Young Americans for Liberty – Ole Miss Chapter

The vocabulary used by the Bush Administration shows that the US involvement in the Middle East was not portrayed objectively, but rather in a way that anticipates a fearful, Bush-supporting reaction. One tactic of the Administration’s strategy was to exaggerate the threat of the enemy with misleading statements, as in the case of Bush’s speech on October 7^th, 2002, five months before the Iraq invasion. Bush warns, “Many people have asked how close Saddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. Well, we don’t know, exactly, and that’s the problem. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud” (Woodward 97). Five days prior to giving this speech, Bush was informed of the National Intelligence Estimate’s (NIE—the collective judgment of all US intelligence agencies) “moderate confidence” that “Iraq does not have a nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one but is likely to have a weapon by 2007 to 2009” (Woodward 97). Bush’s ambiguous assessment of Iraqi’s nuclear program leaves out any mention of this timeline, and instead misleads listeners by implying that an Iraqi nuclear bomb is an urgent threat to America. Among those who had access to the confidential intelligence reports, there was no serious threat of a “mushroom cloud.” Even Donald Rumsfeld later recalled, “We never—none of us ever believed that [Iraq] had nuclear weapons. The only real worry that we had was chemical” (Woodward 102). Bush’s speech incited a fear of nuclear attack by leaving out information that would have depicted Saddam Hussein as a less urgent threat than Bush wanted the nation to believe; the imagery of a mushroom cloud is more effective in gaining support for a military invasion than an explanation of a five to seven year nuclear weapon development program. But it produces a reaction that is inappropriate for the reality of the situation, and favorable to the Bush Administration. As journalist Mark Danner explains in his essay “Words in a Time of War: On Rhetoric, Truth, and Power”:

War produces fear. But so also does the rhetoric of war…What terrorists ultimately produce is not death or mayhem but fear; and in a War on Terror the rich political benefits of that most lucrative emotion will inevitably be shared—between the terrorists themselves and the political leaders who lead the fight against them (Sczanto 19)

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