Abstract
In the US run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the pro-war US–British opinion press adopted a ‘subservient’ role by religiously endorsing the US official perspective about the ‘Saddam Peril’ and the Anglo-American ‘humanitarian’ mission in Iraq through the systematic muffling of the opposing views of anti-war protestors. The US–British pro-war arguers tried to cast doubt on both the motivations and identity of the anti-war demonstrators by categorising peaceful protest within the discourse of ‘deviance’, ‘ignorance’ and ‘incivility’. Therefore, anti-war protest was trivialised, disparaged and depoliticised. Anti-war political protest was relegated to the realm of ‘disorder’, ‘spectacle’ and ‘violence’, despite its global geopolitical reach. This article examines how ‘strategic manoeuvring’ functions in opinion press instrumentalised moral reasoning. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, I propose to demonstrate how the US–British mainstream media were closely wedded to elite interests and how opinion press argumentation was clearly structured in dominance.
Keywords
Introduction
Argumentation is a communicative speech-acts complex, whose intrinsic perlocutionary goal is to maximise opportunities for critical examination of competing arguments in a way that cultivates the exploration of alternative standpoints and guarantees a rational resolution of a difference of opinion based solely on the merits of the arguments made (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984). The need to integrate a ‘rhetorical’ dimension in the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation prompted the pragma-dialecticians to strike a balance between ‘dialectical reasonableness’ and ‘rhetorical effectiveness’. However, the resolution-oriented ‘dialectical’ objective might sometimes be overshadowed by the ‘rhetorical’ aim when an arguer chooses to steer the discussion strategically in the direction that best serves his interests and maximises his chances to resolve the difference of opinion in his own favour. Such ‘strategic manoeuvring’ (Van Eemeren and Houtlosser, 1999) may lead to manipulative practices (e.g. in parliamentary legislation and political debate), which might reduce argumentation to a mere egoistic, opportunistic and undemocratic attempt to advance ideological agendas. For example, exploiting the ‘topic potential’ by directing discussion to topics easiest to handle (e.g. selecting issues related to the ‘brutality’ of Saddam’s regime’) has a rhetorical objective – that of evading the discussion of core issues (the legality of the US 2003 invasion of Iraq; see Sahlane, 2012; Wilson et al., 2012). Similarly, adapting one’s argumentative discourse to the demand of particular audiences by appealing to their beliefs, fears or prejudices in an attempt to sway public opinion against one’s opponent (e.g. ‘argument from pity’), or using certain presentational devices (e.g. metaphor, strategic ambiguity and enthymemes) to frame contentious issues from a certain perspective, are examples of derailments of strategic manoeuvring (fallacies) (Van Eemeren and Houtlosser, 1999: 484).
In this article, first I will focus on the analysis of the ‘unreasonableness’ of the ad baculum and ad hominem arguments by demonstrating that these arguments are fallacious partly because of the faulty inferential process they undergo to come to their conclusions. Conceiving of these arguments as speech acts in the context of media argumentation will allow for capturing the underlying dynamics that govern them. I will also discuss how ‘argument from appeal to witness’ is a clear instance of derailed ‘strategic manoeuvring’ in the context of opinion/editorial (op/ed) press argumentation. Before I proceed, a brief description of the data and methods used in this study is worthwhile.
Materials and methods
This study aims at exploring how peaceful protest in the prelude to the US 2003 invasion of Iraq was represented in Western opinion press. It proposes to use argumentation theory as a basis for doing critical discourse analysis (CDA). Pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation provides the discourse analyst with ‘a set of norms for establishing the extent to which the actual discourse deviates from the course that would be most conducive to the resolution of the [Iraqi] dispute’ (Van Eemeren et al., 1996: 283). The role of the analyst is to ‘reconstruct’, ‘explicitise’ or ‘interpret’ the background assumptions (e.g. unstated connections among premises and implicit refutations) in an analytical way for the purpose of description and criticism. The corpus used in this study encompasses the period between 1 February and 20 March 2003 (the time period leading up to the outbreak of hostilities). The research sample included pro-war op/ed pieces 1 of the highest circulation broadsheets in the United States (New York Times (NYT) and The Washington Post (WP)) and the United Kingdom (The Times), along with opinion pieces from equally prestigious anti-war elite newspapers (The Guardian (United Kingdom) and Le Monde (France)). The retrieval of articles from the web version of the Lexis–Nexis full text database was based on the use of the keywords ‘protest’ and ‘Iraq’. It is observed that despite the global reach of anti-war protest, political dissent was relegated to a realm of ‘deviance’ and ‘ignorance’ in the US–British broadsheet opinion press, as I will demonstrate in the following sections.
