Zagacki

272
"According to Maurice Charland (1987), constitutive rhetorics are crucial during
‘‘founding’’ moments when advocates try to ‘‘interpellate’’ or ‘‘hail’’ audiences, calling a
common, collective identity into existence. As Charland might say, President Bush as
well as administration officials ‘‘addressed and so attempted to call into being’’ a unified
and democratic Iraqi ‘people’ (p. 134)."

273
" Prophetic dualism
holds that Americans are morally and spiritually superior and destined to spread
‘‘good’’ around the globe."

"To be sure, Americans formed the President’s primary
audience: he interpellated them as prophetic dualists. But the effectiveness of Bush’s
rhetorical campaign also hinged on the way he articulated subject positions for
people living in Iraq through a process of ‘‘identification’’ in the uniquely American
prophetic dualist narrative.3 For Bush, the whole idea of ‘regime change’ presupposed
that Iraqis would participate in and secure democratic practices."

 "By the end of 2006, rather than ‘‘reconstituting’’ Iraqis as a unified and
democratic ‘people,’ the President’s policy resulted in what the bipartisan Iraq Study
Group called a ‘‘grave and deteriorating’’ situation (Baker et al., 2006, p. 6)."

 "My purpose in this article is to investigate President Bush’s Iraq war speeches as
failed constitutive rhetoric. My study is guided by three overarching questions: (1)
Why did Bush’s speeches fail as constitutive rhetoric? (2) How did these speeches
invoke or impose constraints on the American–Iraqi relationship in the form of what
I shall call ‘‘constitutive paradoxes?’’ (3) What rhetorical opportunities are afforded
by the failure of constitutive rhetoric? I will argue that, in the process of trying to
create identification between Americans and Iraqis, making them partners in a democratic
founding, Bush’s discourse contributed to the emergence of conditions that
were in many ways diametrically opposed to the democratic transformation he was
promoting, creating several troubling constitutive paradoxes. The choice of the term
‘‘constitutive paradox’’ stems from the work of Kenneth Burke (1968). Burke writes
that many attempts to define audiences as democratic, in effect reconstituting their
identities, reveal ‘‘the paradox that these doctrines of progress contributed their part
to usher in precisely the gloom they thought they were ushering out’’ (p. 331)."

" In
Iraq, as my analysis suggests, President Bush’s rhetoric addressed Americans as givers
of democracy and freedom and the people of Iraq as the recipients, a constitution
that could only last so long as democratization made progress."

"More specifically,
he addressed an audience of Iraqis that he believed was already consubstantial with

274
'the very identity he sought to call into existence, as if their identity was intrinsic to
them, ‘‘existed prior to or served as the ‘container’ of their political community’’
(Charland, 2001, p. 68). In Iraq, however, the views of Shiites and Sunnis, in particular,
were already ‘‘a rhetorical’’ or ‘‘ideological effect,’’ as Charland (1987) might
put it. These views held more ideological sway with most Iraqis than did the discourse
of national identity proposed by Bush, which assumed the existence of a universal
desire for democracy."

" As Charland (1987) suggests, President Bush assumed and
presumed the existence of a fundamental collective identity for his audiences, a kind
of collective ‘we’. In fact, the collective ‘we’ is a shifting formation: the identity of a
reconstituted people, their borders and who counts as members of the new collective
people are constantly contested and repositioned (Drzewiecka, 2002). Thus, when
democratic progress slowed, in part because Shiites and Sunnis resisted the occupation,
President Bush seemed compelled by his own prophetic dualism to intensify
the American military and economic commitment. This renewed commitment made
the Iraqis more dependent on the United States and expended American resources.
But it did not necessarily make the situation better and in some ways made the situation
worse (Ricks, 2006; Shadid, 2005)."

"According to the Bush administration, withdrawing from Iraq would
have enabled America’s ‘evil’ enemies to prevail over the United States and its new Iraqi
allies. As one administration official put it, a premature troop withdrawal amounted to
‘‘surrender,’’ ‘‘defeat,’’ and ‘‘a death sentence for the millions of Iraqis who voted
for . . . a free and democratic society’’ (quoted in Weisman & Williamson, 2007, p. 3A)."
Voice of Iraqis?

"first, as Judith Butler (1997) suggests, the emergence of a
reconstituted and seemingly autonomous identity is rooted in paradox—becoming a
subject is intricately bound up with being subjected to power. In Iraq, Bush rhetorically
constituted the relationship between Americans and the Iraqis in such a manner
that it denied the autonomy requisite for Iraqi self-determination. Moreover, by
describing Iraqis as lacking the resources necessary for instituting democracy, his
public address called attention to an irresolvable lack"

"Second,
advocates must consider the competing worldviews of various audiences and understand
how these identities impede and promote democratic transformation. The contradictions
that arise between competing identities and the narratives that constitute
them pose a tremendous challenge, especially to foreign policy rhetorics which seek
to create founding moments."

