Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror

© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.38 No.2, pp. 269–294 ISSN 0305-8298; DOI: 10.1177/0305829809347513 http://mil.sagepub.com Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror Ty Solomon Many have noted how the Bush administration’s linking of Iraq to the war on terror lent a certain degree of legitimacy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Few scholars who have noted this linkage, however, have theorised about the specific discursive mechanisms that allowed Iraq to be incorporated and normalised within the war on terror. This article utilises the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau to analyse how ‘Iraq’ was (re)constructed as a threat through the war on terror. The productive power of the discourses constructing ‘Iraq’ is examined in the wording of poll questions as sites of reproduction and naturalisation of the dominant understandings of Iraq and the war on terror. Rather than tools used to measure public opinion that exists independently of them, this article argues that polls are better viewed as vehicles through which foreign policy and security discourses are stabilised and naturalised. Keywords: Laclau, polls, war on terror In a town-hall meeting designed to mobilise public support for potential military action against Iraq, the Secretaries of State and Defense and the President’s National Security Advisor addressed a crowd that had seen the recent news about Iraq’s possession of deadly weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The officials argued that these weapons posed an intolerable threat not only to the region, but to the security of the United States itself. The Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was once again showing intransigence towards the United Nations by not allowing weapons inspectors to see suspicious sites. If Saddam did not submit to inspections, the officials added, the US would respond with military force. The crowd was not receptive to the official arguments. The cabinet members were incessantly heckled during the meeting, which was broadcast on For helpful comments on various drafts I thank Sammy Barkin, Aida Hozic, Ed Schatz, two anonymous reviewers and participants at the ISA-South conference, the Workshop on Social Construction and International Studies at Florida International University and the Workshop on Interpretive and Relational Methods at the ISA-Northeast conference. Particular thanks to Badredine Arfi and Ido Oren for their assistance, time and encouragement. 269 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) live television. The crowd became so interruptive that at one point the Secretary of State asked the moderator ‘Could you tell those people I’ll be happy to talk to them when this is over. I’d like to make my point’.1 Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice never faced such a crowd in the run-up to the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The above town-hall meeting was broadcast live on CNN on 18 February 1998. Madeleine Albright, William Cohen and Sandy Berger were attending the meeting to mobilise public support for the Clinton administration’s plan for a military strike against Iraq because of its decision to halt UN inspections. While the US did bomb some strategic Iraqi defence sites, the heckling Albright, Cohen and Berger faced was indicative of the overall public resistance at the time to the idea of a full-scale military invasion of Iraq, an option the Clinton administration was seriously considering. This account is valuable in illuminating a few issues with which scholars of International Relations (IR) have been increasingly concerned. Studies using the theoretical concepts of discourse and identity in IR have increased dramatically in recent years, and have been derived from a variety of perspectives in social and political theory.2 The theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau has been highly influential in political theory, and offers an innovative approach for analysing the political dynamics of discourses and identities in recent US foreign policy. Laclau’s original collaboration with Chantal Mouffe continues to be widely discussed,3 his solo work since then has received sustained comment and critique, including a recent edited volume,4 and has been central to the development of the so-called ‘Essex School’ of discourse theory.5 Many studies 1. ‘US Policy on Iraq Draws Fire in Ohio’, http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/ 9802/18/town.meeting.folo/. 2. Foucauldian, Derridean and Habermasian perspectives, for instance, have all been productively utilised by IR scholars. See David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Maja Zehfuss, Constructivism in International Relations: The Politics of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Thomas Risse, ‘“Let’s Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International Organization 54, no.1 (2000): 1–39, respectively. 3. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). For an overview, see Ann Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 1998). 4. See Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart, eds, Laclau: A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 5. See David Howarth, Aletta Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis, eds, Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies, and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). For Laclau’s major texts after Hegemony, see his New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (London and New York: Verso, 1990), Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), and On Populist Reason (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 270 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror in IR have cited and utilised Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse, yet these typically do not fully employ their complex framework as developed in Laclau’s later work.6 This article utilises Laclau’s framework to engage in the comparison that the above story suggests. The heckling that Albright, Cohen and Berger faced in 1998 brings to mind the Bush administration’s successful campaign to persuade the American public that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was necessary and legitimate, given the new threat environment of the post-9/11 world. This article applies Laclau’s theoretical approach through an analysis of how the signifier ‘Iraq’ was discursively reconstructed and normalised as a ‘threat’ that appeared to naturally fit within the war on terror. It compares the productive power of the discourses of ‘Iraq’ before and after 11 September 2001, arguing that these discourses constructed Iraq as a different kind of threat in these two periods, thereby making sensible different responses to the threat at different times. The war on terror after 9/11 became a social background through which a variety of threats could be (re)constructed, whether those threats came from non-state terrorist groups or Iraq. Many have noted, and criticised, the links made between the war on terror and Iraq. Gershkoff and Kushner, for instance, have showed that the high levels of public support for the war was due to the Bush administration’s linking of Iraq to the war on terror.7 Similarly, Krebs and Lobasz argue that the fixing of Iraq to the war on terror narrative was a major factor in the Bush administration’s successful mobilisation campaign.8 These and other studies recognise that the subtle rhetorical moves that bonded Iraq to the war on terror were crucial in marshalling public support. Jackson refers to the strategy of ‘making terrorists and “rogue states” synonymous’ as ‘an ingenious sleight of hand’, while Western argues that when tied to Americans’ concerns about terrorism after 9/11, 6. For notable exceptions, see Roxanne Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Thomas Diez, ‘Europe as a Discursive Battleground: Discourse Analysis and European Integration Studies’, Cooperation and Conflict 36, no. 1 (2001): 5–38; Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (New York: Routledge, 2006). Diez draws upon Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of the nodal point, but does not integrate it with other concepts central to Laclau’s overall discursive approach. Conversely, Hansen draws upon Laclau and Mouffe’s concepts of equivalence and difference, yet does not integrate them with an understanding of the centrality of nodal points. Importantly, none have yet integrated and applied these theoretical categories to an analysis of the war on terror or the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. 7. Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric’, Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3 (2005): 525–37. 8. Ronald Krebs and Jennifer K. Lobasz, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq’, Security Studies 16, no. 3 (2007): 409–51. 271 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) Saddam Hussein’s long-standing antagonistic relationship with the US ‘meant that most Americans were willing to assume Iraq’s complicity’ in the 9/11 attacks.9 Additionally, Flibbert finds that a ‘black-and-white understanding of international politics blurred the distinction between US adversaries such as Iraq and al Qaeda’.10 This article agrees with all of these arguments and observations,11 but adds something that is missing from these accounts: a theoretical understanding of the discursive mechanisms and logics that produced this linkage. Laclau offers a valuable framework through which to analyse and understand how various signifiers and identities were linked, through what he terms social logics, that made a terrorist–Iraq relationship seem natural. Since major political elites, such as those in the Bush administration, were crucial in articulating the war on terror, much of the analysis in this article focuses upon the discourse as found in elite public statements.12 Although these sources are crucial for the following analysis, they are not the only resources. Public opinion polls are typically viewed as instruments through which citizens’ preferences are conveyed to elites, who then take these preferences into account to enact legitimate public policies. In contrast, this article draws upon critical polling studies13 to analyse how polls conducted by news media and polling organisations 9. Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, Counterterrorism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 107; Jon Western, ‘The War over Iraq: Selling the War to the American Public’, Security Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 106–39. 10. Andrew Flibbert, ‘The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War’, Security Studies 15, no. 2 (2006): 310–52. 11. Although it is outside the scope of this article, the emotional and psychological state of the American public after the attacks on 11 September 2001 played a crucial role in facilitating the hegemonic success of the war on terror discourse. See Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, ‘Emotions in the War on Terror’, in Security and the War on Terror, eds Alex J. Bellamy, Roland Bleiker, Sara E. Davies and Richard Devetak (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) and Gearóid Ótuathail, ‘“Just Out Looking for a Fight”: American Affect and the Invasion of Iraq’, Antipode 35, no. 5 (2003): 856–70. 12. This is not to deny that the war on terror has deeper roots in American history and society. See Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, and Roxanna Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine: Norms, Identity and Securitization under Harry S. Truman and George W. Bush’, Foreign Policy Analysis 3 (2007): 233–54. The reliance upon elite texts in this article should be viewed as a rough proxy for the wider discourse that circulated in American society after 9/11. Other studies demonstrate how closely societal reproductions of the discourse coincided with elite discourse. See Stuart Croft, Culture, Crisis, and America’s War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 13. See Justin Lewis, ‘The Opinion Poll as a Cultural Form’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 199–221 and Lisbeth Lipari, ‘Towards a Discourse Approach to Polling’, Discourse Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 187–215. 272 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror acted as vehicles to perpetuate and naturalise the discourse linking the war on terror with Iraq. The wording of poll questions from late 2001 to March 2003 provide subtle evidence of the productive power of this discourse in terms of providing a privileged interpretation of international events and identities. This article proceeds as follows. I first offer a brief explication of Laclau’s theoretical framework, focusing on the concepts of articulation, nodal points, antagonism, the logics of equivalence and difference, and discursive hegemony. Next, I pursue a comparison between the discursive environments prevailing before and after the war on terror. To reconstruct the war on terror narrative, I focus mostly on statements from George W. Bush since 11 September 2001.14 In order to pursue the earlier period of the comparison, I examine statements by Clinton administration officials on Iraq in 1998 and 2000, suggesting the discourse of ‘Iraq’ at this time constructed a different kind of threat than the one that existed after 9/11, thus hindering the Clinton administration’s efforts to interpolate the American public as ‘insecure’ during previous times of heightened tensions with Iraq.15 Alongside these theoretical reconstructions, the article offers critical readings of poll questions through Laclau’s framework, showing how the wording of questions reflected and reproduced the hegemonic discourse in which they were composed. Discourse, Identity and Hegemony in Laclau While most of the poststructuralist literature in IR agrees that ‘there is nothing outside of discourse’,16 it does not deny the existence of a reality ‘out there’. Rather, it suggests that we do not have access to that reality outside of discourses. Laclau accepts that a discourse ‘is a differential ensemble of signifying sequences in which meaning is constantly renegotiated’.17 These ensembles of meaning are constructed through articulatory practices, which are ‘practices[s] establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result’.18 In other words, through discursive practices signifiers, meanings and identities are brought together to form a particular understanding of the world. 14. George W. Bush was obviously not the only speaker that contributed to the discourse, but Jackson notes how the war on terror remained consistent and coherent across a variety of speakers, without significant deviations from the main narrative. See Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 154. 15. All transcripts were downloaded from the White House website (www. whitehouse.gov) and the Lexis-Nexus database (www.lexis.com). 16. Campbell, Writing Security, 4. 17. Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 85. 18. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 105. 273 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) Laclau maintains, with most of the poststructuralist IR literature, that these practices do not merely reflect or describe relations that pre-exist their linking within discourse, but rather that such relations do not exist outside of the linguistic practices that constitute them. Difference is essential for meaning; ‘an action is what it is only through its differences from other possible actions and from other signifying elements’.19 However, since there is no ultimate principle or foundation underlying social meanings, these meanings cannot be fixed. Identities and particular understandings of the world, organised through discourses, can and do become institutionalised, but they are never totally beyond political contestation. Although meaning can never be completely fixed, partial or temporary stability is possible. Signifiers such as ‘democracy’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom’ have meaning for a great many people, and we can seemingly differentiate their meaning from other concepts. Without some partial fixation, even difference itself would be impossible, since ‘in order to differ, to subvert meaning, there has to be a meaning’.20 Laclau introduces the concept of nodal points to account for this stability, which are privileged signifiers that bind together groups of terms, phrases, concepts and identities into sensible and meaningful narratives. A nodal point ‘creates and sustains the identity of a certain discourse by constructing a knot of definite meanings’.21 For instance, ‘freedom’ can mean many different things, depending upon the particular groups of signifiers with which it is articulated. Freedom to vote one’s preferences in a democratic election, freedom to choose one’s profession, freedom from hunger, freedom from torture; ‘freedom’ in each of these cases conveys a different meaning, and does so through its association with the various other signifiers that it ties together. As illustrated below, the concept of the nodal point contributes a theoretical understanding of how discourses and identities attain partial stability, while still recognising their fluidity and instability.22 Laclau combines nodal points with several other concepts in order to account for the construction of political frontiers and social identities, and 19. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 68. 20. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 112. 21. Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 98. 22. A recent review of the identity literature in IR identifies and discusses four prominent themes: ‘alterity; the fluidity and dynamism of identities; the fact that identities are multiple; and, the fact that they are constructed’. See Patricia M. Goff and Kevin C. Dunn, ‘Introduction’, in Identity and Global Politics: Empirical and Theoretical Elaborations, eds Patricia M. Goff and Kevin C. Dunn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1–8. Although these themes are crucial to the study of identity, the need to account for partial stability of identities is an aspect that IR discourse scholars seem to have de-emphasised in order to emphasise their ultimate instability and fluidity. 