Argumentation, rhetoric and anti-war protest in opinion press
Anti-Iraq War protest is a form of collectively orchestrated ‘argument’ in the context of public debate and controversy. It constitutes a multi-vocalic and visual form of citizen argumentation. The demonstrators articulated their anti-war positions in their speeches, chants and slogans. Hence, these mediated protest events are intertextually and argumentatively networked in that any use of political text is, in effect, an integral part of a wider dialogue. In what follows, I will illustrate how ‘strategic manoeuvring’ in pro-war arguments became derailed (e.g. ad hominem argumentation, ‘argument from appeal to pity’ and ‘mythopoesis’).
Orientalising Arab–Muslim protest: The enthymematic argument
An argument is said to be ‘enthymematic’ when implicit premises needed to make the argument valid are only tacitly recoverable from the context of the argument (Walton, 1989: 115). Therefore, enthymematic discourse requires a kind of ‘complicity’ or joint effort between the arguer and the audience for the enthymematic argument to be successful. However, when analysing enthymemes, it is difficult to attribute assumptions to an arguer by merely interpreting his intended meaning based on explicit premises and contextual clues (Walton and Reed, 2005: 341). Another problem with enthymemes is the possibility of falsely attributing tacit premises to an arguer and thus committing a straw man fallacy. Conversely, the arguer might indulge in enthymematic argumentation as a tactic to manoeuvre strategically by denying implicit premises (e.g. double entendres, veiled threats and racial innuendos) in his standpoints once they come under criticism. Faced with such a dilemma, the discourse analyst can resort to ‘the principle of charity’, which enables him to choose between the best possible interpretations by picking up on the one that makes an argument stronger (Walton and Reed, 2005: 341–342), as we will see in Sachs’ argument below.
By characterising the Arab anti-war protestors as ‘unruly’ and ‘violent’, the US–British op/ed press resorts to fallacious
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neo-Orientalist rhetoric. Consider the example below: The worst The government said
The protesters were portrayed as the ones who instigated the violent ‘gun battle’ by opening fire on the riot police (criminalisation strategy). However, the reason why the police came under attack remained unknown because the only source of information was the Yemeni authorities (the voice of the protesters was muted). The implication might also be that Yemenis, who lack respect for their ‘civil order’ (or fear of the police), must be ‘indecent’ citizens (implied argument). Sachs, however, suppressed the fact that in most Arab countries, policing is still practised in ways that go back to the colonial era. Besides, the use of reported speech reveals the reporter’s uncritical endorsement of the official version of reality. In addition, the inclusion of the age of the killed boy suggests that ‘innocent’ school children are manipulated by unscrupulous Islamist ‘Jihadists’ (the protests took place mostly after Friday prayers). Sachs reported that ‘demonstrators climbed to a parapet on the building [at Al- Azhar mosque in Cairo] and threw down stones and bits of furniture’ at the police (Sachs, NYT, 22 March 2003). The demonstrators also hurled stones at police officers (in Bahrain). Conversely, European anti-war protests were held near parliaments (and not churches) and were naturally ‘peaceful’. For example, Spanish protest ‘leaders’ (which presupposes ‘order’) ‘planted white crosses in a square opposite the Parliament and called for the resignation of José María Aznar’, and in London ‘bicyclists protesting the war blocked the square in front of the House of Commons’ (Sachs, NYT, 22 March 2003). Sachs summarised Arab anti-war protest in the following terms: Demonstrations against the American-led war in Iraq
The depiction of Arab protesters as a human tsunami (‘surged’, ‘roiled’) constructed them as a ‘threat’ to ‘civil order’. The police had no choice except to use bullets to control the ‘rioters’. This is a classic example of enthymematic argument, whereby Sachs makes a number of (Orientalist) value-judgements while leaving a gap in her allegations that invites the constructed (Western) reader to draw the unexpressed (and culturally implied) conclusions. One of such cultural allusions is made explicit later in the report ‘While the antiwar sentiment is shared between Europe and the Arab world, its roots appear to be different’ (Sachs, NYT, 22 March 2003). The roots of anti-war Muslim ‘rage’ should be sought in its fanatical outrage against America (the ‘arch-Satan’), while European demonstrations are part of Western democracy. This racialised ‘argument from group bias’ aims at undermining the legitimacy of Muslims’ right to contribute to a political debate.
