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This article examines the role the ideograph <human rights> plays in George W. Bush's presidential rhetoric. By strategically wielding <human rights> throughout his presidency, and by using it to amplify his use of association and dissociation, Bush connects his actions in important ways to the foundational myths of American democracy. In so doing, he provides powerful warrants for his actions, which undermine the very practices he claims to be supporting. That is, by using <human rights> as a way of tapping into the myth of America as the synecdochic representation of freedom in the world, Bush rhetorically reaffirms that myth while acting in ways that also subvert it.
Disaster is always interesting to scholars, not least because serious mistakes always demand explanation and, if nothing else, research can lay some claims to being able to provide such explanations. Indeed, the troubled history of the American military intervention in Iraq has already generated a vast body of journalistic, scholarly, and popular literature purporting to provide explanations and analysis of how we got into this war, how it has been prosecuted, and whether we ought to remain actively engaged in it or seek an end to our involvement.
This article contributes to the large and growing body of literature on the intervention in Iraq by examining the role the ideograph <human rights> plays in George W. Bush's presidential rhetoric. Ideographs are the constitutive terms of a rhetorical culture and, as such, their use places matters beyond debate. Ideographs are historically bound and yet flexible. Mapping their use helps us determine how complex ideologies are translated into policy through the use of abstract phrases-ideographs are devoid of specific policy content, empty of policy direction, and can be used to defend competing, even contradictory, actions.
By strategically wielding <human rights> throughout his presidency and by using <human rights> to amplify his use of association and dissociation, Bush connects his actions in important ways to the foundational myths of American democracy. In so doing, he provides powerful warrants for his actions, which undermine the very practices he claims to be supporting. That is, by using <human rights> as a way of tapping into the myth of America as the synecdochic representation of freedom in the world, and by associating...