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A RHETORIC OF APPEASEMENT:
TROPOLOGY IN THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC WAR ON TERROR

By

Alma Villanueva

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy

2009

ABSTRACT

A RHETORIC OF APPEASEMENT:
TROPOLOGY IN THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC WAR ON TERROR

By
Alma Villanueva

In the War on Terror that was initiated by the Bush administration after 11
September 2001 and continues in the policies, if not the rhetoric, of the Obama
presidency, there have been rhetorics that act to appease publics thereby persuading
people into accepting the war. The war is justified through a “color-blin ” racism in
which all Muslims become terrorists, potential terrorist, or helpless people in need of
saving. This form of color-blind racism can be seen in political scientist Samuel P.
Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” trope, in which the warfare is blamed on Muslims’
culture (as if there were but one). This paper looks at the clash of civilizations theory as
an overarching, dominant trope existing in the discourse of the politico-econornic War on
Terror. The trope reveals a colony-blind imperialism, that is, an imperialism in which
contemporary colonialism is denied yet practiced. Such tropes provide a story that hides
the politico-economic incentives behind US. foreign policy, thereby allowing the
continuation of warfare in the Middle East. If the field of rhetoric is to follow its
tradition of working towards civic participation, or social activism, then it must continue
in its development of incorporating the study of the macro, the powerful, and the

economic, as these are interlocked with the smaller communities in which we interact.

To the men of my life. My new husband—my study partner—whose
love, support, and conversations made the writing an enjoyment.
My dad, who affectionately withstood my many, longwinded phone calls
in my moments of confusion, anxiety, and excitement,
helping me to carry on the family business.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge but a few of the many people who gave me the
intellectual, practical, and emotional support to finish this initial project in the
development of my professional, scholarly self.

First, I extend the greatest gratitude to my committee members: Ellen, Julie, and
Bill. Ellen, my chair, my mentor, thank you so much for listening to what I wanted to do
for my project, encouraging me to pursue it, and taking it on. You have pushed me to do
what I love from the start, and your commitment has never faltered: from attending my
first conference presentation, throughout all the drafis and meetings in person, and after I
moved. You not only provided invaluable feedback on my scholarship, but you taught
me how to do graduate school, and how to survive the pressure of writing for the
profession.

Julie, the courses I took with you my first and second year of college contributed
immensely to my growth as a intellectual and future academic. You have an amazing
ability to foster a lively, engaging classroom community for us budding intellectuals to
hash out our ideas, challenge one another, and build on each other. It was within your
class that I remembered why I love education. Bill, you have taught me to be conscious
not only of what my scholarship does, but also that how one does it is just as important,
always providing as many advantages as shortcomings. Also, it is in your class that I
really begin to learn what “the field” means and how it is dictated much through
methodology. Thank you both. To the other professors and all my colleagues at MSU,

thank you for your conversations and company. Malea and Roberto, I especially owe

iv

you, as without your moral support during my first year in graduate school, I’m not sure I
would have survived.

To my immediate family—Dad, Mom, Serena, AnaSofia, Sonia, and now
Assaf—I cannot tell you how much it means to me that you have so thoroughly believed
in me. I hope to make you all proud of me as I grow up to be not only a mother, but a
scholar, and maybe even an academic too. Above all, I would like to thank my mother
who has loved me so completely unconditionally, who has sacrificed her career to give
me and my sisters the opportunities she never had, and who has always spoken to me as

an adult, teaching me how to live and how to avoid the storm.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

INTRODUCTION: APPEASEMENT, RACIALIZATION, AND THE FIELD _________________ 1
Contributing to the Field of Rhetoric:
Bridging the Micro with the Macro, the Cultural with the Politico-Economic ...... 3
Methods in the Field of Rhetoric:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Approach to Studying Rhetorics of Appeasement ______________________________________________ 8
The Research Process: What I did and Why ____________________________________________________________ 10
Sections of the Thesis ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 15

PART II

COLONY-BLIND IMPERIALISM:

THE DOMINANT TROPE OF A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS ____________________________________ 17
Appeasement and Democracy __________ ___________________________ 17
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations Theory ____________________________________________________________ 21
Racialization, .. ______________________________________________ 23
The Overarching Clash of Civilizations Trope ........................................................ 26
Civilization Trope: A Colony-Blind Imperialism ____________________________________________________ 31
Epideictic Oratory in Disguise ______ _ _________________________________________ 38

PART III

A POLITICO-ECONOMIC LENS FOR THE WAR ON TERROR:

A STORY OF IMPERIALISM _____________________________________ 39
Another Historical Perspective:

A Non-Cultural Lens for U.S.-Middle East Conflicts _____________________________________________ 44
Advanced Neocolonialism: Global Corporatism _____________________________________________________ 51
An Imperial Enterprise: The War on Terror ___________________________ 54
Concluding Thoughts: New Rhetorics of Appeasement _________________________________________ 59
The Stories Our Rhetorics Create _ _________________________________________ 6O
WORKS CITED 62

vi

PART I

Introduction:
Appeasement, Racialization, and the Field of Rhetoric

there have been no words.
no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.
no prose in trucks driving debris and dna.

evident out my window is abstract reality.
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh.

first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot's heart, the
plane's engine.
god, please, don't let it be anyone
who looks like my brothers.

i do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill.
I’ve never been so hungry that i willed hunger
never so angry as to want a gun over a pen.
not really.
even as a woman, a palestinian.
never this broken. ..

both my brothers - my heart stops - not a beat disturbs my fear.
muslim, gentle men. born in brooklyn
and their faces are of the arab man, all eyelashes and
nose and beautiful color and stubborn hair.
what will their lives be like now?

over there is over here.
across the river, burning rubber and limbs. rescuers

traumatized. skyline brought back to human size. no longer
taunting gods.

~Fr0m “First Writing Since: Poem on Crisis of Terror ”
by Suheir Hammad

Palestinian—American poet Suheir Hammad is not appeased. Surely, this is more

personal for her; for New York is her home, Arabians and Muslims her people, and she is

Brown in America. But people are empathetic and caring. It is in our nature; for without
human compassion and the ability to imagine another’s life as your own, we as a species
would not survive. We thrive off of community, and now we are, as they say, a “global
village,” or as Suheir Hammad puts it, “over there is over here.” So why are we not more
upset about what is happening to our neighbors, both far and near?

In the War on Terror initiated by the Bush administration after 11 September
2001 and continues in the policies if not the rhetoric of the Obama presidency, there have
been rhetorics that act to appease publics into accepting the warfare. Through a “color-
blind” racism in which all Muslims become terrorists, potential terrorists, or helpless
people in need of saving, the warfare is justified. In the public discourse on the War on
Terror, 3 religion and the presumed singular culture of members of that religion get
characterized racially. Thus as Poet Suheir Hammad waited to find out why the planes
crashed into the New York buildings, she prayed, “don't let it be anyone / who looks like
my brothers.” How else could the US. get away with going after Afghanistan and Iraq
when most of the hijackers were Saudi? By portraying “those people” as all the same.

While rhetoric has glorified warfare and empire-building by way of reducing
large-scale systematic racism, sexism, and poverty to individual cases of biological
incapability, the new rhetorics of justification at play in the post-Cold War era use culture
as the impetus for its racialization. In the War on Terror, “color-blind” racialization
occurs through the overarching trope of a “clash of civilizations.” Made known by
Samuel P. Huntington, late Harvard political scientist who was involved in US. foreign
policy, the phrase signifies a gloomy future in which the “Islamic Civilization” is

inherently in conflict with the “Western Civilization” due to culturally-specific traits.

Huntington uses a religion to refer to different peoples: Arabs, Afghanis, Pakistanis,
Iranians, all northern Africans, Indonesians, and so forth. In this way, they all get

6

grouped together— ‘Islamacists” (a newly created term), “foreign” brown people. Here,
as it is for Huntington, religion is a significant marker of cultural identity.

Such rhetorical devices provide a story that hides the economic incentives behind
US. foreign policy, thereby appeasing the public and allowing the continuation of
warfare in the Middle East. I conclude that the cultural lens that is employed in the
dominant narrative of the War on Terror ought to be replaced with one that accounts for
political economy. In so doing, a story about imperialism emerges. In our stage of late
capitalism, the globe is engulfed within a system of domination and oppression that
harms far too many. Big business and government work hand-in-hand, exerting power
and acquiring wealth and status, providing for a system in which a few profit at the
expense of all others. The continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq need to be understood
within this context. In essence, I explore the rhetorical ways that members of the US.

policy establishment justify the suffering and injustices of US. foreign policy in the

greater Mideast region.

Contributing to the Field of Rhetoric:
Bridging the Micro with the Macro, the Cultural with the Politico-Economic

The tradition of rhetoric as emphasized within mainstream academia started as a
way to enlist participatory democracy among those deemed citizens (of course, Athens
was hardly void of sexism or racism, as women and those not of Athenian decent were
denied a political voice). It is, nonetheless, within the spirit of social action that I call

upon the tradition of rhetoric. Through the study of the macro—the powerful, and the

economic—I aim to bridge the work being done within rhetoric with that which ought to
be done. Because rhetorics of domination—such as racist rhetoric—are carried out
through a political economy that is now global, as our world exists within a (neo)colonial
S/state, it is important for our field to understand both the macro context and political
economy.

The field of rhetoric addresses social justice and analysis of systems of oppression
such as classism, racism, and sexism on the local level, especially as pertaining to
communities and classroom pedagogy. It addresses the individual with matters
pertaining to identity politics (Cushman) and internal colonialism (V illanueva). And
there are moments of looking at rhetorics of sovereignty (Powell, Lyons), precolonial
rhetorics (Baca), and neocolonial rhetorics (V illanueva). There is some work on the
political economies of academe and labor (Carter) and first-year composition (Miller and
Crowley), but again these are on the micro scale. While there is some work on
transnational and postcolonial rhetorics (Pandey), more is needed on the global level.

In “Toward a Political Economy of Rhetoric (or a Rhetoric of Political
Economy),” Victor Villanueva suggests that the field not only focus on the cultural, but
also on the political economic. He calls for those in the field to apply rhetorical theory to
political science. He writes:

The role of rhetoric . . . is the demystification of the ideological. The role
of political economy is the demystification of relations tied to the
economic. If we’re to understand where we are and what is happening to
us—and maybe even to affect it—we need the tools provided by both.
(“Toward” 58)

Moreover, as sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein argues, “politics, economics, and the

socio-culture” ought not be treated as separate arenas because these are inseparable

components in social reality (Schouten 5). Any analysis on the human condition will be
faulty if any one of these components is left out of the picture.

Just as it is important for rhetoric to adopt multifaceted perspectives that
traditionally belong to other disciplines, it is also imperative to incorporate a systems
perspective such that any individual or community under study is also seen as part of an
entire system. While I make no attempt to do such an analysis here, there is something to
the idea of a world-systems approach as described by Wallerstein. It is a worldview and
method that analyzes the human condition holistically, including looking at both the
macro in terms of grand space and time, and looking at the individual and smaller units
within that system; for both the macro and micro cannot and therefore should not be pried
from one another (“It’s the End,” 195-96). In studying the rhetoric of the War on Terror,
I work from the scholarship in the field to show a different side of the same coin.

