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George H. W. Bush and the new world order: on stasis, the just war & rhetorical legacy—“a world in disarray”?

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George H. W. Bush and the new world order: on stasis, the just war & rhetorical legacy—“a world in disarray”?

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GEORGE H. W. BUSH AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER: ON STASIS, THE
JUST WAR & RHETORICAL LEGACY – “A WORLD IN DISARRAY”?

by

Laura Alberti

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2018

Copyright 2018 Laura Alberti
ii

DEDICATION

Per mio padre, Giandomenico Alberti
in memoriam

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A special thank you to the members of my committee. First and
foremost, to my advisor, Tom Goodnight, I can’t begin to thank you enough
for the guidance and support that you have provided me all along the way.
Your brilliance, wit, and compassion have deeply influenced who I am as a
scholar and as a person. To Tom Hollihan, thank you for being such an
amazing mentor, and for helping me stay grounded. To Randy Lake, thank
you for teaching me the value of words, and of choosing them wisely. In
addition, I would like to thank Stephen O’Leary and Nina Eliasoph for their
sparkling insights and thoughtful feedback as members of my qualifying
exam committee.
I owe a hearty acknowledgement to the Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism at USC for the financial support and
uncounted research opportunities afforded to me during my years of doctoral
training. Thanks to my cohort of fellow students, I have many fond
memories. To Joel, Yasuhito, Evan, and Ioana, thank you for being true
friends as well as outstanding colleagues.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my family and friends. To my mother
Francesca, whose strength and grace truly inspire me, I could not have done
it without you. To my beloved sister Elena, who always believed in me, as I
believe in her. To my daughter Carolina, who brings joy and laughter to my
life. A heartful thanks to my in-laws, Lauran and Bob, for their unwavering
iv

support and for their masterful help copy editing the final draft of this thesis.
To Lynn, thank you so much for everything.
Last, but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to my spouse and fellow
scholar L. Paul Strait. Your love, humor, and debating skills kept me going
through it all. Grazie.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION ..................................................................................................... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................... v
ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................... viii
Chapter One: Rhetorics of War and Peace in the New World Order ................ 1
Orientation for Inquiry ............................................................................ 5
Rationale for Study ................................................................................ 10
Propositions ............................................................................................ 17
Proposition 1 ................................................................................ 19
Proposition 2 ................................................................................ 19
Proposition 3 ................................................................................ 19
Method .................................................................................................... 20
Chapter Outline & Materials for Study ................................................ 25
Chapter Two: War and Public Policy Argument:
The Classical Inheritance ................................................................................. 29
Stasis and Clash: An Overview ............................................................. 29
A Generative Understanding of Stasis ....................................... 33
The Ordering and Centrifugal Energies of Practical Reason .... 38
Argumentation as Peitho, Bia, and Mythos .......................................... 41
vi

Peitho and Bia in International Relations ................................. 46
Stasis, Strife and the Question of Insurrection ......................... 49
Stasis, Histories of Violence and the Words of War ............................. 52
Order: Persuasion and Necessity .......................................................... 60
Conclusion .............................................................................................. 69
Chapter Three: The Arc of Just War Thinking:
Narration and Public Moral Argument ........................................................... 71
Ancient Antecedents: The Bible and Roman Bellum Iustum ............... 81
Testaments to Public Moral Argument ...................................... 81
Master Narratives of Republic and Empire ............................... 85
The City of God and the Natural City ................................................... 92
Augustine of Hippo and Just War in a Disordered World ......... 93
Aquinas and the Rationalization of Just War .......................... 110
Fellow Travelers: Just War, Holy War, and the Crusades ................ 113
Just War Between the Colony and the State ...................................... 119
Francisco Vitoria and Just War in the New World .................. 120
Hugo Grotius and the Westphalian Order ............................... 125
Conclusion ............................................................................................ 132
Chapter Four: Just War/Stasis Bundles in the New World Order:
From the Panama Invasion to the Persian Gulf War ................................... 135
vii

Post-Cold War Rhetorics of War and Community Renewal ............... 137
The Panama Invasion: Regime Change in New World Order ............ 141
Wimps and Thugs ...................................................................... 143
Operation Just Cause ................................................................ 145
The Persian Gulf War: Iraq against the (New) World (Order) ........... 167
Desert Shield ............................................................................. 168
Desert Storm .............................................................................. 195
The Triumph .............................................................................. 204
Chapter Five: The New Wor(l)d Order:
George H. W. Bush’s Rhetorical Legacy ......................................................... 215
Key Findings ......................................................................................... 220
Dialectical Hermeneutic Strategy ............................................. 220
Rhetorical Legacy Studies ......................................................... 223
President Bush’s Contradictions ............................................... 225
Rhetorical Inquiry in International Studies............................. 228
Conclusion ............................................................................................ 229
Bibliography .................................................................................................... 232

viii

ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores stress points in the post-Cold War initial
transition spaces for the rhetorics of war and peace. It investigates an
extended moment of change from 1989 through the spring of 1991 when a
fifty-year-long war disassembled and a new opportunity arose. It examines
President George H. W. Bush’s rhetoric offered to articulate, justify, and
support the Panama invasion and the Persian Gulf War as a series of
episodes in a rhetorical movement that blended two distinct discourse
traditions – public policy argument related to stasis and public moral
argument related to Just War – in an effort to initiate a new world order and
a (re)new(ed) American foreign policy.
This study argues that the transitional rhetorics of the Bush
administration introduced fragmentary structures of justification that could
neither sustain a rhetoric of national security nor international commitment.
It proceeds to tease out the independent logics of these rhetorics in order to
read the legacy of President Bush’s attempts to initiate new foreign policy at
the fall of the Cold War regime. Public policy argument is reconstructed as
reasons structured by classical, generative interpretations of stasis/clash
internal to the polity or between hegemons and dependent states. Public
moral argument is reviewed as narratives that embed conflict in the
discourse of the Just War where situations confront publics with questions of
good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. The study of these
ix

discourses prepares the way to read how, during the brief but telling
transition years of 1989 through 1991, the Bush administration set the stage
for a new world order in which stasis orientations to strategic interest and
Just War justifications materialized as an inter-linked centripetal gambit to
articulate a benevolent hegemony.
The amalgamation of two traditions was useful in the short term for
purposes of message design in the interest of influence. The result of
communicative expediency was to throw presidential address into endless
contestation, to dismantle coherent policy frameworks, and unintentionally to
leave a legacy out of which following administrations could construct an
endless war on terror. Arguments create disagreement spaces and find uses
unanticipated at the time of utterance; nevertheless, the easy overwhelming
micro-intervention (Panama invasion) and the internationally supported
macro-intervention (Persian Gulf War) convinced opponents throughout the
world to evolve dynamically other ways of making war.

1

Chapter One: Rhetorics of War and Peace in the New World Order
On December 7, 1988, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev
gave a historic speech to the UN General Assembly. To the amazement of the
global community, Gorbachev called for a radical break with “a history of
almost ubiquitous wars, and sometimes desperate battles, leading to mutual
destruction,” in the direction of a “new world order” in which cooperation and
dialogue among peoples could serve to solve new challenges.
1
Gorbachev
announced unilateral military cuts and renounced Moscow’s right to
intervene militarily in the internal affairs of its satellites (the so-called
Brezhnev Doctrine). The announcement stunned US observers. In his
memoirs, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft described
Washington’s reaction to this historical turn as the experience of being “in a
unique position, without experience, without precedent, and standing alone
at the height of power.”
2

A fresh breeze was blowing through Washington, DC in 1989.
International summits between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had
set an agenda for the end of the Cold War. George H. W. Bush was elected
forty-first president of the United States just in time to witness the inspiring,
peaceful transformation of the Velvet Revolution that spring, as countries of

1
Mikhail Gorbachev, “Address to the Forty-Third UN General Assembly Session”
(December 7, 1988), General Assembly, United Nations, UN Doc. A/43/PV.72, December 8,
1988, 8-9, http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/43/PV.72.
2
George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage
Books, 1999), 564.
2

the “Eastern Block” saw crowds assemble, chanting and demanding freedom
now.
3
That winter the Soviet Union withdrew its last troops from
Afghanistan, agreed to submit a variety of issues to the International Court
of Justice, and held elections that provided transition to a new Russian
state.
4
May 4 democratic revolutions were joined in China through
opposition in Tiananmen Square. In the US, the new president gave a
commencement address at Texas A&M welcoming the “new” Russian nation
into the “world order.” The words thrilled with exuberance of a powerfully
resonant epideictic proclamation: “We are approaching the conclusion of an
historic postwar struggle between two visions: one of tyranny and conflict and
one of democracy and freedom,” Bush began and then announced future
prospects: “Our review indicates that forty years of perseverance have
brought us a precious opportunity, and now it is time to move beyond
containment to a new policy for the 1990s. . . . We seek the integration of the
Soviet Union into the community of nations.”
5
From July 9 through 12,
President Bush extended his welcoming theme with a visit to Poland and

3
All mentions of the Bush administration and President Bush in this text refer to the
presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first US president. President George
Walker Bush is referred to as Bush 43, to distinguish him from his father.
4
Paul Lewis, “Soviets to Accept World Court Role in Human Rights,” New York
Times, March 9, 1989, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/09/world/soviets-to-accept-world-
court-role-in-human-rights.html; Liz Thurgood and Jonathan Steele, “Last Soviet Troops
Leave Afghanistan,” Guardian, February 16, 1989,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1989/feb/16/afghanistan.jonathansteele.
5
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the Texas A&M University Commencement
Ceremony in College Station,” May 12, 1989. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
eds., The American Presidency Project (hereafter APP), para. 7,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17022.
3

Hungary, cheerleading their moves toward democracy. At the end of the
Malta Summit between Bush and Gorbachev, Gennadii Gerasimov,
Gorbachev’s spokesman, announced: “We buried the Cold War at the bottom
of the Mediterranean Sea.”
6
On July 24, 1990, the nuclear alert airplane,
Looking Glass ceased officially its surveillance operations. Change was in
the wind.
This study analyzes stress points in the post-Cold War initial
transitional spaces for the rhetorics of war and peace. It investigates an
extended moment of change from 1989 through the spring of 1991 when a
fifty-year-long war disassembled and a new opportunity arose. The collapse
of the Cold War had rendered unnecessary and ungrounded the ideological
polarization and struggles between idealist and materialist champions over
human rights. Perhaps exhilarated by peaceful change, President Bush
seized the opportunity to announce a new world order in polices that were
aimed to strengthen the peace through fulfillment of post-war American
promises and commitments. Yet the collapse of one regime of argument does
not indicate necessarily its replacement or the emergence of a single,
integrated substitute. These transitional rhetorics of the Bush
administration introduced fragmentary structures of justification that could
neither sustain a rhetoric of national security nor international commitment.

6
Alan Philps, “Handshake That Ended the Cold War,” The World Today, December
2014, para. 5, ProQuest.
4

This dissertation seeks to develop rhetorical inquiry where public
address becomes the object of multiple, interpretative interventions. The
study proceeds to examine independent lines of cultural discourse with which
important public address resonates in the explication, justification, and
assessment of US intervention into foreign states. Public policy argument is
reviewed as reasons structured by classical, generative interpretations of
stasis/clash internal to the polity or between hegemons and dependent states.
Public moral argument is reviewed as narratives that embed conflict in the
discourse of the Just War where situations confront publics with questions of
good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. Often, strategic and tactical
discourses become dramatized in moral or legal stories. The dissertation
teases out the independent logics of these rhetorics in order to read the legacy
of President Bush’s attempts to initiate new foreign policy at the fall of the
Cold War regime.
The focus of this study is on select presidential addresses from 1989 to
1991. This was a period when momentous change raised hopes for the future.
I concentrate on Bush’s efforts to articulate this hope and seize the
opportunity of a (re)new(ed) American foreign policy. The study examines
presidential rhetoric offered to articulate, justify, and support two military
interventions: the Panama invasion and the Persian Gulf War.
7
The basic

7
As wars in Gulf area kept piling up in the 1980s and 90s, the term “Gulf War” also
acquired different historical referents. The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is sometimes called the
5

moves are: 1) to articulate stasis as a classical inheritance through examining
its play in questions of unity and faction, persuasion and force, hegemony and
conflict; 2) to examine narratives of the Just War as transformed from the
classic traditions by Augustine, rationalized by Thomas Aquinas, moved into
global stories by the Salamanca school, and modernized into natural law and
international relations in the seventeenth century. The reconstructions of
alternative sources of resonance should enable identification of foreground
and background as the president articulated cultural/cognitive resources
differently for international and national audiences, before, during, and after
the war. After structuring these two ecologies, I find characteristics of both
levels.
Orientation for Inquiry
In this chapter, I provide an orientation that sets in motion critical
inquiry into legacy studies of presidential address. I assemble stasis and
Just War as two argument ecologies, identify propositions that anticipate
how I read Bush’s interventions, and sketch the coordinates of the
contextualist method followed and outline materials and chapters. I present
two guiding questions in this dissertation. 1) How do rhetorics of war and
peace generate essentially contested terms over time and events? 2) How do
these rhetorics challenge, yet invite, critical inquiry? I propose the critical

Gulf or Persian War, the 1990-1991 war is variously referred to as the Gulf War, the First
Gulf War, Gulf War I, or the Persian Gulf War, while the 2003 US-led invasion is known as
Second Gulf War.
6

inquiry of rhetorical history as a way to read discursive traditions within the
push and pull of particular cases.
8

The amalgamation of Christian and classical traditions is a staple of
US domestic and international discourses. Scholars and other elites work to
regulate the discourse through critique or structural-functional analysis. The
discourse itself, while drawing upon academic worldviews, ultimately
emerges in relation to episodes of political debate in which traditional Just
War topics are blended and adapted to contingent circumstances of warfare.
In this dissertation, I tease out two ecologies of argument that grow over
time: public policy argument related to stasis and public moral argument
related to the Just War. Because they are typically fused, by sorting them
out one can see how they interact.
Public policy argument is rooted in the generative give and take of
domestic and international stasis or clash of reasons. Stasis is an ongoing
debate about internal and external factions that in asymmetrical contexts
takes shape as a contest between hegemon and factions, parties, and
oppositional groups inside and outside the polity or state. Public moral
argument emanates in religious and legal narratives of good and evil, right
and wrong, just and unjust, in the behavior of individuals and collectives.

