened (or victimized) us. By some accounts, this danger may justify borrowing a page from their book while exempting ourselves from moral standards that we impose upon others.[12] After all, God is on our side, Satan (or his equivalent) on theirs.[13] These narrative components may be crosscultural and transhistorical; they are by no means confined to contemporary American militarists. Yet the themes run deep in the American psyche,14 and are daily reinforced in American popular culture.[15] They also fit well with President Bush's persona as religious warrior, a Texas-styled sheriff in a Hollywood western who has been called upon by God to make the world a better place.[16] While the president's rhetorical response to 9/11 on September 20, 2001, was uniquely adapted to his ends, audiences, and circumstances, his speechwriters were able to craft much of the address before policy was set, merely by adhering to scriptlike, scripturelike melodramatic formulas.[17]

True to form, the Bush narrative presented a stripped-down account of how the 9/11 attacks came to be that left no room for moral ambiguity, or for criticism. Bush constructed America as a nation unified by an attack on nothing less than its sacred virtues of freedom and democracy, said Anker, a country whose [End Page 185] victimage therefore entitled it to "enact heroic retribution on the evil forces that caused its injury."[18]

With polar oppositions such as these, the administration rallied the American people and reassured them, while also serving notice to the rest of the world of America's unmistakable resolve. Doing anything less at the time might well have seemed heretical. And from the Bush administration's perspective, its melodramatic rhetoric also had the virtue of cowing potential critics while equipping its legions of supporters and spokespersons with a simple, easily repeatable message. Introducing complexity was discouraged. Merely inviting discussion of why American foreign policies were widely disliked in the Arab and Muslim worlds became "playing their game." Yet these same polarities would ultimately be undermined by stubborn realities on the ground in Iraq and by inconsistencies between Bush administration rhetoric and its practices elsewhere in the world.

The Run-Up to Invasion

Building on its melodramatic construction of the threat confronting the United States, the Bush administration launched its open-ended, vaguely stated "war on terror." A chief virtue of its vagaries was its rhetorical adaptability. The antiterror campaign began with assaults on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan coupled with swift passage of legislation designed to fortify the military and to increase national security. At this time it was difficult if not impossible to challenge even such draconian measures as unlimited prison detentions of enemy suspects without court hearings. Periodic reminders of 9/11 served to trump concerns about usurpations of power by the Bush administration and to override criticisms even by appointed commissions and counterterrorism experts. The 9/11 attacks and the crisis rhetoric that followed in their wake enabled the administration to gain control over the terms and limits of permissible debate.

Much of the rest of this story is well known, but new light can be shed by retelling it from a rhetorical perspective.[19] Emboldened by his success, the president chose in January 2002 to extend the reach of his rhetoric to what he called, in his State of the Union message, the "Axis of Evil." Iraq was earmarked as a possible target of U.S. military might, along with Iran and North Korea. Months after 9/11 Americans remained highly vulnerable to insinuations of possible connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. For millions of Americans innuendo sufficed as a substitute for proof.

By August 2002 a full-scale campaign to win support for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime had begun. It comported with the long-standing ambitions of a group of influential neoconservatives as [End Page 186] part of a larger plan to exert America's will in the Middle East. The Bush administration chose its public rationales for invasion carefully. In a major speech by the president on October 7, Saddam was said to possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the means to deploy them. It was also suggested that he had secret links to al Qaeda, and may have had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. Later these allegations were to be severely undermined, but not before the Republicans scored heavily in the November 2002 midterm elections. The Bush administration clung stubbornly to these rationales in the face of troubling counterindicators, even to the point of incurring the wrath of traditional allies when, in March 2003, it declared its intention to intervene militarily in Iraq in the absence of a UN Security Council mandate.

Thus did the administration's post-9/11 crisis rhetoric morph into its case for war with Iraq. In subsequent speeches Bush would continue to capitalize on the appeal of his antiterrorist rhetoric, finding new enemies and new rationales for aggressive action.[20] Iraq was now but a "battle" in the larger war on terrorism. A flow of resistance fighters into Iraq to lend assistance to its homegrown insurgents lent self-fulfilling evidence that the American-led effort to "liberate" Iraq was truly critical to the larger antiterrorist struggle.

