This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call Customer Service. You will be notified in advance of any changes in rate or terms.
You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. Skip to Main Content Skip to Search. During the Gulf War, American policy, as explained by its chief architects, involved elements of both the Just War and the crusade. The White House, however, joined the press to a lesser extent, in its use of the rhetoric of the crusade: It presented the war as an integral part of an overall effort to bring about a new world order, dominated by liberal, Western values in foreign and domestic policies.
In contrast to the Just War concept, not only the liberation of Kuwait but also the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the democratization of Iraq according to Western models were mentioned as goals of the UN sanctions and the subsequent military operation.
This combination of Just War and moral crusade, served to veil an inherent ideological contradiction: defending a feudal regime Kuwait's while employing liberal democratic discourse. In the short term, this inconsistency proved to be a source of propaganda strength, as it enabled the White House and the press to maintain a united front.
In the long run, however, it proved to be a source of confusion to the Administration, with grave political implications. It was George Bush, who in the framework of the propaganda strategy of the moral crusade, led the transformation of the Gulf crisis into a Just War. By so doing, he deliberately blurred the political, strategic, and economic interests involved in the conflict He presented it as a struggle between good and evil, embodied by the U.
The President's dramatic call to the nation on the eve of the war was actually a culmination of the propaganda strategy of the previous six months: "Tonight", Bush solemnly appealed to his listeners, "as this coalition of countries seeks to do that which is right and just, I ask only that all of you stop what you were doing and say a prayer for all the coalition forces May God bless and protect each and every one of them and may God bless the United States of America" In the context of the Just War argument, President Bush employed universal religious motifs and carefully avoided the use of any specific Christian terminology.
Moreover, he specifically rejected the evolution of his campaign for justice and morality into a religious crusade by Christendom against Islam. He repeatedly emphasized that it was not different religious affiliations that had placed the U.
It has, on the other hand, everything to do with what religion embodies: good vs. The use of terms with judicial as well as religious - but not of any specific religion - connotations was, it would seem, not accidental, but carefully selected.
President Bush further asserted that U. Again, in an almost millenarian prophetic tone, he maintained that the campaign was meant to institute an adequate set of rules that would regulate international relations: "The civilized world is now in the process of fashioning the rules that will govern the new world", he rationalized Behind Bush's deliberate attempt to emphasize the moral rather than the crusade nature of the American offensive lay both domestic and foreign policy considerations.
The use of ethical vocabulary with general religious overtones was meant to facilitate the reception of the Administration's policy by a positively predisposed domestic public With the Vietnam trauma ever present in the background 24, Bush's commitment to the status-quo-ante and his avoidance of wider ideological goals hinted to Americans at their president's commitment to keep the conflict within limited, well-defined targets.
Presenting the conflict in terms of a Just War had an important role in American foreign policy, which had to cultivate a supportive public opinion in the coalition countries worldwide 25 - and, indeed, this concept responded to the political limitations imposed by the composition of the anti-Iraq coalition.
To bestow on the Administration's anti-Iraq policy a much needed seal of international approval, the White House regarded as vital the participation of Arab and Moslem countries, fragile and complicated as this would make the coalition Consequently, while the use of religious terminology might have been useful in terms of cultivating American public opinion, it was counterproductive for such an international coalition.
By joining forces with the West - and worse still, with the "pro-Israeli" U. Arab masses, particularly Moslem fundamentalists, were highly critical of the pro-American policy of their governments and. Aware of the sensibilities and limitations of his allies, President Bush acted carefully. His emphasis on the Just War concept, with its universal moral values, provided a perfect solution to the propaganda dilemma posed by past and present uneasy relations between the West and the Arabs.
It enabled the American president to minimize the influence of cultural and religious factors in his anti-Iraq policy and, by so doing, to facilitate the enlistment of Moslem-Arab countries in the coalition.
The focus that Bush placed on a status- quo-ante-onented Just War further served to obscure the fact - one that could easily have been turned into a propaganda problem in the U. In the initial stages of the crisis, the press proved receptive to the White House's propaganda strategy An editorial in The New York Times faithfully voiced the president's creed, establishing that "America, along with most of the rest of the world, are on the right side of this quarrel, and of history" Echoing Bush's argument, Kenneth L.
Woodward instructed Newsweek's readers on the principles and the history of the Just War Maureen Dowd went a step further by depicting Bush's perception of the conflict as a universal struggle of a binary nature, involving contradictory elements: "The President.. James LeMoyne justified this line of argument in light of "the ethos of democratic liberalism" and "the American sensibility of a world divided into good and evil" Rosenthal described how "Mr. Bush preached for a moral, historic and ethical framework for the war".
Making use of a rather rich historical thesaurus, Rosenthal cited the Bible, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Aquinas to justify the fighting, and declared: "the U. The vague duality implied in the presidential message, however, did not always satisfy the press. Indeed, some journalists were not late in pointing to what they believed to be basic weaknesses inherent in the President's reasoning.
Peter McGrath argued that "for George Bush, the problem is a lack of available ideals. He cannot defend democracy while restoring a feudal order in Kuwait. He spoke at the outset of not rewarding aggression, but the modern.
Nor will it work to talk, as he did before Congress in September, of a 'new world order. For the press, the solution to inconsistencies like those to which McGrath pointed was to emphasize, not the element of the Just War in the term moral crusade, but that of the crusade.
Accordingly, in clear contradiction to Bush's propaganda strategy, the press made wider use of religious and cultural arguments 35, with the war gradually emerging as another stage in the seemingly ever-lasting conflict between Christendom and Islam, between the West and the Arab East.