8
My perspective is informed by Marouf Hasian’s call to trace the layers of
“sedimented rhetorics” that surround public justifications of war and peace, leaving residues
of past contestation. Marouf Hasian Jr., In the Name of Necessity: Military Tribunals and
the Loss of American Civil Liberties (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 11.
7

The Just War is examined to uncover how values are embedded in narratives
that frame, direct, and unify actions. The disagreement spaces of Just War
discourse are mapped across religious and secular institutions. The history of
rhetorical stasis theory identifies points of clash within a debate over
questions of justice in a legal forum. The Just War doctrine, I will show,
works from this tradition. The discourses of war and peace, however, are
wider. They exist as tools that strengthen force in security practices. The
public moral argument of the Just War tradition resembles the generative
stasis of public policy argument in fundamental ways. Public moral and
public policy argument can, but need not, be mutually supportive in
addressing, constituting, and unwinding irenic (peaceful) and/or eristic
(violent) situations. However, stasis is generative, developing orientations to
topically-defined risks and hazards as they appear serially; public moral
argument of the Just War tradition embeds right and wrong, justice and
injustice into its narratives to reinforce identity and rearticulate contested
principles.
A discourse formation in time unfolds as a discursus, an ongoing
discussion of theory and practice about tradition and innovation. A discursus
is a running to and fro of arguments. Conversations, discussions, and
debates constitute public and private, elite and popular, prevailing and
opposing discourses. Wars inevitably generate discursus, especially before
the fact (in efforts to find alternative means of resolving dispute) and after
8

the fact (in assessing the costs of violence and debating the causes of its
occurrence). The discourse of war and peace thus offers lines of
argumentation where violence becomes an important topic of debate. This
dissertation explicates two discursive traditions in order to read the
discourses of a presidential administration that, to paraphrase Kenneth
Burke’s famous prescription, used all there was to use in its rhetorical
appeals at a transitional moment in world history.
9
I apply this and other
insights to the study of Just War as a rhetorical formation through time,
isolating how it works rhetorically in furnishing places for invention for the
advocacy of war and peace.
In war discourses, situations call in a mix of topics that set the model
for discussion and debate within an episode, where technical doctrine and
secret planning get entangled with needs for justification. The justification is
Janus-faced, looking toward domestic audiences as well as outsiders.
Propaganda during times of total war drives the justification to master
narratives. Post-modern, network warfare is characterized by rhetorical
kaleidoscapes whose petite narratives and points of clash remain in the tube
of culture, while shifting to create different patterns of representation of
means and ends. The resulting pattern furnishes the discourse of an episode.
Episodes can be mapped to identify trajectories.

9
See Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974), 23.
9

I argue that the Bush administration anticipated, if not set in place,
the post-modern heterogeneous asymmetrical contemporary discourses of war
and peace. One key to these discourses is the Just War, a term that has
skyrocketed into a vast conversation since the implosion of Cold War
horizons. The Western Just War tradition emerged over millennia to answer
questions of violence in new ways, thus leaving a legacy within which
justifications of policy, interpretations of events, motivations for fighting and
goals of negotiation are anchored. Discussions of what constitutes a just war
in present circumstances unfold as an ongoing, repeated discursus
(arguments among elites over what to do, change, or institutionalize). In its
performance, the Just War tradition is a knot of essentially contested
concepts, that is, “dialectical terms which gain meaning only in relation to
their opposites.”
10
These contested terms, in turn, work as symbolic drivers
of the rhetorics of war and peace.
The Just War and stasis offer materials for the craft of strategic
doctrine, targets for objection and discussion, and a place for post-hoc
critique. The blending of moral goals into narratives with institutional
procedures and strategies generates hubs of efforts to speak in a way that
renders contemporary events meaningful to some (primarily protestant US
groups) and incomprehensible to others (outside the US). The study of these

10
David Zarefsky and Victoria J. Gallagher, “From ‘Conflict’ to ‘Constitutional
Question’: Transformations in Early American Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 76, no. 3 (1990): 247.
10

discourses prepares the way to read how the Bush administration set the
stage for a new world order in which stasis orientations to strategic interest
and Just War justifications materialize as an inter-linked centripetal gambit
to articulate a benevolent hegemony. I claim that Bush articulated a thin,
unsustainable, transitional discourse of war and peace that eventually
furnished immediate, unreliable, and contingent working terms for
subsequent iterations of an aggressive war on terror.
11
In the next section, I
review alternative perspectives on the rhetorics of war and peace within the
field of rhetoric and argumentation.
Rationale for Study
The body of studies on the rhetorical strategies of the Bush 41
administration is fairly developed.
12
Studies have illuminated various
aspects of Bush’s Desert Shield/Desert Storm war discourse. These studies
can be broadly categorized as falling within either the classificatory

11
What to call the “war on terror” has been controversial. In 2005, President Bush
43 rejected the Pentagon-sponsored ‘“Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism”’ (GSAVE),
only to introduce an alternative moniker, the “Long War,” in the 2006 State of the Union
Address. Later, the Obama administration sought to replace the “Global War on Terror”
(GWOT) with “Overseas Contingency Operation.” Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, “‘Global War
on Terror’ Is Given New Name,” Washington Post, March 25, 2009,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR2009032402818.html.
12
Martin J. Medhurst, ed., The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006); Catherine H. Palczewski and Arnie Madsen,
“The Divisiveness of Diversity: President Bush’s University of Michigan Commencement
Speech as an Example of the Linguistic ‘Turnaround,’” Argumentation and Advocacy 30, no.
1 (1993): 16–27; J. Clarke Rountree III, “The President as God, the Recession as Evil: Actus,
Status, and the President’s Rhetorical Bind in the 1992 Election,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 325–52; University of Washington Discourse Analysis Group, “The
Rhetorical Construction of a President,” Discourse & Society 1, no. 2 (1990): 189–200.
11

perspective or the perspective of radical critique.
13
Critique-oriented
scholarship focuses on one characteristic feature of war rhetoric: its high
reliance on misrepresentation and manipulation. Scholars working from the
standpoint of critique have unveiled the argumentative and rhetorical
strategies that make up the arsenal of the president as commander in chief.
14

Within the classificatory perspective, a sizable body of literature focuses on
the metaphors and historical analogies employed in Bush’s intervention

13
I should point out that the categories of classification/critique, while useful as
heuristic devices in the context of the argument advanced here, do not do justice to the
variety and nuance of scholarship in the field.
14
Rachel Martin Harlow showed how Bush’s rhetorical strategy of authorization
relied on a binary opposition between heroes and villains animated by the dialectical pairs
unity/disunity and legality /illegality. Rachel Martin Harlow, “Agency and Agent in George
Bush’s Gulf War,” in The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, ed. Martin J.
Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 56–80. Kathryn Olson
examined presidential war rhetoric associated with Reagan’s invasion of Grenada and Bush’s
Persian Gulf war, finding that both presidents used four main rhetorical tactics to stifle
debate on the wisdom of military action: (1) conflation of “pro-troops” sentiments with “pro-
war” advocacy; (2) use of double hierarchy and a fortiori reasoning; (3) underplay of present
and prospective costs of war; (4) implementation of tight news management. Kathryn M.
Olson, “Constraining Open Deliberation in Times of War: Presidential War Justifications for
Grenada and the Persian Gulf,” Argumentation & Advocacy 28, no. 2 (1991): 64–79. Nicolas
Rangel argued that Bush’s Persian Gulf War rhetoric layered American exceptionalism and
realism by means of three main strategies designed to facilitate US troops’ efforts to win the
war against Iraq: (1) “Bush promoted UN diplomacy as a subsidiary of US foreign policy;” (2)
“he compared and contrasted US action in the Gulf to the Vietnam War” in order to combine
“the moral urgency of prior foreign policy efforts with the hindsight necessary to avoid a
repeat of the American experience in Vietnam;” and (3) “Bush defined victory as the removal
of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, in an attempt to shape a historical consensus on the significance
of US action.” Nicolas Rangel Jr., “Part of Something Larger than Ourselves: George H. W.
Bush and the Rhetoric of the First United States War in the Persian Gulf” (Ph.D.
dissertation, Texas A&M University, 2007), 3. See also: Rebecca S. Bjork, “Public policy
argumentation and colonialist ideology in the post-Cold War era,” in Warranting Assent:
Case Studies in Argument Evaluation, ed. Edward Schiappa (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1995), 211–36; Kathleen M. German, “Invoking the Glorious War: Framing
the Persian Gulf Conflict through Directive Language,” Southern Journal of Communication
60, no. 4 (1995): 292–302; Kimber Charles Pearce and Dean Fedely, “George Bush’s ‘Just
War’ Rhetoric: Paradigm of Universal Morality,” Journal of Communication & Religion 16,
no. 2 (1993): 139–52; Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm,” in
Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, ed. Frederick M. Dolan
and Thomas L. Dumm (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 11–37.
12

rhetoric.
15
Mary Stuckey explored efforts by Bush and Bill Clinton to
formulate a new foreign policy consensus to supplant the faded Cold War
paradigm. Bush’s foreign policy rhetoric, Stuckey argued, was a confusing
blend of World War II narratives, Cold War moralism, and partnership-
oriented idealism, coupled with a pragmatic orientation to action, and
concluded that, although initially successful, Bush’s hybrid drama ultimately
failed to live up to its own lofty vision of global American leadership.
16

Similarly, Roy Joseph posited that Bush’s appeals to a new world order –
which aimed at signaling to “the international community that his political
style was based on consultative leadership and not on hegemony” – in the end
proved too vague, leaving the door open for misconceptions and critiques that
diluted its potential to embody “a fulfillment of the United Nations
Charter.”
17
Steven Hurst argued that Bush’s progressive upping of the

15
Robert Ivie posited that Bush’s Persian Gulf War rhetorical performances,
epitomized by his calls for a new world order, are best understood as expressions of the Cold
War rhetorical legacy of tragic fear permeating US political culture. This legacy materializes
in national experiences of extreme fear in response to international events that elicit cycles
of redemptive victimage. In these redemptive cycles, the United States is cast as “a heroic
nation struggling globally to redeem itself by contesting the relentless forces of chaos and
establishing a New World Order.” Robert L. Ivie, “Tragic Fear and the Rhetorical
Presidency: Combating Evil in the Persian Gulf,” in Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed.
Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 172. Benjamin
Bates showed how Bush framed his efforts to persuade foreign leaders to join the anti-Iraq
coalition through the metaphors of civilization and savagery. Benjamin R. Bates,
“Audiences, Metaphors, and the Persian Gulf War,” Communication Studies 55, no. 3 (2004):
447–63. See also Mark A. Pollock, “The Battle for the Past: George Bush and the Gulf
Crisis,” in The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric, ed. Amos Kiewe (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1994).
16
Mary E. Stuckey, “Competing Foreign Policy Visions: Rhetorical Hybrids after the
Cold War,” Western Journal of Communication 59, no. 3 (1995): 214–27.
17
Roy Joseph, “The New World Order: President Bush and the Post-Cold War Era,”
13

rhetorical antes and amplification of the Gulf crisis – in terms of
demonization of Saddam Hussein, focus on Iraq human rights abuses, etc.–
helped to create public disillusionment once the war ended with Hussein still
in power.
18
Timothy Cole, on the other hand, contended that Bush’s
prioritization of the orientational metaphor of war, with its attendant
rhetorics of securitization, exceptionalism, and democratic peace, represented
a failure to adapt to the radically changed domestic and international
political scene that ultimately undermined his prospects for reelection.
19

