Defining the Enemy

Last night I attended a speech by former Senator Rick Santorum held by the Georgetown College Republicans. Mr. Santorum began his speech, "Threats in foreign diplomacy," by posing the question, why do Americans still want to pull out from Iraq now that we are winning the war? Ignoring possible explanations such as fears that we aren't in fact winning the war, Mr. Santorum posited one primary cause for the current public opinion: the failure to define the enemy in the War on Terror.

Mr. Santorum went on to declare that there cannot be a "War on Terror," because terror is a tactic, not an enemy. He equated declaring a "War on Terror" to responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor with a "War on Sneak Attacks." Furthermore, he stated that we cannot even declare a "War on Terrorists," because there are terrorists all over the world that the US is not fighting. Instead, Mr. Santorum states that the enemy is a specific group of terrorists: Islamic fascists. He clarified this statement with the qualification that by this title he does not mean all practitioners of the Islamic faith, he refers to Islamic radicals intent on destroying Western civilization, bringing upon the apocalypse and imposing a caliphate on the world. However, Mr. Santorum pointed out that it is not politically correct to define the enemy in the United States. The one time President Bush used the term “Islamic fascism,” he was attacked by the press and rebuked by the state department. He has not used the word since.

This difficulty in defining the enemy in the war on terror reminded me of the article we read by Krebs and Lobasz: “Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq.” In this article, Krebs and Lobasz argued that the reason that Democrats failed to challenge the case for the War in Iraq was that they were “unable to advance a politically sustainable set of arguments with which to oppose the war.” The fixing of the meaning of 9/11 under the concept of a War on Terror allowed for the legitimation of the Iraq War. According to Krebs and Lobasz, it was not merely the president’s position on the bully pit that allowed for this formation of political discourse, the events of 9/11 were conducive to his argument.

Krebs and Lobasz’ argument also applies to Mr. Santorum’s description of the failure of President Bush to define the enemy. If the bully pulpit was all that is needed to advance a definition of an enemy, President Bush would have done so by now. Furthermore, President Bush’s explanation that once the US began winning the Iraq War the American public would get behind it is clearly inaccurate, because now that the war is going more successfully the majority of Americans still disapprove of it.

In the lead up to the Iraq War Krebs and Lobasz argue that Democrats were hindered by the established opinion of Saddam as a despot along with the implications of the War on Terror, which combined to limit the publicly sustainable arguments against the Iraq War. For instance, the successful linkage of Iraq to the War on Terror led arguments by Democrats that the US had higher priorities on which to use its resources to be perceived as sacrificing “national security for the sake of a few dollars.”

Paradoxically, it seems that the same framing of the War on Terror that legitimated the Iraq War has helped confine Republicans from more clearly defining the enemy in this war. Both this framing of political discourse under the War on Terror and the concern that defining the enemy as Islamic fascists will be seen as prejudiced against Muslims and Islam make defining the enemy a politically unsustainable argument, to put it in Krebs and Lobasz terms.

And whether or not you agree with Mr. Santorum’s definition of the enemy as Islamic fascists, the failure of President Bush to use the bully pulpit to define the enemy in such terms gives credence to Krebs and Lobasz’ constructivist perspective on the legitimization of the Iraq War, and their theories that rhetorical contests can’t be solely explained by power or institutional position and that dominant discourses are a major element of political debates and policy outcomes.