274 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror the creation of discursive hegemony. The notion of antagonism fulfils the role of limit in his framework. As Edkins explains, Laclau’s notion of antagonism ‘is not a contradiction between preexisting concepts nor an opposition between preexisting subjects or identities’, but rather ‘arises in the process of constitution of identities as the limit that makes’ fully formed and uncontestable identities impossible.23 Although identities can to some extent become settled or institutionalised, there is no aspect to identity that is beyond political contestation. ‘Others’ are constructed as blockages to full identity, yet ‘complete’ identities are mythical constructs. Laclau discusses antagonism and ‘others’ as coextensive; ‘the presence of the “Other” prevents me from being totally myself’.24 ‘Others’ are ‘constitutive outsides’ in the sense that any discourse or identity must somehow establish limits to be coherent. Not only does the presence of ‘others’ ‘prevent me from totally being myself’, but they are necessary for making identities coherent by establishing the boundaries of an identity or discourse. However, the construction of a constitutive outside cannot occur through reference to positive differences that can be located outside of discourse. Rather, it can only be represented through groups, or chains, of signifiers that suppress differences among ‘interior’ elements of an identity in relation to ‘outside’ elements of an ‘other’.25 In the war on terror, for instance, what ‘America’ means is deferred to other signifiers with which it is grouped together in the dominant discourse, such as ‘good’, the defender of ‘Western civilisation’, ‘just’, ‘innocent’ and so on. These signifiers, which have no necessary or intrinsic affinity, became equivalent to the extent that the differences between them were suppressed in relation to the elements of the identities they opposed, such as ‘evil’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘devious’. Laclau calls the discursive practice of creating the internal coherence of an identity by suppressing differences a logic of equivalence. The practice of emphasising differences and particularities, on the other hand, is the logic of difference. All social identity, Laclau argues, is constructed through the tension between these two logics.26 However, these two logics mutually subvert each other. Logics of difference attempt to break down the linkages (or equivalences) between signifiers and identities to emphasise their differences, while logics of equivalence work to expand relational linkages and similarities. Neither logic will ever completely dominate the social field, but temporary 23. Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 133. 24. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 125. See also Laclau, New Reflections, 17; Laclau, Emancipation(s), 52–3. 25. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 128; Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 124. 26. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 38; Laclau, On Populist Reason, 70. Lene Hansen, in Security as Practice, calls these ‘processes of linking’ and ‘processes of differentiation’. 275 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) fixation results when one logic temporarily dominates over the other in a hierarchical relationship.27 While these logics account for the relational dimensions of identity that IR has recognised, what they add (when integrated with the other concepts discussed here) is a theoretical understanding of how the tension between inside and outside is produced and articulated on the level of the signifier. Which logic gains a dominant position and structures the ‘common sense’ of a society depends upon the political struggles of the particular area. For instance, in the war on terror, equivalences largely dominated over differences. Social space was constructed around two antagonistic poles (‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’28), and identities on either side of this antagonistic frontier were seen as equivalent to the extent that they were opposed to the threatening ‘others’.29 Laclau defines the struggles to construct a dominant understanding of social reality as attempts to achieve discursive hegemony. While certain understandings of the world may achieve dominance, they are never so dominant that they are uncontestable. The war on terror arguably achieved hegemonic dominance in the US from late 2001 to at least early 2003, but it was met with (largely unsuccessful) resistance from other discourses.30 In Laclau’s view, what we call politics is the series of struggles to create a ‘common sense’ for a society. Logics of Identity in the War on Terror Much has been written on how, after 9/11, ‘self’ and ‘other’ relations were constructed by American elites who portrayed the US as good against terrorist ‘others’ who were evil and barbarous.31 Laclau’s approach offers a way to think more systematically about how self–other relations are constituted through a specific theoretical understanding of social logics and identity. This approach is illustrated here through a reconstruction of a few major narrative elements that were articulated as part of the war on terror, which is important for understanding how this discourse constituted a social background against which ‘Iraq’ as a meaningful signifier was reconstructed and normalised, thus making the idea of an American-led invasion of Iraq more palatable and sensible. 27. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 129. 28. George W. Bush, Address to Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001. 29. Norris also notes this in passing, but does not provide an extended analysis. See Andrew Norris, ‘Ernesto Laclau and the Logic of “the Political”’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 1 (2006): 111–34, 292–3. 30. See Chapter 5 in Croft, Culture, Crisis. 31. For a brief sample, see Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism and J. Maggio, ‘The Presidential Rhetoric of Terror: The (Re)Creation of Reality Immediately after 9/11’, Politics and Policy, 35, no. 4 (2007): 810–35. 276 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror One element that was prominent from the beginning of the war on terror was ‘evil’. Jackson finds that ‘evil’ is ‘perhaps the most frequent rhetorical construction of the terrorist enemy’, and that there are ‘literally hundreds of references to “evil” in the official discourse’.32 Sometimes ‘evil’ was what the 9/11 attacks were a manifestation of, an abstract concept that became realised through actual events; ‘the year now ending saw a few acts of terrible evil’.33 At other times ‘evil’ was a threat that was ostensibly anywhere and everywhere simultaneously (‘We are planning a broad and sustained campaign to secure our country and eradicate the evil of terrorism’34), and at still other times it remained more abstract, something ‘at the heart of terrorism’,35 or a goal the terrorists were hoping to accomplish through the attacks (‘the evil the terrorists intended has resulted in good they never expected’36). Tied to different concepts and meanings in different contexts, ‘evil’ functioned as a discursive nodal point around which the stability of ‘terrorism’ and the ‘war’ was anchored. It was commonly reiterated in the official discourse and was articulated with a variety of other terms, such as ‘barbarism’, ‘terror’, ‘savage’ and ‘murder’. While this had the effect of moralising the conflict and drawing an inside–outside boundary,37 these linkages of evil–terror–barbarism–murder and so on had the broader effect of recreating the meaning of what ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ meant after 9/11, and was discursively produced through articulations of equivalences among these signifiers and identities. ‘Evil’, through its frequent reiteration and linkage to other terms and identities, tied together other discourses about what ‘terrorism’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘war’ meant, all linked to a particular interpretation of the 9/11 attacks as the beginning of a ‘war’. The ambiguity of ‘evil’ allowed its meaning to be filled in by a hegemonic project aiming to articulate a ‘common sense’. For Laclau, the ambiguity of nodal points such as ‘evil’ is necessary for the production of equivalences that tie together meanings.38 The groups of signifiers that produced the terrorist identity, tied together through ‘evil’, were differentially opposed to the signifiers that constituted US identity. Laclau’s approach offers a discourse-theoretical understanding of how self-and-other relations are produced as mutually constitutive. Just as ‘evil’ was a privileged point in the string of signifiers 32. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 66. 33. George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 22 December 2001. 34. George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 15 September 2001. 35. George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 20 October 2001. 36. George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 24 November 2001. 37. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 67–9; Laura J. Rediehs, ‘Evil’, in Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War, eds John Collins and Ross Glover (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002), 65–78. 38. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 96. 277 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) composing terrorist identity, so did it play a central role in US identity construction as a major signifier against which the chains constituting US identity drew their meaning. Sometimes this was articulated explicitly; the American public was reassured that the US ‘is the greatest force for good in history’ and that ‘our country has shown the strength of its character by responding to acts of evil with acts of good’.39 It was assured that the US ‘can overcome evil with greater good’.40 ‘Good’ was frequently linked to notions such as the US as the defender of Western civilisation, an innocent country that was attacked without provocation, a peaceful, generous and tolerant country, a country of heroes, and as a country whose values and way of life were under attack.41 US identity was (re)produced within the discourse of the war on terror through equivalences linking ‘good’, ‘civilised’, ‘innocent’, ‘peaceful’, ‘values’, ‘dignity’ and ‘justice’.42 These groupings of signifiers drew their meaning from their opposition to chains of signifiers like ‘evil’, ‘murder’, ‘terror’ and ‘tyranny’.43 Of the various signifying elements that (re)produced US identity, perhaps the most frequently reiterated was ‘freedom’. Not only was the US attacked for being ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world’, but that in the ‘struggle of freedom against fear ... freedom will win’.44 It was maintained that ‘history has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and privilege to fight freedom’s fight’.45 The frequent invocation of ‘freedom’ after 9/11 served the purpose of universalising American values, but also played a deeper role in the discursive dynamics after 9/11. Its prominence and repetition in numerous contexts established its centrality to defining US identity in relation to the enemy. Whoever happened to occupy the position of ‘enemy’ in the discourse, the US defined itself against the lack of freedom; ‘so long as nations harbor terrorists, freedom is at risk’.46 Although it was never truly defined within the discourse,47 it worked as a nodal point tying together US identity precisely through this emptiness and ambiguity. It did not need an inherent, positive meaning so long as there was something against which its meaning could be inferred.48 39. George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 31 August 2002. 