Based on this brief panoramic of the body of studies on Bush’s rhetoric
of war and new world order, I suggest that there has been a rush to judgment
on the Bush administration which, despite having won a significant war,
could not manage to accomplish re-election. Several critical studies were
conducted before the advent of the new century; the impact of Bush’s
speeches was studied, but the events of 9/11 drew attention away from the
initial hopeful and troubling moments of post-Cold War era. On the other
hand, Carol Winkler has shown how Bush’s decision, after the initial
reluctance, to publicly denounce Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as a terrorist,
“transformed the crisis in the Persian Gulf from a conventional war scenario

in The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 88, 99.
18
Steven Hurst, “The Rhetorical Strategy of George H. W. Bush during the Persian
Gulf Crisis 1990–91: How to Help Lose a War You Won,” Political Studies 52, no. 2 (2004):
376–92.
19
Timothy M. Cole, “When Intentions Go Awry: The Bush Administration’s Foreign
Policy Rhetoric,” Political Communication 13, no. 1 (1996): 93–113.
14

between two foreign nation-states into an international battle against the
scourge of terrorism.”
20
Winkler showed the implication of Bush’s strategic
linguistic choices for future presidential confrontations with the issue of
terrorism.
I aim to complement Winkler’s approach with an emphasis on the
distinctive argumentative ecologies that shape a presidential rhetorical
legacy. Rather than identifying and tracking articulations of terrorism in
presidential discourse over time, I look at justifications for military action to
examine how the new world order interacts with geopolitics in Bush’s
Panama and Iraq interventions. My approach seeks to develop inquiry into
rhetorical legacies of argument and discourses-in-the-making. As Annita
Lazar and Michelle M. Lazar argued, “the American presidential statements
and actions arising from 11 September and thereafter should be viewed as
part of a larger discourse on the ‘New World Order’ (NOW).”
21
“Viewed
historically,” Lazar and Lazar contended that “the NOW can be said to be a
discourse-in-the-making, . . . – one that has been implicitly underway since
the end of the Cold War” from its first articulation by Bush to its subsequent
iterations by Clinton and Bush 43.
22
The discourse of the new world order

20
Carol K. Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the
Post-World War II Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 109.
21
Annita Lazar and Michelle M. Lazar, “The Discourse of the New World Order:
‘Out-Casting’ the Double Face of Threat,” Discourse & Society 15, no. 2–3 (May 1, 2004): 223,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926504041018.
22
Lazar and Lazar, 224.
15

functions to articulate America’s “unipolar global hegemony in the face of a
world otherwise gravitating towards multipolar centers of power.”
23
The
work of these authors suggests that critical inquiry should revisit rhetorical
legacies in order to map blowback. Blowback refers to the unanticipated
counter-effects of policy. Some blowback is immediate, other occurs over
time. The rush to judgment only picks up the first round; revisiting a legacy
looks at blowback as it builds. The result is to curb conspiracy theories by
examining unintended consequences and multiple ways that discourse and
narratives interact.
The rhetorics of war and peace are always in transition because they
address important questions with life and death urgency. They also move
about because the relation between persuasion and force itself has never been
stable. Rhetorical history requires study of the contingent contexts within
which policy moves from one order (historical period) to fashion a subsequent
discourse. As such, I pay attention to the historical and institutional
movements of stasis and Just War practices. This study is a version of a
“macroscope.” The macroscope maps networks of arguments as they develop.
The scope is a figure of speech with variable ways of arranging discourse at
micro, meso, and macro levels. In the present version, I take a macroscopic
approach to read discursus internal to two distinctive traditions, one drawing

23
Annita Lazar and Michelle M. Lazar, “Enforcing Justice, Justifying Force:
America’s Justification of Violence in the New World Order,” in Discourse, War and
Terrorism, ed. Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2007), 45.
16

from the classical tradition and the other from its religious remake. My own
assumption is that of an argumentative contextualist who maps articulated
disagreement spaces as they change over time.
I map stasis as a disagreement space. The Just War borrows from
stasis but is not reducible to it. The analytic explications used in this study
set up alternative maps of disagreement spaces over discourse formations. I
present perspectives of rhetorical inquiry that scholars have used in their
appraisals, not to frame my own response but rather to open questions into
the historically variable, unstable, and contested relationship between words
and war, talk and violence, restraint and use of power. The objective of
inquiry is the discovery of relationships among arguments and the naming,
making, and settling of war and peace. I am following Sally Jackson’s
injunction to map disagreement spaces. A disagreement space is the outcome
of an argument formation composed of repeated questions that turn on points
of contestation and that must be reconciled to anchor arguments in history,
read events, justify response, and set goals for the duration of conflict. A
disagreement space is a “structured set of opportunities for argument”
characterized by the “indefinitely large and complex set of beliefs, wants, and
intentions.”
24
Disagreement spaces, in turn, are shaped by “historically
situated practices” of argument “that have been building from invention over

24
Frans H. van Eemeren et al., Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1993), 95.
17

invention, from many centuries.”
25

I aim to contribute the outlines of an approach that uses theories of
rhetoric to analyze war and peace discourses as generative, dynamic
processes. An overarching goal of this dissertation is to show that the
rhetoric of war and peace is an open discourse formation, subject to critical
inquiry rather than subordinated to a strategy of pragmatic realism or
totalizing critique. Complementing the standing literature, I provide a
contextual analysis of how irenic and eristic symbols emerge within cultures
of discourse as generative rhetorical formations – concepts intertwined in
bundles of shifting emphasis. The study reconnects war and peace discussion
to rhetorical inquiry through investigation of the role of stasis in the rhetoric
of war and peace. At the same time, I hope to show how this approach
contributes to research about the genres of war rhetoric by uncovering the
forensic elements and judicial patterns of reasoning of post-Cold War US
rhetoric as influenced by the logic of the Just War tradition.
Propositions
This dissertation is a hermeneutic study, the overarching goal of which
is to come to terms with the fate of distinct interpretative traditions that
have been amalgamated into a presidential discourse effort during the brief
but telling transition years of 1989 through 1991. Stasis and Just War

25
Sally Jackson, “Design Thinking in Argumentation Theory and Practice,”
Argumentation 29, no. 3 (2015): 244.
18

emerge over time as distinct discourse formations, each creating a reservoir
of topoi that are drawn forward, systematized, and used to justify the wars of
the day. In the post-Cold War era, stasis and Just War function as key
discursive sites for the production and contestation of US domestic political
authority and global hegemony. The study hypothesizes that President
Bush’s speeches sought to establish a new world order at odds with his effort
to justify American interventions. The presidential movement articulated by
Bush not only failed to order the world but helped set in motion the
centrifugal, heterogeneous, chaotic forces or relations that have come to
characterize US foreign policy.
The Bush administration blended the two discourses in providing
multiple assertions and responding to varieties of objection during two key
episodes of post-Cold war transition, the invasion of Panama and the Persian
Gulf War, setting into place invitations to rhetorics of violence and response
that continue to demand military counter-responses. The amalgamation of
two traditions was useful in the short term for purposes of message design in
the interest of influence. The result of communicative expediency was to
throw presidential address into endless contestation, to dismantle coherent
policy frameworks, and unintentionally to leave a legacy out of which
following administrations could construct an endless war on terror.
Arguments create disagreement spaces and find uses unanticipated at the
time of utterance; nevertheless, the easy overwhelming micro-intervention
19

(Panama invasion) and the internationally supported macro-intervention
(Persian Gulf War) convinced opponents throughout the world to evolve
dynamically other ways of making war.
26

The dissertation develops support for three conclusions:
Proposition 1
The Panama invasion and the Iraq intervention were characterized by
mixed strategies demonizing figures in power. The strategy of demonization
is not new. Charges of savagery are a staple of propaganda across the
twentieth century. The particular twist Bush gave both events was to
personalize the animus, to blend stasis claims to corruption with moral
claims of disgust.
Proposition 2
The Panama invasion resulted in a post-modern intervention that
openly conflated moral narrative and strategic stasis into questions of law
enforcement, corruption, and the drug wars. Unseating Noriega was its main
objective. The legal results as well as the problem of corruption were
addressed in a pseudo-fashion, setting the stage for wag-the-dog charges by
media theorists.
Proposition 3
The Iraq intervention engaged the White House in a rhetorical

26
In this context, micro and macro refer to modalities of international relation. The
traditional categories are bilateral and multilateral.
20

strategy that deployed the principle “use all there is to use.” The result in
shifts in view was a failure to drive victory into political momentum. I look
at three episodes: Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and the Triumph.
3a. Operation Desert Shield constituted a presidential policy that
foregrounded stasis formulation of issues on an international scale while
backgrounding national interests expressed in narratives of public moral
argument.
3b. Operation Desert Storm constituted a presidential moral narrative
that foregrounded discourses of Just War in stories of American moral duty
and the avoidance of moral hazard while backgrounding the
internationalization of supporting means-ends justifications.
3c. The Triumph constituted a failed effort to fuse stasis-driven
justifications with public moral argument. The speech labored to establish a
new world order but unfolded unintentionally the undoing of resources for
comprehensible irenic and eristic discourses.
Method
The method of the dissertation is that of a case study in rhetorical
history. I follow the injunction by Kathryn Olson, Michael William Pfau,
Benjamin Ponder, and Kirt Wilson to perform criticism that “contributes to a
broader, variegated ‘theory of the case.’ ”
27
Rhetorical artifacts are not

27
Kathryn M. Olson et al., eds., “Preface,” in Making the Case: Advocacy and
Judgment in Public Argument (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), ix.
21

examined in isolation but as parts of rhetorical movements. Inquiry into
ways of making the case reflects an effort to create something of a learning
curve where the rhetorical legacies of presidential administrations can be
assessed and episodes for learning can be teased out. Legacies studies
examine the cumulative impact.
Contextualist criticism is sensitive to the way meanings are
interpreted and reinterpreted as we act symbolically to respond to, and
sometimes seize on, situations – an insight that Kenneth Burke illustrated in
two essays: “ ‘Coriolanus’: And the Delights of Faction” and “Antony in Behalf
of the Play.”
28
Burke read Coriolanus as a dramatization of the “factional
malaise” that emerges when class tensions throw “the body politic . . . in
great disarray.” While “a public relations counsel might go as far as possible
towards toning down such situations, the dramatist. . . . must find ways to
play them up,” with the help of “a kind of character who is designed to help
aggravate the uneasiness of the relationship between nobles and
commoners.”
29
Coriolanus’ “motivational tangle (individual-family-class-
nation)” is intricate.
30
The play nevertheless performs “a remarkably
complex simplification of these issues, dramatically translated into terms of

28
Kenneth Burke, “‘Coriolanus’: And the Delights of Faction,” The Hudson Review
19, no. 2 (1966): 185–202, https://doi.org/10.2307/3849013; Kenneth Burke, “Antony in Behalf
of the Play,” Southern Review 1 (1935): 308–19.
29
Burke, “Coriolanus,” 186 (emphasis in original).
30
Burke, 198.
22

action and character” in the lead up to Coriolanus’ end act as sacrificial
scapegoat.
31
In sum, the dramatic movement of purgative catharsis works in
this way:
Take some pervasive unresolved tension typical of a given social order
(or of life in general). While maintaining the “thought” of it in its over-
all importance, reduce it to terms of personal conflict (conflict between
friends, or members of the same family). Feature some prominent
figure who, in keeping with his character, though possessing admirable
qualities, carries this conflict to excess. Put him in a situation that
points up the conflict. Surround him with a cluster of characters
whose relations to him and to one another help motivate and
accentuate his excesses. So arrange the plot that, after a logically
motivated turn, his excesses lead necessarily to his downfall. Finally,
suggest that his misfortune will be followed by a promise of general
peace.
32

As we will see, the personalization of conflict and the vilification of Noriega
and Hussein performed key symbolic turning points in the simplification of
discourse leading up to military intervention.
A useful heuristic device to unpack the development of rhetorics of war
and peace in the West is to imagine them as an extended argumentative
contest over persuasion (peitho) and force (bia). Peitho and bia have broad
semantic fields with manifold entanglements rooted in classical rhetoric and
philosophy. The antithesis of peitho and bia is a commonplace in the
classical rhetorical tradition. Peitho involves peaceful arguments in the
interests of life. Bia is associated with force. Yet, the powers of persuasion

31
Burke, 197.
32
Burke, 202.
23

precipitate, support, and extend violence from time to time. Likewise, bia is
figured as necessity to act in the interests of self-defense, security, and
survival. Just War features debates over how to sustain allies whose support
is required out of necessity or for advantage, even if identification with these
friends is temporary, expedient, or untrustworthy. Thus, societies come to
terms with ways to organize violence behind the force of the better argument,
giving shape to rhetorical practices that constrain and set boundaries to
conflict while at the same time serving to legitimize and justify certain forms
of violence. Coercion and persuasion are mixed. As David Cheshier and Cori
Dauber suggested:
By analyzing events as concretely grounded in the historical record, yet
nonetheless subject to transformed interpretations over time through
processes of persuasion and deliberation, scholars of public argument .
. . sidestep the reductionism of both some current work in critical
international relations (which invariably sees ‘discourse’ trumping
‘force’) and the type of work exemplified by Huntington (which
invariably sees the opposite).
33

This study selects episodes of post-Cold War presidential war rhetoric to
illuminate how recent past presidents positioned and put to work Just War
topics to mediate the interplay of peitho and bia according to situational
exigencies and strategic considerations. The related concepts and rhetorics
mix the two with one in the lead and other in the background, thereby
animating a style of presidential address. They work in dialectic, as we look

33
David M. Cheshier and Cori E. Dauber, “The Place and Power of Civic Space:
Reading Globalization and Social Geography through the Lens of Civilizational Conflict,”
Security Studies 8, no. 2–3 (1998): 39.
24

at rhetoric as text and context. Presidential address sets the configuration
and manages the optics, at times drawing attention to the president as
commander in chief, at others by diverting attention away. This study
sketches out a rhetorical framework to investigate presidential rhetoric of
intervention focused on the function of rhetorical stasis as a structuring
process developed for regulating the centrifugal forces of rivalry and
dissension, ordering domestic as well as international violent conflict. I take
up select presidential address to show how rhetoric shifts across a collection
of stasis points in order to name recurring events of conflict/contestation in
ways that justify security policies of prevention, punishment, and retaliation.
I approach Bush’s post-Cold War presidential address as a rhetorical
movement. In this, I follow David Zarefsky, who emphasizes that a
presidency can marshal resources for social change.
34
Critics need to
interrogate the consequences of presidential rhetorical movements and revisit
discourse as a legacy that calls for scholarly analysis. Furthermore, I build
on James Klumpp’s work on argumentative ecologies to develop the ecological
concept of biome as a tool of hermeneutic strategy. Biomes, regions
harboring multiple ecologies that compete, cooperate, and war, change over
time. Biomes operate at micro and macro levels. Klumpp proposed a
framework of argumentative inquiry informed by the metaphor of ecology to