While Arab–Muslim anti-war protest was negativised, depoliticised and vilified in the US–British pro-war opinion press, the French op/eds had a more favourable coverage. For example, Gilles Paris wrote that Les The Egyptian
Paris represented the Hosni Mubarak regime as a new breed of modern dictatorship, which would crush any dissent in the public sphere. Paris added that un mouvement spontané avait touché les principales universités. Ce terreau a été propice à la création d’autres comités contre la mondialisation ou bien contre une guerre en Irak. (Le Monde, 17 February 2003) [a spontaneous movement had spread to the main [Egyptian] universities. This terrain was favourable for the creation of other committees against globalisation or against a war in Iraq. (Le Monde, 17 February 2003)]
Hence, in contrast to mainstream US–British newspaper accounts about the ‘unruly’ and ‘fundamentalist’ nature of Arab anti-war protest, Paris constructed Egyptian pacifist movements against social injustices (e.g. globalisation and war against Iraq) as an organised ‘sociopolitical’ activism within Egyptian civil society (consisting of not only ordinary (religious) people, but also of neo-Nasserites, left militants, students and the educated elite). In the same vein, Le Monde wrote that Les manifestations contre la guerre qui ont réuni des millions de personnes dans le monde entier le weekend dernier ont rappelé qu’il existe une autre superpuissance à côté des États-Unis: l’opinion publique. […] Dans ces [The demonstrations against the [Iraq] War, which attracted millions of people across the whole world last weekend, brought to attention the fact that there is another superpower beside the United States: the public sphere […]. In these
While Western protest is placed in a frame of legitimate social action (‘a group of 41 Nobel laureates in science, medicine and economics’ joined anti-war campaign (Lichtblau, NYT, 16 March 2003)), protest by Muslim Americans is condemned by the very act of labelling it. For example, Ignatius argued that ‘[w]hen the bombs begin exploding over Iraq, this reform process may be threatened by anti-American protest and renewed Islamic militancy’ (Ignatius, WP, 7 February, 2003). Similarly, a NYT editorial, titled ‘The Antiwar Non-March’, claimed that When antiwar protesters gather in Manhattan tomorrow, they will not be allowed to march and will not be permitted near the United Nations. New York City officials have decided to limit the protest to a stationary rally several blocks away. The city has the right to impose
NYT used a ‘veiled threat’ (ad baculum argument), which has pragmatic (non-inferential) implications in that ad baculum can be viewed as an illocutionary complex act consisting of a binding order (directive) and a threat (commissive). The directive act puts the anti-war opponent under the obligation to cancel the march near the United Nations (UN) because it would be illegal (permission was denied), and the deontic powers (official status) invested in the pro-war public order keepers boost their commitment to their commissive act of threat to bring about the desirable consequence (‘limit the protest to a stationary rally several blocks away’ from the UN). Such ‘appeal to force’ also has an inferential structure of argument from negative consequences, which can be represented as shown in Figure 1 (Walton, 2014: 287).
Argument from threat.
However, this prudential ‘argument from warning’ is masked in the form of an implicit speech act of advice: ‘since you were denied permission to protest near the UN, you should reroute your marches to other areas far from the UN. Otherwise, you will get in trouble. And I don’t want you to be in trouble’. Therefore, NYT deployed argumentum ad baculum strategically in that its ‘sophistical tactic’ was mainly intended not only to discourage the protestors from taking to the streets, but also to ‘artfully pretend that the arguer is acting in the helpful capacity of someone who is only giving friendly advice to the respondent’ (Walton, 2014: 305).
Peaceful anti-war demonstrations are meaningful discursive acts that articulate dissent and resistance through the use of voice and public space to counter a hegemonic pro-war position. However, some spaces have more symbolic power than others. Therefore, denying the protest permission to ‘march down First Avenue past the United Nations’, would empty these ‘ethnic parades’ of 10,000 ‘non-marchers’ of any ‘symbolic power’ (NYT, 14 February 2003). By focusing only on the violent spectacle (e.g. arrests of demonstrators), opinion press muted the anti-war voice. For example, Lichtblau described demonstrators in Washington as ‘throngs of protesters armed with banners and bullhorns implor[ing] Mr. Bush to abandon a possible war’ (NYT, 16 March 2003). ‘[T]he protesters flooded nearly a dozen blocks of city streets in a sea of colorful and often angry antiwar banners and chanted slogans’ (Lichtblau, NYT, 16 March 2003). Thus, ‘San Francisco officials rerouted today’s rally to avoid the downtown shopping area where rioters vandalized stores’ (Lichtblau, NYT, 16 March 2003). By characterising protest in terms of metaphors of danger (‘flood’, ‘army’, ‘sea’ and ‘throngs’, meaning ‘hordes’), political dissent was criminalised and categorised as mere propaganda (‘slogan-chanting’) and an emotional outburst (the marches attracted ‘relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks’ and ‘high school students’; Wilson, NYT, 7 October 2002).