40. Bush, State of the Union, 2002. 41. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 76–88. 42. George W. Bush, Primetime news conference, the White House, 11 October 2001; Bush, State of the Union, 2002. 43. Bush, State of the Union, 2002. 44. George W. Bush, Statement by the President in Address to the Nation, 11 September 2001; Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 20 October 2001. 45. Bush, State of the Union, 2002. 46. Ibid. 47. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 157. 48. Thomassen also notes ‘freedom’ to be a nodal point in the war on terror, but does not provide analysis. See Thomassen, ‘Antagonism’, 295. 278 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror ‘Freedom’ tied together various signifiers that (re)produced US identity, and simultaneously acted as a point of exclusion against which enemy identity was constituted. The organising signifiers of ‘freedom’ and ‘evil’ simultaneously produced both American and enemy identities in the discourse. A logic of equivalences produced discursive linkages and stabilised the meanings of ‘freedom’, ‘good’, ‘justice’ and ‘Western civilisation’, and (re)produced enemy identity by articulating together ‘evil’, ‘terror’, ‘terrorists’, ‘murder’ and ‘barbarism’. Although there is no natural or given relationship between any of these terms, their articulation and position within the discourse tied their meanings together in a way that created a coherent narrative, a ‘war on terror’, that made sense within American society. As this section has suggested, identity is constructed through relations of difference, but it is not simply a unified ‘self’ that is reflected back from an ‘other’. One cannot, Laclau argues, ‘begin by accepting [a] separate identity as an unconditional assumption and then go on to explain its interaction and articulation with other identities on that basis’.49 Rather, one must accept ‘a field of simply relational identities which never manage to constitute themselves fully, since relations do not form a closed system’.50 Both US and enemy identities were (re)constructed through the antagonistic blockage they each posed to the other, yet this blockage was necessary for understanding what these identities meant within the war on terror. ‘Terror’ meant the suppression of ‘freedom’. ‘Civilisation’ included everyone except terrorists who lived in an ‘underworld’ of ‘remote jungles and deserts’.51 ‘Justice’ meant hunting down ‘every enemy’ of the US.52 The meanings of ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘Western civilisation’, ‘liberty’ and ‘good’ were emptied in terms of their opposition to the elements that produced the enemy identity. To defend ‘freedom’ was to defend ‘justice’, ‘liberty’, ‘good’ values and ‘civilisation’. Similarly, to be ‘evil’ was to be a ‘barbarian’, a ‘terrorist’, a ‘murderer’ and so on. The meaning of these terms differed (to the extent one can speak about them as separate concepts) but was also deferred to other terms in the chain. As Doty states, ‘we have a circle of signifiers with no positive content’.53 Although these chains of differences and equivalences were ultimately unstable, their meaning was partially stabilised through their tying together through nodal points, such as the ambiguous, privileged signifiers like ‘freedom’ and ‘evil’. In the months after 9/11, a majority of the American public accepted the idea of a ‘war on terror’ as articulated in terms of these logics and 49. Laclau, New Reflections, 24. 50. Ibid., 20–1. 51. Bush, State of the Union, 2002. 52. Ibid. 53. Doty, Imperial Encounters, 46. 279 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) linkages. In terms of its power to marginalise other discourses, and the extent to which it was uncritically employed by political opposition, media and social institutions, the war on terror arguably achieved hegemonic status after 9/11.54 As Lustick observes, ‘It is assumed without debate or public questioning that terrorism is a problem of the sort that must be addressed by a “war”. The war on terror has thus achieved the status of a background narrative.’55 He notes how many poll questions assume the necessity of the militarised aspects of the discourse, arguing that they ‘contribute to creating and reinforcing perceptions of the scale of the terrorist threat and the need for a War on Terror’.56 This article agrees with Lustick’s observation, but further argues that poll questions reproduced major signifying elements of US and terrorist identities and the logics of equivalences and differences that constructed social space in the war on terror. In this sense, poll questions are an important, and under-examined, site of reproduction of the discourse. A few examples from late 2001 and early 2002 show this:57 Which comes closer to your view about the actions the United States should take to deal with terrorism? The U.S. should focus on taking military action to punish the specific terrorist groups involved in Tuesday’s attacks. OR, The U.S. should mount a long-term war to eliminate terrorist groups world-wide.58 Which is your greater concern: that we will take military action against the terrorists TOO QUICKLY, or that we will wait TOO LONG to take military action?59 Would you describe the governments of each of the following countries as evil, or not? How about (Iraq; Iran; North Korea; Cuba; China; Russia)?60 54. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 159; Croft, Culture, Crisis. 55. Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 17. 56. Ibid., 17. Krebs and Lobasz (‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11’, 423) also note this, but do not provide analysis or examples. 57. I make no claim that every poll question (drawn from nationally prominent polling organisations) asked during the time periods examined in this article reproduced the discursive themes of the war on terror, or dominant constructions of Iraq. Yet, the poll questions analysed here are not an exhaustive inventory of those that did reproduce these hegemonic discourses. I simply claim that the poll questions analysed here offer a sample of how deeply these discourses were embedded in American society. 58. CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 14–15 September 2001: http://www. pollingreport.com/terror9.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 59. Pew Research Center survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 21–25 September 2001: http://www.pollingreport.com/terror9.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 60. CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 8–10 February 2002: http://www. pollingreport.com/terror7.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 280 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror Which ONE of the following do you think is the main reason why those who attacked us and their supporters hate the United States? ... (‘Our democracy and freedom;’ ‘Our support for Israel;’ ‘Our values and way of life;’ ‘Our influence on the economy and lives of Middle Eastern countries;’ ‘Our economic and military power;’ ‘Not sure’).61 These questions are interesting not only because they reinforce ‘the need for a War on Terror’, but also for the assumptions that are embedded within them about the scale, approach and stakes in the conflict.62 The first question, for instance, not only accepts as unproblematic that a war in terms of ‘military action’ is a legitimate option, but the two possible responses assume that ‘military action’ is the only option. The only question or ambiguity over such an imperative is whether military strikes should ‘punish specific terrorist groups’ or should be used to ‘mount a long-term war to eliminate terrorist groups world-wide’. Similarly, the second question accepts that military action is the only legitimate response to terrorism, and the only real decision to be made is when to commit military forces. The last two questions provide specific examples of the extent to which the major signifying nodal points articulated in the official discourse became embedded in the language of polling. ‘Evil’ in the third question is offered as the sole quality to characterise a series of states; it is assumed to be such a central and meaningful concept that no clarification or elaboration is needed for the respondent to answer. This fits well with the construction of the conflict in terms of an equivalential logic that condensed social space and identities around two antagonistic poles (‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’63). Notably, this question was asked shortly after the 2002 State of the Union address, which vividly linked what had been a nodal point constructing terrorist identity (‘evil’) to the nature or identities of states (the ‘axis of evil’). Additionally, ‘freedom and democracy’ and ‘our values and way of life’ appear in the last question as major signifying elements around which an antagonistic frontier is constructed and through which US and terrorist identities are (re)produced within the question itself. The wording of these questions shows how they (re)produced and maintained the dominant understandings of the war on terror discourse that existed after 9/11. As this critical reading of these poll questions demonstrates, their composition does not occur in a social vacuum. The questions through which it was discerned what people believed were perpetuations and reproductions of the very interpretations found in the official discourse. Those who composed the questions were themselves subjects within the discourse 61. Harris Poll, 19–24 September 2001: http://www.pollingreport.com/terror9. htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 62. Here I draw upon existing critical polling studies. See Lewis, ‘The Opinion Poll as a Cultural Form’ and Lipari, ‘Towards a Discourse Approach to Polling’. 63. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001. 281 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) that was dominant at the time, thus the hegemonic discourse provided them with the representations through which to interpret their world. Thus, these poll questions offer small glimpses into how this discourse (and all the various narrative strands, articulations, logics and identities that composed it) was (re)produced, which helped to further solidify the naturalness it possessed in the months after 9/11. Iraq’s Normalisation into the War on Terror Many accounts now exist, both academic and popular, of the politics that cast Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a part of the war on terror.64 What this article adds is a discourse-theoretical interpretation, based on Laclau’s framework, of how the discursive elements that constituted identities were (re)produced through articulatory practices and social logics that worked to make the war on terror–Iraq linkage seem natural. In the first few months after 9/11, even as the national and international focus was on terrorists, al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the enemy was not defined solely as ‘a radical network of terrorists’, but ‘every government that supports them’.65 It was asserted that no distinction would be made between terrorists and ‘those who harbor them’, and that ‘any government that tries to pick and choose its terrorist friends will be regarded by us as a supporter of terrorism’.66 Later, a much more specified tone was taken when such governments were portrayed as more active and dangerous to US security, much more so than earlier in the discourse. The terms ‘terrorist’, ‘terrorist groups’, ‘outlaw regimes’ and ‘terror states’ were frequently found in the same sentence in late 2002 and early 2003; ‘we will not wait to see what terrorists or terror states could do with weapons of mass destruction’.67 Hence, before Iraq entered the picture, the linkage between terrorists and state sponsors of terrorism was not only a decisive move by administration officials, but its repetition by other major elites, pundits, institutions and media constituted a movement whose effect was to condense many of the discordant elements of what ‘terrorists’ and ‘regime’ meant. There obviously remained differences between what nonstate ‘terrorists’ and ‘states’ meant; they were not portrayed as synonymous entities. Hence, logics of difference were not absent. ‘Equivalences can weaken, but they cannot domesticate differences’, Laclau argues.68 64. See, for instance, Gershkoff and Kushner, ‘Shaping Public Opinion’; Krebs and Lobasz, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11’. 65. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001. 66. Bush, Statement by the President in Address to the Nation, 11 September 2001; George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 10 November 2001. 67. George W. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 8 March 2003. 68. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 79. 282 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror However, to the extent that ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ were successfully articulated to ‘state’, ‘state sponsor’ and ‘regime’, a logic of equivalence worked to subvert whatever differences existed between these identities over their shared opposition to their constitutive outside, namely, those discursive points around which US identity was constructed. Through equivalence, the meanings of these terms were emptied to the extent that the boundaries between them collapsed and that although they were not viewed as synonymous entities, in a way, they did mean the same thing in relation to the threat they posed to the US. To the extent that ‘terrorists’ and ‘terrorism’ were successfully linked to ‘states’ and ‘regimes’, a discursive relation was established among them ‘such that their identity [was] modified as a result of the articulatory practice’.69 The inclusion and linkage of ‘terrorists and regimes’, ‘evil regimes’ and ‘outlaw regimes’ was made much more explicitly and frequently after the ‘axis of evil’ State of the Union speech in late January 2002.70 As the national and international focus on Iraq increased over the course of 2002 and early 2003, Iraq came to occupy the same ‘enemy’ position within the discourse as did terrorists at the beginning of the war on terror. Just as the terrorist enemy was ‘devious and ruthless’,71 so Iraq was part of the ‘axis of evil’, and was ‘very good at denial and deception’ based on the previous dozen years of frustrating efforts of United Nations inspectors and the international community.72 Just as al Qaeda were the ‘heirs to all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century’ and followed ‘in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism’,73 so Saddam represented an ‘ideology of power and domination’, the contemporary incarnation of ‘Hitlerism, militarism, and communism’.74 Just as terrorists wanted to ‘overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries’,75 Saddam could not be allowed to gain the ‘means to terrorize and dominate the region’ or to ‘resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East’.76 Just as the conflict after 9/11 was ‘a clash of civilization against terror’77 where ‘all civilized nations have a responsibility to join in fighting it’,78 in 2003 it was the job of the US to end ‘terrible threats to the civilized world’ and 69. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 105. 70. See Bush, State of the Union, 2002; Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 25 May 2002; Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 16 November 2002. 71. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 24 November 2001. 72. Richard Cheney, Appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, 8 September 2002. 73. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001. 74. Bush, State of the Union, 28 January 2003. 75. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001. 76. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 28 September 2002; Bush, State of the Union, 2003. 77. John F. Kerry, Remarks at the Arab-American Institute National Leadership Conference, Dearborn, MI, 17 October 2003. 78. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 10 November 2001. 283 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) ‘defend the hopes of all mankind’.79 The discourse that had existed since September 2001 provided a social background against which a variety of threats could be understood and naturalised, whether those threats came from terrorists or Iraq. A major signifier from the beginning of the war on terror that was reiterated throughout 2002 and early 2003 was ‘freedom’. Again, ‘freedom’ constituted a major point of condensation around which US and enemy identities were (re)produced. Just as ‘freedom’ was under attack from terrorists, so it was reiterated as threatened by Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The US would not ‘permit either terrorists or tyrants to blackmail freedom-loving nations’.80 In the 2003 State of the Union address, less than two months before the invasion of Iraq on 19 March, Bush repeated that he would ‘defend the freedom and security of the American people’, that the US would bring Iraqi citizens ‘food and medicines and supplies – and freedom’, and that since ‘Americans are a free people’, they knew that ‘freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation’. ‘Freedom’ was also a quality bestowed on the Iraqi people. The US led ‘a coalition to disarm the Iraqi regime and free the Iraqi people’; the ‘lives and freedom of the Iraqi people [mattered] little to Saddam Hussein’, but mattered greatly to the US.81 Terrorists and later Iraq came to pose the same kind of threat to ‘our’ most cherished value, since ‘they’ did not share it and sought to promote their own deviant ideologies. The same signifying chains that (re)produced US identity earlier in the war on terror remained largely unaltered as the invasion of Iraq drew closer. In late 2001 and early 2002, ‘freedom’, ‘civilisation’, ‘civilised’, ‘good’ and ‘just’ constituted one side of an antagonistic frontier, and drew their meaning from the exclusion of ‘terror’, ‘evil’ and so on. Later in 2002 and early 2003, the chains that constructed US identity were differentially opposed to ‘rogue state’, ‘outlaw state’, ‘terrorist states’, ‘evil regimes’, ‘Saddam Hussein’ and ‘Iraqi regime’. Although the signifiers and concepts that constituted both US and enemy identities had no intrinsic or necessary affinity, their discursive stitching through organising nodal points such as ‘freedom’, ‘terror’ and ‘evil’ produced meaningful identities. The signifiers and identities in one chain drew their meaning from their excluded opposites in the other chain. Along with these differential oppositions were relations of equivalence producing the chains. The differences between what the identities of ‘America’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘freedom’ each meant collapsed through the practices in which they were successfully articulated together. Similarly, the differences between ‘rogue state’, ‘evil regime’, ‘Saddam Hussein’ and ‘Iraq’ collapsed to the 79. Bush, State of the Union, 2003. 80. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 23 November 2002. 81. Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 28 December 2002; Bush, Weekly Radio Address, 1 March 2003. 284 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror extent that their identities were modified and successfully articulated together in an equivalential chain. What ‘America’ or the ‘US’ meant within the war on terror was the same as ‘good’, ‘freedom’ and the defender of ‘civilisation’. What ‘Iraq’ and ‘Saddam’ meant was similarly deferred to other signifiers and identities like ‘terrorist’, ‘evil regime’ or ‘rogue state’. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, as more identities are articulated together and equivalential linkages expand, the underlying commonality linking them together is not something positive, but rather the exclusion of ‘threatening’ elements or identities.82 As the meaning of US identity expanded to include ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ and ‘civilisation’, Iraqi identity came to embody those characteristics that were not part of ‘civilisation’. It was through a privileging of equivalence that ‘Saddam’ and ‘Iraq’ were discursively incorporated and normalised into the war on terror. Although logics of difference and equivalence subvert each other, social space is constructed through the tension between them, and hegemonic agents can succeed in emphasising one over the other. The construction of social space in terms of two antagonistic poles (‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’83) had emphasised equivalence over difference from the beginning of the war on terror, and was a strictly ‘us versus them’ understanding of the world. As this was repeated by numerous other actors in countless contexts, a hegemonic hierarchy of equivalence over difference took hold, and arguably became the ‘common sense’ way of understanding the world from an American perspective. Croft argues that this kind of ‘inclusivity’ was a major part of the dominant narrative interpretation of 9/11.84 The need to construct national unity after 9/11 led to emphases on internal similarities over differences in order to construct terrorism as ‘the antithesis of the values and nature of America’.85 The identity and position of the US and terrorists within the war on terror remained largely the same as the identity and position of the US as (re)produced in reference to Iraq. The same discursive structure that had successfully rendered the American public ‘insecure’ in late 2001 had also, by March 2003, successfully interpolated a majority of Americans as ‘insecure’ against Iraq. The representation, and endless (re)production within American society, of the war on terror as a conflict against terrorists and ‘evil regimes’/Iraq collapsed their meanings in a way that discursively reconstructed them as the same kind of threat. Both espoused the same ideology of ‘power and domination’. Both posed a threat to ‘our values and way of life’. Both posed an existential danger to the ‘civilised’ world. The danger of terrorism from non-state actors and the threat posed 82. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 128. 83. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001. 84. Croft, Culture, Crisis. 85. Ibid., 102. 285 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) by US-designated state sponsors of terrorism was never differentiated in a way that made them threats that warranted being dealt with in different ways. If military action against one was justified, so the other should be confronted with the same means. The differences between terrorists and Iraq/Saddam were dissolved to the extent that they came to effectively pose the same kind of threat to the US, through the dominance of the logic of equivalence that was at work in merging the nature of the threats. It is important to note at this point that although much of this analysis is based on presidential and elite public statements, this article does not argue that George W. Bush was the sole author of the war on terror. Foreign policy discourses are necessarily embedded within earlier foreign policy and societal discourses.86 Nor does it argue that even a small group of neoconservative elites was solely responsible for the discursive hegemony of the war on terror in the US from late 2001 to early 2003. We should not, however, discount these powerful agents, either. Such privileged positions constitute part of what Laclau calls the ‘unevenness of the social’.87 ‘Not any position in society’, Laclau argues, ‘is equally capable of transforming its own contents in a nodal point’ that can be filled in by a hegemonic agent.88 Such agents are a major part of the story, but not the only part. Rather, hegemony is created and maintained by ‘an endless series of de facto decisions, which result from a myriad of decentered strategic actions undertaken by political agents’ that have the effect of producing and temporarily stabilising a discourse.89 Several recent studies on Iraq and the war on terror have recognised this. Western notes that ‘paralleling the administration’s blitz was the mobilisation of dozens of think tanks and ad hoc collections of commentators supportive of invading Iraq’, while Krebs and Lobasz acknowledge that ‘persons outside the government – in think tanks, on opinion pages, or even talk radio’ were ‘essential to the reproduction of the dominant discourse’.90 Additionally, Jackson examines how the war on terror was reproduced by the media, academia, think-tanks and religious groups.91 In addition to these various sources, this article argues that the wording of poll questions is a widespread, yet under-examined, site of reproduction that works to normalise the hegemonic articulations that constitute 86. Sjöstedt, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine’. 87. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 43. 88. Ibid., 43. 89. Jacob Torfing, ‘Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges’, in Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy, and Governance, eds David Howarth and Jacob Torfing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–32. 90. Western, ‘The War over Iraq’, 127; Krebs and Lobasz, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11’, 421. 91. Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, 164–79. 286 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror the war on terror. Numerous public opinion polls have shown the initially broad support the American public gave to the invasion of Iraq. A Program on International Policy Attitudes/Knowledge Networks poll conducted in January 2003 found that 68 per cent of Americans believed that Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks.92 Of respondents who believed that the US had found evidence of an Iraqi–al Qaeda relationship, 67 per cent supported going to war in Iraq.93 Rather than re-analysing these data, this article examines poll questions as vehicles that reproduced the major narrative elements of the war on terror. Just as earlier poll questions presupposed the legitimacy of the idea of a ‘war on terror’, poll questions in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq presupposed certain sets of relationships that were part of the dominant discourse at the time: Do you believe Iraq is involved in acts of terrorism against the U.S., or not?94 How concerned are you that war with Iraq will lead to more terrorist attacks in the United States?95 Do you think Iraq has or has not provided direct support to the Al Qaeda terrorist group?96 Please try to answer my next questions about Iraq to the best of your knowledge. But if you’re not sure of an answer, that’s okay – just tell me and I’ll go to the next question. Do you think Iraq and Al Qaeda – Osama bin Laden’s organization – are allied and working together to plan new acts of terrorism, or not?97 These questions from late 2002 and early 2003 suggest the possibility, and nearly posit as a natural fact, that Iraq is involved in terrorist acts, or that it is involved with al Qaeda. The first question, for instance, asks if the respondent believes that Iraq is involved in terrorism against the US, and leaves open the likelihood that Iraq engages in terrorism elsewhere. The second question presumes a direct linkage between Iraq and terrorism, although the nature of the linkage is left unstated. While the latter two questions offer the respondent the opportunity to answer negatively to the possibility of a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq, one could argue that merely asking the question through these presentations strongly 92. Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay and Evan Lewis, ‘Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War’, Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 (2003/4): 575–90, 572. 93. Ibid., 577. 94. Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV Poll conducted by Market Shares Corp., 10–11 December 2002: http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq17.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 95. FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll, 19–20 November 2002: http://www. pollingreport.com/iraq17.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 96. ABC News Poll, 28 January 2003, following the State of the Union speech: http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq17.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 97. Knight Rider poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 3–6 January 2003: http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq17.