34
David Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
25

indicate a synthetic context within which argument takes place and applied
this ecological perspective at the meso range in analysis of disputes
generated by Bush 43’s efforts to modify the Just War doctrine. I extend this
framework to take into account movements at the bilateral/multilateral and
local/global scales.
Chapter Outline & Materials for Study
The dissertation makes its interpretative moves in three chapters that
explicate two discourse traditions with disagreement spaces defined by
repeated topical questions; then it proceeds to outline the stressed
disagreement space brought about when these argument formations were
amalgamated for purposes of justifying American interventions. Chapter
Two develops stasis by examining its generative roles in the classical
tradition. I view domestic stasis as the systematization of disagreement
spaces so that rule of law prevails with persuasion replacing force as a matter
of resolving domestic grievances. I show, too, how stasis evolved to address
questions of power in external relations among nations. Stasis analysis takes
up the issue of peitho and bia in figuring what the available range of
persuasion is and when it is necessary to act in the interest of preserving or
extending power. Stasis is shown to be a key rhetorical marker of concord
and discord that informs public policy argument about domestic and
international relations.
Chapter Three examines public moral argument of the Just War, as
26

the moral narratives constituting this tradition are articulated and changed
over time. I explore four different moments in which there has been a
committed effort to define Just War in the West. I map the transition from
the Augustinian synthesis of classical and religious views to its
rationalization by Thomas Aquinas. I move to modern secular versions of the
Just War embedded in international law with the initial debates of the
Salamanca School over the treatment of indigenous peoples and the
establishment of sovereignty of Hugo Grotius brought into realization in the
treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Just War is a matter of narratives about
good and evil, right and wrong, and proper and improper behavior of
individuals, nations, and states.
Chapter Four examines the rhetoric of the Bush administration as it
blended the two distinctive discourse traditions in an effort, apparently, to
use all available rhetorical resources to persuade domestic constituencies and
bring on board (or reduce opposition from) international governments and
publics. I trace the rhetorical style of Bush’s New World Order discourse as
fashioned to justify and defend responses to events from 1989 through 1991.
I briefly review actions of the Bush presidency, but largely examine the
consequences of its interventionist rhetoric for discussion of war and peace. I
show that the Panama invasion as a micro-event is fit to a petite narrative of
bilateral relations whereby interventionist rhetoric blends Just War topoi in
the service of expediency. The Persian Gulf War is treated as a macro-event
27

through which stasis of international law (with oblique references to oil as a
rationalization) rules the discourse of Desert Shield. Pragmatic, moral
argument fuels the aggressive energy of attack in Desert Storm. The war
ended with irresolution. Chapter Five concludes the study. In this chapter I
identify key questions of stasis and justice that characterize a somewhat
fragmented but impassioned debate about the futures of the world and
international relations generally. The concluding chapter examines critical
rhetorical inquiry in terms of history, reading the development of discourse
formations in their full range of disagreement spaces.
Materials for the study comprise a set of President Bush’s speeches on
the Panama invasion and the Persian Gulf War, supplemented by
controversies and supporting statements. These addresses are those where
words and deeds are most linked together. The presidential statements and
speeches analyzed include: “Address to the Nation Announcing United States
Military Action in Panama” (December 20, 1989); “The President’s News
Conference” (December 21, 1989); “Address Before the 45th Session of the
United Nations General Assembly in New York” (October 1, 1990); “Remarks
at the Annual Convention of the National Religious Broadcasters” (January
28, 1991); “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Cessation of
the Persian Gulf” (March 6, 1991). Speech texts were sourced online from the
American Presidency Project (APP) edited by Gerhard Peters and John T.
Woolley (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/). These materials are
28

supplemented by additional statements, remarks, and congressional
testimonies by Bush and other White House officials.

29

Chapter Two: War and Public Policy Argument: The Classical
Inheritance
Questions of war and peace appear to have been a core feature in the
development of the arts of rhetoric. This chapter reconstructs ancient
dynamics as predecessors of modern policy debate, through interweaving
model building and detailing Greek and Roman heritage. Initially, I
overview stasis theories to provide a general sense of the variable structures
of clash over action in relation to domestic and international policy. Then, in
order to tease out the deep history of its articulation, the chapter brings into
view relations between force and violence and necessity and contingency as
articulated in myth and in concepts of order. The problems and solutions for
resolving meaningfully decisions squaring persuasion and violence are
tracked across select classical historians, philosophers, and the system
builder, Aristotle. The goal of this chapter is to work through varied classical
constructions of stasis. The observations on clash are necessary to open an
expanded range of critical thinking about the argumentation over policy
among choices between bia and peitho in our contemporary times – where
questions of peoples and nations, democracies and empire still face the
proliferating consequences of insurgent, elite, and collective enactments of
war and peace.
Stasis and Clash: An Overview
Aristotle attributed to the philosopher and cosmologist Empedocles the
30

origins of rhetoric. Empedocles noted famously that Love and Strife were the
basic elements of the universe. In ancient terms, stasis was observed as force
or energy in the change of elements: fire, earth, water, and air. Elements
clashed. Change occurred. Things transformed. Stasis entered into human
societies as structures of argument with mimetic resemblance to material
phenomena, but also specific local features addressing the contrast between
events and responses that bring alternative irenic and eristic horizons into
view.
Systems of rhetorical stasis emerged historically to articulate the
boundaries between different forms of disputes and corresponding means of
mediation and resolution within a group (clan, family, people) and between
residents of a family, town, city, or empire, and alien others. In the Western
political tradition, stasis points – which emerge in the public sphere through
what are perceived as efforts of persuasion in the shape of strikes, picketing,
protests, and other forms of engagement – are understood as expressions of
contestation. The judicial process follows a similar logic, while managing to
domesticate clash with procedural regularity. In democracies, policy
deliberation stems from the articulation of issues. Customarily, modern
cases for preserving, extending, or overturning the status quo become
debated in terms of needs, causes, plans, and outcomes.
In democracies, the frame of contestation is ontic: the point of clash or
stasis becomes a standpoint to be channeled in institutional systems of
31

mediation and adjudication designed to resolve disputes with the help of
evidentiary tools. When points of conflict emerge and fester outside the
domestic constitutional order, they tend to be viewed as standoffs, according
to the ontological framework of antagonism. Stasis, then, has a twin face: on
the one hand, stasis presents a way of organizing clash presented for the
judgment of elites or public audiences; on the other, in policies directed to
attenuated situations of the polis, stasis becomes conflict, risking the comity
of governance.
Stasis captures clash inside the polis. Clash extends outside, as well.
In classical theory, the stasis of the polis is considered as the workable
procedure that focuses the argument of a democracy. For empire, stasis
unfolds in the context of struggles for hegemony. Such struggles are ongoing
efforts to mesh a domestic order with international relations to initiate and
respond to events in efforts to bring about, protect, or extend security.
Hegemony is a situation where contestation governs the relations between a
powerful, metropole center and a network of vassal or beholding states. Its
etymological root is the Greek hegemonia (rule, leadership), a word whose
meaning in ancient Greece is both wide in its scope and changing with
context and that in the fifth century BCE comes to refer to the process
whereby a polis achieved and maintained dominance over Hellas. In classical
Greek though, hegemonia stands in opposition to arkhe ‘rule, authority,’ a
derivative of the verb ἄρχω [arkho] ‘to begin, rule.’ Both terms were deployed
32

in antiquity to describe the struggle for primacy between Sparta and Athens,
and to refer to Athenian rule of other Greek poleis, with hegemonia denoting
self-restrained leadership and arkhe despotic rule. Thucydides uses the
binary hegemonia/arkhe to trace Athens’ development from admired hegemon
of the Delian League to imperial tyrant. Athens’ violent response to revolts
and uprisings among its former allies and meddling in their factional politics
spiraled out of hand until the empire collapsed and the city itself plunged
into civil war.
The argument advanced in this chapter is threefold: 1) the Western
traditions of domestic and international policy argumentation emerges
historically as a discourse formation to regulate social disagreement arising
over the reasons emanating from the dialectic of bia (force) and peitho
(persuasion); 2) the generated stasis-systems of argument work
presumptively according to an inside/outside dichotomy that organizes civic
life between an internal sphere where persuasion is used and the external
realm where force is necessary because violence rules; 3) in the struggle for
hegemony, stasis can catalyze centrifugal social forces as discord
(unregulated disagreement) but also can function centripetally when it
resolves itself in stock issues that regulate disagreement as concord. These
arguments underwrite a generative understanding of rhetoric that I identify
and then elucidate with reference to tragic (Aeschylus), philosophical (Plato,
Isocrates), historical (Herodotus, Thucydides), and teleological (Aristotle)
33

explications.
A Generative Understanding of Stasis
The ancient stasis system is most commonly read as a rhetorical model
of persuasive argument. Stasis is viewed as a coherent, core techne of
forensic reasoning. Its focus on clash appears to be produced by common
sense. Is it? What is it? What is its quality? What to do? The questions are
open to repetition, variation, and development around the particular case.
The premises bundled for making cases vary of course, depending on local
tradition and change. So, stasis encompasses a wide range of meanings in
the realms of physics, medicine, athletics, and politics, as well.
35
As Otto
Dieter noted in a seminal article on the subject, “when we look for stasis in
ancient thought and culture, we seem to find it everywhere.”
36
Greek
rhetoricians borrowed the term and used it to describe human communicative
interaction. Further elaborated by Roman rhetoricians, the classical stasis
theory “remained the heart of rhetorical invention until the end of the
Renaissance.”
37
In the process, rhetorical stasis was molded into various
argument systems that emerged as situated responses to particular historical

35
The term and its cognates, arising from the Indo-European root STA, comprise a
broad semantic field within the Western metaphysical and political tradition.
36
Otto Alvin Loeb Dieter, “Stasis,” Speech Monographs 17, no. 4 (1950): 348. In the
sense of absence or cessation of motion, stasis figures in ancient scientific treatises, where it
was paired with its counterpart kinesis (motion) to explain metabole (change) in the natural
world.
37
George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition
from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999), 100.
34

and social situations.
38

In classical antiquity, the system of stasis provided a major nexus for
argumentation over policy or invoking the police powers of a group.
39
In
political terminology stasis can refer to a) the standpoint – a position or
stand, a party’s position, a citizen’s stand against another – or b) the standoff,
the state of being in dispute.
40
The metaphorical development goes in this
direction: “(1) stand, (2) standpoint, (3) group of persons sharing a
standpoint, (4) in the plural two or more groups of persons holding conflicting
standpoints, (5) the conflict between such groups, civil war.”
41
Stasis as
standoff can take the form of apostasis (revolt, “the falling away or defection
of a colony from the domain of a stronger power”), epanastasis (insurrection),
diastasis (dissension), and neoterismos, an unwelcome political innovation
associated with “self-serving change and conjoined with brute force.”
42
The

38
Ann Michele Kemmy, “From Practice to Theory: The Evolution of Rhetorical Stasis
and Its Implications for Discourse and for Teaching Writing” (PhD dissertation, University of
Oregon, 1990).
39
As Benedetto Fontana put it, “the search for a space or a topos within which reason
and discourse may flourish, and from which coercive force and violence are excluded, is a
perennial problem in Western political thought.” Benedetto Fontana, “Bia and Logos: Power
and Rhetoric in Antiquity,” History of Political Thought 38, no. 1 (2017): 26.
40
Paul F. Mustacchio, “The Concept of ‘Stasis’ in Greek Political Theory” (Ph.D.
dissertation, New York University, 1972), 31–32; William Lambert Newman, The Politics of
Aristotle: With an Introduction, Two Prefactory Essays and Notes Critical and Explanatory,
vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 217.
41
Morgens Herman Hansen, “Stasis as an Essential Aspect of the Polis,” in An
Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis: An Investigation Conducted by The Copenhagen
Polis Centre for the Danish National Research Foundation, ed. Morgens Herman Hansen and
Thomas Nielsen Heine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 127.
42
Kostas Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease: An Inquiry into Stasis
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 4.
35

word came to denote the “State” (Polybius, 16.34.11) and someone’s
individual “position” in society (Polybius 10.3.6). Understood as bodily
posture/position, stasis also played a central role in the agonistic vocabulary
of boxing, wrestling, and warfare.
43
The Greek word stasis referred to “the
moment when two wrestlers would lock each other up in a stance that neither
could easily break.”
44
In this denotation, stasis also played a role in hoplite
warfare, which was conceived as an agon culminating in the so-called
othismos, the charge of opposing forces on a level battlefield.
45