The role of political metaphor as a ‘strategic manoeuvre’ to arouse people’s emotions (through the use of scare tactics), privilege or rationalise particular accounts of a social reality (suppression of protest) or ridicule one’s political opponents (portrayal of anti-war protestors as irrational) is an attempt to avoid a ‘reasoned discussion’. The use of aquatic or military metaphors evokes the schematic frames drawing on anti-Muslim iconographic stereotypes. This has political implications in that metaphor encapsulates a particular perspective and obscures alternative (anti-war) positions. Metaphors, therefore, serve to predefine a situation, help set agendas and legitimise a desirable course of action (Sahlane, 2013a: 157).
This topos of threat is also extended to political elite dissenters. For example, Sieghart spoke of Robert Cook’s threat to resign (Times, 14 March 2003), while Riddell pointed out to ‘the danger threatened by the French veto’ (Times, 13 March 2003). Similarly, Hume did not appreciate that ‘she (Clare Short) now threatens to run away rather than stand by what her Government has done’ (Times, 13 March 2003). Similarly, George Will contended that the Democrats’ anti-war dissent was a mere ‘incontinent love of snobbery and nostalgia’, ‘a longing for the fun of antiwar days of yore’ (WP, 19 March 2003). Will’s Vietnam analogy is a ‘revisionist reconstruction’ of America as the victim of a ‘betrayal from within’. Michael Kelly, in his turn, constructed anti-war dissent as ‘immorality on the march’. He argued that To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil. This cannot be the moral position. (WP, 19 February 2003)
In the light of the discussion above, the pro-war consequentialist stance can be reconstructed as a ‘practical argument’ as shown in Figure 2 (see Macagno and Walton, 2012).
Pro-war consequentialist or practical argument.
The assumption that anti-war protestors represent a threat to US national security is based on the information that the police are worried about an imminent ‘terrorist’ alert. This assumption may also be grounded on general experience or probability of occurrence and, hence, acquires the status of a ‘presumption’ 3 (of ‘fact’) in that the probability of the undesirable consequence is boosted by the protestors’ ethical character (they are ‘radical Islamists’) and/or actions (they chant ‘anti-American’ slogans) and by past experience that has shown that such Muslim ‘rage’ always turns violent (presumption of guilt). This presumptive reasoning, however, cannot be considered as a proof in itself as it is based on mere presumptive inference and as such it remains defeasible (Walton, 2008: 210). In contrast, presumptive evidence of law (e.g. rights for peaceful protest are guaranteed by law) remains irrebuttable (Walton, 2008: 242). Another instance of fallacious pro-war argument is the abundant use of ad hominem defamation.
Ad hominem argumentation: Protestors as the ‘freakish’ other
Argumentum ad hominem is casting doubt on the other party’s ethical character to undermine the worth of his argument. Such allegations, however, can be ‘based on innuendo rather than real evidence, and can have a powerful smear effect in persuasion much out of proportion to the real worth of the argument’ (Walton, 2006: 275). Consider the following examples: The demonstrations have While some of Mr. Blair’s prominent lieutenants are reported to oppose the war, only You had only to look at the crowd on Saturday to see how surreally, almost randomly, eclectic it was. Alongside What unites these
The negative representations of anti-war protestors (‘the usual suspects’) forestall disagreement. Demonstrators are portrayed as ‘a few dozen scraggly Western protesters’ acting ‘as “human shields” by planting themselves next to potential targets such as power plants’ (Kinsley, WP, 3 March 2003). They are ‘herded together’ (like sheep), ‘tripping over each other’ (Broder, WP, 9 March 2003). They are also accused of maliciously brainwashing ‘naive’ ordinary citizens to win them to their side. For instance, it was claimed that ‘psychologist Suzanne Doherty, 56, has worked to assemble a squad of grandmothers to join her on Saturday’. The Rev. Robert Moore, who is 52 and ‘a pastor of two United Church of Christ congregations’, 4 ‘has helped fill a five-bus caravan of homemakers, students and retirees’ (Fernandez, WP, 13 March 2003). Hence, it was not surprising that ‘the crowd [would] be large’ as it also attracted ‘gray-haired former hippies, high school honor students and suburban mothers’ (Fernandez, WP, 13 March 2003).
