Terror and Evil in Iraq : A Study of Political Discourse

2008

America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights-to the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor, self-government to the rule of terror and torture. America is a friend to the people of Iraq. (October 7 2002 whitehouse.gov).

Young Scholars in Writing, 2005

This paper attempts to demonstrate how the White House motivated U.S. public consent while simultaneously restricting the potential for open and rational debate. I analyze several presidential speeches delivered between September 2001 and May 2004 and examine interviews with Osama bin Laden to illustrate parallels between Bush’s and bin Laden’s strategic applications of language. Ultimately, I argue that because Bush had to appeal to an ideologically diverse U.S. population, he invoked an interpretive stance; rather than inviting logical consideration of merit and disadvantage, the war was presented through abstract language and within a framework of moral and cultural association. This strategy circumvented social variances and promoted social cohesion as his audience became bound through unifying principles. By drawing from and reiterating pre-existing notions of community and collective identification, Bush associated traditional values of the U.S. democratic ideal with his own agenda.

2005

2020

, attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the US along with its allies declared War on Terror, where the binary opposition of 'Us' vs 'Them' was firmly established and channelized via both electronic and print media. The media's discourse on the war against terrorism has been an intriguing research area for linguists as well as international relations experts. This paper highlights the problematization in defining a universally accepted definition of terrorism, the idiosyncratic nature of the War on Terror and how it differs from conventional wars, and, later how media, state and non-state actors (those labeled terrorists) use language to legitimize their views. International research journal of management, IT and social sciences © 2020. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Indonesian EFL Journal, 2017

This study aims to reveal how a single reality, i.e., terrorism, is presented and viewed by US officials. The corpus of the current study is US President Barack Obama's speeches from 2011 to 2015. The approach used in this study to detect discursive structures within the transcripts of the American officials' speeches and discover the ideologies underlying them is Van Dijk's (2004) as well as a content-based analysis method. As far as the analysis the data is concerned, the macro strategies of 'positive self-representation' and 'negative other-representation' are useful to evaluate attitudes and opinions on the one hand, that is, Obama has applied polarization, victimization, actor description, national self-glorification, presupposition, lexicalization, and actor description among other strategies in his speeches. On the other hand, the findings prove that Obama's impressions of terrorism versus terrorists and states versus people are changing from 2011 to 2015. The findings of the present study is hoped to be useful for both critical discourse analysts and political activists.

2017

The paper aims to identify the colligations of ‘terrorism’ with its ideological stances in WOTC corpus using John Sinclair’s model of extended lexical units. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the constructions 'of' and constructions 'around' the lemma 'terrorism' for this colligational analysis. To finds out the main actors, actions, events and policies in the discourse of 'war on terror', the keywords analysis with detailed concordance analysis has also been conducted. The findings show that the Pak Anglo-American newspapers frequently invoke the ‘syntax of terror’ to legitimise and rationalise the global 'war on terror'. The grammatical patterns identified in this study are classified into nine distinct syntactic structures. Finally, drawing from the belief that discursive practices are political practices, the research studies the syntax of the terror discourse that may have enabled, necessitated or disabled particular discourses or may...

Jurnal Ilmiah Peuradeun, 2020

The study of this article was set out to identify the use of the language of propaganda in Bush’s political speech. It was purposed to clarify the propaganda techniques applied by Bush in order to have one point of view among the audiences. The study focused on how the techniques of propaganda occurred within Bush Jr.’s speech in which he attempted to explain the different sides of who is combating terrorism and who is performing terror. The material of analysis was the speech delivered by Bush Jr. in front of the Military Officers Association of America Meeting in 2006. This article then found that the propagandist tries to control the relationship between information and audiences’ mind through the usage of language in their political speech. It was argued that propaganda can also effectively work toward almost all types of audiences, whereas the strategy of propaganda was mostly creating a fallacious reasoning connection concerning the topics being discussed.

The concept of terrorism (and antiterrorism) is a complex phenomenon that has received a lot of debate in the last decade. A highly complex phenomenon, terrorism stands at the forefront of national and international agendas. Taking on many forms, it is associated with a wide variety of groups and motivations. It has been presented in different ways, depending on who is speaking. It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to do a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of speeches of Bush and Obama on terrorism. Using six speeches from Bush and Obama as the data and using a qualitative content analytical approach, it draws on van Dijk's concept of Critical Discourse Analysis. The study reveals that Bush and Obama projected terrorism negatively while they projected anti-terrorism positively by carefully selecting emotionally charged vocabulary and expressions. The notion of power as control, mind control and context control were common features of Bush and Obama's speeches. This study has implications for the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis and studies on terrorism.

Arab World English Journal (AWEJ), 2020

Manipulation is a discursive phenomenon used by speakers to affect the thoughts ( and indirectly the actions) of the recipients. This study is concerned with manipulation in two political speeches; one in English delivered by the American President Donald J. Trump, while the other in Arabic delivered by the Iraqi President Barham Salih to be the study's data. Each one of these two speeches is divided into serial-numbered extracts( henceforth Ext.). The study aims at investigating the semantic and rhetorical devices utilized as manipulation strategies in these speeches. To this end, the qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis will be followed in this study. The significance of the study stems from how the ideological dimension based on bettering off the speaker's image and derogating others' image plays a vital role in the political speeches. This study draws on Van Dijk's ideological approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of political discourse, and accordingly, it is adopted as a model. Results revealed that both speakers use lexicalization, a list of three, repetition, and citing as effective techniques in their two speeches to affect their recipients' minds. The study concluded that the ideological framework of "positive self-presentation" and "negative other-presentation" is the central umbrella under which manipulation can exist and work freely. The findings might help linguists and political analysts to understand how politicians use the linguistic features in their discourse to affect the audience's thoughts and behaviors manipulatively.

The present paper examines pronouns, modal auxiliaries, metaphors, and euphemisms in certain 9/11 and warfare speeches delivered by the last two American Presidents, George Bush and Barack Obama, from 2001 to 2013. The aim of the paper is to raise awareness about the manipulative use of language in political speeches, and by applying Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper quantitatively and qualitatively approaches the analysis of salient pronouns, modal auxiliaries, metaphors and euphemisms, examining their frequencies, patterns and implications of manipulative use. More precisely, the paper tries to discover correlations between the above items, suggest the purpose of their manipulative usages, and implies which President prefers which manipulative usage more. Finally, the paper suggests how the Presidents may be perceived by the public. As for the findings of the present study, they reveal a correlation between pronouns and modals on one hand, and metaphors and euphemisms on the other. The above-mentioned items are used for a couple of manipulative purposes: positive self and negative other-presentation, “face” protection, intimidation, and justification of war. Bush seems to favour the last three usages, while Obama is predominantly focused on “face” protection and positive self-presentation. As far as the perception of the public is concerned, the findings suggest that Bush may be perceived as more direct, daring, formal and personal, while Obama may be perceived as more social, polite, and professional. Basically, the findings suggest that Bush deals more with foreign policy, while Obama is focused on domestic policy. This indicates that the findings may have been influenced by Obama’s senatorship speeches on warfare, which make up half of the Obama-corpus, and were introduced to match the size of the Bush-corpus. Thus, future research including the latest, and only presidential speeches of President Obama may yield different results.