Combining the macro and micro is really a natural thing in a world in which the
same system reigning over me reigns over most others. While reading a recent College
English issue, I ran across an article by Aja Y. Martinez, who writes of her students of
color and how they, like herself, internalize cultural racism, a concept borrowed from
Bonilla-Silva, who writes of the new racism in the US. What I found interesting while
reading this piece was that Martinez’s breakdown of cultural or color-blind racism, which
is racism based on cultural rather than biological premises, is that it is just as applicable
to Muslims abroad as it is to her study of it in relation to Americans of color. While
discussing pedagogy and internal colonialism, the frame or trope (depending on if you are
in sociology or rhetoric) also applies at the macro level. This is such because the rhetoric

is manufactured by the same political economy.

The tropes Martinez utilizes were referred to her by Villanueva, which he uses to
identify color-blind rhetoric being imposed internally in the US. and outwardly to
Muslims in the Middle East and its surrounding geography. In “The Rhetorics of the
New Racism or the Master’s Four Tropes,” Villanueva discusses two of Huntington’s
texts: The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National
Identity, a book about the “danger” of Latinos in the US. In bridging these texts,
Villanueva finds the new trope for racism to be culture, which is being implemented to
justify systemic injustices inflicted on people of color both domestically and
internationally. Thus, Villanueva bridges the macro and micro and provides the analytic
of color-blind racism that I, in his footsteps, utilize in the clash of civilizations trope.
However, his discussion of my topic is preliminary because his main emphasis is not on
Huntington’s civilization-clash rhetoric nor on the War on Terror.

It is Dana L. Cloud from the Communications camp of rhetoric who really delves
into the clash of civilizations trope in the War on Terror. In “Flying While Arab: The
Clash of Civilizations and the Rhetoric of Racial Profiling in the American Empire,”
Cloud analyses the rhetorical justifications of imperially motivated racial profiling of
Arabs and Muslims in US. airports. Her assessment is that the rhetoric is “masked as
discourse about cultural difference, [but in actuality it] rests on a logic of racialization
coded in terms of the ‘clash of civilization’ and the ‘white man’s burden’” (220). Cloud
traces this rhetoric’s longstanding imperial legacy, dating it back to European expansion
in the nineteenth century. Cloud’s thesis is informative and compelling, offering much

for a productive dialogue.

Cloud, as does Villanueva, posits the dangers of using a cultural lens without an
economic one, stating that such an approach is “insufficient for understanding the logics
of contemporary racism.” She continues to vie for the study of the “histories and
motivations of ruling classes” so that we do not “misunderstand racism as a simple clash
of values and cultures, or as an inevitable product of difference” (223-24). I follow suit
by looking at those in power and attempting to understand something of their worldview.
With such resolutions calling for scholarship addressing the intersection of the rhetorical
tropes and political economy as a necessity of understanding the rhetorics of the War on
Terror, I follow Villanueva and Cloud’s lead, working towards a holistic understanding
of the rhetorics of imperial justification, appeasement, and racialization.

My work extends the scholarship of my predecessors by providing both a depth of
detail and a focus on the rhetorical language of those who have had a decisive position of
power in the policy establishment—namely Bush and Huntington—and an in-depth
analysis of the politico-economic situation of the War on Terror. Villanueva’s speech
studies tropes and how they are used in the official, dominant narrative, yet Cloud’s does
little to unpack the tropes and their inner-workings. Further, while both rhetoricians
stress the importance of incorporating the economic, neither rhetorician employs a solid
framework on the political economy of the War on Terror. In essence, I employ
Villanueva’s analysis of rhetorical tropes to Cloud’s magnified attention on racialization
in the rhetorical and politico-economic War on Terror. The product is a tropology of the
clash of civilizations rhetoric, whereby tropology means a study of tropes much in the

same way that Ralph Cintrén employs the word “tropologic” in Angels’ Town (I do not

mean to indicate “tropology” as it is used for religious interpretations of texts, however

such an angle is worth pursuing in this context).

Methods in the Field of Rhetoric:
An Approach to Studying Rhetorics of Appeasement

I began this research project long before I entered graduate school. In the years
following the 11 September 2001 events, my mom kept pointing out the recurrent phrase,
“clash of civilizations” in the media when Muslims were the topic. Discussions at home
introduced me to Huntington (I even secretly “borrowed” my parents’ copy of the book
and have yet to return it). With the intent of looking into what this popular phrase
entailed, I initiated the project. My primary tasks have been to understand (1) what the
catchphrase signifies when it is dropped as a simple and quick explanation for the events
of the years-long War on Terror, and (2) how it is those meanings are constructed.

Such goals require viewing the catchphrase as a symbol, or a trope. Treating the
phrase as such enables two outcomes. One, the phrase transcends its original text(s) and
finds life elsewhere. For example, the “clash of civilizations” exists not only in
Huntington’s text, but significantly in language adopted by others in many other outlets.
Those outlets do not share with the original source(s) the explicit theme of being about
political affairs on the global level. Newspaper articles employing the trope range in
topics from the war in Iraq to hate crimes against Muslims in Brooklyn. Such articles do
not question or explain the premise of inherent cultural conflict, but the message
nonetheless exists in the very words used.

Secondly, as a symbol, the phrase’s meaning may imply more than what the

words themselves mean on the surface level. Kenneth Burke writes of symbols as

transforming entities in which “what goes forth as A returns as non-A” (438). Burke’s
purpose with studying tropes is in determining “their role in the discovery and description
of ‘the truth’” (421). For instance, the “clash of civilizations” argument reads warfare as
a result of cultural difference, but a symbolic reading of the phrase reveals that warfare is
fought for empire. Symbols as an analytic do more than answer the “what,” they also
show the “how.”

In order to understand how it is that the “clash of civilizations” trope functions, I
proceeded with particular methods in research. My research required textual analysis in
the form of rhetorical critique as guided by Sonja K. Foss’s Rhetorical Criticism. In part
because the methodology in Foss’s book largely comes out of Communications, it was
useful as a heuristic, but it was not to be followed formulaically. Significantly, it has as
its precedent a book by Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Stuafy in Method, which
was first published in 1965. While largely outdated, unlike with Foss, Black foregrounds
rhetorical criticism and distinguishes it fiom methods used in fields like linguistics.

Black states that rhetorical criticism aims to “account for how that subject [the
researcher’s object of inquiry] works” (1 8). My object of inquiry is the clash of
civilizations trope. This conception of rhetorical critique is important because I do not
attempt to establish the impact of the notion of “clash of civilizations.” Rather, my aims
have been to explore and explain how it operates to potentially appease its audiences.
Toward this end, Black writes, a “system of rhetorical criticism... postulates that there
will be a correspondence among the intentions of a communicator, the characteristics of
his discourse, and the reactions of his auditors to that discourse” (16). The premise

guiding my paper is that the discourse of the communicator conveys racialized meanings

through a unique environment of tropes that have the effect of appeasement on many of
the audience members.

The set of procedures I undertook in order to understand the “clash of
civilizations” trope lead to my doing a tropology, which is the study of the functionality
of the trope(s) of inquiry. Within this context, tropology also indicates the existence of
more than one trope at play in the rhetoric of clashing civilizations. My findings revealed
that the “clash of civilizations” trope operates within an environment of particular other
tropes, making for a cluster of tropes. What follows is a brief description of the process

of my research and the general structure of the thesis.

The Research Process:
What I did and Why

The research process in general has been recursive, a bouncing between texts,
between reading and writing, rereading materials and ongoing with finding new
materials. Also, the research and its write-up are theory-oriented, largely based on what I
already saw happening in the world; none of it is empirical in the least. I did, however,
make some general moves, all of which were guided by the following research questions
that now make up the bulk of my paper.

1. What is the logic of “clash of civilization ” rhetoric?
2. How is a process of racialization ascribed through culture clash rhetoric?
3. What material realities does culture clash ideology hide?

I began by looking at the phrase “clash of civilizations” as used by those who

coined the term, that is Huntington and his primary source, Bernard Lewis (more on this

later). I performed a rhetorical analysis of Huntington’s 1993 article, “Clash of

10

Civilizations,” with a focus on the text’s logos. I took the article as the object of analysis
as opposed to the book for matters of practicality since it is sufficient enough for getting
at the ideology inherent in the words of the book.

While I am using Huntington’s text as the foundation for analysis, the notion of
civilization clashing and culture clashing ideology is not particular to nor originates from
Huntington. As will be elaborated on in the body of the text, Huntington’s
conceptualization of civilizations comes from a mid-twentieth century British historian,
Arnold Toynbee, and the very phrase “clash of civilizations” comes from a prominent
historian of Islam and the Middle East, Bernard Lewis. I have chosen Huntington’s
version because it is his name that gets taken up in the media and by government figures
since 2001, and because he had and his work continues to have direct influence in foreign
policy.

One might be quick to dismiss scholarship with such outlandish and skewed
worldviews. However, this would be a dangerous mistake because these scholars do
receive attention fiom publics and their ideologies are even adopted by those in the
highest seats of power. Toynbee, for example, was widely popular within his time, even
making the cover of Time magazine in 1947. Moreover, he affected “Western” policy by
working within the British government and circles. For example, he worked in the
British Foreign Office during WW1 and WH. During WWI this meant working for the
Political Intelligence Office, a department responsible for gathering political, economic,
and military intelligence on countries involved in the war for the Prime Minister’s senior

cabinet members. While Toynbee is a root source of civilizational ideology, Lewis and

11

Huntington, on the other hand, have had direct influence in the contemporary US. policy
establishment.

Both Lewis and Huntington’s ideas made their ways into the circles of the George
W. Bush administration. Lewis had an influence on policy in that his ideological leaning
regarding Muslims has been adopted by those in power. He has been a direct informant
on the state of affairs in the Middle East and as a knowledgeable scholar of Islam,
providing lectures at conventions in which government officials were present, such as at
functions held by the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank group.
He also has a close relationship with Dick Cheney Weisberg). Like Lewis, Huntington
too was an academic. Unlike Lewis, however, it is Huntington who had more of a direct
and longstanding relationship with the State and on foreign policy and with matters more
varied than simply the Middle East and Muslims.

During the Johnson and Carter presidencies, Huntington served as a consultant for
the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence
Agency. His crowd continued to include Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
More still, according to an article in The Guardian, “by the 19803 [he was] the most cited
political scientist in America on international relations, and several universities made his
works required reading” (I-Iodgson). Also, significantly, in the aftermath of the
September 1 1, 2001 acts of warfare within US. borders, it was Huntington’s name that
echoed in the media, not Lewis’s.