"When Iraqis resisted President Bush’s notion of an Iraqi
democratic founding, he defined away the resistance within the confines of a prophetic
dualist frame. This prevented him from adjusting or thinking ‘reflexively’
about this resistance and how it could be transformed into a rhetorical and political resource

275
"President Bush’s foreign policy discourse
has always characterized the world in a simple, dualistic fashion that actually evades
a critical engagement with history and the deeply rooted traditions of other countries."

"escalating violence and lack of overall
democratic progress in Iraq) led to rising discontent in the United States, opening
what Tate (2006) calls ‘‘a rhetorical space’’ from which opponents in Iraq but also in
America could contest the President’s Iraq policy. In the United States, dissenters
revised the prophetic dualist identity, although their resistance did not result in an
immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq or seriously oppose the basic
grounds of prophetic dualism."

"Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric and its extension
in the work of Burke and Butler. Next, I rhetorically analyze several of President
Bush’s public speeches spanning the period from right before the invasion of Iraq to
immediately after the Iraqi constitutional elections in January 2006. This primary
selection supplies a fairly broad overview of the President’s public discourse on Iraq.
I focus on how Bush’s speeches tried to interpret events in Iraq in prophetic dualist
terms. Finally, I investigate the implications of the President’s speeches for the theory
of constitutive rhetoric. I attend specifically to what this case study reveals about the
constitutive paradoxes and the reflexive inventional possibilities of constitutive rhetoric."

277


"Following Foucault, Butler argues that we must see power as forming the subject and
not just subordinating or relegating it to a lower order. Power supplies the very condition
of the subject’s existence and the future path of its desire. In this sense, power
‘‘is what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the
beings that we are’’ (Butler, p. 2). In Iraq, as Tate (2006) might explain, the ideology
of prophetic dualism became a liberating discourse for many Americans and for some
Iraqis.4 But the rhetoric failed as a constitutive term of collective Iraqi identity: the
political purpose and end implied by the narrative of the American founding in President
Bush’s discourse redefined democracy according to a restrictive agenda, one
imposed from the outside and not particularly attuned to the Iraqi peoples’ unique
cultural=historical traditions. If violence may be said to possess a rhetorical dimension,
the rhetorical space opened up by this failure empowered Iraqi insurgents to
resist coalition and Iraqi government efforts to democratize Iraq, both symbolically
and militarily. In other words, Shiites and Sunnis found themselves addressed by a
discourse of power seeking to awaken them to the possibilities of becoming autonomous
political subjects. Some of them used this autonomy to act democratically,
although this made them dependent on the occupiers to make democracy succeed.
Other Shiites and Sunnis turned around and exercised their autonomy to resist not
only the occupation but each other. In either case, the deployment of American
power ‘formed’ Iraqi subjects, as it were—subjecting Iraqis to the occupation on
the one hand and emboldening Iraqis to resist the occupation on the other.
These developments made it difficult for the United States to achieve its prophetic
dualist goals."

278
" Gelb, in particular, recognized that Iraqis lacked what Charland placed at the center
of his analysis of the peuple Quebecois, an extended rhetoric of national history that
would motivate future independence and restoration. As Gelb (2005) makes clear, many
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds really aspired to return to a cultural heritage based more in
the premodern past of contested space and divided (though autonomous) identity
and politics, rather than to jump into the modern era as a unified democratic state.
According to Rieff (2003), the CIA agreed with these more realistic assessments
while the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration and within the Department
of Defense consistently asserted ‘‘that there was no reason to suppose that Iraq could
not become a full-fledged democracy, and relatively quickly and smoothly’’ (p. 32).
On several occasions before and after the invasion, President Bush put the best possible
public face on this upbeat neoconservative prediction regarding the possibility
of democracy by illustrating how the various ethnic and religious factions living
in Iraq could be ‘‘unified’’ as one people, the ‘‘Iraqis.’’"



Speech - cold war
279
" Bush once again framed the upcoming invasion in prophetic dualist
terms:
We go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right
country. Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time.
Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves.
At times in this speech, the President played down the altruistic motives of the United
States. He preferred instead to authorize the impending military assault by linking
it to Divine Providence: ‘‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is
God’s gift to humanity.’’"

