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Waging Wars Against Iraq: Metaphoric Constitution of the War in the US and the UK
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1. Draft for presentation to ‘The News from Baghdad: The Second Gulf War’, 46th Annual ISA Convention“Dynamics of World Politics: Capacity, Preferences and Leadership” Honolulu, Hawaii, M arch 2, 2005. Not forcitation without permission. Comments welcome.
2. For a useful summary of the ways of reading texts in international relations, see M illiken, (1999).
Waging Wars in Iraq
The Metaphoric Constitution of the War in the US and the UK
David Mutimer
1
Department of Peace Studies
University of Bradford
I begin with a puzzle, but a political puzzle rather than a theoretical one. The puzzle is the apparentexpectation of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that he would be able to garner domesticpolitical support for Britain’s involvement in the War in Iraq. Clearly, it was a false expectation tosome degree, but the question is how a politician as evidently skilled as Mr. Blair felt this could bedone. This questions raises immediately the comparison with the United States, and the likequestion for the US President, George W. Bush. The reason that Blair is the puzzle rather thanBush, however, is that the British public tends to be more attentive to foreign affairs and less willingto follow the leader than is that of the United States. In other words, Blair had a much more difficultbit of political salesmanship than did Bush.
In both cases, the salesmanship was practiced in a number of ways, with messages delivered by anumber of routes. These different forms of delivery, however, were anchored around a series ofspeeches in which the Prime Minster and the President set out the case for the war they ended upfighting. It is in these speeches that we can find the object that they are each trying to sell. Thequestion we can pose to these speeches, then, is for which war were each trying to garner politicalsupport? Objects, even objects as violently graphic as wars do not present themselves immediatelyfor our understanding, for our study, or even for our political support. In these two sets of speechesover more than six months, the President and the Prime Minister each produced the war in his ownway, for his own purposes: one of which, of course, was mobilising political support.
This paper examines these two sets of speeches to find the war-object that produced by each. There are a number of forms of reading that can contribute to this analysis, but I will limit thisparticular paper to a metaphorical reading of the texts. Metaphors, by rendering the novel or
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unknown in terms of the known, shape our understanding of a novel object. A text, or a series oftexts, on the same object will draw on a number of metaphoric links, creating in the process a webof connections and thereby constituting the object as a very particular object. I will begin by brieflydiscussing metaphoric analysis, before moving on to provide a comparative reading of the keyspeeches of Blair and Bush in the run up to the War in Iraq. The questions I will pose are: whatwar does each produce? To what degree are these the same war, and also, to what degree, and inwhat ways, are they different?
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1. Draft for presentation to ‘The News from Baghdad: The Second Gulf War’, 46th Annual ISA Convention
“Dynamics of World Politics: Capacity, Preferences and Leadership” Honolulu, Hawaii, M arch 2, 2005. Not for
citation without permission. Comments welcome.
2. For a useful summary of the ways of reading texts in international relations, see M illiken, (1999).
Waging Wars in Iraq
The Metaphoric Constitution of the War in the US and the UK
David Mutimer
1
Department of Peace Studies
University of Bradford
I begin with a puzzle, but a political puzzle rather than a theoretical one. The puzzle is the apparent
expectation of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that he would be able to garner domestic
political support for Britain’s involvement in the War in Iraq. Clearly, it was a false expectation to
some degree, but the question is how a politician as evidently skilled as Mr. Blair felt this could be
done. This questions raises immediately the comparison with the United States, and the like
question for the US President, George W. Bush. The reason that Blair is the puzzle rather than
Bush, however, is that the British public tends to be more attentive to foreign affairs and less willing
to follow the leader than is that of the United States. In other words, Blair had a much more difficult
bit of political salesmanship than did Bush.
In both cases, the salesmanship was practiced in a number of ways, with messages delivered by a
number of routes. These different forms of delivery, however, were anchored around a series of
speeches in which the Prime Minster and the President set out the case for the war they ended up
fighting. It is in these speeches that we can find the object that they are each trying to sell. The
question we can pose to these speeches, then, is for which war were each trying to garner political
support? Objects, even objects as violently graphic as wars do not present themselves immediately
for our understanding, for our study, or even for our political support. In these two sets of speeches
over more than six months, the President and the Prime Minister each produced the war in his own
way, for his own purposes: one of which, of course, was mobilising political support.
This paper examines these two sets of speeches to find the war-object that produced by each.
There are a number of forms of reading that can contribute to this analysis, but I will limit this
particular paper to a metaphorical reading of the texts. Metaphors, by rendering the novel or
2
unknown in terms of the known, shape our understanding of a novel object. A text, or a series of
texts, on the same object will draw on a number of metaphoric links, creating in the process a web
of connections and thereby constituting the object as a very particular object. I will begin by briefly
discussing metaphoric analysis, before moving on to provide a comparative reading of the key
speeches of Blair and Bush in the run up to the War in Iraq. The questions I will pose are: what
war does each produce? To what degree are these the same war, and also, to what degree, and in
what ways, are they different?
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