Anti-war political dissenters were also constructed as mere cynical defeatists. Consider Hume’s argument: There The
Anti-war protest is depicted as a mere form of ‘cowardice’. The French are depicted as the ‘axis of weasels’, and ‘a chorus of cowards’ and ‘wimps’, led by a bunch of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ (dehumanisation strategy; Younge and Henley, Guardian, 11 February 2003). Hence, the voices for peace are placed on a devalued, feminised footing by casting the US political actors as brave ‘cowboys’. Similarly, diplomacy is negativised. The UN Security Council is represented as ‘a set-up created jointly by Stalin and his allies following the victory over Nazism in which the Soviet Union played such a critical role’ (Freedland, Guardian, 5 March 2003). It ‘has rarely risen above being a mere “bazaar for the trading of interests between major powers”’ (Hoagland, WP, 13 March 2003). Hence, it is ridiculous to ask for ‘the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world – and the long-suffering Iraqi people – of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant’ (Krauthammer, WP, 28 February 2003). Krauthammer echoes Bush’s argument that ‘when it comes to our security, we really don’t need anybody’s permission’ (quoted in McGrory, WP, 9 March 2003) because ‘[t]he course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others’ (quoted in WP, 28 January 2003). This stance, however, is inconsistent because the United States should support democracy in the UN organisation as much as it professes to institute it in the ‘Greater Middle East’. The irony is that ‘a man who lost an election and won a court case’ (Younge, The Guardian, 10 March 2003) promised to ‘install’ ‘democracy’ and reinstitute ‘civilisation’ where it originally started.
In the same vein, ‘the French street’ was accused of being ‘so obsessed with countering U.S. power’ (Friedman, NYT, 5 March 2003) by ‘challenging American supremacy’ (Krauthammer, WP, 28 February 2003). Hence, The
The depiction of France as a potential ‘counterweight’ for America polarised the argumentation through the use of the strategy of positive self-presentation (America as a righteous world leader beset by malign plotters) and negative other-presentation (anti-war political actors as anti-American rivals). Safire even accused France of trading in illegal weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with Saddam’s regime. His argument reads as follows:
Safire’s argument is an attempt to discredit France as regards its unshakable anti-war position by ‘criminalising’ the French political actors. Besides, predominant use of nominalisation, passivisation and ergativity is a distancing strategy that serves to conceal the agents of the alleged illegal acts (‘a shipment … left China’, ‘arrived in the Syrian Port’, etc.). Such anonymisation strategy effaces the identity of the alleged WMD traffickers, thus undermining any effort to verify the veracity of the claims. Safire resorts to argumentum ad numerum (20 tonnes of Hydroxyl Terminated Polybutadiene (HTPB) in a 40-foot container) to boost the truthfulness of his allegations. The representation of anti-war dissenters as ‘anti-American’ is more conspicuous in the following section.
Ad hominem defamation: Protesters as the anti-American or anti-Semitic Other
Discourse plays a crucial role in positioning ‘us’ and ‘them’ in different ‘ethical spaces’. For example, pro-war arguers claimed that ‘the monomania of those swarming in the “European street” was mainly motivated by their “loathing for America” and their “moral infantilism”’ (Will, WP, 23 February 2003). In other words, this ‘clamor of opposition’ was basically led by a ‘handful of leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, [who] have chosen to ride a wave of antiwar and increasingly anti-American opinion’ (WP, 23 February, 2003; italics added). This conspiracy thesis is also clear in Amos Oz’s stance below:
A But these days
The claim that ‘emotional hostility towards Israel’ is at the core of much anti-war protest reduced any criticism of America or Israel to sheer dogmatic anti-Semitic or anti-American hate speech. Oz ‘functionalised’ the social actors by dissociating ‘decent people of enlightened and pragmatic views’ from the radical anti-Semites, who blame Zionism and capitalism for all the evils of the modern world. He contended that ‘this war campaign does not emanate from oil lust or from colonialist appetite. It emanates primarily from a simplistic rectitude that aspires to uproot evil by force’ (Oz, NYT, 19 February 2003). But he failed to cater for the anti-war reservation (Who assigned the United States the role to democratise Iraq?). Similarly, Peter Riddell argued that Their [Blair’s opponents within the Establishment] concerns differ sharply from those of the marchers. They are not pacifists, or anti-American, though many dislike the Bush Administration’s Manichean rhetoric and the often dismissive approach of some US officials towards old allies in Europe.