"President Bush addressed Iraqis more directly in his March 17, 2003, ‘‘Address
Issuing an Ultimatum to Iraq,’’ a speech delivered only days before the attack that
used virtually the same prophetic dualist language found in his other Iraq war messages.
He asserted that ‘‘Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast,
and I have a message for them.’’ The message was that a military campaign
would ‘‘be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against
you.’’ Bush promised that the United States would provide resources necessary for
‘‘building’’ the nascent democracy, including ‘‘the food and medicine you need.
We will tear down the apparatus of terror and . . . help you to build a new Iraq that
is prosperous and free . . .. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is
near.’’ He once again emphasized how the United States and other free nations had a
‘‘duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent . . . . tonight as we have
done before, America and its allies accept that responsibility.’’
In these messages, Bush drew from prophetic dualism the idea"
(Americans "suited to do this)
285
" The ideological effects of President Bush’s rhetoric manifested themselves in the
American–Iraqi relationship as a series of constitutive paradoxes. In this section I
consider these paradoxes in greater detail. As suggested above, when Bush hailed
his audiences, he created a paradoxical relationship in which the supposedly freed
and yet occupied people of Iraq could only meet the demands of democracy and freedom
by acting almost entirely as he and the other coalition ‘liberators’ said they
should.6 Their ‘democratic’ being, Burke might say, came from outside—it was
extrinsic to them. Butler would put it this way: the relational terms under which Bush
addressed the other in Iraq were paradoxically self-disabling—the gift to democratic
subjects offered to enable agency yet prevented that autonomy. Subjection and interpellation
are always simultaneously limiting and enabling."
287
"The many different Iraqi insurgent groups, and the threat of an all-out civil war
should the Americans withdraw from Iraq, complicated this paradoxical situation
even more. According to Tate (2006), ‘‘Charland argues that the process of renaming
may enact a constitutive rhetoric, and this constitutive rhetoric may set a historical
narrative into motion’’ (p. 7). However, Bush’s prophetic dualist rhetoric did not resonate
with the material realities and previously articulated identities of Iraqi insurgents.
The insurgents pursued religious and political goals that accorded with their
own ethnic and sectarian identities and narratives. These were in no way consubstantial
with either the American policy or the views of the newly formed Iraqi government.
These identities and narratives were already rhetorically constituted but also
provoked by the American effort to occupy and democratize Iraq. Why did this
provocation occur? One possibility it that the President engaged in what Butler
(1997) calls ‘‘misrecognition’’ (p. 96). The name by which he interpellated Iraqis
who joined the insurgency was not a proper name but an improper political (or ethnic=
religious) category and ‘‘hence a signifier capable of being interpreted in a number of
divergent and conflictual ways’’ (p. 96). These names could have been interpreted
as affirmations or insults, depending on the context in which the hailing occurred
and where, according to Butler, the ‘‘context is the effective historicity and spatiality
of the sign’’ (p. 96)."
287
"Instead, Bush’s rhetoric reduced or ignored
Iraqi ethnic=religious traditions and histories, what Butler calls ‘‘totalizing’’ and
‘‘paralyzing’’ the person who is named (p. 96). As political scientist Larry Diamond
(2004) puts it, ‘‘Too many Iraqis viewed the invasion not as an international effort
but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers,
and this evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist
struggles against Iraq’s former overlords.’’ The President characterized insurgents
as ‘‘terrorists,’’ ‘‘Al Qaeda,’’ ‘‘enemies of freedom,’’ ‘‘Saddamists’’ and ‘‘rejectionists.’’"
289
"They must understand that many audiences exist between and among competing
narratives. For Charland (1987; see also 1991), this comprehension moves them closer
toward communicative praxis by overcoming or defining ‘‘away the recalcitrance
the world presents by providing the subject with new perspectives and motives’’
(p. 142). In this sense, President Bush’s rhetoric was not reflexive enough.
In order to encourage a more reflexive democracy in Iraq, efforts to address various
ethnic and sectarian groups will not only have to contain some signs of the audiences’
oppositional ethnic=religious positions but also ‘‘capture alienated subjects by rearticulating
existing subject positions so as to contain or resolve experienced dialectical contradictions
between the world and its discourses’’ (Charland, 1987, p. 142). In other words, as
Gelb (2004) advises, security and other material conditions notwithstanding, the negotiation
of some kind of collective community can only take place if such rhetorics are
based upon the fundamental political reality of Iraq: that none of the three largest
ethnic=religious groups—Arab Shiites, Arab Sunnis and Kurds—will allow itself to
be dominated by the others. Each will fight if its core interests are jeopardized. (p. A12)
Marr adds that political leaders must negotiate political alliances and alignments
created on the basis of ‘‘interests and programs between and among parties that
cut across ethnic and sectarian lines’’ (quoted in Kelleman, 2006)."