Journal of American Studies of Turkey
14 (2001) : 25-29
Rhetoric and/as Terrorism: Before and After
September 11
Bennett
Lowenthal
The
following is a neatening-up of remarks delivered as a panelist discussing the
topic “Rhetoric and/as Terrorism: Before and After September 11.” The venue was
the Poetry and Linguistics Association (PALA) Conference held in Istanbul in
June 2003. The six other panelists were academics and journalists, all working
in Turkey.
I
have interpolated precious little. Where the following text differs from my
actual remarks, it is for the sake of greater illustration.
I
thank the panel’s organizer and moderator, Dr. Matthew Gumpert of Bilkent
University in Ankara, for his kind invitation to submit the following for
publication in the Journal of American
Studies in Turkey. I sought permission from the U.S. Department of State to
do so. Permission was granted. The opinions expressed in this article are those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S.
Government. Any inaccuracies are, however, mine and mine alone.
September
11 is a date on a calendar.
“September
11” is a neologism.
Six
short “e” vowels. Assonant rhyme. Scansion of the meter is amphibrach
hexameter. As a rhetorical unit, it is probably destined for immortality.
That
said, the currency of “September 11” (or its prosodically identical twin
“September 11th”) as a trope may be overtaken – in American usage –
by “9/11”. Is this American love for numbers and/or codes? Is it American
exceptionalism? (Who cares that most calendars render it “11/9”?) How strong is
the tug of the telephone emergency number “9-1-1?” Does the twin appearance of
the number “1” in “9/11” conjure the fallen twin towers?
“September
11” is probably by now a figure of speech in most languages across the world.
(I have made no attempt to verify that assertion.) However, I am indebted to
Dr. Elisabeth Kendall, Professor of Arabic at Oxford and Edinburgh
Universities, for a thumbnail assessment of how “September 11” fares as a
locution in the Arabic-speaking world. It seems that, as a basic general
conclusion, “September 11” and its variants are referred to in the same way in
the Arab press as in the Western press: “Ahadashar
aylul” (11th of September) or the “attacks (“hajamat”) of September” or, less
commonly now, “the disaster (“karitha”)
of September.”
Admiral
Chuichi Nagumo’s Carrier Striking Task Force Operations Order No. 1 dated 23
November 1941 referred to “X Day”; it did not mention “Pearl Harbor”. The Great
Soviet Encyclopedia had an article not on the American Civil War but rather on
the “Failed Second American Revolution, 1861-1877.”
Should
“September 11” or “9/11” begin to be challenged or eclipsed, take note and
watch out.
“…Before
and After…”
Let
us relinquish the metaphor of the “watershed?” How can time flow away from
time?
If
water is to be the substance of our metaphor, then let us better describe
“September 11” as a cascade, a waterfall, a cataract.
Even before getting flecked, drenched, or drowned by “September 11,” every one was already carrying a notion of terrorism packed inside their heads. Did it get wet?
Let
us examine President Bush’s initial public statements after “September 11”
(i.e. on September 11). Here is the
very first:
Two
planes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack
on our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, the Governor of New York,
and the Director of the FBI and have ordered that the full resources of the
federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a
full-scale investigation to hunt down and find those folks who committed this
act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand. Now, if you will join me in a
minute of silence. God bless the victims, their families, and America.
Leaving
aside the reference to God’s blessing – which some might consider rhetorically
more significant – I would draw attention to the statement’s language of
law-enforcement. Note the words “FBI” and “investigation” and “find”. The
statement does not contain the word “war.”
How
long did it take for the phrase “war on terrorism” to enter the President’s
public vocabulary with reference to the events of September 11? About eleven
hours. At 8:30 pm on the evening of September 11, the President addressed the
nation and said, among other things:
America
and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in
the world to stand together to win the war against terrorism.
Note
the use of the definite article. “The” war against terrorism. Not “this” war.
Not “a” war. The use of the definite article presupposes the prior existence of
the noun specified.
So,
who declared war? And how? And when?
Was
war declared by the terrorists? That is clearly the position of the President,
stated explicitly, for example, in a speech in New York City in June 2003:
“Terrorists declared war on the United States of America and war is what they
got.” One might point to the first World Trade Center bombing or the bombing of
the U.S.S. Cole or the 23 February 1998 World Islamic Front tract entitled
“Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” signed by, among others, Shaykh Usamah
bin-Muhammed bin-Ladin? (More from this document later.)
Or,
alternatively, has there been a “war on terrorism” going on for decades, if not
longer?
Can
the “war on terrorism” be said to resemble the “war on slavery” or the “war on
piracy” from earlier eras?
Were
Abolitionists in America engaged in a “war on slavery” and did they use that
term? (John Brown remarked: “I have to make war on slavery because only by
making war on slavery is it endable.”) Was there in any sense an international “war on slavery” that
contributed to sovereign nations’ decisions to end the practice, e.g. Cuba and
Brazil in the 1880s? Is there still a
“war on slavery” being waged, for example, in Mauritania and Sudan? Or would
some say that precisely what is lacking
is a “war on slavery?”