Riddell resorted to the use of the strategy of ‘dissociation’ by differentiating between ‘malignant’ anti-Semitic protesters (who wanted to destroy Israel) and responsible political dissenters (who simply opposed Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy). Similarly, Cohen questioned the honesty of anti-war activists: Where were the peace marchers when Hussein was using poison gas against the Kurds? Where were they when he slaughtered the Shiites? Where were they when he invaded Iran and then Kuwait? Why don’t those so-called human shields in Baghdad find Hussein’s torture chambers and chain themselves to the gates? (WP, 11 March 2003)
Cohen’s strategy of ‘exposure’ has an ad hominem intent in that it is an attempt to besmirch the image of the protestors by painting them as mere manipulators of honest citizens. The pro-war arguers contended that ‘[t]he London demonstration – 1 million strong, much the largest in British history – was not as large as the death toll from the war Saddam Hussein launched against Iran’ (Will, WP, 23 February 2003). Therefore, ‘the anti-war movement must now look for deeper arguments beyond the simple desire to save lives or preserve world peace. Saddam is a genocidal butcher, whose removal will almost certainly save far more lives than it destroys’ (Kaletsky, Times, 20 March 2003). This pro-war stance can be reconstructed as a circumstantial argumentum ad hominem, as shown in Figure 3 (Walton, 2004: 364).
Circumstantial ad hominem argumentation.
The problem with the ad hominem strategic manoeuvre above is that the truth or falsity of the anti-war position should be independent of the person espousing it. Besides, the pro-war arguer tends to exploit the opponent’s alleged inconsistency (failure to honour their human rights commitment in previous similar circumstances) as a further justification for his pro-war position. Another pragmatic problem relates to the presupposition that arguers must be sincere not only in their truth-claims but also in their aim to reach a reasoned solution to a difference of opinion (see Budzynska and Witek, 2014). Actually, the demonisation of dissenters is a mere ploy to silence the anti-war voice. As Safire explicitly stated, It is futile to try to reason with
Safire seeks to create a fake sense of urgency to smokescreen any concerns with analytic stances about plans and costs of war. He construes anti-war activists as biased groups, who are incapable of consensual stakeholder ‘dialogue’ because they ‘have invested too much, emotionally and intellectually, in the antiwar cause. They will, though they may not admit it, be secretly hoping for catastrophe’ (Johnson, NYT, 16 March 2003). This ‘futility’ argument is a form of ‘poisoning the well’ ad hominem that can be schematised, as shown in Figure 4 (Walton, 2006: 289).
‘Poisoning the well’ and the exclusion of the protesting ‘Other’.
The ‘poisoning the well’ fallacy attacks the intellectual honesty of the anti-war arguer by questioning his sincerity or objectivity. This fallacy has ‘a diffusion effect because it does not merely refute the opponent’s argument; it destroys his capability for putting forward any argument on the same subject, or perhaps even any argument on any subject, in the future discussion’ (Walton, 2006: 292). This is a clear instance of derailment of strategic manoeuvring because no party is entitled to deny other arguers the unconditional right to initiate any standpoint or question any arguments voiced by other discussants (the freedom rule). Patterns of self- and other-identification are also rooted in narrativised ‘myths’ (‘mythopoesis’) about ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Mythopoesis and argument from appeal to witness testimony
The pro-war disputants appealed to visually and experientially evocative narratives of human suffering perpetuated under Saddam’s rule to win the audience to their side. However, resorting to the ‘rhetoric of atrocity’ is not without problems. For example, Ann Clwyd packaged her pro-war stance in the form of direct speech (to avoid any personal liability). She states that Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: ‘Women were
Clwyd’s deployment of an armoury of instrumentalised ‘morality’ is meant to draw a sharp moral contrast between America’s ‘virtuous humanity’ and the alleged ‘inhuman savagery’ of the Iraqi regime. Her strategic resort to such ‘epideictic rhetoric’ aims at generating emotion in the target audience to the effect of garnering support for America’s imminent military intervention in Iraq. However, when viewed against the neocolonial tradition of US military interventions in the Middle East region and elsewhere,
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this pathos-based argument becomes shaky. She tried to enhance the persuasiveness of her appeal to witness testimony by declaring that witnesses had to ‘swear that their statements are true and sign them’ (Clwyd, Times, 18 March 2003). This construction of the Baathist regime as a gang of rapists is embedded in ‘moralistic’ reasoning, as illustrated below: About 400 Kuwaiti civilians On the second day of the invasion [of Kuwait], Only one Kurdish man was not afraid to be named: Abdurrahim Guler, 37, who has endured repeated bouts of ‘You can use your stick’, Mr. Guler says. ‘I still won’t talk even if you use a minaret!’ (Kristof, NYT, 14 March 2003)
Appeal to ‘argument from witness testimony’ brings into play proof to expound the arguers’ pro-war standpoints. These narratives provide ‘us’ with a sense of who ‘we’ are and offers us a good opportunity to indulge in self-adulation. Besides, with this ‘Western-experience-as-proof’ strategy (e.g. ‘I watched one torture victim …’, ‘I saw a woman minutes after she had been raped’), Ba’th regime’s repressive practices are rendered factual by the appropriation of the voice of a Western insider-narrator. The use of the victim’s eyewitness testimony is very persuasive because it is difficult to refute personal accounts of emotional and physical hardship. Kelly was echoing the victims’ pain and sufferings in a way that recreated the scene of the rape. The ‘particularisation’ of experience invites empathic concern and the engendered emotional evidence has a mere rhetorical potency of being mainly deployed to invoke context and cultural interpretation frames for ‘moral reasoning’. The emotionalisation of ‘facts’ is a strategic manoeuvre to induce empathy from relevant political decision-makers by seeking morally grounded punitive response against the evil Iraqi Other.