Furthermore, Huntington does political science (although he does not do political
economy). As is elaborated in Part III, journalist Naomi Klein brings in her assessment

of capitalism on a global scale, and by bringing in Milton Friedman, who is the icon of

12

economics that Huntington is of politics. And Lewis comes in as the foundation of
Huntington’s analysis of foreign policy. In order to study a trope, it is important to locate
it in other texts (either oral or written). As such, I look at how Huntington’s clash of
civilizations theory operates as a trope in political discourse.

Because I am making a case about the ideology of those in power, and since
former President Bush initiated and carried out the bulk of the War on Terror to date,
analysis of his rhetoric is more compelling than general media sources such as newspaper
or journal articles written by individuals who have relatively little political or military
power. There were two approaches I took to locate fitting pieces of rhetoric. In one
approach I conducted intemet searches for “Bush” and “clash of civilizations” or
“civilization.” These provided a plethora of primary and secondary sources from which
to choose and analyze.

The other approach I pursued was locating the speeches Bush made in the
immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 plane hijackings and the 9/11 anniversary
speeches made every year of his presidency thereafter (although not all were on the 11th
of September). From these texts, I focus on two of them: one from 20 September 2001 to
Congress and the other from 2006 which was addressed to the nation. In the final
product herein, the speech that gets most of the attention is the 2006 one because (1) it is
here that he uses not only the trope “civilization,” he uses the entire phrase, “clash of
civilizations” (which he does in another of the speeches I reviewed); and because (2) all
the rhetorical elements I observed exist within this single piece (whereas in others there is

only some of the criteria).

13

While analyzing Bush’s texts, I primarily sought those rhetorical elements
identified in Huntington’s article in order to determine the extent to which a common
trope existed. The correlation, as I suspected, was strong. Then I proceeded to analyze
the conditions of the trope that existed in all the texts, coming to the conclusions that (1)
there was a certain rhetorical environment and other tropes coming together to make up
the dominant trope, “clash of civilizations,” and (2) racialization did indeed figure into
the way civilization-clash rhetoric functions.

Aside from explicating Huntington and Bush’s texts, I searched behind the
rhetoric of civilization clash for the material conditions of the War on Terror in order to
see what other stories might exist. This required asking the questions, What else could be
going on here? and If we assume that there are not inherent cultural di/fcrences creating
international intercultural violence, what would other lenses reveal? In order to move
away from culture as an analytic, then, I looked at a variety of scholarly sources from
history and political economy that look at U.S.-Middle East relations, with a special focus
on the 11 September 2001 acts of warfare and the subsequent War on Terror through an
analysis of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course all of this required an extensive literature review. From the library
book database, the online journal databases, intemet search engines, and by way of
friends and family, I located material that discussed rhetoric, civilizations, terrorism,
racism and racialization, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, US. foreign policy,
capitalism and more. The works I chose span many disciplines, including not only

rhetoric, but communications, English studies, sociology, political science, business

14

economics, and history, not to mention the independent scholars and journalists whose

work fit into one of these categories.

Sections of the Thesis

Toward these ends, the remainder of the paper has two parts. The next section,
Part II, looks at the rhetorical War on Terror, meaning the political discourse addressing
11 September 2001 and the successive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Herein Bush’s
speech is used as a way into looking at the dominant trope of the clash of civilizations
that is traced to Huntington and his intellectual influences. Within this tropology the
dominant trope is broken down into the rhetorical elements and tropes that comprise it.

There are five rhetorical elements that indicate the presence of the clash of
civilizations dominant trope: (1) subject, (2) common topics, (3) color-blind racism, (4)
disclaimer, and (5) type of discourse. The subject is the overall topic: the War on Terror,
or more generally, some interaction of non-Westem Muslims and members of the West.
The idea of the common topics is borrowed from Aristotle but pertains to those words
that signify the clash of civilizations trope: “clash,” “civilization,” and “culture.” Color-
blind racism is a trope in this context and refers to the mention of culture or religion as a
cultural marker in place of race. The disclaimer is the necessary element of denouncing
any kind of discrimination or negative generalizations about Muslims or Arabs. And the
type of discourse borrows again from Aristotle, meaning generally the three types of
oratory: epideictic, deliberative, and judicial. Here the discourse is supposed to be
political, but acts more celebratory with praise and blame. These five rhetorical elements

mesh together in the trope of “civilization,” thereby forming the dominant trope that

15

reveals a colony-blind imperialism, that is, an imperialism in which contemporary
colonialism is denied yet practiced.

The final part of the paper, Part III, looks to the imperialism that is denied by the
rhetoric of the War on Terror. The section begins with non-cultural incentives for
warfare directed at the US, including the actions of 11 September 2001, pointing largely
to US. foreign policy towards the Mideast region of the world. After complicating US.
claims that Muslim terrorism and tyranny is a product of cultural difference, what follows
is a look into advanced neocolonialism, a global economic system. The political
economic approach provides a view into alternative motives for the U.S.’s desire to
promote democracy throughout the greater region of the Middle East. But before

entering into politico-economic War on Terror, we begin with the rhetorical war.

16

PART II

Colony-Blind Imperialism:
The Dominant Trope of a Clash of Civilizations

one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers.
one more... [person] ask me what navy my brother is in.
one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed.
assume they know me, or that i represent a people.
or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a
flag and words on a page.

we did not vilify white men when mcveigh bombed Oklahoma. . .
or blame the bible or pat... robertson. . ..
and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why
never mention the kkk?

©

"either you are with us, or with the terrorists"
- meaning keep your people
under control and resistance censored. meaning we got the loot
and the nukes.

~From “First Writing Since: Poem on Crisis of Terror ”
by Suheir Hammad

Appeasement and Democracy

The clash of civilizations theory is that continual warfare is inevitable in

international politics because some “civilizations” are incompatible with others due to

differences in cultural values. Before getting into the logos of the argument as articulated

by its spokesperson, the late political scientist Huntington, its importance must first be

stressed. That the theory has been adopted by others in the US. policy establishment

demonstrates the existence of an ideology among the ruling classes that promotes—if not

favors—warfare. Warfare is not a result of cultural difference, but it is necessary in

imperial expansion.

17

However, unlike other colonial-type enterprises that have fought wars and taken
over others’ lands and bodies outright, without the need to get people on board, the US.
claims not to be an imperial power. Rather, we are in a post-colonial age. America is a
democracy, based on principles of freedom and “free” markets. And within a democracy,
people are supposed to have influence and be involved in political affairs. So an imperial
power cannot simply invade Iraq and privatize business over there. It needs to justify its
actions, and keep people appeased. People are held at bay through military force,
economic deprivation, or ideological penetration. In a system of supposed democracy,
like that of the US, all three are at play, but it is largely in the ideological that the State
maintains and exerts its control.

Noam Chomsky discusses how within the American democratic system the media
promotes ideology that favors the ruling class, which is big business and the government.
Chomsky traces an ideology among those in power in Western democracies that extends
centuries back. The worldview is one in which the ruling class does not trust American
publics to know what is in their best interests. Thus this elite yet minority class attempts
to reduce the power of the other classes and proceeds in policies that work within its best
interests, all the while portraying its minority interests as the interests of the majority
(“Manufacture”).

This mentality among the powerful is evident in Huntington’s scholarship,
especially in a report discussing the “crisis in democracy” that occurred during the 19605
in the US. The report was published in 1975 and provided to the Trilateral Commission,
an organization existing to promote international democracy. The organization was

founded in 1973 and was comprised of “about 400 distinguished leaders in business,

18

media, academia, public service, labor unions, and other non-govemmental organizations
from” Japan, Western Europe, and North America. As stated by the organization, the
goals of the Trilateral Commission are “to foster closer cooperation among these core
democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the
wider international system.”

According to the report, the crisis of democracy was that there was, in
Huntington’s very words, an “excess of democracy” which “involved the challenging of
the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions, increased popular
participation in and control over those institutions,” increased “marches, demonstrations,
protest movements,” and “markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of
blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women” (113, 61, and 59-
60). Thus, he concluded that there needed to be a move to cultivate “political passivity,”
because “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some
measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups” (84-
85 and 114). Being passive, apathetic, and noninvolved means that people are soothed,
quieted, and anything but angry and stirred up. The democracy envisioned by the ruling
class, thus, is one in which appeasement is key.

While Huntington makes no direct correlation between this report and his clash of
civilizations theory, we can see an ideology at play that is not only among those in power,
but within Huntington himself. Appeasement is a goal, and the rhetoric and ideology the
clash of civilizations trope promotes surely has that effect on far too many. For instance,
as for the US, American soldiers and mercenaries remain plentifirl in Afghanistan and

Iraq, even without a draft. Without massive protests or riots, the continuing policies of

19

the War on Terror are minimally challenged. Again, material power, like the military and
economic hardship also deflected the masses from mobilizing, but it is the ideological
that I study here.

Seeing as how appeasement goes hand-in-hand with the U.S.-style of democracy,
perhaps the quest to spread democracy across the Middle East is an attempt to spread the
hegemonic control that functions so well within the US. Edward Said does not believe
in a description of an Islamic culture as one in which Muslims spend the majority of their
time plotting against the “West,” which Said sees as being implied in Huntington’s clash
of civilizations theory. In stark contrast to the mainstream portrait of the “threat of Islam,
Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorism that one encounters so often in the media,” it is
Said’s belief that there are a variety of “currents and counter currents” among Muslims,
and that there is an “extremely wide-spread attitude of questioning and skepticism
towards age-old authority that characterizes the post Cold War in both East and West.” If
this cultural reading is indeed a pattern emerging from Muslim cultures and peoples, then
in order to protect US. interests abroad, the implementation of a system of appeasement
in the Middle East would be desired.

In short, those in power benefit fi'om certain ideological explanations of US.
foreign policy that work in the interests of the few. Thus, with the premise that the
rhetoric of the clash of civilizations argument has either the intent or consequence of
appeasing some of its audiences, it is important to look at how that appeasement may
occur. The remainder of this paper aims to address just this question, finding that it relies

heavily on racism. In order to get into the specifics of how a process of racialization is

20

ascribed through the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations, we turn first to Huntington’s

thoughts on the subject.

Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations Theory

Huntington’s thesis first came out in the article, “The Clash of Civilizations?,”
which was published in Foreign A flairs in 1993. Three years later it became a book by
the same title (but without the question mark). The article was one of the most read in
the joumal’s history and the book made the national bestseller list. Within both a
roadmap for war is outlined, including the U.S.’s targeted group of so-labeled “Islamic
Civilization.” According to Huntington, during the Cold War era ideology was the
determining factor of global politics and warfare, and with the demise of that era our
world has entered into the next: one in which the “great divisions among humankind and
the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (sec. 1).

Huntington divides the world into what he calls “civilizations.” The primary
civilizations, which account for the entire globe, include Western, Confucian, Japanese,
Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African (sec. III). The varied
countries and ethnic groups are grouped together by what Huntington considers to be
their “cultural” commonalities, meaning that, in his own words, the “civilizations are
differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most
important, religion” (sec. 111). There is no in-depth explanation for why the globe is
divided and grouped as such, and yet these cultural borders are fixed and non-fluid.