One indication of the president's increased power was the willingness of the mainstream news media to put aside doubts and help make the administration's case for war. This compliance continued through to the "liberation" of Iraq in May 2003. A tragic consequence of that complicity was America's failure to prepare adequately for the occupation of Iraq. Another was the failure of editorialists, commentators, columnists, and the like to weigh in candidly on possible motives for the U.S.-led intervention or on its long-term consequences. Once the war commenced, Fox News demonstrated beyond doubt to rivals like CNN and MSNBC the pulling power of unabashed jingoism.[21]

Invasion and Beyond

U.S. troops went into Baghdad expecting to be greeted as liberators.[22] They soon learned that they were unwelcome occupiers. Yet the administration's "war on terror" has displayed great resilience, the Bush administration demonstrating great skill at fending off criticism while repeatedly invoking 9/11 as an emblematic reminder of the need for steadfast vigilance. A stunning example of that resilience was the Bush administration's ability to survive high-level exposures of pre-9/11 ineptness at preventing the 9/11 attacks. Yet another indicator of resilience was the administration's ability to roll with the punches over 9/11-related news from elsewhere in the world, including, [End Page 187] for example, the mysterious disappearance from Tora Bora in Afghanistan of Osama bin Laden, and his subsequent appearances on Arab TV. Still another example has been the occupation, at human and economic costs to Americans and Iraqis alike, reminiscent of Vietnam. Despite these problems the Bush administration managed in fall 2004 to maintain public support for "staying the course" in Iraq and to triumph over the Democrats in the 2004 elections.

Gradually, however, the narrative began to unravel. And while not all of the problems can be laid at the feet of rhetoric, it appears that the Bush administration increasingly fell victim to its own desperate efforts to prop up the case for war, offering, for example, overly optimistic projections for success in Iraq based on spurious statistics, denying high-level authorization for the use of torture while at the same time calling for exemptions to the Geneva Convention's strictures against torture, and efforts to discredit former acting ambassador to Iraq, Joseph Wilson, who had been a vociferous critic of some of the administration's earlier intelligence claims.

Increasingly over time the threads in the narrative linking the war on terror to the war in Iraq wore thin. What did Iraq have to do with the bombings of the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, asked Security Council members even before the invasion? Why not go after corrupt and autocratic Saudi Arabia, from which not just the hijackers had come but also the insane form of jihad that Saudi extremists had helped export to the rest of the Muslim world? Why, asked the Spanish after Madrid was terrorized by an al Qaeda–type attack, must we keep troops in Iraq in order to prevent further such attacks on our territory? By remaining in Iraq, aren't we creating more terrorists than we are killing or imprisoning?

Troublesome questions such as these continued to plague the Bush administration. They included questions of mission in Iraq, of who our friends and enemies were, of why the Sunni Arab world continued to support the Iraqi resistance, and of whether, by turning political power over to the Iraqi Shiites, the United States was playing into the hands of Islamic extremists, including its long-standing enemies in Iran.

Once having invaded and occupied, it was of course impolitic simply to turn back, or to confess wrongdoing. The decision to invade and the decisions made in the course of the occupation created other rhetorical dilemmas, not least tensions between the need to appear consistent and the need for flexibility, the need to appear credible and the need to dissemble. Dilemmas such as these bedevil political leaders. Routinely advised to stay on message, they are also criticized for sticking with failed messages. Damned if they seem evasive, they are ridiculed if their self-disclosures become self-damning. Honesty and openness are regarded as qualifications for office by a trusting public, but [End Page 188] political leaders are often obliged to cover over narrow self-interest with the fig leaf of morality and the aura of sincerity.

Neither is it always possible to satisfy competing interests simultaneously, or to reconcile conflicting interests. Consider the paradoxes, for example, of "liberating" Iraq by way of a "shock and awe" aerial bombardment, and of ordering its people to become "free" by way of an America-imposed electoral process. Imposing one's will on a people while also trying to win their hearts and minds has been a perennial problem ever since the United States invaded and occupied Iraq.

One year after President Bush's reelection, polls indicated that Americans had become disenchanted with the war—no longer willing to reward its congressional supporters and punish its critics as they did in the 2002 elections; no longer eager to cheer on the president, as they did when he stood aboard the carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to proclaim "Mission accomplished" in Iraq; not sure whether to place much stock in the transfer of political power under way in Iraq; not certain, even, whether American troops should remain in Iraq, with whatever consequences that might entail.

As this is written it is too early to know whether the present instability in Iraq will persist and even get worse. However there is little doubt but that the Bush administration was unprepared for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, including the strength of the Sunni Arab resistance and the developing civil war. The United States continued to be incapable of reconciling its ongoing mythic crisis narrative with real-world constraints. Outside the United States its sanitized version of "why they hate us" was generally not believed. Nor was the president credible when he declared (repeatedly) that our aim in Iraq was to stop "terror" in its tracks—before it could return to the United States. Not until after the 2004 elections did the president acknowledge that the Iraq insurgency was mostly homegrown. As the United States attempted to reach out to Arabs and Muslims by way of "public diplomacy" campaigns in the Middle East and declarations of intent to bring peace, freedom, and democracy to that troubled region, its efforts fell afoul of its continuing alliances with Arab dictatorships, its tilt toward Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and its own record of human rights violations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including killings of innocents, illegal detentions of Muslim suspects, and widespread prison abuses.