However, the testifying witnesses here have vested interest and are, hence, potentially biased. Besides, their testimonies lacked the required institutional procedures used in litigative investigation (e.g. the threat of perjury prosecutions and cross-examination by lawyers) to be considered as sound proof in legal reasoning. Kelly’s use of ‘evidentiality’ (citing the BBC) is a good strategic manoeuvre to establish the ‘credibility’ of his claim. Hence, when a BBC TV crew is quoted, evidentiality becomes intertextual. The ‘numbers game’ is another strategy to support one’s argument by statistical facts (‘About 400 Kuwaiti civilians had been killed’). But reference to anonymised social actors (‘Iraq’s terrible special security units’, ‘one torture victim’, ‘a BBC television crew’) places the sceptical reader in a position where access to the truth is beyond reach.
Thus, war can once again be waged to rescue Muslim women from being raped. Such stories reinforce Master Orientalist narratives and boost their ‘topic potential’ to the effect that the need to verify the truthfulness of such allegations becomes functionally irrelevant to the production of an immediate ‘call for arms’ appeal. The use of ‘sexuality’ and ‘family notions’ was meant mainly to ‘paint immorality on Iraq and moral righteousness on the United States’ in an attempt to ‘generate a unanimity in outrage against an outside evil, Iraq’ (Farmanfarmaian, 1998: 286). ‘Native Americans were accused of kidnapping white women and these allegations were used as justification for genocide’ (Stabile and Kumar, 2005: 770). The evocation of ‘rape’ scenarios served as a cultural trigger of the black rapist or white woman schema, which ultimately led to the ritualistic lynching and ‘castration of the racial Other’ in the 1920s (Farmanfarmaian, 1998: 288). This sexual anxiety ‘necessitates a display of virility’ against ‘sand niggers’ (Farmanfarmaian, 1998).
Similarly, Bush senior’s account of Iraqi soldiers removing hundreds of premature Kuwaiti babies from incubators proved to be a mere apocryphal story. On 10 October 1990, a videoed ‘appeal to pity’ (viewed by about 35 million audience) was staged by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti witness, who tearfully asserted in a hearing before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus (who received US$50,000 as donation from a Kuwaiti lobby known as ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’) that While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the children to die on the cold floor. [crying] It was horrifying. (quoted in Walton, 1995: 771–777)
This dramatic story was part of a massive campaign for war against Iraq, which was promoted by a powerful US public relation firm, Hill and Knowlton (which was paid more than US$11m by the Kuwaiti government; Walton, 1995: 773). The US administration publicised these allegations and the Amnesty International reports endorsed them. However, subsequent investigation and interviews of medical officials then working in Kuwait (by John Martin of ABC news) revealed that it was mere war propaganda. After the invasion of Iraq in 1991, Amnesty International failed to find ‘credible witnesses’ of Iraq’s alleged atrocity. It was not until 1992 that an investigative reporter (MacArthur of NYT) revealed that the Kuwaiti girl (Nayirah) was, actually, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States (Saud Nasir Al-Sabah), a member of Kuwait’s royal family. The concealment of Nayirah’s real identity (given reason: to protect her family in Kuwait) threw some doubt on the honesty of the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The well-calculated ‘rhetorical moment’ (Bush had already given Saddam a deadline for withdrawal from Kuwait or face war) was exploited to the effect that the verification of the truthfulness of the baby incubator story would be impossible. More importantly, the co-chairman of the US Congress committee on human rights (who knowingly presented Nayirah as a Kuwaiti volunteer health worker), Amnesty International (who failed to be an independent fact-finder) and the media (which inundated the public with misleading information) were all accomplices in this scandal (Walton, 1995: 780).