In rhetorical practice, a stasis is a standstill, a place of dispute or
sticking point where arguments come to clash. Cicero provided a useful
summary of the ancient stasis theory, located in the courts of Republican
Rome:
Every subject which contains in itself a controversy to be resolved by
speech and debate involves a question about a fact, or about a
definition, or about the nature of an act, or about legal processes. . . .
When the dispute is about a fact, the issue is said to be conjectural,
because the plea is supported by conjectures or inferences. When the
issue is about definition, it is called the definitional issue, because the
force of the term must be defined in words. When, however, the nature
of the act is examined, the issue is said to be qualitative, because the
controversy concerns the value of the act and its class or quality. But
when the case depends on the circumstance that it appears that the

43
Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2004).
44
Lynda Walsh, “Understanding the Rhetoric of Climate Science Debates,” Wiley
Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 8, no. 3 (2017): 4, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.452.
45
Everett L. Wheeler, “A. Land Battles,” in The Cambridge History of Greek and
Roman Warfare, Volume 1: Greece, the Hellenistic World and the Rise of Rome, ed. Philip
Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
190.
36

right person does not bring the suit, or that he brings it against the
wrong person, or before the wrong tribunal, or at a wrong time, under
the wrong statute, or the wrong charge, or with a wrong penalty, the
issue is called translative because the action seems to require a
transfer to another court or alteration in the form of pleading. There
will always be one of these issues applicable to every kind of case; for
where none applies, there can be no controversy. (On Invention
1.8.10)
46

The stases take the form of answers to four fundamental questions: “(1) Does
or did a thing exist or occur? (2) How can it be defined? (3) What is its
quality? and . . . (4) Whether or where it makes sense to answer or even
argue one of these questions.”
47

Far from being the sole province of forensic discourse, the system of
stasis also informs classical deliberation that cultivates the judgment of the
public who must choose between doing too little or too much, acting
precipitously or belatedly in face of a topic of action. In order to grasp why
this is the case, it is useful to remember that classical judicial and political
processes were similar in many respects. “Already in the fifth century,”
Christopher Carey wrote, “political oratory concerned itself with many of the
topics found in judicial oratory, expediency, justice, honour;” moreover,

46
Cicero, De Inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1949).
47
Jeanne R. Fahnestock and Marie J. Secor, “Grounds for Argument: Stasis Theory
and the Topoi,” in Argument in Transition: Proceedings of the Third Summer Conference on
Argumentation, ed. David Zarefsky, Malcolm Sillars, and Jack Rhodes (Annandale, VA:
Speech Communication Association, 1983), 137. Along with such questions of fact, definition,
quality, and jurisdiction, also called rational questions, there is also a set of legal stases that
center on questions of proper interpretation of written documents: (1) letter vs. spirit of the
law, (2) conflicting laws, (3) ambiguity, and (4) permissible inference from written text.

37

the mode of argument is the same. And the need to direct the
emotional response of the jurors is the same. For the politician
proposing alliance or intervention, attack or retaliation, is in part an
advocate for or against friend or foe. He is moreover in direct
competition for the hearers’ favour no less than the litigant. The
political process was highly competitive, and the speaker supporting
any policy is almost by definition impinging on the interests of a
political faction.
48

What defines a rhetorical dispute, or amphisbetesis, is not the material
(general vs. particular) but the form of the action, which Dieter defines as “an
actual individual two-way movement in thought and speech of some one
specific thing by opposite or contrary-minded speakers.”
49

Basically, the stases are key places of clash, where questions of war
and peace draw upon, select, and modify available cultural resources that
fund the social imaginary of war as an enactment, instrument, or necessity
for international order. Rhetoricians also connected stasis to clash on the
questions of empire when raising alternatives of how to respond to choices for
the use of force in military, economic, or other interventions. Stasis
furnished points in a case that addressed whether and how to intervene in
the colonies when disagreements erupted and festered in factional strife and
insurrection loomed on the horizon. Recovering how the classics developed
stasis as a rhetorical mold to think through the opportunities and
accountabilities of empire in relation to the more studied system of stasis as a

48
Christopher Carey, “Rhetorical Means of Persuasion,” in Persuasion: Greek
Rhetoric in Action, ed. Ian Worthington (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33–34.
49
Dieter, “Stasis,” 351.
38

method of resolving civil and criminal grievances opens spaces for critique of
contemporary hegemonic justifications of military violence. Whereas stasis
can provide a locus for arguments in a particular case, it also can become an
object of controversy in a dispute over how a case is to be judged or a policy
deliberated.
The Ordering and Centrifugal Energies of Practical Reason
Hermagoras of Temnos, a Hellenistic orator and teacher of rhetoric
from the mid-second century BCE, was the first author to work out a formal
system of rhetorical stasis.
50
The works of Hermagoras are mostly lost, but
much of his system of rhetoric survives in Cicero's On Invention, in the
Rhetorica Ad Herennium, in Aurelius Augustine’s De Rhetorica and in the
Ars Rhetorica of C. Julius Victor, among others.
51
Hermagoras distinguished
between thesis and hypothesis by delimiting the hypothesis by seven
peristaseis or circumstances, listed by Aurelius Augustine as “Who? (quis),
What? (quid), When? (quando), Where? (ubi), Why? (cur), In what manner?
(quem ad modum), By what means? (quibus adminiculis).”
52
Note that the

50
Beth S. Bennett, “Hermagoras of Temnos,” in Classical Rhetorics and Rhetoricians:
Critical Studies and Sources, ed. Michelle Ballif and Michael G. Moran, 2005, 187–93.
Jeffrey Walker described the Hermagorean stasis system as “a systematic method for
identifying the crucial point of controversy . . . and thus for discovering the most appropriate
and persuasive arguments available in a dispute.” Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in
Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61.
51
Also influential in the historical development of rhetorical stasis was the treatise
On Stases, composed by Hermogenes of Tarsus in the second century CE. From the fifth to
the fifteenth century On Stases served as the main rhetoric textbook. “On Stases,” trans.
Ray Nadeau, Speech Monographs 31, no. 4 (November 1964): 361–81.
52
Otto Alvin Loeb Dieter and William C. Kurth, “The De Rhetorica of Aurelius
39

circumstances play a preliminary role in the Hermagorean inventional
system: their function is to define and circumscribe the argument in the
introduction. More important are the staseis, or quaestiones rationales:
conjecture, definition, quality, and legal procedure.
Cicero’s early treatise On Invention (c. 91-88 BCE) distinguished
between disputes about general questions (theses or queastiones), which deal
with problems of theoretical or scientific knowledge, and special cases
(hypotheses or causae) about particular individuals and circumstances.
53
In a
rhetorical causa the two main elements are persons and acts. What doubts
there are concerning the particular persons and acts in question can be
resolved by examining their attributes. Cicero incorporated Hermagoras’
circumstances and reworked them into a complex system of topics, the eleven
attributes of the person and the four attributes of the act, to be used in
formulating the part of the speech called confirmatio or proof (On Invention
1.24.34-1.28.43). The topic of the person corresponds to the Hermagorean
quis, while the topic of the action (negotium) corresponds to the quid and
comprises four categories: attributes coherent with the performance of the act
(locus, tempus, occasio, modus, and facultas here correspond to the five

Augustine,” Communications Monographs 35, no. 1 (1968): 99. There is yet no agreement
concerning whether the famous bishop of Hippo is also De rhetorica’s Aurelius Augustine.
53
Cicero took issue with Hermagoras’ inclusion in the subject matter of oratory both
disputes about general questions (theses or quaestiones), which deal with problems of
theoretical or scientific knowledge, and special cases (hypotheses or causae) involving
practical controversies about particular persons and acts.
40

remaining circumstances identified by Hermagoras), connected with the act,
adjunct to the act, and consequences.
54

According to David Goodwin, contemporary theoretical reformulations
of stasis share the same objective that prompted stasis formalization in
antiquity, that is, “the need to find an overarching paradigm that shapes the
vast array of distinctions belonging to rhetorical theory into a practical
system, one capable of identifying and resolving current communication
problems.”
55
This view of stasis is focused on its internal function within the
city. For Goodwin, classical stasis invites the skepticism of contemporary
rhetoricians because it assumes that “the landscape of argumentation – the
geography, so to speak, of places on which conflict comes to rest – is stable
and objective, and is not in itself open to dispute.”
56
“Contemporary
argumentation,” on the other hand, “makes stasis herself the object of debate,
moving disputes beyond the categories of classical theory into ‘meta-stasis’.”
57

What is missing in this account, I argue, is an appreciation of how the city

54
For treatments of the reworking of Cicero’s topics of person and act and of
Hermagoras’ circumstances up to the early Middle Ages see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric,
Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular
Texts, vol. 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66–68; Karin M. Fredborg,
“The Commentary of Thierry of Chartres on Cicero’s De Inventione,” Cahiers de l’Institut Du
Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 7 (1971): 1–36; Michael C. Leff, “The Topics of Argumentative
Invention in Latin Rhetorical Theory from Cicero to Boethius,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the
History of Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1983): 23–44; Fiorella Magnano, “Cicero’s Lists of Topics from
Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages,” Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval 22 (2015): 85–
118.
55
David Goodwin, “Controversiae Meta-Asystatae and the New Rhetoric,” Rhetoric
Society Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1989): 205.
56
Goodwin, 207.
57
Goodwin, 208.
41

transfers its internal system of stasis outside its borders, bringing its stasis
points, or places of clash to bear in its dealings with those situated in the
grey zone of an empire. Interestingly, Goodwin’s argument about how
contemporary rhetoric transforms the four classical controversiae asystatae
into meta-asystatae, that is, “strategies of closures in disputes about the
grounds of disputation,” charts the development of classical stasis in
antiquity as a method for dealing with the challenges of empire.
58

Rhetorical stasis is centrifugal. In a hegemonic international system,
stasis points developed to regulate conflict internal to the hegemon are
externalized to the periphery. The periphery responds. Sometimes
agreements are reached and concord rules. Sometimes uses of power provoke
counter-reactions and the relations of nations become stakes in a contest of
violence. Thus, stasis reaches further back into the mythic imagination of life
and death.
Argumentation as Peitho, Bia, and Mythos
Irenic longings and heroic battle swelled the Greek imagination.
Myths that found their way into oral narratives as epochs expressed thoughts
and feelings on the marvelous features of human inheritance. The symbolic
management of social disagreement and conflict was a longstanding human
preoccupation for the ancient Greeks. They saw people as possessing a
natural ability to choose between justice and violence. As they understood it,

58
Goodwin, 212.
42

however, this capacity could be fully realized only within the polis. The
inside/outside binary at the borders of the city was constructed and
legitimated with reference to the foundational antithesis in Greek political
thought opposing persuasion (peitho) to violent force (bia).
59
Pitting
persuasion against force is a commonplace of the classical rhetorical
tradition. Bia is the source of force whereby compulsion directs activity, like
compliance.
60
The two are different but coupled into contrapuntal work of
debate.
61

59
According to John Kirby, “the peitho/bia polarity is rooted in our most fundamental
concepts of civilization. The wild beasts settle their disputes by bia; it is a mark of our
humanity, we feel, that we can use persuasion to effect change.” John T. Kirby, “The ‘Great
Triangle’ in Early Greek Rhetoric and Poetics,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of
Rhetoric 8, no. 3 (1990): 215. Richard Buxton identified the following “range of polarities” as
analogous to the peitho/bia dialectical pair in ancient Greek thought: civilized/uncivilized,
inside polis/outside polis, nomos/absence of nomos, dike/absence of dike, mankind/animals,
Greeks/barbarian. Richard G. A. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 62.
60
Bia refers to force, might, and compulsion, and is closely associated to ananke
(necessity). In Greek mythology, Bia is the daughter of the Titan Pallas (god of warcraft and
battle) and Styx (Hatred), and sister of Nikē (Victory), Kratos (Strength), and Zēlos (Rivalry).
Ananke (also called Adrasteia, inescapable, not-fleeing) referred to the idea of binding and
consequently to situations of involuntary subjection and powerlessness (aporia), such as
slavery, siege, imprisonment, and torture. Other applications included bodily needs and
drives, death, the bonds of family and friendship, and the binding of cosmos and the law.
The goddess Ananke was the personification of divine necessity. In archaic and Presocratic
thought, ananke was closely related to moira (fate), tyche (lawless chance), and agon
(contest). For a useful discussion of ananke in classical Greek thought, see James Hillman,
“On the necessity of abnormal psychology,” in Norms in a changing world, ed. Adolf
Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 91–136.
61
Examples of the peitho-bia/ananke topos abound. Notable iterations of the
antithesis include: (1) the two ways of inquiry identified by Parmenides, the way of
persuasion caused by objective truth and the way of doxa brought about by compulsion and
force; (2) Empedocles’ opposition of Ananke to Charis (Love); (3) Democritus’ favoring of the
persuasion of logos to the ananke of laws as guide to moral behavior (arete). Later, this last
theme was taken up by Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius. I am indebted to George M. Pepe for
these sources. George Michael Pepe, “Studies in Peitho” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton
University, 1967).
43

The ancient Greeks were the first to imagine that politics should not be
decided by violence.
62
Conceived as a personification of erotic as well as
political persuasion, the goddess Peitho, Aphrodite’s handmaid and double,
represents “the consensual force that joined people together in civilized
society,” bridging the personal sphere of marriage and the public sphere of
the polis.
63
In the affairs of the city, divine persuasion could exercise a
benign influence in the resolution of divine and human conflicts by words
rather than violence.
64
Francis Kane has shown how the Eumenides of