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 287 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) suggests such a possibility. The hegemonic discourse that circulated in the US at the time, that Iraq posed a much greater threat than before because now it could ally with terrorists, is reflected in these questions and the possible responses. Other polls ask questions about the nature of the threat, and about the options for dealing with it: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling policies to deal with the threat posed by Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein?98 Which comes closest to your view: Iraq poses an immediate threat to the United States, Iraq poses a long-term threat to the U.S., but not an immediate threat, or Iraq does not pose a threat to the United States at all?99 In the fight against terrorism, the Bush Administration has talked about using military force against Saddam Hussein and his military in Iraq. Would you support using military force against Iraq, or not?100 Right now, which ONE of the following do you think is more important for the United States? To move forward quickly with military action as the only way to effectively deal with the threat posed by Iraq. To take more time to try to achieve our goals in Iraq without using military force?101 The first question accepts as fact that Saddam Hussein poses a threat, presumably to the US. The second question offers the respondent the option of finding that Iraq does not pose a threat, although this is only one option out of three; the other two options accept that Iraq is a threat to the US, only the temporal immediacy is questioned. The third question is prefaced by the assumption that Saddam Hussein ‘and his military in Iraq’ are part of the ‘fight against terrorism’. This kind of preface ‘does not request an answer from respondents’, but rather ‘communicates symbols’ and embeds within the question certain ‘images and ideas’.102 The ‘fight against terrorism’ evokes an entire set of events, images, identities and relationships, which is presumably triggered when the respondent answers. The only options offered for dealing with this threat is military action or no military action. Here, it remains ambiguous whether the military option must be used because Iraq is a ‘terrorist’ threat, or whether Iraq is related in some other way to terrorism. The last question similarly assumes that Iraq poses a threat, and that military action is a legitimate response. The respondent is given the option of choosing quick military action, or of ‘try[ing] to achieve our goals in Iraq without using military force’. Not only does the question assume, twice, 98. Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 13–14 March 2003: http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq16.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 99. CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 14–15 March 2003: http://www.pollingreport. com/iraq16.htm (accessed 12 May 2008). 100. Newsweek Poll 13–14 March 2003. 101. Newsweek Poll 13–14 March 2003. 102. Lipari, ‘Towards a Discourse Approach to Polling’, 200. 288 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror that military force is a legitimate option, but it remains unclear how ‘we’ would ‘achieve our goals’ otherwise; these two options are unequal in their specificity. Relations of equivalence are clearly reflected in these questions. Just as the meaning of ‘terrorists’, ‘terrorism’, ‘rogue state’, ‘Iraq’ and ‘Saddam Hussein’ were equated to the extent that they came to pose the same antagonistic blockage to the US and ‘freedom’, so these questions reflect the unquestioned assumption that the threat posed by terrorism and Iraq held the same meaning that warranted their being dealt with in nearly identical ways (military force), and that there is the strong possibility that a relationship exists between Iraq and terrorism. These poll questions reproduced and maintained the ‘common-sense’ understanding of the war on terror as between ‘us and them’, regardless of whether ‘they’ were terrorists or Saddam. The antagonisms and logics of equivalence and difference (re)constructing the positions and identities of the US and Iraq in the official discourse were reproduced in these polls as questions designed to discern respondents’ beliefs about the war on terror and Iraq. Rather than asking neutral questions about a ‘reality out there’, these poll questions helped to discursively recreate the hegemonic understandings of the war on terror and the US invasion of Iraq. Iraq before 11 September 2001 The (re)productions of ‘Iraq’ detailed above contrast significantly with earlier understandings of what Iraq meant to the US. In January 1998, Saddam’s refusal to comply with United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors prompted a threat of military action by the US, with British support. Although conflict was avoided due to an agreement forged by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, another crisis came in November, when Iraq refused UN inspectors access to suspected sites. The air attacks launched in December were in response to Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with the UNSCOM inspectors and continued noncompliance with multiple UN resolutions regarding the declaration and elimination of weapons programmes.103 The public statements made that year by top Clinton administration officials regarding Iraq, and as (re)produced in polling questions from the time, shared many similarities to arguments that would be made by Bush administration officials in 2001–3. Yet, there were distinct differences between the discourses surrounding the identity of ‘Iraq’ during the Clinton administration and after 9/11, and the social environments that were produced by discourses at the time. 103. For background and analysis on the 1997–8 tensions with Iraq, see K. M. Fierke, ‘Logics of Force and Dialogue: The Iraq/UNSCOM Crisis as Social Interaction’, European Journal of International Relations 6, no. 3 (2000): 335–71. 289 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) Several major discursive themes constituted what ‘Iraq’ meant during this time. Perhaps most prominently, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) held a central position in this discourse. By 1998, after years of UN inspections, the linkage between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was well-entrenched in US foreign policy discourse. President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen both stated that WMD were the principal reason for the December airstrikes,104 as did Secretary of State Albright and Secretary of Defense Berger.105 One can barely find discussions or mentions of Iraq at this time without encountering this category. While the linkage to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ works to fix a certain kind of threatening identity, another common theme that helped constitute Iraqi identity during this time was the notion of Iraq as a threat to its ‘neighbours’ in the region. As President Clinton stated, ‘Saddam will strike again at his neighbors. He will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them’.106 Other officials reiterated the same theme. Saddam Hussein was ‘a threat to the neighborhood’, as Albright warned.107 The December strikes were carried out to ‘diminish his ability to wage war against his neighbors’108 and to ‘prevent Saddam from rebuilding his deadly weapons and from threatening his neighbors’.109 Other themes emerged during this time of heightened tensions with Iraq. Not only did Iraq attack its neighbours, but it was frequently reiterated that Saddam Hussein attacked his own people. Addressing the nation upon the conclusion of the December strikes, President Clinton reminded his audience that Saddam had ‘used [WMD] before against soldiers and civilians, including his own people. We have no doubt that, if left unchecked, he would do so again’.110 The administration looked forward to ‘working with a post-Saddam regime that will not violate the human rights of the Iraqi people or threaten the neighbors’,111 and to working with internal opposition groups ‘to help them become a more effective voice for the aspirations and hopes of the Iraqi people’.112 Thus, there existed a split between the ‘Iraq’ as the rogue state of Saddam Hussein, and the innocent citizens of 104. Associated Press, ‘Objectives of Iraq Airstrikes’, 17 December 1998. 105. Associated Press, ‘Albright: It’s Up to Saddam’, 13 November 1998. 106. William Jefferson Clinton, Address to the Nation Announcing Military Strikes on Iraq, 16 December 1998. 107. Madeleine Albright, Appearance on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, 12 November 1998. 108. Associated Press, ‘Objectives of Iraq Airstrikes’, 17 December 1998. 109. Whitehouse Bulletin, ‘Berger Outlines Two-Pronged Clinton Approach on Iraq’, 23 December 1998. 110. William Jefferson Clinton, Address to Nation on Completion of Military Strikes in Iraq, 19 December 1998. 111. Albright, Appearance on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. 112. White House Bulletin, ‘Berger Outlines’. 