Was
there ever a “war on piracy?” If not, then what caused pirates to disappear
from the high seas? Was it sufficient that maritime powers signed the
Declaration of Paris in 1856 to the effect that “privateering is and remains
abolished,” or did the invention of the steamship do the trick? Moreover,
similar to slavery, can we say that the “war on piracy” is actually over,
considering the risks to shipping even today in, say, the Straits of Malacca.
(Or the risks posed to manufacturers of entertainment and pharmaceuticals by
“pirates”?)
Is
there a “war on terrorism” in the sense that there is (was?) the “war on
poverty” (President Johnson, 1964) or the “war on drugs” (President Nixon,
1972)?
The
possibility of analogy among slavery and piracy and poverty and drugs and
terrorism suggests to me that the “war on terrorism” remains keenly
metaphorical.
“The
Cold War,” as a figure of speech, began as a metaphor. From the late 1940s to
1991 that metaphor covered an astonishing range of activity, all over the
world. After 1991, though, can we not say that it has lost its rhetorical
quality of metaphor? It is now a perfectly adequate historical designator. It
is no more metaphoric than, say, the War of the Roses or the War of Jenkins’
Ear.
The
“war on terrorism” is not (yet) the “War on Terrorism.”
“…Rhetoric
and/as Terrorism…”
It
struck me that in course of our PALA Conference discussion, both panelists and
audiences seemed exclusively focused on examining the terrorism rhetoric of
government officials, most notably, of course, the President of the United
States. Perhaps if we had had more time, we could have taken a look at the
terrorism rhetoric of terrorists. For example, instead of a protracted
discussion of the subliminality (or lack thereof) contained in the President’s
use (subsequently retracted and regretted) of the metaphor “crusade,” perhaps
we could have considered the unretracted and unregretted rhetoric of the aforementioned
“Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.”
The
Arabian Peninsula has never – since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and
encircled it with seas – been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies
spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations.
All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like
people fighting over a plate of food…The ruling to kill the Americans and their
allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who
can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate
the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order
for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to
threaten any Muslim…We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in
Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the
Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.
If
a primary purpose of rhetoric is exhortation, then who is exhorting a “war of terrorism” and who is exhorting a
“war on terrorism?”
Some
would argue, in a certain discourse, that war = terrorism. In the discourse
that arguably matters most – international law – this is not so. War is deemed
legal in some circumstances, per the United Nations Charter. Terrorism,
however, is deemed criminal in all instances. Terrorism is defined and
criminalized both at the national level (e.g. Title 22 of the United States
Code) and at the international level in various United Nations multilateral
treaties and conventions, e.g. those relating to aviation and shipping (1963,
1970, 1971, 1988), Diplomatic Agents (1973), Taking of Hostages (1979),
Suppression of Terrorist Bombings (1997), and Suppression of the Financing of
Terrorism (1999).
According
to Article 5 of the 1997 Convention:
…criminal
acts within the scope of this Convention, in particular where they are intended
or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group
of persons or particular persons, are under no circumstances justifiable by
considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic,
religious or other similar nature…
Meanwhile,
Article 19 of the 1997 Convention notes that:
the
activities undertaken by military forces of a State in the exercise of their
official duties, inasmuch as they are governed by other rules of international
law, are not governed by this Convention.
Lest
I have gone too far and appear to be presenting myself as two things I
absolutely am not – a lawyer and an international lawyer – allow me then simply
to offer the opinion that in the “war on terrorism” it is crucial that
terrorism continue to be both legally defined and publicly felt as something in
the domain of the criminal, with no chance of osmosis into the domain of the
legitimate.
Since
I have now wound up in a discourse landscape that is a bit dry, dotted with
words like “convention” and “treaty” and “article,” I sense it would be best if
I ended soon. I beg your indulgence for one last story about an “article,”
however, before I end.
In
its youth, the United States of America fought the collectively-named Barbary
Wars, covering the Tripolitan War of 1801-1805 and the war with Algiers in
1815. In the aftermath of “September 11,” these wars have not been seized upon
for rhetorical purposes, either by supporters or opponents of recent American
foreign policy.
One
can perhaps imagine hesitation among Americans to buff up distant memories of
American ships shelling Muslim capitals and offloading American Marines onto
Muslim shores.
One
can also perhaps imagine the other side’s fears of negative PR, were it forced
to reconstitute a historical defense for the rights to tribute and ransom money
for kidnapped sailors. There might, however, be one additional factor. Perhaps
those who seek to ascribe a deep-seated religious motivation to the “war on
terrorism” would prefer not to draw attention to Article XI of the Treaty of
Tripoli.
In
June 1797, a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with the North African state of
Tripoli was unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate and subsequently signed by
President Adams. The treaty was soon
broken; the ruler of Tripoli, in 1800, upset that promised American tribute payments
were late, began again to attack U.S. shipping.
Although
the Treaty of Tripoli was obscure and its life short, nevertheless its Article
XI achieved long-lasting notoriety. Article XI reads:
As
the Government of the United States of America is not founded in any sense on
the Christian religion – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the
laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims]—and as the said states
have never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan
nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious
opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the
two countries.