The argument is that a cultural identity, or a civilizational identity, is the most

fundamental aspect of any person’s being. In demonstrating this point, Huntington

21

claims that it is possible for a person to be of a mix of nationalities and/or ethnicities, like
Arab and American, for example. However, one cannot so easily be of two different
religions: Muslim and Christian (sec. III). Thus, due to an innate identity and way of
being that characterizes a civilization, some are more likely to be allies, while others are
more likely to have conflict or clash with others.

The civilizational conflict that most of the article is concerned with is the one
between the West and Islam. The Western Civilization includes the North American
continent north of Mexico, Western Europe, and Australia. The Islamic civilization, the
West’s nemesis, includes northern Africa, Turkey and the Middle East, eastern Central
Asian countries such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the
southeast Asian island chains of Malaysia and Indonesia (see map in Appendix B).

While Huntington does not get into the specifics of Islam’s values, he does lay out
those values that are apart of the West that Islamic cultures lack. These include the
following (sec. V):

o individualism

o liberalism

- constitutionalism
0 human rights

0 equality

o liberty

0 the rule of law

0 democracy

0 free markets
0 the separation of church and state

The Western cultural values are not religion-centered. Yet the Islamic civilization is
titled by a religion. In the upcoming sections it will become apparent how the

underpinning ideology comes to life in the War on Terror.

22

Once the actions of 11 September 2001 occurred, Huntington’s clash of
civilizations idea became a prominent framework in which to comprehend and interpret
the violence that America was not used to experiencing. It was a national experience
because it was sold as such through the media and such outlets of public discourse. The
official story read as an inevitable clash between Islam and the West, which included all
Americans. Basically, there was an enemy—terrorists—and their violence was a product
of their culture. Because the terrorists were apart of the “Islamic” culture, and they are
the most fundamentalist and thus the furthest removed from our values and ways, they
simply seek violence and destruction. However, because we are an “enlightened” society
and do not discriminate on the basis of “color or creed,” then we could not generalize so
openly about an entire culture or religion. Thus, a “subtle” racism emerged: a rhetoric

that denies and yet perpetuates racism, and imperialism.

Racialization

Adopted from two sociologists, Karim Murji and John Solomos, a basic definition
of racialization is “the process by which ideas about race are constructed, come to be
regarded as meaningful, and are acted upon” (1). In the context of the War on Terror,
however, race is an unspoken idea, disguised as culture, and it is applied to a religion that
is comprised of varying ethnic groups. Thus the idea is not so much about “race” per se,
but rather it is an idea about a people or peoples who are conceptually grouped together
on the basis of religion and are depicted in ways that mark them racially.

Persons of a race share a lineage, ancestry, and common physical characteristics.

As such, racism has commonly been a prejudice or discrimination against a people of a

23

certain “race,” or people who “look” a certain way, and it has been justified on the basis
of biological difference. Targets of the War on Terror, however, have been multifarious
yet conceptually contained by affiliation to a geography in which Muslims are the
majority: the Middle East, northern Afi‘ica, southwest Asia. The people are not one race
(they are Afghanis, Pakistanis, Arabs, Persians, etc.), but have the commonality of
religion, which dictates presumed commonality in culture. If the idea is not centered on
race, then, one might wonder, why “racialization”?

The answer resides in the conceptualization of racialization as described by the
sociologist Robin Cohen in which a religion gets racialized. Writing in the mid-nineties,
Cohen considers Muslims to be targets of racism, even though “race” is not the
determining factor of the discrimination. Although his analysis is on anti-Irish sentiment
in post-World War 11 Britain, Cohen concludes that a group is racialized if the people
pertaining to that group are “treated like a different race and alluded to in race-like ways”
(194). Through culture, Muslims are treated racially.

Scholar and historian on Muslim and East-West affairs, Mahmood Marndani,
describes the way that culture has become the central explanation for the War on Terror.
He calls this element in public discourse, “Culture Talk,” and he writes of it as follows:

[This discourse] assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that
defines it, and it then explains politics as a consequence of that essence.
Culture Talk after 9/11, for example, qualified and explained the practice
of ‘terrorism’ as ‘Islamic.’ ‘Islamic terrorism’ is thus offered as both
description and explanation of the events of 9/1 1. (17-18)

Cultural explanations replace the biological explanations that racism used to rely on.
Therefore, even though a notion of culture (by way of religious affiliation) stands in for

race, it is still appropriate to discuss civilization-clash rhetoric in terms of racialization.

24

Returning to the broad definition of racialization as set out by Murji and Solomos,
the following addresses how the idea of race/culture in the War on Terror is constructed,
gains currency, and is put into action. In the War on Terror, it is through symbols,
especially tropes, and they gain currency in the context of imperialism. Writing of
metaphors, which are a particular type of trope, Steuter and Wills fi'om sociology and
English, respectively, state that the words of symbol discourse are powerfirl because they
do not only describe reality, but they shape how it is one conceives of reality (10). Much
of how Americans understand the War on Terror is through the propaganda of the media,
which provides the tropes, or as the authors purport, the “frames through which we see
the world” (17).

In war there is what Steuter and Wills call a “fabricated enemy.” This enemy
implicitly and dangerously indirectly becomes symbolic of the whole group fi'om which it
is believed to belong. In regards to the War on Terror, the authors write: “When the
terrorist comes to stand for all Arabs, for example, or religious extremists for all
Muslims, then we generalize globally, broadening our target from immediate actors like
the 9/11 suicide bombers to encompass all Middle-Eastemers” (26). Furthermore, they
assert, “Racism at large works on this same principle, [the] lumping together into a single
mass all the variety of individual humanity” (27). Thus, hasty generalizations work to
color (pun intended) all Muslims.

However, because symbols make the racism less direct than the racism of the
past, racism gets denied. Villanueva points to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva who writes of
racism without racists: a “color-blind racism” in which racism is denied yet continues

disguised through “frames or set paths for interpreting information” (italics in original;

25

Bonilla-Silva 26). Bonilla-Silva provides four frames, from which Villanueva finds
“cultural racism” to be the rhetorical trope of the new racism that the current power nexus
employs, as provided by civilization-clash rhetoric (“Rhetorics”). Thus, the clash of
civilizations concept itself becomes a trope that when invoked in discourses surrounding
the War on Terror forwards a racist argument. The following sections work to unpack
this trope, identifying it as a dominant trope that works within a particular rhetorical

environment.

The Overarching Clash of Civilizations Trope

The clash of civilizations theory becomes a trope when it comes to life in public
discourses within a certain rhetorical context comprised of other tropes and symbols. The
phrase signifies the meanings conveyed in Huntington’s text, and those meanings
themselves have a tropologic history. A trope is such when the ideas conjured reveal
hidden messages and thus signify something else. The clash of civilizations trope
indicates a colony-blind imperialism because it operates to justify and thereby promote
empire building all the while denying the continued existence of imperialism.

As a dominant trope, the clash of civilizations includes some combination of the
following rhetorical criteria. First, the subject concerns Muslims and members of “the
West,” and is often within the context of the War on Terror. Secondly, one of the phrases

,3 ‘6

or words “clash of civilizations, civilization,” “culture clash,” or “clash” with
“culture,” must be employed. Third, when discussing the causes of the 11 September
2001 plane hijackings and subsequent wars, blame is based on cultural difference.

Fourth, there is usually a rhetorical caveat indicating that while some Muslims are

26

terrorists, most are not. And lastly, in the case of political discourse, it seems to be
political, but a closer analysis of it demonstrates that its central function is to justify and
promote a predetermined course of action, without leaving open alternative options. That
is, whereas deliberative rhetoric is a call to action or at least proposes the possibility of
deliberation, the epideictic is a praise of action taken.

The clash of civilizations dominant trope comes to life in the public speeches
former President George W. Bush gave on the War on Terror. Before getting into the
internal workings of the trope, first a snippet of Bush’s September 11th fifth anniversary
speech to the nation in which each rhetorical element comprising the clash of
civilizations dominant trope are collectively manifest. Bush goes so far as to invoke and
yet seemingly reject the culture clashing theory in his proclamation: “This struggle has
been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.” However,
what this struggle entails is evident in the following passage taken from the speech.

Since the horror of 9/1 1, we've learned a great deal about the enemy. We
have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy, but not without
purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists
who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam - a totalitarian ideology that
hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent. And we have
learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women
are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings,
and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and
other civilized nations. The war against this enemy is more than a military
conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the
calling of our generation.

While denouncing that there is a clash of differing civilizations, Bush nevertheless
provides the phrase and thus the associated meanings that the trope invites.

Bush invoked the clash of civilizations trope numerous times, usually with the
common topic, “civilization.” Richard Jackson, whose work on critical terrorism studies,

27

international conflict resolution, and security studies gets published in international

‘66

political science journals, finds that the war against terrorism’ [was constructed] as a
fight for civilisation itself.” He provides a plethora of examples in which Bush, his
cabinet members, and even Senator Kerry as a presidential candidate, made such
declarations (50).

Just within the six speeches that formed the primary sources for this paper—
Bush’s annual 11 September, pro-War on Terror speeches from 2001 to 2006—there is at
least one such declaration per speech. These statements include: “civilization's fight”
(2001), “threaten civilization” (2002), “threat to civilization” (2003), “civilized nations
are in this struggle” (2004), “enemy of civilization” (2005), and as already cited above,
“struggle for civilization” (2006). Moreover, within these speeches alone, there are
seventeen references to “civilization” or “civilized,” and in one other speech (2004),
Bush again used the very phrase, “clash of civilizations” (also to deny such a worldview).
Thus, the first two criteria of the dominant trope are met: the theme is about the War on
Terror and the common topics are plentifirlly present.

The next two indicators of the dominant trope are the cultural explanations and
the disclaimer not to generalize about a whole population. Within the passage above,
Bush describes the enemy as “evil,” and driven by an ideology that is “totalitarian” and
“hates freedom.” Their ideology stems from a “perverted vision of Islam.” There is little
else to explain why the terrorists want a repressive empire in the Middle East and to harm
America. All rests on the idea that the terrorists are such because they are (bad) Muslims

and come from a totalitarian society. Such expressions are imbued with culture as

conceptualized by Huntington. Culture is explained in terms of matters associated with

28

America’s political system: democracy, liberalism, liberty, “free” markets, the separation
of church and state, and so forth.

In another part of the speech, Bush states that the US. is “now in the early hours
of this struggle between tyranny and freedom.” Freedom is associated with and even
equated with democracy. Bush claims that terrorism is born of non—democratic or
tyrannical states. Bush tells a (his)story of US. foreign policy toward the Middle East
prior to 2001. According to Bush, the US. spent sixty “[y]ears of pursuing stability to
promote peace” in the Middle East. But this was ineffective, as is evident by one
“September morning,” presumably the eleventh, in 2001. He concludes: “So we changed
our policies, and committed America's influence in the world to advancing freedom and
democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism.” Therefore, Bush
implies that if countries in the Middle East were democratic there would not be any
foreign terrorism. Since democracy is associated with the very cultural values that make
up a civilization, then the problem is a matter of culture.