62
The literature on this theme is extensive. See, for example, David Keyt and Fred
D. Miller Jr., “Ancient Greek Political Thought,” in Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Gerald
F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 304–19; David Keyt,
“Aristotle and the Ancient Roots of Anarchism,” Topoi 15, no. 1 (1996): 129–42.
63
Amy C. Smith, Polis and Personification in Classical Athenian Art (Boston, MA:
Brill, 2011), 57. Attic pottery often depicted Peitho in mythic representations of courtship,
marriage, and childbirth. Seductive Peitho was sometimes contrasted, and other times
associated, with the violence of rape, on a ‘spectrum,’ so to speak, which included themes of
elopement, arranged marriage, and abduction. Harvey Alan Shapiro, Personifications in
Greek Art: The Representation of Abstract Concepts, 600-400 B.C. (Zurich: Akanthus, 1993).
64
At Athens, the associated cults of Peitho and Aphrodite Pandemos celebrated the
role of Persuasion and Eros in forging unity and harmony within the polis. Mark H. Wright,
“Greek Mythic Conceptions of Persuasion,” in Proceedings of the International Society for the
Study of Argumentation, 1998, http://rozenbergquarterly.com/issa-proceedings-1998-greek-
mythic-conceptions-of-persuasion/. In the traditional narrative, Theseus founded the cult of
Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho to mark the synoikismos (unification) of Attica. Peitho was
also linked to Hermes and Athena. See Helen F. North, “Emblems of Eloquence,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137, no. 3 (1993): 406–30. Pausanias, a
Greek writer of the second century CE, recounted this story about the temple of Peitho in the
Greek city of Sykion: “Within the market-place is a sanctuary of Persuasion; this too has no
image. The worship of Persuasion was established among them for the following reason.
When Apollo and Artemis had killed Pytho they came to Aegialea to obtain purification.
Dread coming upon them at the place now named Fear, they turned aside to Carmanor in
Crete, and the people of Aegialea were smitten by a plague. When the seers bade them
propitiate Apollo and Artemis, they sent seven boys and seven maidens as suppliants to the
river Sythas. They say that the deities, persuaded by these, came to what was then the
citadel, and the place that they reached first is the sanctuary of Persuasion” (Description of
Greece 2.7.7-8). Pausanias’ story suggests that persuasion had replaced violence (in the form
of human sacrifice) as a means of conflict resolution and reconciliation. Pausanias,
Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
44

Aeschylus dramatizes this vision of peitho as constitutive of human activity.
65

In the play, the goddess Athena breaks the cycle of domestic revenge: the
deity appoints a group of citizens to decide of the justice of Orestes’s deed –
he slayed his mother, Clytemnestra, in retribution for her killing of his
father, Agamemnon – and pleads with the Erinyes, the wrathful goddesses of
vengeance and retribution, not to sow in her people “the spirit of tribal war
and boldness against each other,” but to “let their war be with foreign
enemies” (Eumenides 860).
66
Finally, the proper order of the polis is restored
when Athena invokes the goddess Peitho, who persuades the Erinyes to
accept the acquittal of Orestes. Thereafter, the topos or place of this
‘domesticated Peitho’ – based on the valorization, retraced by Jane Sutton, of
“the masculine (polis dweller)” over the “feminine (barbaric wander)” side of
peitho– is situated firmly inside the polis.
67

Starting in the fifth-century, the motive of peitho – conceived as
product, process, and act – becomes closely associated with the art of

University Press, 1918), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane (Tufts University,
n.d.). The seductive powers of Peitho could be invoked for irenic purposes. In Aristophanes’
comedy Lysistrata (411 BCE), for example, the women appeal to the goddess for help in
talking the men into changing their mind and end the war.
65
Francis I. Kane, “Peitho and the Polis,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 19, no. 2 (1986): 99–
124.
66
Herbert Weir Smyth, trans., Aeschylus, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1926).
67
Jane Sutton, “The Taming of Polos/Polis: Rhetoric as an Achievement without
Woman,” Southern Journal of Communication 57, no. 2 (1992): 114.
45

rhetoric.
68
Democratic rhetors constructed logos as crucial to the formation of
citizens and the political reorganization of the city, fashioning peitho into “an
antidote to violence from above (tyranny) and . . . violence from below (mob
rule).”
69
In the commonplace antithesis, peitho leads to free choice and
responsible action. When necessity comes into play, persuasion becomes
useless; notoriously, the goddess Bia is aneu logon (without speech, mute).
This persuasion does not involve a search of philosophical truth by means of
compelling proof “but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of
opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and . . . what
kind of things are to appear in it.”
70

Rhetorical peitho works by means of pistis (faith, belief). The term
pistis (Latin fide, fiducia) has two main denotations: (1) “trust in others, faith
. . . persuasion of a thing, confidence, assurance” and (2) “an assurance,
pledge of good faith, warrant, guarantee . . . a means of persuasion, an
argument, proof, such as used by orators.”
71
In ancient Greece the term

68
Derived from the verb peithein, to persuade, the meanings of peitho include “to
prevail upon, win over, persuade,” and, in passive and middle voice, “to be prevailed on, won
over, persuaded . . . to listen to one, obey . . . to believe or trust in a person or thing.” Henry
George Liddell and Robert Scott, eds., “Peitho,” An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane (Tufts
University, n.d.)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%
3Dpei%2Fqw.
69
Alan Singer, “Aesthetic Community: Recognition as an Other Sense of Sensus
Communis,” Boundary 2 24, no. 1 (1997): 230.
70
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New
York: Viking Press, 1961), 223.
71
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, eds., “Pistis,” An Intermediate Greek-
46

pistis, named after the goddess of good faith, trust, and reliability
(corresponding in Roman mythology to Fides) “encompasses the related
qualities of trust, trustworthiness, credence and credibility, and extends to
objects and means used to secure trust or belief.”
72
At the same time,
classical rhetoric also internalizes the peitho/bia dualism. Aristotle’s
description of the two types of pisteis, or proofs illustrates this point.
Whereas inartistic proofs (pisteis atechnoi) deal with “such things as are not
supplied by the speaker but are there at the onset – witnesses, evidence given
under torture, written contracts, and so on,” artistic proofs (pisteis entechnoi)
involve persuasion “such as we can ourselves construct by means of the
principles of rhetoric;” inartistic proof is meant “to be used,” while the artistic
kind must “be invented” (Rhetoric 1355b).
73

Peitho and Bia in International Relations
Peitho exercises her beneficial influence in the realm of the city, while
Bia governs foreign policy and the household. “To be political, to live in a
polis,” Hanna Arendt wrote, “meant that everything was decided through
words and persuasion,” whereas command and force were considered
“prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis, of

English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory
Cane (Tufts University, n.d.)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%
3Dpi%2Fstis.
72
Carey, “Rhetorical Means of Persuasion,” 26.
73
Aristotle, The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, trans. William Rhys Roberts
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984).
47

home and family life . . . or of life in the barbarian empires of Asia.”
74

Consequently, Arendt wrote, “the use of violence seemed to them beyond the
need for justification in the realm of what we today call foreign affairs or
international relations.”
75
In the wake of the Persian Wars (490–479 BCE),
the idea of polemos or external war as contest that polarizes the opposition
between (Greek) freedom and (barbarian) slavery becomes central to the
discourse of Athenian democracy.
76
The barbarian portrayed in Greek
literature and art lacks logos, defined as the ability to speak Greek as well as
the capacity for reason and moral responsibility so crucial to the practice of
freedom.
77

Matters of war and peace bring to the fore the significance of the
peitho/bia pair in classical Greek culture.
78
The myth of peitho’s taming of

74
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 26–27.
75
Ultimately, however, in Arendt’s analysis, this conception of agonism “was to bring
the Greek city-states to ruin because it made alliances between them well-nigh impossible
and poisoned the domestic life of the citizens with envy and mutual hatred.” Hannah
Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 12.
76
As Peter J. Rhodes wrote, “the fear of a Persian return and the foundation of the
Delian League . . . gave the Greeks in general and Athens in particular a reason for
regarding the opposition between Greeks and Persians as fundamental and the successes of
the Greeks against the Persians as their greatest achievement.” Peter J. Rhodes, “Impact of
the Persian Wars on Classical Greece,” in Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity
to the Third Millennium, ed. Emma Bridges, Peter J. Rhodes, and Edith Hall (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 35. For more on war in relation to Greek self-identity in the fifth
century, see Page DuBois, “Greeks and Barbarians,” in Centaurs and Amazons: Women and
the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982),
78–94.
77
Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 82.
78
Megan Foley, “Peitho and Bia: The Force of Language,” Symploke 20, no. 1 (2012):
173.
48

divine and human bia, itself a central element of Sophistic social thought,
becomes a commonplace of funeral orations. In the Funeral Oration ascribed
to Lysias, the orator praised the great deed of the Athenian ancestors, who
believed “that it was the way of wild beasts to be held subject to one another
by force [bia], but the duty of men to delimit justice by law [and] to convince
by reason [peisai]” (2.18-19).
79
The occasion is the public funeral after the
Corinthian War (393-394 BCE):
By means of countless toils, conspicuous struggles, and glorious perils
they made Greece free, while proving the supremacy of their native
land: they commanded the sea for seventy years and saved their allies
from faction, not suffering the many to be slaves of the few, but
compelling all to live on an equality [translator note: “i.e., they were
the general promoters of democracy”]; instead of weakening their
allies, they secured their strength along with their own, and displayed
their own power to such effect that the Great King no more coveted the
possessions of others, but yielded some of his own and was in fear for
what remained. In that time no warships sailed from Asia, no despot
held sway among the Greeks, no city of Greece was forced into serfdom
by the barbarians; so great was the restraint and awe inspired in all
mankind by the valor of our people. And for this reason none but they
should become protectors of the Greeks and leaders of the cities. (2.55-
7)

A society committed to the course of persuasion, peitho, rather than the
imposition of force, bia, is imagined to be an exemplary city under whose
aegis alliances are formed and smaller powers willingly pay tribute, as the
condition of protection. Thus, democracies couple a smarter process of

79
Lysias, “Funeral Oration,” in Lysias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1930), 28–69, in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane
(Tufts University, n.d.)
http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0540.tlg002.perseus-eng1:1.
49

decision-making to effective material and technological choices in order to
create and sustain a thriving network of alliances. What happens when the
centrifugal structures of stasis come into play? How does concord fall into
discord within the polis and between the metropole and its client states?
Stasis, Strife and the Question of Insurrection
The ancient Greeks celebrated themes of unity and solidarity and
dreaded stasis (civil strife) with a passion that may sound extravagant to
contemporary ears. At the same time, they also prized individual
achievement. Athens, for example, was a highly agonistic society, “where
rivalry, enmity, and competition are the inevitable counterpoint to
community.”
80
According to Werner Jaeger, “the entire teaching of Plato and
Aristotle about political change is simply a theory of stasis.”
81
In a 1962
study of Athenian demagoguery, M. I. Finley concurs that stasis “is the
greatest evil and the most common danger.”
82
From the mid-sixth century
on, civil strife becomes a constant preoccupation in the Greek world, and a
recurrent motif for its poets.
83
We find the earliest description of a polity torn
by civil strife in a poem by the seventh-century Mytilenian poet Alcaeus; in it,

80
David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8.

81
Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. 2:
In Search of the Divine Centre (Oxford: Blackwell, 1947).
82
M. I. Finley, “Athenian Demagogues,” Past & Present, no. 21 (1962): 6.
83
Gregory Nagy, “Theognis and Megara: A Poet’s Vision of His City,” in Theognis of
Megara: Poetry and the Polis, ed. Gregory Nagy and Thomas G. Figueira (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 22–81.
50

he allegorized stasis as the winds blowing in opposite currents that threaten
to sink the ship of state.
84

Strife leads to change in human affairs as well as in nature.
The ancient Greeks distinguished between stasis (internal discord), the
deprivation of homonoia, and polemos (war with foreigners) with its
counterpart eirene, peace in inter-city relations.
85
The Presocratic
philosopher Heraclitus re-conceptualized polemos as the elementary
cosmological force, “both father and king of all; some he has shown forth as
gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free” (Fr. 25).
86

In other words, polemos, properly regulated, is constitutive of social order.
On the other hand, stasis upsets the commonplace antithesis of peitho and
bia that structures Greek thinking about politics inside/outside the city.
Stasis threatens to engulf the city in stasis emphylos, war in the family, but
the dynamic can also go in the opposite direction, from enmity among friends

84
“I fail to understand the direction [stasis] of the winds: one wave rolls in from this
side, another from that, and we in the middle are carried along in company with our great
black ship, much distressed in the great storm ship and its passengers.” Alcaeus, fragment
208, in David A. Campbell, trans., Greek Lyric, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1982). According to Nicole Loraux, Alcaeus was “the first to pronounce in his verses
the word stasis.” Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient
Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2006), 156.
85
Peace inside and outside the polis respectively guaranteed autonomia and
eleutheria, inner and outer autonomy. Marta Sordi, “Introduzione: Dalla ‘Koinè Eirene’ Alla
‘Pax Romana,’” in La Pace Nel Mondo Antico, ed. Marta Sordi (Milan: Università Cattolica
del Sacro Cuore, 1985), 7.