290 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror ‘Iraq’ that were Saddam’s victims. Saddam was also a threat because of his ‘deception’ towards UN inspectors.113 The US had helped the UN, Secretary Albright stated, to ‘break through the smokescreen of lies and deception put out by the Iraqi regime’.114 As Secretary Cohen succinctly put it, Saddam ‘has delayed, he has duped, he has deceived’.115 Consequently, Iraq had failed to ‘live up to its obligations’, and had instead ‘spent the better part of [the 1990s] avoiding its commitments to the international community’.116 In 2000, roughly a year after the airstrikes and heightened tensions surrounding the expulsion of the UN inspectors, these discourses constituting the meaning and identity of ‘Iraq’ remained unchanged. WMD was a frequently reiterated theme,117 Iraq was still represented as a threat to its neighbours, Iraqi citizens were still victims of Saddam’s brutality,118 and Iraq continued to display blatant disregard for international law and its UN obligations.119 These various elements were discussed in the same manner as they had been during the heightened tensions in 1998. Yet, an important discursive theme that was evident in both 1998 and 2000 was the notion that despite these various threats that Iraq posed, it had been, and was continuing to be, successfully contained by efforts on the part of the US and the international community. In 1998, National Security Advisor Berger outlined the US’s containment policy towards Iraq as consisting of four combined strategies of economic sanctions, UNSCOM inspections, the credible threat of military strikes and support from regional allies,120 with the overall goal of keeping Saddam from ‘rebuilding his deadly weapons and from threatening his neighbors’.121 In 2000, this theme was distinctly more prominent. President Clinton praised the military for ‘working to contain Saddam Hussein’.122 Secretary Albright 113. Clinton, Address to the Nation, 16 December 1998. 114. Associated Press, ‘Albright: Heat Still on Saddam’, 9 September 1998. 115. Associated Press, ‘Albright, Cohen Seek Support in Ohio’, 18 February 1998. 116. William Jefferson Clinton, Statement on Iraq’s Failure to Comply with United Nations Weapons Inspections, 6 August 1998. 117. See, for instance, Madeleine Albright, Appearance on Meet the Press, 12 January 2000; William Jefferson Clinton, Speech to Democratic Leadership Council, Georgetown University, 12 January 2000; William Cohen, News Conference in Udairi Range, Kuwait, 8 April 2000. 118. Madeleine Albright, Appearance on The Diane Rehm Show, 19 June 2000; William Jefferson Clinton, Statement on Fiscal Year 2001 Budget Initiatives Benefitting Native Americans, The White House, 25 February 2000. 119. William Cohen, Remarks aboard USS Germantown, Singapore, 17 September 2000. 120. Sandy Berger, Press Briefing, 16 December 1998. 121. White House Bulletin, ‘Berger Outlines’. 122. William Jefferson Clinton, Remarks by President Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen at Opening Ceremony of Joint Service Open House, Andrews Air Force Base, MD, 19 May 2000. 291 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) stated that despite being ‘very obviously concerned about his ability to reconstitute [illegal weapons]’, that ‘we are keeping him in his box’.123 Similarly, Secretary Cohen asserted that the containment policy was working, and would continue to as long as Saddam Hussein was a threat to the region and the Iraqi people.124 The assertion by top officials that, despite posing a threat to the ‘national interest of the United States and, indeed, the interest of people throughout the Middle East and around the world’,125 Iraq had been successfully contained up until that time illuminates a significant contrast with the discourse of Iraq after 9/11. While Saddam’s Iraq might have posed a threat to US national interests and allies in the region, it was not constructed as an existential threat to the US itself. Iraq was a threat to its neighbours, to US national interests and to the Iraqi people, but none of these narratives produced a discursive environment in which Iraq posed the same kind of existential threat that it was said to pose in 2002–3. Despite the concerns expressed by top Clinton administration officials, the construction of Saddam’s Iraq was arguably more comparable to an international pariah that was not a mortal or imminent threat. On occasion, Iraq seemed more like a persistent and familiar offender to be disciplined, rather than considerable military threat. In 2000, when responding to a reporter’s question about a US response to Saddam’s claim that Kuwait was illegally drawing oil from the Iraqi side of the border, Secretary Cohen confidently asserted that ‘we can certainly handle Saddam, should he choose to take any kind of aggressive action. It would be a mistake on his part, if he should seek to repeat today what he did in the past’.126 Perhaps most noticeably, the major signifying nodal points that produced US and Iraqi/terrorist identities in 2001–3 were largely absent from the discourse in 1998 and 2000. ‘Freedom’ was not under attack, nor were ‘our values’ or ‘our way of life’. ‘Evil’ was rarely used to describe Iraq at this time, and rarely was it described as a ‘rogue state’ by the Clinton administration officials cited here. ‘Terror’ and ‘terrorism’ were rarely mentioned in discussions on Iraq, and even more rarely directly linked to Iraq. The privileged signifiers that constituted a nodal point for US and enemy identities in the war on terror were not the signifiers around which US identity was constructed in relation to Iraq in 1998 and 2000. Crucially, the relations of equivalence that existed after 11 September 2001 that worked to merge Iraqi identity to the hegemonic social background of the war on terror did not exist during the Clinton administration. There 123. Albright, Appearance on Meet the Press. 124. William Cohen, News Conference in Amman, Jordan, 4 April 2000; Cohen, News Conference, Kuwait City, 19 November 2000. 125. Clinton, Address to the Nation, 16 December 1998. 126. Cohen, Remarks aboard USS Germantown, Singapore, 17 September 2000. 292 Solomon: Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror existed no omnipresent and overwhelming threat analogous to the war on terror to which Iraqi identity could be discursively linked and normalised. Arguably, the discourse that (re)produced ‘Iraq’ in 1998 and 2000 produced a different kind of entity, and a different kind of threat, than the Iraqi identity discourse of 2001–3. Just as poll questions in late 2001 through early 2003 reproduced the hegemonic understandings of the US–Iraq relationship, so did the wording of poll questions from 1998 reproduce the dominant understandings of Iraq at that time: Do you think this attack will or will not achieve significant goals for the United States?127 Do you favor or oppose the United States using its Air Force to bomb targets in Iraq after Iraq failed to comply with its agreement for United Nations weapons inspections?128 Do you think that President Clinton took military action against Iraq primarily because immediate action was warranted or primarily because he wants to put off impeachment proceedings?129 In these questions, ‘Iraq’, and the US airstrikes against it, clearly has a different meaning from the attacks the US launched against Iraq in 2003. Not only do these questions reflect the speculation that President Clinton had launched the air strikes to turn attention away from his domestic troubles, but the very need for the airstrikes is questioned. The first and second questions offer the possibility that airstrikes are unnecessary, and that they may not help the US to ‘achieve significant goals’. To the extent that airstrikes were portrayed as necessary, this was not to defend the US or ‘civilisation’ from the ‘threat’ of Iraq, but rather to enforce the international legal standards that Iraq had ignored regarding UN weapons inspections. Iraq was not a ‘threat’, but rather was a state that had to be punished by the US for its violations of international law. Notably, the US was constructed in a dominant position in this discourse as the state that enforces UN resolutions through an ‘attack’, rather than ‘defending’ itself against the ‘threat’ of Iraq. Conclusion This article was written in order to address a gap in the existing Iraq War literature regarding the links between the war on terror and Iraq. The 127. Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll, 16 December 1998: http://www. pollingreport.com/iraq18.htm (accessed 17 May 2008). 128. CBS News Poll, 16 December 1998: http://www.pollingreport.com/ iraq18.htm (accessed 17 May 2008). 129. NBC News Poll conducted by the polling organisations of Peter Hart (D) and Robert Teeter (R), 16 December 1998: http://www.pollingreport.com/ iraq18.htm (accessed 17 May 2008). 293 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2) rhetorical subtleties performed by Bush administration officials bonding Iraq to the war on terror has been noted by many scholars as a crucial factor in explaining why the invasion of Iraq was initially supported by a majority of the American people. However, most have not theorised about the linguistic mechanisms that allowed for such a link to be asserted and reproduced. This article utilised theoretical concepts from the work of Ernesto Laclau to analyse how ‘terrorists’ and ‘Iraq’ were (re)constructed and linked so as to make their relationship seem natural, thus making the US invasion of Iraq more sensible and palatable to the American public. Relations of equivalence gained dominance in the hegemonic project that subverted the differences between, and meanings of, ‘Iraq’ and ‘terrorists’ to the extent that they came to be viewed as the same kind of threat to the US. The hegemonic power of this discourse was analysed not only in elite public statements, but in the wording of poll questions that served to naturalise the discourse. Discursive readings of poll questions (rather than analysis of polling data) are typically not offered by critical security studies as relevant sites of the reproduction of security discourses. This article, however, argues that poll questions, rather than tools that measure public opinion that exists independently of them, are instead better viewed as vehicles that serve to naturalise, stabilise and reproduce hegemonic discourses. The comparison of polling questions on ‘Iraq’ before and after 11 September 2001 demonstrates the productive power of the differing security discourses surrounding this signifier. Ty Solomon is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, University of Florida, USA 294