Also, in returning to Huntington, religion is the fundamental determinant of one’s
culture and a functioning democracy. The cultural explanation is also a part of the
discourse’s requirement of a quick acknowledgement that not all Muslims are terrorists.
The clash of civilizations trope works only in the discourse environment of what
Mamdani refers to as the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” binary. Marndani explains that in
public discourse Muslims fall into one of these two camps; they get described as either
“good” Muslims who desire democracy and the like, or they are “bad” Muslims, who are

fundamentalists (24). As a rhetorical tactic, the disclaimer functions along the same lines

29

as the introductory clause, “No offense, but. . .,” at which point the person proceeds with
an offense.

It is clear that Bush makes a distinction between “good” and “bad” Muslims. The
terrorists seek to repress other Muslims. These other Muslims seek democracy, as
indicated in one part of the speech in which Bush states: “And now the challenge is to
help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfills the dreams of the nearly 12 million
Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December.” Even though everything
else within the passage at hand provides images and views of “bad” Muslims, negative
stereotyping is denied within the passage itself by way of the inclusion of the clear claim
that not all Muslims are bad.

Marndani attributes the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” phenomenon to Bernard
Lewis, not Huntington (20-24). However, while it is a part of Lewis’s arguments about
Muslims, this does not mean that it does not also come from Huntington. One,
Huntington’s work directly draws from Lewis, and two, it is evident in Huntington’s
article itself. As with the assimilation narrative with people of color in the US, the logic
of Huntington’s civilization clashing theory too has its version of how a member of a
civilization can, in a sense, transcend her/his “color or creed.” It would seem that if those
of the Islamic civilization adopt Western values, like democracy and its counterparts of
freedom and free markets, then there would not be any reason for conflict. Furthermore,
as Huntington wraps up his thesis, he concludes with suggestions for foreign policy in
general, most of which support warfare. Yet he encourages policy makers to learn more

about the religious and philosophical underpinning of other civilizations and to aim for

30

“coexistence” and a shared future of a single “global civilization” (17). Such remarks
have as their premise the belief that there are or can be “good” Muslims.

Yet, as is the nature of the disclaimer, the idea that there are good Muslims and a
future of peace is plausible is not the dominant message throughout the text. Huntington
is skeptical of “coexistence” as a long-term solution because he finds the culture of Islam
to be so drastically different from that of the West, and he predicts other civilizations may
modernize yet refuse to “Westernize,” meaning not politically and thereby not culturally
assimilate (14 and 16). Thus, even with the disclaimer, Huntington still forwards an
image of a dark firture, and negative images of Muslims. The “good Muslim, bad
Mulsim” disclaimer leads to a generalization of a people through disguised meanings.
Color-blind racism and the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” disclaimer are foundational for
the proliferation of civilization-clash rhetoric in a proclaimed post-colonial era in which
racism too is a thing of the past.

Thus far we have looked at four of the rhetorical criteria that indicates the
presence of the clash of civilization trope: subject, common topics, cultural racism, and
the disclaimer. The fifth element, the genre of the discourse, will be discussed after a
look into what the entire trope of the clash of civilization means. The very term
civilization signifies both culture and empire. On the one hand, it signifies who is
“civilized,” which is explained in cultural terms (as opposed to biological). On the other
hand, it stands in for “empire” such that one can use the terms interchangeably. The

dominant trope becomes not just a color-blind racism, but a colony-blind imperialism.

Civilization Trope:
A Colony-Blind Imperialism

31

The very word “civilization” itself functions as a trope, a trope that, when
combined with the other rhetorical elements, is indicative of the clash of civilization
trope. Civilization in public discourse pertains to the “civilized” world, meaning those
who have “progressed” and “modernized.” Civilization is about “advanced” members of
the “first” or “developed” world. Jackson believes that the word as invoked in the public
discourse of the War on Terror is apart of the centuries old “civilization-barbarism”
narrative (50), which Cloud sees as leading to a scenario of white man’s burden (228).
From both scholars the idea is that there is a construction of “us vs. them,” with an
assumed superiority of “us.” The “us” are those who belong to some notion of “the
West.” The “them” are not the terrorists per se, but all who are uncivilized, all who are
not us, not the West.

The “uncivilized” get portrayed as either savages in need of help, being freed
through a system of democracy, or as the enemy, who are barbarous and ought be
“exterrninated.” While the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” element is employed, the images
we are left with are not of a docile, kind people in need of help. Rather, the images are of
a violent, explosive (pun intended) people who are irrational and full of hatred. The
barbarian narrative is dominant. Steuter and Wills look into this stereotyping of Arabs
and Muslims in animalistic metaphors, stating that they “extend the violence of
individuals to encompass an entire culture, a culture portrayed as inherently violent,
uncivilized, empty of our values and our shared concern for the work of human life” (4).
The authors claim that the othering of enemies of the State functions to create insoluble

divisions (xi and 9).

32

Such divisions are necessary when the motives of the US. are not really to help
people, be it Iraqis seeking free elections or Americans who could be attacked again.
Wallerstein finds that imperial power is always accompanied by a “moral defense.” He
writes of the “civilizing mission,” a “presumed moral necessity to force others to conform
to the norms prescribed by universal values,” and what constitutes “universal” values are
always the proclaimed values of the imperial power (510). Mamdani stresses the need to
“distinguish between civilization and power” (33). Within Bush’s speeches there is never
the mention of US. power nor any political or economic gains the US. may realize in
spreading democracy. Yet they are present (as will become evident in Part III). This is
how a well-functioning trope operates. When Bush invokes the idea of civilization or the
phrase “clash of civilization,” he invokes a story of power.

In tracing Bush’s rhetoric on the War on Terror to Huntington and his influences,
it becomes apparent that the trope of “civilization” really means empire, and the “West”
primarily refers to the U.S., since it is the current center of imperial power. Huntington
draws on a selective history of East-West relations to demonstrate the inherently differing
and thereby conflicting Western and Islamic civilizations. In so doing, it becomes
apparent that the civilization history is a history of empire. The history of conflict is
centuries old, which Huntington dates to 732 CE (a century after the inception of the
religion of Islam) when Islam with the Moors expanded into and up through Spain and
fought in Tours, with France as a symbol of the West. After, there are the Crusades, the
expansion efforts of the Ottoman Empire, Arab and Israeli warfare starting in the mid-
twentieth century, the Egyptian and the French problems in the mid fifties, late twentieth-

century Muslim terrorist actions, and then the Gulf War.

33

The latter Huntington alludes to by stating, “This warfare between Arabs and the
West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf
to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another” (sec. IV). The earlier
history Huntington invokes includes imperial rule: the early spread of Islam as an empire,
the Ottoman Empire, and the French colonization of Egypt. The recent and current
affairs are connected to that history as if they were but a continuation of imperial
interactions, thereby contextualizing terrorism and Mideast warfare in an imperial setting.

Huntington’s civilizational lens in which the history of humanity is viewed in a
breadth spanning centuries on a scale encompassing the globe follows the scholarship of
Toynbee. From 1934 to 1961, Toynbee produced twelve books in a series entitled, A
Study of History. It is a history of “civilizations” throughout time that, like Huntington’s,
recounts, examines, and predicts their emergences and demises. Toynbee begins with
twenty-three civilizations, most of which have failed and many of which have been
consumed by others, resulting in just five now. These he labels as Western Christian,
Orthodox Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Far Eastern. Toynbee’s civilizations are also
classified as cultural entities in which religion plays a major part. While Toynbee shapes
Huntington’s view of civilizational history as imperial history, Huntington draws from
Lewis for a conceptualization of the “Islamic Civilization” in particular.

Huntington’s article even cites an article written by Lewis in 1990, “The Roots of
Muslim Rage,” which has a section entitled, “A Clash of Civilizations.” What
Huntington directly borrows is Lewis’s belief in a clash of civilizations as an ancient and
inherent description of relations between the West and Islam. This is evident in Lewis’s

history which mirrors Huntington’s.

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Like Huntington, Lewis provides a long, distorted history of waning interactions
between presumed members of the Islamic and Western cultures, which is also about
imperial power. In Lewis’s 2001 article, “The Revolt of Islam,” which in 2004 turned
into the book, Crisis of Islam, the historian tells a history of Islam in order to explain the
causes of the War on Terror. The history he invokes is one of imperial pursuit from
Muslim peoples, beginning with the Prophet Mohammad and the foundation of Islam in
632 CE. Huntington and Lewis tell histories or stories not of people but of empires.

Huntington lists a handful of reasons for the inevitable clashes between differing
civilizations, all having to do with differences in cultural identities and values, and,
significantly, the institutions that advance both. The two greatest reasons, states
Huntington, concern power and culture: “Differences in power and struggles for military,
economic and institutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West and
other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values and beliefs, are a second
source of conflict” (sec. VI). Power and culture are not just intertwined; power is
realized through cultural domination.

Huntington claims that the main concern is with the cultural, yet he reveals a great
concern with military, economic, and political power. Huntington states: “The West in
effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the
world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and
promote Western political and economic values” (sec. VI). The values that the West
exerts its power to protect and promote are political and economic, thus populations with
such values would add to Western power. In fact, it is through culture that power can be

achieved. Huntington finds that “Differences in culture and religion create differences

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over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to
the environment” (sec. 111). Such concerns with the exportation of Western values
abroad suggest imperial expansion via culture.

Cultural expansion is justified through cultural racism. The justification largely
comes from the simultaneous acknowledgement of Western imperial penetration in the
Middle East and dismissal of the significance and consequences of empire by putting
blame on the alleged violent culture of Muslims. As does Huntington, Lewis
acknowledges that there is legitimacy in the argument that the Muslim world has been
altered by “Western domination, Western influence, or Western precept and example.”
He explains: “For vast numbers of Middle Eastemers, Westem-style economic methods
brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought tyranny, even Western-style
warfare brought defeat.”

Just as Lewis affirms Western imperialism and some of its aftermath in the
Middle East, he nevertheless continues with: “And since the United States is the
legitimate heir of European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged leader of
the West, the United States has [as if innocently] inherited the resulting grievances and
become the focus for the pent-up hate and anger [of Muslims]” (italics mine; “Roots”).

This “pent-up hate and anger” is a cultural attribute that is inherited as if it were a
genetic predisposition:

There is something in the religious culture of Islam which is inspired, in even the
humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never
exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations. And yet, in moments of
upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and
courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred
which irnpels even the government of an ancient and civilized country. (“Roots”)

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The above passage displays the same rhetorical ploy of acknowledging and yet
dismissing something that ought to be highlighted and given great attention. Lewis puts
forth the argument that it does not matter how many kind, hospitable, or gentle Muslims
one has known, because while it is in their “nature” to be as such, the core of a Muslim is
actually filled with hatred and anger waiting to explode out of “its” facade.