86
Philip Wheelwright, trans., Heraclitus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1959). The association of slavery and warfare was an established feature of ancient Greek
culture.
51

and family to civil war.
87
In the Odyssey, after Odysseus returns to Ithaca
and kills Penelope’s suitors with the assistance of Athena, the relatives of the
slain rise up against the king. When the “evil war [polemos kakos]” risks
spilling beyond Ithaca’s shores, Zeus intervenes to put an end to stasis and
imposes a solemn oath of friendship (philotes) on both sides, thus opening the
way for peace (eirene) and prosperity (ploutos). As this narrative illustrates,
intra-Hellenic warfare occupied a middle position between stasis and polemos
that was negotiated with the emergence of informal rules of conduct.
88
In the
agon of war, the panhellenic gods “were invoked as arbiters who would
guarantee the rules that both sides had to observe.”
89
Fables, epoch
narratives, and allegories constitute cultural resources for raising dread of

87
Nicole Loraux, “War in the Family,” trans. Adam Kotsko, Parrhesia 27 (2017): 13–
47. The friend (philos) was “first and foremost an individual’s close relative, and the model
of philia is realized in the close family circle.” When friendship turned into hate and stasis,
one’s fellow became echthros (personal/internal enemy). The stranger (xenos) was the
external enemy (polemios), but the same term was also used to refer to the guest – an
opposition mirrored by the antinomy between the stranger (othneois) and the native
(oikeion). Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New
York: Zone Books, 1990), 30.
88
This body of unwritten rules for land warfare, which evolved in the course of the
seventh century, established ritualistic hoplite battle as the main means of violent dispute
resolution among Greek peoples. These norms included, for example, the truces for pan-
Hellenic festivals and for recovering dead soldiers’ bodies after a battle, the supplication
ritual, rules for the ransoming of prisoners, and prohibitions, in the context of hoplite battle,
against surprise attacks and the killing or enslavement of captives. Josiah Ober, “Classical
Greek Times,” in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, ed. Michael
Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark L. Shulman (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1994), 12–26. The hoplites were a privileged minority of citizens wealthy enough to
afford the hopla (heavy armor). Their “political and social predominance was based squarely
on their right and duty to carry a shield in the phalanx.” Doyne Dawson, The Origins of
Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1996), 50. These norms discouraged destabilizing strategies aimed at internal
subversion or at changing the constitution of a defeated state. Walter Robert Connor, “Early
Greek Land Warfare as Symbolic Expression,” Past & Present, no. 119 (1988): 3–29.
89
Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, 41.
52

factionalism and imagining irenic possibilities. So, too, do ancient historians
record the fates of cities, states, and empires.
Stasis, Histories of Violence and the Words of War
Ancient historians authored narratives within which episodes of
conflict were weighed as the outcome of war. They read the concrete value of
a people, city, and empire as suffering a common fate. Lessons were drawn
about stasis as both a cultural and material phenomenon appearing over
time. The lessons provided morals that fueled the living rhetorics of a time,
as well as historical legacies to be revisited. In his Histories, Herodotus of
Halicarnassus traced “the historical transition from the polemos of the
narrative to the contemporary stasis.”
90
The historian judged that the
Athenians had been wise not to quarrel (stasiasousi) with the
Lacedaemonians over naval hegemony in the war against Persia, for they
knew that “civil strife [stasis emphulos] is as much worse than united war
[polemos homophroneon, war ‘of one mind’] as war is worse than peace”
(Histories, 8.3.1).
91
But their panhellenism, Herodotus was quick to add, was
motivated by self-interest rather than by a desire to avoid stasis, “for when
they had driven the Persian back and the battle was no longer for their
territory but for his, they made a pretext [prophasis] of Pausanias’

90
Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in
the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 220.
91
Herodotus, Histories, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1920), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane (Tufts University, n.d.)
http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-grc1:8.3.1.
53

highhandedness [hybris] and took the command away from the
Lacedaemonians” (8.3.2).
In Herodotus’ narrative of “a shoving of many words [logon pollon
othismos]” (9.26.1) between Athenians and Tegeans generals at Plataea, “the
divisiveness of the Greeks in the world of the narrated stands for their
subsequent state of war against one another.”
92
Rosaria Munson posited that
“for Herodotus’ Athenians, perceiving the difference between defense and
aggression has been difficult since the beginning of democracy. Their newly-
acquired excellence is described in terms that suggest an agonistic effort vis-
à-vis their fellow Greeks.”
93
Agonistics characterize policy judgment as
passions are raised in questions varying between persuasion and force. I find
an illustrative example in Herodotus’ narrative of the Athenians’ landing to
the island of Andros after the victory of Salamis. Upon arrival, the general
Themistocles tried to extort money from the islanders for siding with the
Persians.
94
He announced that “the Athenians had come with two great gods
to aid them, Persuasion [Peitho] and Necessity [Ananke], and that the
Andrians must therefore certainly give money.” The Andrians’ reply is ironic:
“It is then but reasonable that Athens is great and prosperous, being blessed
with serviceable gods. As for us Andrians, we are but blessed with a plentiful

92
Munson, Telling Wonders, 218.
93
Munson, 213.
94
After winning at Salamis, Themistocles exploited his command of the Greek fleet
to extort money from some small Greek islands (Herodotus, 8.111–12).
54

lack of land, and we have two unserviceable gods who never quit our island
but want to dwell there forever, namely Poverty [Penia] and Helplessness
[Amekhania]. Since we are in the hands of these gods, we will give no money;
the power of Athens can never be stronger than our inability” (Histories
8.111). The Athenians besieged the city.
95

Soon after the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, Pericles
delivered the funeral oration that was to be represented later in the famous
Thucydidean text. Pericles’ Epitaphios used the antagonistic genre of
contemporary patriotic rhetoric to serve the short-term goal of unifying the
audience behind the war effort against Sparta. Drawing on Gregory
Bateson’s theory of cultural differentiation, James Mackin argued that
Pericles’ Funeral Oration illustrates a symbolic dynamic similar to
schismogenesis, “a process of progressive differentiation that results in
polarization.”
96
In Thucydides’ History, Mackin noted that schismogenesis is
channeled by antithetical rhetorics of consubstantiality that unfold
materially according to the cultural dynamic and vocabulary of stasis. The

95
Here compulsion is represented by the Greek notion of necessity (ananke). In
ancient Greek mythology, Ananke was the powerful goddess of necessity, compulsion, and
constraint, who ruled over the bare necessities of body and life, the chains of prison and
slavery, and the bonds of kinship, friendship and love. Ananke exercised her power mainly
in the earthly world, where there was often little choice but to follow her violent dealings.
96
James A. Mackin Jr., “Schismogenesis and Community: Pericles’ Funeral Oration,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 3 (1991): 251,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639109383959. For Bateson’s theorization of schismogenesis,
see Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of
the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1958). See also Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding
History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
55

main features of this process, as elucidated by historian Marc Cogan, are “the
utterness of the opposition of parties, the destruction of any middle, neutral
ground, and the distortion of thought and speech by the spirit of
partisanship.”
97
Because “the increase in consubstantiality at one level in a
hierarchy of systems will be accompanied by a decrease in consubstantiality
at higher levels,” the rhetoric of unity over time produces ‘side-effects’ that
ultimately prove self-defeating because it atrophies a community’s capacity
for compromise.
98
As Mackin posited, the unfolding of Thucydides’ History
dramatizes the emerging off-shoots of Athens’ rhetoric of Attic cohesion:
As the Athenians became more unified in opposition to the Spartans,
they lost their perception of consubstantiality with the other city-states
of Greece. . . . The loss of perceived consubstantiality changed the
nature of the system by altering the pattern of interaction. The
Athenians did not negotiate with their fellow Greeks as equals (a
consubstantial term) but as superiors who dictated terms. Even the
allies of Athens found themselves treated as substantially different.
99

Ultimately, Athens’ strategy proves self-defeating. Stasis, which had always
introduced the risk of outside interference, swept through the Greek world in
the late fifth century, during the time of peaking Athenian hegemony.
100
At

97
Marc Cogan, The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides’
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 152.
98
Mackin Jr., “Schismogenesis and Community,” 258.
99
Mackin Jr., 258.
100
In ancient Greece, Hans-Joachim Gehrke wrote, “social conflict usually had a
foreign policy component, as major powers exploited the highly competitive mentality and
the resultant conflict structures in their own interests.” Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Social
Conflicts,” ed. Christine F. Salazar, Brill’s New Pauly, 2006, para. 4. The Hellenic rules of
engagement finally broke down during the Peloponnesian War. Athens under Pericles’
leadership withdrew from the conventions of hoplite warfare by refusing to meet the Spartan
56

the height of its power, Athens relied increasingly on the loyalty of the lower
classes to control its allied states, supporting democratic factions and
imposing democratic constitutions all over its sphere of influence. Stasis
intensified even further in the last decades of the century following the
polarizing trends stirred by the Peloponnesian war (431-404 BCE). This
period saw civil wars erupt all over the Greek world.
101
Citizens divided
along socio-economic lines and connected preference for different forms of
constitution, as in the frequent conflicts that saw the oligarchy-supporting
elites pitted against the demos. Factions often allied with sympathetic
groups in neighboring cities or called in outside powers such as a powerful
hegemon (Athens or Sparta), or a Persian satrap.
102
Prevailing against one’s
political opponents hinged on “calling in the right side at the right time to
wrest control of the government.”
103

The ‘great movement’ of the Peloponnesian War provides fertile ground

army in traditional battle outside the walls, where they were at a disadvantage, and turning
instead to a strategy of social and economic disruption. When the Athenians started
encouraging insurrections among the Helots – the subjugated people of Laconia and
Messenia whose slave labor Sparta depended on – the Spartans responded by facilitating the
mass flight of Athenian slaves.
101
Kostas Kalimtzis identified these five generic traits of ancient Greek political
stasis as reflected in passages 3.81-84 from Thucydides’ account of the revolution at Corcyra:
(1) a conception of stasis as “deviant political process” accompanied by (2) “transformations
in values,” and (3) “the dissolution of familial and political friendship ties” and their
replacement by extra-constitutional bonds, (4) the search for “honor and gain” by means of
“terror and fraud,” and (5) “unbounded passions” such as fear, greed, and insolence.
Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease, 8–9.
102
Geoffrey Ernest Maurice De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981), 288.
103
Mustacchio, “The Concept of ‘Stasis’ in Greek Political Theory,” 32.
57

for the contagion of stasis. Thucydides’ description of this centrifugal
spreading to the whole Hellas is among his most famous passages:
“Revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions
occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places
caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal” (History 3.82.3).
104
He
explains this dynamic in this famous passage from his account of the stasis at
Corcyra (427 BCE), a civil war precipitated by the sedition of pro-Sparta
oligarchs followed by the intervention of the Athenian fleet on the side of the
demos:
In peacetime there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling
them in, but in time of war, when each party could always count upon
an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at the same time
strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who
wanted a change of government to call in help from outside. (3.82.1)

Loyalty to one’s social peers often trumped loyalty to the city. Times of war
force “cities and individuals alike . . . into a situation where they have to do
what they do not want to do.” They “find themselves suddenly confronted
with imperious necessities [akousious anagkas]” (3.82.2).
105

For Thucydides this is because war is “biaios didaskalos” (3.82.2), a
violent teacher and teacher of violence.
106
This polarizing dynamic, which

104
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York:
Penguin, 1972).
105
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1910), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane (Tufts University, n.d.)
http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0003.tlg001.perseus-eng3.
106
On the connection between war and stasis in Thucydides’, see Jonathan J. Price,
58

brings internal contradictions into open conflict, manifests itself in a
characteristic distortion of language. In a much-celebrated passage,
Thucydides described how, under the pressures of partisanship, the
evaluative valence of words shifts from communal emphasis to factional
interest:
What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now
regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to
think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was
a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s
unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides
meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm
was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his
back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent
opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them
became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it
was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. (3.82.4-5)

The world turns upside down. As Quentin Skinner argued, Thucydides here
described the corrosive effects of paradiastolic speech on a social fabric torn
by stasis.
107

Paradiastole, a ‘putting together of dissimilar things,’ is a composite of
the Greek para (beside) and diastole (drawing asunder, dilatation). Aristotle
used similar words in the Rhetoric when addressing how speakers re-describe
one’s virtue as a vice (and vice versa) for purposes of praise or blame:
We are also to assume, when we wish either to praise a man or blame
him, that qualities closely allied to those which he actually has are

Thucydides and Internal War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
107
Quentin Skinner, “Paradiastole: Redescribing the Vices as Virtues,” in
Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin
Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 149–63.
59

identical with them; for instance, that the cautious man is cold-blooded
and treacherous, and that the stupid man is an honest fellow or the
thick-skinned man a good-tempered one. We can always idealize any
given man by drawing on the virtues akin to his actual qualities; thus
we may say that the passionate and excitable man is frank; or that the
arrogant man is superb or impressive. Those who run to extremes will
be said to possess the corresponding good qualities; rashness will be
called courage, and extravagance generosity. That will be what most
people think; and at the same time this method enables an advocate to
draw a misleading inference from the motive, arguing that if a man
runs into danger needlessly, much more will he do so in a noble cause;
and if a man is open-handed to anyone and everyone, he will be so to
his friends also, since it is the extreme form of goodness to be good to
everybody. (Rhetoric, 1366b23-1367b6)
108

Quintilian called this rhetorical technique distinctio, “by which we
distinguish between similar things, as in this sentence: ‘When you call
yourself wise instead of astute, brave instead of rash, economical instead of
mean’” (Institutio Oratoria 9.4.65).
109
Paradiastole emerges then as a “strife
trope, a trope born of and tending toward the reproduction of contention,”
whose “fundamental oppositions” of “honor and dishonor” may be harnessed
strategically either to unmask or exculpate.
110

