Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq

Abstract

Abstract As the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq mount, scholars have sought to explain how the United States came to launch this war in the first place. Many have focused on the "inflation" of the Iraq threat, and indeed the Bush administration did frame the national dialogue on Iraq. We maintain, however, that the failure of most leading Democrats to challenge the administration's case for war in 2002–2003 cannot be explained fully by the bully pulpit, Democrats' reputation for dovishness, or administration misrepresentations. Rather, we argue that leading Democrats were relatively silent in the run-up to war because they had been "rhetorically coerced", unable to advance a politically sustainable set of arguments with which to oppose the war. The effective fixing of the meaning of the September 11 attacks in terms of the "War on Terror" substantially circumscribed political debate, and we explain why this discourse became dominant. The Bush administration then capitalized on the existing portrait of Saddam Hussein to bind Iraq tightly into the War on Terror and thereby silence leading Democrats and legitimate the war. The story of the road to war in Iraq is not only one of neoconservative hubris and manipulated intelligence. It is also the story of how political actors strove effectively after 9/11 to shape the nation's discourse of foreign affairs and of how the resulting dominant narratives structured foreign policy debate. Behind the seemingly natural War on Terror lurk political processes of meaning-making that narrowed the space for contestation over Iraq. Ronald R. Krebs is Assistant Professor and McKnight Land-Grant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. This article was completed while he was a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Jennifer K. Lobasz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. The authors are grateful to Robert Art, Janice Bially Mattern, Risa Brooks, Bud Duvall, David Edelstein, Patrick Jackson, Robert Jervis, Patrick McDonald, Benny Miller, John Mueller, Daniel Nexon, Thomas Saretzki, Bartholomew Sparrow, Peter Trubowitz, Jon Western, Wesley Widmaier, Michael Williams, and three anonymous reviewers for Security Studies for helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association and at seminars at Northwestern University, the University of Haifa, and the University of Texas at Austin: thanks to all who participated in those forums for their constructive criticism.