Through cultural racism, blame falls on Muslims and persons of the Mideast, and
the US. is glorified. Thus there is no reason for the US. to change its policies and
actions abroad. Culture thus serves as both the reason for Muslim terrorism and the
reason for US. foreign policy in the Mideast. Through the first four criteria of the
dominant trope of the clash of civilizations—subject, common topics, cultural racism,
and the disclaimer—we see how these rhetorical elements interact in order to mask
colonial discourses. Yet the discourse genre that is under study herein is categorized into
political discourse. And political discourse in the tradition of ancient rhetoric, going back
to Aristotle, was for deliberation in order to come up with varying solutions for the
ailments of society.

The next section looks to the fifth rhetorical component: the type of discourse,
which functions as epideictic, not deliberative. Because it does praise and blame without
looking into the varied narratives that work through such profound social concerns, it
creates one grand narrative that operates to forward but one agenda. Part III, which
follows the next section that details how the discourse genre functions, utilizes a lens of
political economy in order move in the direction of creating more deliberative rhetorics

that take into account multiple perspectives.

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Epideictic Oratory in Disguise

The very discourse genre employed by Bush and Huntington is not really political
in the sense of drawing on history, weighing facts, and coming to different ways of
proceeding and solving the problem. Rather, it is epideictic, celebratory of the West. It
does praise and blame, and leads to only one solution. The discourse itself functions to
justify and promote but one story and one type of foreign policy, to promote and advance
U.S. imperialism.

A premise of the clash of civilization trope is that there must be a “civilization”
hierarchy, and it is unquestionably presumed that the “West” will vie for the position in
this global competition. There is no suggestion of or hint towards the US. taking a
different direction; not a thought of deliberation. Rather, Huntington simply states, “In
the politics of civilizations, the people and governments of non-Westem civilizations no
longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West
as movers and shapers of history” (sec. 1). Subtly, the existence of colonialism is denied,
and a postcolonial universal culture is alluded to. In utilizing the tropologic reading
unpacked in the previous section, such a universal civilization means an even stronger
U.S.-dominated monopoly over the world.

Huntington believes that as the West attempts “to promote its values of
democracy and liberalism to universal values, to maintain its military predominance[,]
and to advance its economic interests” around the globe, it will “engender countering
responses from other civilizations” (sec. 111). From this Huntington concludes that there
are but three routes for these civilizations to take, of course excluding any alternative

action on the part of the West.

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The non-Western civilizations can attempt to (1) isolate themselves from Western
penetration, (2) assimilate into Western culture, or (3) confront the West through warfare
(sec. VI). Thus, what in effect happens is that the agency and the blame of the future
events of any civilizational clash are afforded to all civilizations; the US. is not to blame
for a future of global warfare. However, a lens of political economy indicates that what
Huntington really advocates is a post-Cold War era of U.S.-led neocolonialism, such that
the US. expands its power globally not only through militaristic means (a colonial
strategy), but also through political and economic institutions via culture (or democracy
spreading). More on political economies and the War on Terror in Part III, for now we
focus on how the clash of civilization trope in political discourse works to support the
US. agenda of advancing such economic, military, and political systems of domination.

Huntington, for example, espouses some possible paths for the US. in his history
and prediction of civilization interactions. He asserts, “Western democracy strengthens
anti-Westem political forces” like in the Gulf War when many in the Middle East were
proud of Saddam Hussein for challenging the West. Thus, in the long run, Huntington
maintains, democracy on non-Western civilizations will be counter productive (sec. IV).
Basically, all routes point toward one end: warfare. Even in the one paragraph of
Huntington’s article that has any explicit call to action, below, there remains one course
of action.

Given that warfare is inevitable in the long run, there are nonetheless short term
implications for US. foreign policy, which thereby provides some element of deliberative
discourse. For the time being, Huntington advises the policy shapers of the US. to (1)

“exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states;” (2) “to support in

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other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests;” and (3) “to
strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and
values and to promote the involvements of non-Westem states in those institutions” (sec.
IX). Yet such deliberation is minimal, as the calls to action ultimately have a single goal:
the promotion of US. imperialism.

In the wake of the War of Terror, the clash of civilization trope in political
discourse, demonstrates the non-deliberative “political” discourse. As mentioned earlier,
Bush’s solution for the “struggle of civilization” is simply the advancement of “freedom
and democracy.” Without deliberation, all his rhetoric does is glorify “the West,” and all
the values associated with the US. political system, such as democracy and individual
freedom. There is no real political debate. If there were any actual critique we might get
another side of what civilization stands for.

As historian Roger Osborne points out, the images conjured in the mention of
civilization tend to be of “tolerance, freedom of expression and democracy; not poverty,
family breakdown, inequality, crime and drug dependency, . . . war and torture, slavery
and genocide” (italics mine; 3). Jackson purports that the dichotomy of the civilized
versus the uncivilized world conjured in the civilization argument “obliterates any
reference to western civilisation’s savagery and brutality in two World Wars, the
Holocaust, the atomic attacks against Japan, numerous colonial wars and recent wars,
or the barbarous and savage treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo
Bay” (50). Not to mention all the harm inflicted on the masses comprising Western
civilization, such as the U.S.’s large growth of poverty, homelessness, prisons, and

increasingly negligent systems of health care and education.

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In short, seeing things through a cultural lens provides limiting and destructive
solutions to a war that has ensued. Without looking elsewhere, like the material causes of
terrorist attacks against the U.S., we might never find a more peaceful path. In order to
find productive solutions, all the root causes need to first be ascertained. While the clash
of civilizations narrative offers one solution, other viewpoints offer more solutions. Part
III is a step towards the activist rhetoric that is deeply needed yet nearly absent in
mainstream political discussions. I attempt to bring into dialogue other stories viewed
from other angles, through other lenses. The next section looks at some stories that might

arise when the lens viewing the War on Terror is one of political economy.

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PART III

A Politico-Economic Lens for the War on Terror:
A Story of Imperialism

i cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves
like a broken heart. i have never owned pain that needs to spread
like that.
there is no poetry in this. causes and effects.
symbols and ideologies. mad conspiracy here,
information we’ll never know. there is death here, and promises
of more.
there is life here. anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting,
but breathing for sure. if there is any light to come, it will
shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the
rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen.
~From “First Writing Since: Poem on Crisis of Terror ”
by Suheir Hammad
The colony-blind imperialism that is cultivated in the clash of civilizations trope
comes to light with a neocolonial perspective. Without such a perspective, one is less
likely to be dissuaded from the clash of civilizations narrative, and one might not
conclude that discussions of civilizations reveal masked colonial discourses. Taking the
flip side, when one is dissuaded from such rhetorics, it begs the question of what
alternative narratives exist. Because my theory of colony-blind imperialism depends on a
story of neocolonialism, such are the narratives I advance herein.
The clash of civilizations trope offers a story based on cultural premises: terrorism
is due to the extremist culture of Islam thus the exportation of democracy and the cultural

values inherent in such a political system would make for a peaceful world. Yet behind

rhetorics are material conditions. Thus if we assume that there are not inherent cultural

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differences creating international violence, what would other lenses reveal? In order to
move away from culture as an analytic, then, I look to a variety of scholarly sources
primarily from history and political economy that look at U.S.-Middle East relations,
with a special focus on the 11 September 2001 acts of warfare and the War on Terror as
embodied in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In my attempt to apply a politico-economic lens to understand the War on Terror
and its rhetoric, I do not mean to create another totalizing narrative to replace the clash of
civilizations narrative. Quite to the contrary, I attempt to disrupt totalizing narratives by
offering other worldviews. Stories of all walks of life need to collide and intenningle,
and most importantly, allow space for other rhetorics and their stories. By offering other
ways of making sense of the wars between the US. State and Muslim countries and
groups, I move in the direction of enacting the very types of discourse and rhetorics that
need to be fostered.

I begin with identifying the targets of the 2001 acts of warfare: the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon, and likely the White House. Given that the plotters were intelligent
enough to take control of commercial flights and coordinate multi-destination attacks, it
is unlikely that they had any intention of actually destroying American infrastructure. Of
course, as the definition of the term “terrorist” designates, the hijackers inflicted fear.

But if it was just about conveying fear they could have attacked a large church,
commercial mall, or a park, for example.

Rather, the actual targets have symbolic meanings. They convey a history that is
not just about inflicting terror because of cultural tendencies and differences. It was

about conveying a message about the US. military (Pentagon), executive government

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(White House), and the economy (World Trade Center). In a word: imperialism. As
such, it is imperative to a look into U.S.-Middle Eastern history and to do it within a
holistic manner through the scope of political economy.

In pointing to political and economic incentives for the War on Terror,
Huntington’s claim to purely socio-cultural reasons behind “civilization ” strife between
the “West” and Islam becomes undermined. Yet it is not enough to just demonstrate the
political or economic, for the two are as connected as are the people and their cultures
within and surrounding these spheres. It is in the political and economic where power is
realized, which is done through rhetoric and ideology. Therefore, since Part II studies the
rhetorical and ideological aspects of the War on Terror, what follows is a politico-
economic outlook. In the sections that follow, what emerge are alternative reasons
behind Muslim terrorism towards representatives of the West, and US. foreign policy in
the Mideast region. These stories purposefully contradict and conflict assumptions and
premises of the clash of civilizations narrative, in an effort to promote rhetorics with the

potential for deliberation of social concerns.

Another Historical Perspective:
A Non-Cultural Lens for U.S.-Middle East Conflicts

In contrast to the history that the clash of civilizations trope affords, scholars
argue that there are many causes for warfare between the US. and groups and countries
within the greater Middle East region. After the 2001 acts of war within US. borders, the
US. launched into the post-Cold War ideological phase of justifying and thereby
projecting the future path of US. foreign policy. Before getting into economic

incentives, simply establishing non-culturally based explanations for any Muslim and

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Mideast “animosities” towards the West is the next rhetorical move I apply to pry open
spaces for varied narratives and thereby varied solutions.

Middle Eastern territory has a history of European and American imperial
penetration that has sown resentment against the US. Historian of Islam and the Middle
East, John Esposito, makes reference to a build up of Middle Eastern tension due to a loss
of control over its own territory. As Esposito recounts, “the twentieth-century map of the
Muslim world reveals” that the “boundaries and rulers of countries were created by
European colonial powers” (75). Furthermore, “deeply felt Muslim grievances against
the West,” claims Esposito, is a result of “European colonialism, the creation of
Israel,. . . [and] the presence of American troops in the Gulf,” among other factors (73).

Of prominence among these factors, Esposito points to the establishment of
Israel’s official statehood in 1948. According to Esposito, “the most volatile example of
European nation building in the Middle East remains the creation of Israel amidst
competing and still-unresolved religious, nationalist, and territorial claims” (81). James
Bamford, a journalist, takes Esposito’s claims firrther by arguing that the September 2001
attacks in America were a backlash from a long-term US. foreign policy in the Middle
East, especially the U.S.-backed Israeli state that systematically harms Palestinian people.
One example after another provided by Bamford shows that Middle Eastern terrorists’
demands were that the US. should no longer occupy or control Middle Eastern territories
and affairs, especially in regards to Israel and Palestine (96, 138-139, 144, 168, 210-211,
237, 239, and 248). However, the presence and actions of Israel is not all there is.