This is not to say that the Democrats were in a better position to fix in Iraq what the Bush administration had broken. President Bush's electoral success in 2004 was as much a function of Democrats' failures, due in large measure to their rhetorical dilemmas. Critics of the war were in the unenviable position of appearing to welcome bad news from Iraq—either that or to mute their opposition by focusing on means rather than ends. The nomination of John [End Page 189] Kerry over Howard Dean was regarded initially as an opportunity for the Democrats to adopt a centrist stance on the war, and even to "out-hawk" the Bush administration on a number of issues, such as the alleged failure of the Defense Department to supply U.S. troops with sufficient armor to conduct its rightful mission. But the Republicans managed to reframe that attempted centrism as flip-flopping. In general, the Republicans proved themselves masterful at rendering as treasonable, or at least unpatriotic, any criticisms that cut to the heart of their own overblown rhetoric.

But beating back the Democrats in 2004 proved a lot easier than overcoming the wrath of ordinary Americans, increasing numbers of whom were expressing disillusionment with the war in Iraq and demanding a pullout or significant cutbacks of American troops. From time to time since the occupation began, news of hopeful developments—the transfer of political power to Iraqis, signs of economic redevelopment in Iraq, and the planned replacement of American troops by Iraqi soldiers and police—had seemed to give renewed meaning to the invasion. But the president's options became increasingly limited.

Lessons Learned

Looking back on the praise bestowed upon President Bush for his melodramatic framing of the threat to America made manifest on 9/11, it seems that the conventional standards for judging crisis rhetoric of this kind need rethinking. Opinion polls at the time confirmed expert judgments that his speech of September 20, 2001, had been highly effective on its target audiences. But findings such as these provide scant indication of the long-term consequences of an important speech. What works in the short run often fails over the long term. What meets immediate expectations often fails to take into account what in retrospect were the needs of the moment. What persuades targeted audiences may have deleterious effects on unintended audiences, including potential recruits for the Jihadists' cause.[23] What led journalists and politicians at the time to pronounce unequivocally favorable judgments may have concealed privately held doubts and suspicions. And too, there is the danger that those who crafted or delivered the important speech may get carried away by their own rhetoric.

We should be wary, then, of crisis rhetoric constructed on simplistic melodramatic binaries. We should be wary too of cultural predispositions toward assuming our inherent moral superiority. To the extent that these assumptions are fed by the news and entertainment media, or by our schools and places of [End Page 190] worship, they too need critical scrutiny. This is not to say that moral outrage is never justified or that the world's sole remaining superpower can dispense altogether with its outrage melodramatically in response to attacks like those on 9/11. But that rhetoric needs to make room for alternatives between war and capitulation. In retrospect, President Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric served his own good (for a while) but not the nation's good. Realism dictated a more modulated response to the attacks, if not in their immediate wake, then shortly thereafter.

As the Bush administration floundered in Iraq, a turn away from melodramatic binaries seemed all the more urgent. The condition known as quagmire, or situational entrapment, is marked by dilemmas of a sort that seem at once unendurable and unsolvable. A striking example as of this writing: the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq appeared essential for purposes of preventing civil war but served also to fuel the Iraq insurgency and the larger Jihadist movement. What to do?

I do not pretend to know how quagmire can be avoided, but it does seem, as of this writing, that the time for melodrama is long past. A cooler rhetoric is surely needed, whether by the Bush administration or one that succeeds it. Such a rhetoric must exhibit greater respect for differences, greater openness to compromise and inclusion in the evolving political process, and a greater willingness to address fundamental problems that virtually guarantee continued strife. These problems include U.S. support for repressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world that make a mockery of its self-declared commitments to freedom and democracy.

It is possible too that sheer exhaustion with continuous armed struggle will drive the opposing factions in Iraq toward a U.S.-brokered peace agreement, one that includes plans for redevelopment of infrastructure and equitable redistribution of resources. It is even conceivable that the Bush administration, or one of its successors, will come to appreciate the value of America's "soft power," its powers of attraction and alliance-building, as opposed to its current inclination to bully others by use of punitive "hard power."[24] When that happens we may discover that those whom we count as our worst enemies will prefer to talk with us rather than terrorize us. Rhetoric, said Kenneth Burke, is an advantage-seeking activity, but we should not forget that the benefits it reaps for us need not disadvantage others; the benefits may instead be mutually advantageous.[25]

More realistically, it appears that we and our enemies will be locked into conflicts that are mutually destructive for some time to come. Rhetoric will have had a role to play in that outcome as well. [End Page 191]

Herbert W. Simons is Professor of Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he has taught communication since 1960. He wishes to thank Dr. Craig Eisendrath for his valuable comments on successive drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

1. See George Packer, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005).

2. See for example Daniel Okrent, "The War of the Words: A Dispatch from the Front Lines," New York Times, March 6, 2005, 12.

3. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and the War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).

4. For an excellent account of how 9/11 played to the interests of neocons and of others in and close to the Bush administration who had long campaigned for forceful removal of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime, see Packer, The Assassin's Gate, chaps. 1–4. See also James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking Books, 2004). On the horrors perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and his regime, see Con Coughlin, Saddam: His Rise and Fall (New York: Harper, 2004).

5. See Packer, The Assassin's Gate, 40–41. According to Packer, history began anew for George W. Bush on 9/11, and made him newly receptive to a national security staff already predisposed toward regime change in Iraq. Apparently it was an easy sell.

6. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/.

7. Following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush enjoyed the highest presidential approval ratings in recorded history, upwards of 90 percent. See Stephen F. Frantzich, "September 11th and the Bush Presidency: Rally-Round-the-Rubble," White House Studies (Spring 2004): 1-3.

8. Media reactions were overwhelmingly positive. See Packer, The Assassin's Gate, chap. 2.

9. Denise M. Bostdorff, The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994).

10. See Elisabeth Anker, "Villains, Victims, and Heroes: Melodrama, Media, and September 11th," Journal of Communication 55 (2005): 22–37; Elisabeth Anker, "From Politics to Evil: Melodrama and State Politics," eScholarship Repository (Berkeley: Institute of Government Studies, 2005) at http://repositories.cdlib.org/igs/WP2005–1. That which is subsumed by Anker under the heading of melodramatic discourse or melodramatic narrative finds expression by other names: e.g., agonistic rhetoric, binary discourse, political fundamentalism, prophetic dualism, crisis rhetoric, or simply domestic war propaganda. See for example David Domke, God Willing: Political Fundamentalism in the White House (London: Pluto Press, 2004). On binary discourse, see Kevin Coe, David Domke, Erica S. Graham, Sue Lockett John, and Victor W. Pickard, "No Shades of Gray: The Binary Discourse of George W. Bush and an Echoing Press," Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 234–52. See Bostdorff, The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis, on crisis rhetoric. On prophetic dualism, see Philip Wander, "The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy," Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 339–61. On domestic propaganda and agonistic discourse, see James J. Kimble, "'Whither Propaganda?' Agonism and the 'Engineering of Dissent,'" Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 201–18.

11. See Anker, "From Politics to Evil"; Domke, God Willing; Kimble, "'Whither Propaganda?'"

12. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

13. On American exceptionalism, see Dan Nimmo and James E. Combs, Subliminal Politics: Myths and Mythmakers in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980). See also Denise M. Bostdorff, "George W. Bush's Post–September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 293–319. [End Page 192]

14. See, for example, Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kimble, "'Whither Propaganda?'"; and Bostdorff, "George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric."

15. Several essays in Lee Artz and Yahya R. Kamilipour's Bring 'Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) speak to this point. See especially Tanja Thomas and Fabian Virchow's "Banal Militarism and the Culture of War." See also Michael Billig's Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995) for its astute analysis of how nationalism insinuates itself into British and American culture in subtle, barely noticeable ways.

16. Gone from modern-day political melodramas are the grandiose gestures and stirring music that marked old-fashioned morality plays, but they have been more than adequately replaced by television's capacity to bring heart-rending documentary footage and diatribe directly into the home.

17. See, for example, D. T. Max's excellent account of the crafting of the September 20 address: "The Making of the Speech," New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001.

18. Anker, "From Politics to Evil," 4.

19. Of particular interest to me as a rhetorician were the Bush administration's uses of deception short of outright lying in making the case for war; also its ability to "pre-persuade," as Pratkanis and Aronson put it, by their influence and/or control of the terms and conditions of debate. This included, for example, gaining widespread acceptance of the assumption that skeptics and naysayers had the burden of proof in showing that Saddam didn't possess hidden weapons of mass destruction. See A. Pratkanis and E. Aronson, Age of Propaganda (New York: Freeman, 2000). In this special issue see especially the essays by Jamieson and Zarefsky.

20. Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006).

21. See for example Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2006).

22. But see Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's Weapons of Mass Deception (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2003) on Iraqi perceptions of the American-assisted toppling of Saddam's statue.

23. See Danner, The Secret Way to War; also Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: New York Times Books, 2005).

24. See Joseph Nye's Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

25. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).