In its most extreme form, this trend encouraged the depiction of the conflict in terms of a modern crusade Curiously enough, this anti-Iraq line of argument was fostered by Saddam Hussein and his supporters' abundant use of crusade terminology. Saddam strove to mobilize Arab and Muslim public opinion by emphasizing the long, fundamental antagonism between the Arabs and the West.
The extensive use of the precedent of the crusades was meant as a historical lesson: in the s, like years earlier Battle of Hattin, 1 , there would be a clear Muslim- Arab victory, led by a modern Saladin.
The conflicting political goals of George Bush and Saddam Hussein were, therefore, faithfully reflected in their respective lines of propaganda The American press, rather paradoxically, found Saddam's crusade terminology more to its taste Faced with the propaganda challenge emanating from Baghdad, the press responded by readily adopting the more colorful, stimulating terminology of the crusade, with all its romantic, religious, and historical symbols.
When, however, columnists like Howard Fineman and Evan Thomas compared George Bush and Saddam Hussein through this heroic perspective, they portrayed the American president in a somewhat caricaturistic manner: "Saddam sounds like a ninth-century holy warrior preparing to battle the infidel, Bush sounds like a high-school football coach on the eve of the big game Saddam borrowed his ghoulish threat to make the Americans 'swim in their own blood' word for word from Al-Tabari, the Herodotus of the Arab world who chronicled the jihads of the Abbasid Empire..
Bush's declaration to Saddam, 'I've had it! Crispin's Day at Agincourt" The press thus reached the unavoidable conclusion that if Bush. The White House, though, recognized that both political and propaganda considerations made such a strategy unacceptable. Politically, the use of the crusade - with its emphasis on the antagonism between the Arab world and the West as a model for the military campaign in the Gulf - would endanger the cohesiveness of the coalition.
Propagandistically, adopting the crusade analogy would bring Bush closer to Saddam's line of argument, thereby blurring the differences between their respective goals - a difference that was made very clear in the framework of the Just War concept. The history and mythology of the crusades enriched U. Thus, an editorial in The New York Times emphasized in an oxy moronic manner the "shining achievement of the European enlightenment's crusade against feudal monarchies" The eminence of Western culture over the "barbarian" East was further suggested.
According to Lance Morrow, "it seems to Westerners that some amorality is at work in the way Arabs judge atrocities and measure the worth of human lives" The crusade precedent became the appropriate framework in which to interpret the crisis in the Gulf, which in the press gradually turned into an expression of the ongoing confrontation between the West and the Arabs, similar to that which had led Christendom to oppose Islam many centuries earlier.
Pursuing this line, George J. Church made the psychological-anthropological observation that "he [Saddam] does not think like a Westerner" According to Kenneth S. Stein, "whether one accepts that interpretation or not, the global response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is the latest event in a thousand-year encounter between Western and Arab cultures". He recalled a conversation with Syria's president, Hafez al-Assad, about Saladin's crucial victory over the crusaders in the Battle of Hattin.
To his comment that "the Muslims soundly defeated the Christians" in this battle, Assad reacted by saying, "No. This was where the Arabs defeated the West" Whereas Assad undoubtedly meant to draw a line between religious Moslem, Christian and political terms Arabs, Westerners , the context in which this anecdote was recycled served to obscure these differences.
Stein's report clearly demonstrates the print media's manipulation of the crusade symbol during the crisis in the Gulf.
It led the reader to a foregone conclusion, that relations between the West and the Arabs were those of an. The conclusion to be drawn was that the encounter between the West and the Arab world would forever follow the patterns - though not the results - of the crusades and the Battle of Hattin.
Against Bush's tendency to demonize Saddam Hussein, to turn him into the main obstacle in the way of a new, harmonious world order u, the use by the press of the crusades paradigm paradoxically undermined the role of the "bad guy" ascribed to the Iraqi leader, for this effectively belittled his personal responsibility as a representative of the Arab-Moslem world as a whole.
President Bush thought in terms of turning the Gulf War into the corner-stone of a new international concord In contrast, the press, by using the crusade theme, not only doubted whether such an order was possible at all, but portrayed a status quo of continual conflict between two mutually exclusive systems. The crusades gradually lost their concrete historical meaning and became a metaphor for the only possible pattern of relations between West and East, in fact a paradigm for international relations in general.
Although this paradigm was the opposite of the new world order delineated by Bush, it would seem that it was especially receptive to large segments of American public opinion. Roger Wilkins, a former Justice Department official, concluded that history proved that Americans were more comfortable with conflicting weltan- schauungs, since "we can always be galvanized by the threat of barbarians.
Our feelings about the Soviets and now Saddam weren't terribly different from the crusaders' views about the infidels" By presenting the struggle against the barbarians - in the ideological and moral sense - as an integral part of the American scale of values, the crusades paradigm with its Christian connotations, gathered momentum Ordering from Brill. Author Newsletter. Piracy Reporting Form. How to Manage your Online Holdings.
Sales Managers and Sales Contacts. Ordering From Brill. LibLynx for Selected Online Resources. Discovery Services. Online User and Order Help. MARC Records. Titles No Longer Published by Brill. Latest Key Figures. Latest Financial Press Releases and Reports. Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. Share Information. Specialty Products. Catalogs, Flyers and Price Lists.
Open Access. Open Access for Authors. Open Access and Research Funding. Open Access for Librarians. Open Access for Academic Societies.
0コメント