According to Karen Armstrong, scholar on Islam, the coordinators of the

September 2001 assaults on the US. attribute their reasons for the violence not only to

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the US. support of Israeli occupation, but also to the US. army in the Middle East and on
Muslim “sacred soil” and the deaths attributable to Iraq’s sanctions (190). To go directly
to the source, a quote from bin Laden in a 2004 speech points to the U.S.’s involvement
in the Middle East with regards to Iraq:

[T]he oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in
the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the
throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children -
also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with
a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil.

According to this interview, a major influence in bin Laden’s violent campaign against
the US. has to do with the violence inflicted upon innocent people, and what is construed
as the U.S.’s motives regarding oil.

Of course there is no justification for violence, especially when otherwise
uninvolved people become the victims. Also, the speech may simply be a way of
exciting support from those populations directly affected by the U.S.’s harmful military
and economic policies. Still, even if bin Laden’s motivations are separate from his army,
there remains non-cultural factors to consider. Finnegan, a journalist of international
affairs who writes of the 2003 initiated war in Iraq, points out that while the “US.
currently enjoys a truly rare global preeminence—military, economic, pop-cultural,”
“power is not, obviously, the same as legitimacy.” And the more imperialist actions the
US. takes, argues the journalist, the less legitimacy that the US. will have abroad.
Finnegan takes it further by asserting that the the actions of al Qaeda have support in the
Muslim world because of the group’s claims against American imperial power (Finnegan
53). Since in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 the wars get played out in Iraq and

Afghanistan, it is important to understand these countries’ histories in relation to recent

46

US. foreign policy. A synopsis of US. foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan supports
Finnegan’s argument.

A former US. attorney general and scholar of US. foreign policy in the Middle
East, Ramsey Clark, addresses the U.S.’s involvement in the Middle East throughout the
twentieth century. He states, “The Gulf War was fought. . .to establish US. power over
the region and its oil” (3). Such a claim has backing in the history of US. involvement in
the Middle East, especially in regards to the history of Iraq.

As is the case with many Middle Eastern countries, Iraq and its resources were
colonized and controlled by the British until 1958 when there was a national revolution
that put Iraqis in charge of their own land. With the help of the new Iraqi government the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was formed in 1960. OPEC
allowed for greater Middle Eastern control of their oil, instead of the US. This
organization exerted Middle Eastern power, as demonstrated with the 1973 oil embargo
that temporarily crippled the US. (Clark 4, 8). The US. was not able to penetrate Middle
Eastern lands and their resources as successfully thereafter.

The nationalization of the oil industry did not allow outside control over the
industry, resulting in a significant reduction of US. profit (Clark 5, 8). Thus, the Central
Intelligence Agency began to target the Iraqi government (Clark 5). Tensions between
the US. and the Middle East escalated with such events. In Iraq, escalation came to its
high point in 1990 when Hussein invaded Kuwait, providing the US. with a “justification
for intervention in the region to control its resources,” a justification that had been needed

since the 19703 when Iraq nationalized its oil (italics mine; Clark 22, 24).

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Thus war ensued in 1991, resulting in mass destruction from hundreds of missiles
and bombs that targeted crucial infrastructure that the Iraqi people needed for survival.
Also what resulted was an economic embargo, a significant increase of US. military
units in the region, and continuing acts of warfare for years (Clark 37). Within one year,
more than one-hundred-fifty-thousand Iraqi civilians died as a direct result of the war
(Clark 1). Such violence and suffering may have had an affect on the 2001 hijackers.

Like with Iraq, Afghanistan too has a history of violence that has spurred anti-
U.S. sentiment. During the administrations of Reagan and George Bush in the 19803, the
US. became involved in the Afghan War with the Soviets. The US. supported the
Afghans in an attempt to defeat the Soviets because of the competition between the
superpowers since the beginning of the Cold War. Also, through covert actions using the
Central Intelligence Agency, the US. attempted to replace the country’s leader with
someone who would easily work in favor of the U.S.’s demands. In fighting this war, the
US. employed terrorist tactics, solicited Islamic ftmdamentalists, and killed thousands
(many likely of whom had nothing to do with the military aspects of the war). As soon as
the US. succeeded in removing the leader, the US. withdrew from the country (Bamford
178-79).

Afghanistan was left in “violent chaos,” well armed with missiles that ended up
“missing,” and with more weapons “smuggled, dropped, and tucked into Afghanistan
during the 1980s than to any other country in the world” (Bamford 179). The US.
helped to dissemble the political power structure and practically invited terrorism,

providing them with strength and an enemy.

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Moreover, the US. interference in Afghanistan is the foundation for transforming
Osarna bin Laden into a violent enemy of the US. Bamford states that the US. left
Afghanistan vulnerable to terrorism, including bin Laden and the Taliban. As a youth,
bin Laden had a teacher named Sheik Abdullah Azzam from Palestine. Azzam was a
product of the 1967 Israeli occupation that displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians
from the West Bank. Always intent on saving his homeland and the people of Palestine
from the Israelis, Azzam saw opportunity with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With
this knowledge of Azzam, bin Laden joined his mentor (Bamford 97-98). Thus, one
might argue, the seeds of the September 2001 attacks may have been planted by US.
actions.

A decade later the Pentagon and World Trade Center are hit and, what Noam
Chomsky calls, the “new phase” or continuation of the War on Terror is instigated
(“New”). Bamford argues that the 11 September 2001 events occurred largely because of
the inadequacy of US. intelligence agencies and the US. support of Israel, and then the
terrorist actions were used by the Bush administration as a pretext for a war in Iraq that
the Presidential cabinet coveted for years.

Of the violence inflicted on the Iraqi people, Bamford writes, “as more and more
civilians, broken and bloody, were pulled from the ruble of their houses following US.
bombing runs, the anger, fear, and resentment toward the United States spreads”
(Bamford 396-3 97). If there is any merit to Bamford’s argument, then there is concern in
the casualty rates. According to a 2004 BBC news source, conservative figures placed
the Iraqi death toll since the war began in 2003 at about ten thousand. Other 2004 figures

ranged up to thirty-seven thousand Iraqi deaths (“Iraq”). A study found that as of 2005,

49

possibly one-hundred thousand innocent Iraqis had been killed as a direct result of the
US. invasion, and more than half of these civilian casualties were children and women
(Bamford 394). Whether its ten or one-hundred thousand deaths, there are far too many,
and since 2004 only more people have suffered through the pain of living within a
warzone.

So if the US. is creating terrorism through its foreign policy, why does it continue
to conduct such policy? The aforementioned scholars of Middle Eastern history, Islamic
history, and US. foreign policy with regards to the Middle East provide productive
insight into this question. There is the protection of Israel, apparently for control over
other countries within the region. There is the motive of acquiring wealth through the
natural and valuable resource of oil. With Afghanistan there was the motive of defeating
Russia, the other dominant world power at that time. And more recently, with the War
on Terror, the official or mainstream explanations justifying US. foreign policy, such as
the clash of civilizations narrative, are incomplete and insufficient.

Juxtapose the history told thus far herein with the history inherent in the clash of
civilizations trope. Huntington and Lewis, for example, point to a history in which
Muslims and persons of the Mideast penetrate and assault the US. as the sole
perpetrators, not the other way around. By entertaining the idea that the US. may be
partially responsible for Muslim warfare, and by presenting a history that does not take as
its premise culture as a driving force of conflict, the emerging story might not glorify the
U.S.’s quest to democratize the Mideast. Rather, US. foreign policy may be driven by a

global political economy that is a system of imperialism.

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Of US. foreign policy, journalist Finnegan writes that it is not about “fi'eedom or
democracy. It is a system of control. It is an economics of empire” (italics mine; 42).
After September 2001, with the advent of the war in Afghanistan, Esposito had the
impression that there was a growing concern among the peoples of the Middle East that
“America [would] repeat EurOpean colonialism and attempt to infiltrate, dominate, and
ultimately redraw the map of the Middle East once again” (75). Such assumptions are
worth pursuing. With the War on Terror, however, there is a significant difference from
previous European colonization and even U.S. twentieth-century military interference
into the Middle East.

While the Middle East has been subjected to European colonialism and American
imperialism, the region now faces the violence of American advanced neocolonialism.
Neocolonialism is, in a nutshell, the way that big business has replaced or carries on
domination through economic means. Advanced neocolonialism, I argue, is global
corporatism. The concepts are elaborated upon in the context of U.S.-Middle East
relations, starting with a look into corporate economics and its ties to military expansion,

which is key to neocolonialism.

Advanced Neocolonialism:
Global Corporatism

In a critique of mainstream economics, that being the dominant version of
economics in business schools and among American society in general, political
economy is defined as pertaining to the “relationships of the economic system and its
institutions to the rest of society and social development. It is sensitive to the influence

of non-economic factors such as political and social institutions, morality, and ideology

51

in determining economic events” (qut. in Sackey, pg. vi and 96). In other words, an
economic policy or lens needs to take into consideration the political and social situation,
as they are necessarily intertwined.

In studying the US. War on Terror, or the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, for
instance, the politics and the history are entrenched in the economy. Interestingly, in
Strategic Management, a core part of any business school’s curriculum, it is explained
that Business Strategy has military origins and antecedents. In a common, mainstream
book utilized in Business programs, Contemporary Strategy Analysis, it is written:

Enterprises need business strategies for much the same reasons that armies
need military strategies — to give direction and purpose, to deploy
resources in the most effective manners, and to coordinate the decisions
made by different individuals. Indeed, the concepts and theories of
business strategy have their antecedents in military strategy. (italics mine;
3-14)

Moreover, in an article published in Harvard Business Review, “Blue Ocean
Strategy,” by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgen (which in 2005 became a book that
made the international bestseller list), the authors advocate for a corporate strategy in
which the main focus is not competing against other corporations, but rather to
“discover” and maintain hold over new uncontested market spaces, which are not
necessarily physical space like land, but rather any new profit-making opportunity.

In a move away fi'om company-against—company competition, the authors
discourage the leading worldview of “corporate strategy [which] is heavily influenced by
its roots in military strategy.” They continue, claiming that even the “language of
strategy is deeply imbued with military references—chief executive ‘officers’ in
‘headquarters,’ ‘troops’ on the ‘front lines.’ . . . It is about confionting an opponent and

driving him off a battlefield of limited territory” (3). The authors at once confirm the
52

indoctrination of the corporate world in military mentality and demonstrate a desire of
corporations to seek new market space in which a business venture can in essence
monopolize the industry.

Business schools are the training centers for the upcoming generations of the
capitalist elites. They are ideology camps for the corporate world, which is our
contemporary world where economic imperialism has become the primary avenue of
imperial expansion. Big business follows suite from the military because its aims are the
same as wars fought by imperial powers. In the latter half of the twentieth century, after
World War II, the US. has denied its status as a colonial power by granting its colonies
either independence, statehood, or the title of “commonwealth,” which falls in neither of
the former two categories.