Thus, ‘argument from appeal to witness testimony’, a subcategory of ‘argument from position to know’, can be easily defeasible. It can be represented as shown in Figure 5 (Walton, 2005: 442).
Argument from appeal to witness testimony.
There is a growing awareness of the importance of visual evidence that provides a graphic record of human suffering and death, as in the case of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old Iraqi civilian who died as a result of 93 injuries (detailed in 46 photographs) inflicted by a group of seven British soldiers over a 36-hour period in a British detention facility in Basra in September 2003. The autopsy photograph (Baha’s badly bruised face) and a soldier’s one-minute video footage of Baha being brutally mass beaten were a key part of the evidence (Whitty, 2010: 692). Official strategies of denial of the use of torture in interrogations were defeated by such visual evidence (hooding, stress positions, starving, sleep deprivation, etc.). However, as in Abu Ghraib, competing official narratives constructed ‘torture’ as mere ‘conditioning techniques’ used by individuals (‘rotten apple’ argument) to squeeze life-saving intelligence information from detainees (ticking ‘timebomb’ argument). Hence, even visual imagery does not always provide an unchallengeable record of what happened. This also depends on ‘how law views the credibility and motivation of the “witness” photographer’ (Whitty, 2010: 713). Similarly, ‘junk science’ might infiltrate the courts and render the provided ‘expert opinion’ misleading. More interestingly, the interpretation made by the judge and juries of ‘expert testimony’ might be crucial to reach a fair decision.
Conclusion
In this article, I have demonstrated how rational thought yielded to the language of ideological framing and polarisation in pro-war rhetorical argumentation. The presumptive reasoning characterising pro-war strategic manoeuvring led to the fallacious representation of controversial aspects of the described reality as taken for granted. The ineffective use of strategic manoeuvres is also clear in instances such as the appeal to emotions of an imagined like-minded audience (argument from pity). Another instance of abusive use of strategic manoeuvring features in the confinement of ‘topic potential’ to stereotypical misrepresentations related to the ‘Islamic Peril’ as if the obtaining categorisations of Muslim protestors are self-evident starting points. A third obvious exercise in derailed strategic manoeuvring is the description of protesters in terms of aquatic or military metaphors to transform complex political realities into more readily graspable Orientalist concepts. A fourth instance of fallacy involves strategic manoeuvring with unexpressed premises, which renders enthymematic argumentation a mere rhetorical manoeuvre to evade the burden of proof. The construction of controversial issues (e.g. ‘protests by Muslims are naturally violent’) as shared ‘starting points’ by appealing to the vox populi (argumentation ad populum) was a subtle sophistical tactic to manipulate people’s decisions and manufacture their consent. The pro-war arguers failed to calibrate their appeals carefully in a way that caters for the concerns, attitudes and values of a universal audience. A final kind of deficient strategic manoeuvre involves the reframing of peaceful anti-war protest as a ‘threat’ to ‘national security’ and ‘civil order’. Therefore, claims such as safeguarding ‘national security’ overrode the need to sufficiently scrutinise the ‘evidence’ put forward by pro-war arguers by deploying strategies of refutation by definition (predefining protest by Muslims as characteristically irrational). Such ‘presumptive and defeasible type of reasoning’ ‘shifts a burden of proof in dialogue’ and ‘lends itself to fallacious variants that utilize tactics of intimidation or scaremongering, exploiting a respondent’s insecurity or fear’ (Walton, 1996: 76–77). This is clearly facilitated by the use of an arsenal of metaphors of threat. For example, the metaphor ‘protest is a flood’ has innumerable profound entailments at the level of the proposed policing tactics of anti-war activism in the United States. Metaphor is a strategic manoeuvre deployed by the pro-war arguers to fallaciously ‘transfer’ modes of reasoning related to dealing with disaster threats to more problematic arenas of peaceful protest control.
However, it is worth noting here that strategic manoeuvring involving defamation or pointing out an inconsistency in the other party’s position may have different soundness rules in context. Therefore, future research should aim at explaining how strategic manoeuvring can derail in situated argumentative discourse (e.g. the use of emotional appeal, ‘argument from pity’ and ad hominem defamation (among others)) might be legitimate in certain argumentation situations.
Footnotes
Appendix 1
Acknowledgements
A preliminary version of this article was presented at the 4th International Conference on Argumentation, Rhetoric, Debate, and the Pedagogy of Empowerment held at Qatar Foundation, 11–13 January 2013 (see Sahlane, 2013b). I would like to thank the members of the audience for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive comments on an earlier version of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.