Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle: A Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell's U.N. Address

Chapter One. The Campaign for War in Iraq: Contextualizing Powell’s Speech in Political and Media Discourse

23 Chapter One The Campaign for War in Iraq: Contextualizing Powell’s Speech in Political and Media Discourse x After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. —“Irrefutable,” Washington Post, February 6, 2003 O n February 24, 2001, Colin Powell indicated to reporters that economic sanctions against Iraq had worked: Saddam Hussein posed no significant threat to the Gulf region, let alone to the United States. As Powell put it, “[Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. 24 Chapter One He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors” (quoted in “Briefing” 2001). Roughly two years later at the United Nations, however, Powell had changed his tune considerably. Now Powell portrayed Saddam Hussein as a monumental threat, a leader who “hides weapons of mass destruction,” “provides haven and active support for terrorists,” and who is prepared to realize his “ambitions for regional domination” (UN/2.5/CP). How do we explain this apparent conversion? What motivated the rapid drive for war in Iraq? Equally important, how might we explain theAmerican news media’s response to this drive for war? Why is it that U.S. reporters so readily accepted the administration’s claim that Iraq posed a serious threat in 2002, when the same administration had reached the opposite conclusion in 2001? How is it that American journalists—like those quoted in the epigraph—found Powell’s presentation so persuasive, when international journalists found it entirely unconvincing? In this chapter, I address these questions. I situate both Powell’s speech and the news narratives that covered it in their proper social, historical, and intertextual context. Warranting War: The Campaign for “Preemptive” Violence in Iraq ItisnowwellknownthatevenbeforetheterroristattacksofSeptember11, 2001—and indeed before George W. Bush’s inauguration—members of the Bush administration had considered “preemptive” military action against Iraq. As Hybel and Kaufman (2006) report, people like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz were advancing a policy of preventive violence in the early 1990s as a way to sustain the United States’ superpower status in a post–Cold War world. By the late 1990s, the idea of preventive violence was specifically attached to Iraq. For instance, in January 1998, members of the Project for the New American Century urged President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power before he could pose a threat to the United States. Of the 18 people who signed the recommendation, 11 would eventually serve under President Bush. In 2000, Condoleezza Rice—then an adviser to George W. Bush the presidential candidate—similarly wrote that Saddam Hussein must be deposed as a precautionary measure. The Campaign for War in Iraq 25 As Dunmire explains (2009), the events of 9/11 finally gave the administration a pretext for preventive war. To be clear, the Iraqi government had not suddenly become more dangerous. There was no new evidence indicating that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction or better means of delivering them—nothing to refute Powell’s February 2001 assessment that Iraq was even unable to threaten its neighbors. However, as Greg Thielmann, an aide to Colin Powell suggests, there was now a “faith-based” certainty among senior administration officials that Iraq needed to be dealt with (quoted in Leung 2009). Thus, days after the 2001 terrorist attacks, several members of Bush’s team urged him to pursue military action against Baghdad (Hybel & Kaufman 2006). In particular, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld skillfully guided discussion toward the idea that Iraq presented a threat to the United States—and ultimately won Bush’s support in the effort to depose Saddam Hussein (Warshaw 2009). The public push to demonize Saddam Hussein began to intensify in late 2001—just months after the 9/11 attacks (Althaus & Largio 2004). During his State of the Union Address in January 2002, Bush strongly hinted at the prospect of violence, declaring that Iraq was continuing “to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror” (Bush 2002a). At this point, war was not a foregone conclusion; however, as early as July 2002, the administration had apparently settled on the use of force (T. H. Anderson 2011). Around this time, members of the Bush cabinet launched the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). The job of this group, according to Scott McClellan (2008), was to...