Aside from what is the obvious ownership of other territories—after all, what is a
commonwealth but a colony with another label—the US. has expanded as an imperial
power through economic means. In a Harper’s article that came out shortly after the
beginning of the 2003 war in Iraq, “The Economics of Empire,” Finnegan predicts that
the war in Iraq was to be one of imperial pursuit, much like the US. economic
penetration in Latin America over the past few decades. Much of the article discusses the
tools of neocolonialism (although he himself does not use this terminology).

The system Finnegan describes is one in which free trade is exported globally,
which is done “directly through US. foreign policy and indirectly through multilateral
institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World

6‘

Trade Organization.” This system’s core tenets are deregulation, privatization,

‘openness’ (to foreign investment, to imports), unrestricted movement of capital, and

53

lower taxes” (41—42). This free trade, as capitalism is referred to, is pushed on the
countries of the world in order “to open new markets for US. firms and products”
(Finnegan 49).

Finnegan is surely onto something here, but his analysis does little in the way of
actual examination of Iraq and Afghanistan. What he does is explicate what the US. did
to Bolivia in the 19803 when that economy was restructured according to free market
values. From this detailed account, he argues that the US. is likely operating in the same
fashion with Iraq. Finnegan sees merit in such a comparison as he cites a Wall Street
Journal article that “reported that the Bush Administration’s plan to rebuild and
administer a conquered Iraq relies not on the UN. or other intemational-development
agencies but on American private companies with deep Pentagon connections, such as
Bechtel and Kellog Brown & Root, which have been secretly bidding on contracts”
(Finnegan 53). Here Finnegan touches on the inner workings of advanced
neocolonialism. Following is a more detailed look into the economic system of
neocolonialism as it is manifest in Iraq and Afghanistan, beginning with journalist Naomi

Klein.

An Imperial Enterprise:
The War on Terror

Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is a powerful
compilation of research that analyzes the ways in which the government and big business
interact on the global scale, in their many local manifestations around the world. In a
methodology that is admirable, the journalist’s work begins with her experiences in Iraq

immediately following the initiation of the war in 2003. Klein noticed that in each

54

country where there had been a major socially destabilizing event, immediately following
was a major shift in business structures in that location. Looking to Milton Friedman, a
pioneer of both capitalism and “democracy”—according to his conception of the political
term—Klein “discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the
modus operandi” of global capitalist advance since the early 19708 (9).

Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism relies on what she calls the shock doctrine,
which consists of stages of shock that explain how it is that whole societies are weakened
and vulnerable to being taken advantage of. This sequence of events is as follows. First,
“[C]ountries are shocked—by wars, terror attacks, coup d’etat and natural disasters” (25).
Then “they are shocked again—by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear
disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy” (25-26). And
then if people resist in the midst of this shock, they are shocked for a third time with
“police, soldiers and prison interrogators” (26). Klein documents the growth of advanced
capitalism by way of shock doctrine in many countries throughout the world during the
past three decades, but she finds a significant difference after 11 September 2001.

In Iraq, for example, Paul Bremer, chief envoy to set-up Iraq’s new government,
spent the first four months of his term drafting the country’s new laws regarding the
economy. The changes included the following. Corporate taxes dropped from forty-five
percent to fifteen. Foreign companies were given the right to own one-hundred percent
of Iraqi assets. All of the profits made by foreign investors could be withdrawn from the
country without any reinvestment. Investors could have forty-year leases and contracts,
which could then be renewed, meaning that “future elected governments would be

saddled with deals signed by their occupiers,” as Klein puts it. The only thing that has

55

yet to occur is the obvious privatization of Iraq’s oil (345). But simply extracting the
resources, as Clark identifies as the primary motivation behind the Gulf War, would be
too simple for the workings of advanced neocolonialism.

The evolution of this capitalist world-system relies on market space as described
in blue ocean strategy, which is not necessarily physical land. Colonialism relies on the
taking of the land; neocolonialism is once removed such that it colonizes economic
industry. Advanced neocolonialism, however, takes it to a new level. Klein writes, “the
architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from
their predecessors, one for whom war and other disasters are indeed ends in themselves”
(311).

Traditionally, when the US. has initiated wars or supported coups through the
Central Intelligence Agency, offered loans through the World Bank (WB) or International
Monetary Fund (IMF), or determined trade through the World Trade Organization
(WTO), it had been paving the way for transnational trade conditions that would benefit
U.S.-dominated companies. Not only has the US. been working to accomplish favorable
free-market conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Department of Homeland
Security and all the contractors enlisted to “restructure” these war-tom countries are
profiting tremendously.

High ranking members of the government use their credentials to enter the
“homeland security industry” where they then sell their services. Klein provides a few
examples, crediting her findings to research conducted by New York Times journalist Eric
Lipton who details ninety-seven such cases. The government figures move into the

private sector to create and head crisis and counterterrorism consulting companies, or

56

companies that assist homeland security firms in the acquisition of federal contracts, for
example (314-15). The War on Terror made the Department of Homeland Security a
two-hundred-billion—dollar industry (13).

Moreover, the homeland security market’s outsourcing of Iraq’s and
Afghanistan’s “restructure” projects has been phenomenally beneficial to US.
corporations, many of which high ranking government officials had shares in. To name a
few, there is Bechel, ExxonMobil (309), Lockheed, Carlyle, Gilead (Rumsfeld had shares
here), and Halliburton (where Cheney owned shares) (311). Halliburton, for instance,
had fifty-thousand employees (while the new Iraqi government at that time had only
fifteen-hundred) (347), and its profits were greater than they had ever been in its entire
history up to the Iraq war (313). War is this century’s first grand blue ocean strategy.

Or, as Klein puts it, the “invasion, occupation and reconstruction” of Iraq created a “fully
privatized new market” (346).

And now Afghanistan is on a similar path with reconstruction contractors such as
Halliburton, and the involvement of the World Bank that is privatizing its health care
system (Klein, “Rise”). Since Afghanistan is the new warfiont of the War on Terror
(even though the campaign is not called such anymore), it is important to look at who
will profit during the process of war and its aftermath. Given the sweeping geography of
“the enemy,” being “terrorists,” we may have only seen the beginning of the warfare into
the Middle East. Of this, Klein writes: “After the [U .S.-led free market] crusade had
conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world called out as

its final frontier” (326). As such, she continues: “The Middle East would be ‘cleaned

57

out’ of terrorists and a giant free-trade zone would be created; then it would be locked in
with after-the-fact elections” (328).
Klein calls it a “contemporary crusade to liberate world markets:”

The coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate
regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been
written off as the excesses of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts of the
Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed
opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically
eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that
suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or
terrorism—almost never as the fi ght for the advancement of pure
capitalism.” (20)

In short, a global pattern emerges that demonstrates U.S. imperialism. As Klein makes
evident, this is hardly isolated to the Middle East. The story that is retold over and over
supports capitalism or imperialism in whatever political economic form existing at the
time. The advancement of this global system has been sold to publics to appease people,
to convince us to follow the State’s foreign policy and economic incentives.

However, by combining rhetorical and politico—economic lenses, the “struggle for
civilization” shows through as a struggle for empire. The two narratives run together,
and conflict. They can enter dialogue. They can fight. But they cannot remain in
separate spheres. The clash of civilizations trope leads to a grand narrative and that
defeats the purpose of political discourse because it offers but one viable solution.
Likewise, a neocolonial perspective like Klein forwards too risks becoming a grand
narrative. The trick is to engage rhetorics for the political, the deliberative, for its activist
roots such that there are varied stories, alternatives, and solutions to the problems

humanity faces.

58

Concluding Thoughts:
New Rhetorics of Appeasement

As Bush, Huntington, and Klein have informed us, the current ideological phase
is the War on Terror; the last, the Cold War. While the clash of civilizations trope was
the rhetorical trope of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, it will be curious to see
the new tropes that carry on the campaign for global corporatism.

Using a politico-economic lens is especially important now that the US. has an
African American president who uses his distant Muslim ties to relate to others of the
world. Interestingly enough, Huntington predicted that “Decreasingly able to mobilize
support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments and groups will
increasingly attempt to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and
civilization identity” (sec. III). Perhaps in this very spirit Obama will have greater
success than Bush in carrying on the same goals: the spread of U.S.-style democracy
through warfare or other means.

It is important to use a politico-economic lens now more than ever because the
policies of the War on Terror continue. Obama may not use the phrase, “War on Terror,”
and he does not employ the same clash of civilizations trope, but he is not backing out of
Iraq quickly enough, and he is pursuing war in Afghanistan, calling it a “war of
necessity.” And yet the President has won the Nobel Peace Prize. What might be
happening is a far too successful colony-blind imperialism, just with different rhetorics of
appeasement at play. With a politico-economic lens and an analysis of the types of
symbols and trOpes at play in the campaign for continued U.S. imperialism, we can not
only decipher rhetorics of appeasement, but we ought to create rhetorics that open spaces

for deliberation and offer stories that shape our understanding of our world.

59

The Stories Our Rhetorics Create

We cannot view the events of our times through a single lens. Looking into wars
and other social problems requires multiple lenses, such as bringing together foreign
policy, political economy, and rhetoric, among others. Likewise, we need to foster and
promote interdisciplinarity in academia. Rhetoric, as does other fields within the
Humanities and Social Sciences, needs to continue to break from its borders. The human
condition cannot be categorized into isolated categories; we are multifarious and the
interconnections of life are our reality.

By looking through alternative lenses, multiple lenses, and entering into dialogue
with one another, many ways of seeing the world and many ways of dealing with the
problems humanity faces will emerge. Through different lenses we can create different
stories, different worldviews and ways of surviving. Of course not everyone is appeased.
Obviously there is much resistance to wars and other violent actions of the State.
However, if the ideological has anything to do with the maintenance of imperialism, then
there is far too much ideological indoctrination.

As a rhetorician, I would like to take my scholarship forward and not only study
the rhetoric of the powerful, but also rhetorics of resistance. It is not enough to only
analyze and critique dominant narratives of domination. There are rhetorical ways other
than exposing imperial tropes that can lead to more peaceful paths. These are the stories
that we need to create and foster. Many in the field do look to rhetorics of survival and
resistance, and I would like in the future to do this yet while directly tying it to the study

of the powerful.

60

 

Because I am invested in the human condition and how we, each of us, can have
the power to survive and flourish within the time afforded to us here on earth, it is
important to study the ways that people grapple with structures of domination so that they
may at some point live without such forces. But I work off the premise that in order to
fight your enemy, you’ve got to know your enemy. But this is only the first step in the
larger project. I find that I need a methodology that does the glocal (a combining of the
local and the global, a term coined by Michal Featherstone) and theorizes by way of

symbol meaning-making. There is power in our rhetorics, and in the stories they create.

61

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