In the stasis, Thucydides wrote, “family relations were a weaker tie
than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any
extreme for any reason whatever” (Histories 3.82.6). With Thucydides, the
Peloponnesian War – a biaios didaskalos, a violent teacher and a teacher of

108
Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
109
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, vol. 3 (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1921).
110
Rachelle Gold and Jim Pearce, “Ferox or Fortis: Montaigne, Hobbes, and the Perils
of Paradiastole,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 2 (May 18, 2015): 188–89.
60

violence – finally upsets the classical antithesis of peitho and bia. Quintilian
concluded that the Greeks opposed paradiastole to synoikeiosis, the type of
speech that “connects two different things” (9.4.64). Significantly,
synoikeiosis or “synoecism” (syn- “dwelling together,” oikos “house”) was also
the term that the Athenians used to refer to the political merger of previously
independent communities to form the democratic polis.
111

Order: Persuasion and Necessity
War and peace offer material to the classical tradition that reaches
into orbits of philosophical reflections – that extends into present reflections
on politics, publics, and conflict. The relations among people of support and
friendship, friction and enmity furnish perennial subjects for discussion of
how strong allied ties are built within and between entities internal to the
city, people, and/or state and external to it. If persuasion is unreliable and
force abhorrent save under conditions of necessity, upon what then are norms
of individual and collective political conduct based? Plato tries to deal with
the problem posed by the centrifugal interaction between stasis and polemos

111
Paradiastole is associated with antanaklasis, which denotes a “reflection” or
“bending back” of light towards its source, an echo of sound, and also the physical rebound
generated by an object thrown against another. More generally, paradiastole refers to an
action that ‘reflects back’ on the agent. In Aristotelean logic, antanaklasis is the conclusion
of the perfect syllogism. As rhetorical figure, antanaklasis is “where the same word is used
in two different meanings” (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.3.68). Henry George Liddell,
Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, eds., “Antanaclasis,” in A Greek-English Lexicon
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane (Tufts
University, n.d.)
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0096%3Apart%3
DSchemates+Rhetorical%3Asubpart%3DThe+first+order%3Asection%3DFigures+of+Separat
ion%3Asubsection%3DAntanaclasis.
61

in risking violence by enlarging his irenic model of the city to include all
Greeks, thus directing polemos outside Hellas. In book five of the Republic,
Plato has Socrates articulate how the ideal soldiers of Kallipolis should
behave in times of war. The entire discussion is premised on two differentiae
or distinctions: 1) between stasis, which Socrates defines as “the hostility of
the friendly,” and polemos, which is “that of the alien,” and 2) between the
way in which “the Hellenic race [to hellenikon genos]” sees itself – “friendly to
itself and akin [oikeion kai sungenes]” – and how it sees the so-called
barbarians, that is, “foreign and alien” (Republic 5.470b-c).
112
On this basis,
Socrates declared that the only true conflict worthy of the name polemos is
the unrestrained war of the Greeks against the barbarians, while inter-Greek
wars should be treated as stasis, and conducted more moderately:
We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians,
and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature, and that war
is the fit name for this enmity and hatred. Greeks, however, we shall
say, are still by nature the friends of Greeks when they act in this way,
but that Greece is sick in that case and divided by faction, and faction
[stasin] is the name we must give to that enmity.”. . . .
“Will they then not be good and gentle?”
“Indeed they will.”
“And won’t they be philhellenes, lovers of Greeks, and will they not
regard all Greece as their own and not renounce their part in the holy
places common to all Greeks?”
“Most certainly.”
“Will they not then regard any difference with Greeks who are their
own people [oikeious] as a form of faction and refuse even to speak of it

112
Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Paul Shorey, vol. 5 and 6 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1956), in the Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory Cane (Tufts
University, n.d.) http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg030.perseus-
eng1:5.470.
62

as war [polemos]?”
“Most certainly.”
“And they will conduct their quarrels always looking forward to a
reconciliation?”
“By all means.”
“They will correct them, then, for their own good, not chastising them
with a view to their enslavement or their destruction, but acting as
correctors, not as enemies.”
“They will,” he said. (5.470c–471a)

The Platonic idea of war that emerges in the Republic is of “a special kind of
violence that finds its legitimacy in the fact that it unifies the forces at work
in the city . . . by giving these forces a shared direction.”
113
In an essay
concerned with the intellectual roots of the Western idea of authority,
Hannah Arendt argued that what drives Plato’s philosophy of government is
the search for a new warrant for obedience to substitute for the dualism of
peitho and bia in the ancient Greek conception of politics. While Plato
distrusted the role of persuasion in politics, he was also unwilling to make
naked force – a means reserved for women, slaves, and ‘barbarian’ peoples –
the foundation of government legitimacy. The question of “how to assure that
the many . . . can be submitted to the same truth” that compels the minds of
the few, Arendt argued, is “the central predicament of Plato’s political
philosophy,” one that at first is solved, in the Republic, “through the
concluding myth of rewards and punishments in the hereafter,” a solution
later abandoned in the Laws in favor of “a substitute for persuasion, the

113
Karel Thein, “Cities of the Warriors, Cities of the Sages,” Utopian Studies 26, no.
1 (2015): 229.
63

introduction to the laws in which their intent and purpose are to be explained
to the citizens.”
114

Isocrates proposed a different alternative that becomes a rhetorical
resource for nation building for the city-states and pan-nationalism for the
Hellenic project (which was transformed by Alexander’s Macedonian lead
quest for empire). John Poulakos posited that Isocrates’ conception of logos
should be understood as a response to “the political turmoil and intellectual
disorientation” that plagued Hellas in the wake of the Peloponnesian War.
115

Against the background of a society beset by “prolonged strife within and war
between the states,” Isocrates’s “hegemonic notion of logos” aims to
materialize “a new vision of cooperation and Ὁμόνοια (likemindedness).”
116

Proposed as an alternative to the agonistic rhetorical practice espoused by
the Sophists, the Isocratean logos politikos functions to curb the centripetal
pull exerted by large-scale historical trends. The purpose of rhetorical
paideia becomes “to unify divided political communities by articulating
desirable visions and specifying common goals,” the worthiest of which was
the cultivation of a panhellenic identity spearheaded by Athens and

114
Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter
Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2003), 475–76.
115
John Poulakos, “Rhetoric and Civic Education: From the Sophists to Isocrates,” in
Isocrates and Civic Education, ed. Takis Poulakos and David Depew (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2004), 71.
116
Poulakos, 73.
64

weaponized against the Persian barbarians.
117
In his famous “hymn to logos”
– included in the oration Nicocles (6-9) and quoted in the later Antidosis (253-
257) – Isocrates (436–338 BCE) rehearsed the Hellenic myth of peitho’s
taming of bia to buttress his vision of rhetoric as constitutive of political
community. Because “we have the ability to persuade one another and to
make clear to ourselves what we want,” Isocrates declared, “not only do we
avoid living like animals, but we have come together, built cities, made laws,
and invented arts” (Nicocles 6; Antidosis 253 – 256).
118
Isocrates’ conception
of the role of persuasive speech encompasses more than the already
mentioned antinomies of human/animal and Greek/barbarian. In addition to
these, as Yun Lee Too emphasized in introducing the Antidosis, for Isocrates
“logos and the arts associated with it are responsible for the advantages . . .
that the Athenians have over the rest of the Greeks.”
119
As mentioned above,
Isocrates praised logos as “the leader [hegemon] of all thoughts and actions”
(3.9). In Plataicus, Isocrates decries those who resort to violence against
other Greek city-states and condemns the destruction of Plataea by Thebes
following their refusal to join the Boeatian federation. He argued that it is
unjust “to inflict penalties so contrary to justice and so cruel” and, moreover,
not “consistent with the dignity of the city of the Plataeans, without their

117
Poulakos, 78.
118
Isocrates, Isocrates I, trans. David Mirhady and Yun Lee Too (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2000).
119
Isocrates, 203.
65

consent [peistheisan] but under compulsion [biastheisan], to accept such
dependence under the Thebans” (14.8). Similarly, in To Philip, Isocrates
advocated the use of peitho as the proper way for Philip the Macedon to deal
with Greek poleis. When the subject is the Persians, Isocrates reverted to the
traditional understanding and counsels war, arguing that “persuasion will be
useful with the Greeks; compulsion will be advantageous against the
barbarians” (5.16). Isocrates argued for expanding the sphere of peitho
beyond the boundaries of the polis to the whole Hellas but stops short of
including those falling beyond his panhellenic vision.
120

Necessity and Contingency: Aristotelian Rhetoric
Plato’s laws and Isocrates’ panhellenism commence discussion of order
and policy. The system in which the ends of internal and external order are
realized was developed philosophically into a teleology of evidence and proof
that fused politics and ethics into a virtuous spiral of argument. On the
ethical side, deliberation begets a vibrant polis. On the political side,
calculated judgments of intervention become conditioned as goal-oriented
deference, prompts, or uses of force. In Aristotle’s way of thinking, the
dualism of peitho and ananke/bia revolves around the distinction between
internal and external origins of an action’s generative principle.
121
Aristotle’s

120
Terry L. Papillon, “Unity, Dissociation, and Schismogenesis in Isocrates,” in Logos
without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language before Plato, ed. Robin Reames (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 11–18.
121
Foley, “Peitho and Bia.”
66

philosophy of movement (kinesis) is attuned to change (metabole), possibility
(endechomenon), and potentiality (dunamis). In the Lexicon of the
Metaphysics, one kind of necessity, that is, “that which cannot be otherwise”
is “the compulsory and compulsion, i.e. that which impedes and hinders
contrary to impulse and choice.” And, conversely, “compulsion is a form of
necessity, as Sophocles says: ‘Force makes this action a necessity’.” Ananke
is beyond the reach of peitho: “Necessity is held to be something that cannot
be persuaded – and rightly, for it is contrary to the movement which accords
with choice and with reasoning” (Metaphysics 5.5.1015a20b9).
122
Ananke, the
antithesis of possibility, is never fully persuaded.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described bia as a kind of
necessity whose origin is external: “An act is biaion when its origin [archē] is
from outside, the person compelled contributing nothing to it” (3.1.1110b).
123

On the other hand, “what is voluntary would seem to be something whose
origin is in the person himself, who knows the particulars that constitute the
action” (Nicomachean Ethics 3.1.1111a22-23). These particulars in turn are:
“who acts, what he does, and with respect to what or in what circumstances,
and sometimes also with what (for example, with an instrument), for the sake
of what (for example, preservation), and how (for example, gently or
violently)” (3.1.1111a3-6). In the final pages of the Nicomachean Ethics

122
Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle.
123
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
67

Aristotle concludes by observing that most people will behave ethically only
in the presence of the law, because “the law has compulsive power, while it is
at the same time a rule proceeding from a sort of practical wisdom and
reason” (10. 9).
Aristotle’s Politics emerges out of the “palpably explosive political
terrain”
124
of the late fourth century, a moment of transition in the
Hellenistic world between Greek polis and Macedonian rule.
125
Book five of
the Politics is the longest treatment of stasis available in ancient literature.
Here, Aristotle sets to develop a general theory of how stasis arises within the
polis and how it might be prevented. Aristotle considered three main
questions concerning why political revolutions occur: “(1) what is the feeling
[pos echontes]? (2) what are the motives of those who make them [tinon
heneken]? (3) whence [archai] arise political disturbances and quarrels?”
(Politics, 1302a21-22). In answering these questions, Aristotle developed a
powerful account of stasis conceptualized as an unfolding process of political
change. For Aristotle, it is the perception of injustice, the sense of being

124
Mary G. Dietz, “Between Polis and Empire: Aristotle’s Politics,” The American
Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 289.
125
Aristotle (384–322 BCE), a metic (foreign resident of Athens) from Stagira, lived
during times of war and military conquest at the hands of Macedonian armies, with whole
cities obliterated (Thebes, Olynthus, and his own Stagira) and hundreds more occupied.
Aristotle was born shortly after Philip II of Macedon defeated the Greek city-states at
Chaeronea (388 BCE), and lived through Alexander III’s victory over Persia at Gaugamela
(331 BCE). After the defeat at Chaeronea, Greece was made into a Macedonian protectorate,
organized around the Corinthian League, and under the supervision of a Macedonian
executive tasked with squashing the seeds of revolt.
68

treated unfairly, rather than self-interest, that incites people to stasis.
126

Thus, the “revolutionary feeling” gets stirred when people perceive that they
have been treated unfairly. In factionalizing, they act to pursue wealth and
honor (and prevent dishonor and loss). This state of mind and the goals that
people aim to accomplish by initiating stasis, however, are bound to emerge
only after certain causal factors have set the stage for stasis, for “men are
excited against one another . . . at seeing others, justly or unjustly,
engrossing them” (1302a39-1302b1). These causes (archai) of insurrections
and revolutions are: (1) gain, (2) honor, (3) insolence, (4) fear, (5) “excessive
predominance,” (6) contempt, and (7) “disproportionate increase in some part
of the state.”
Aristotelian political thought is identified with the claim that “the
state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal”
(1253a1-3). Thus, to have no polis makes one either a brute or a god. “He is
like the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homer denounces,”
Aristotle tells us, and “the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may
be compared to an isolate piece at draughts” (1253a4-7).
127
The process

126
Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and
Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
127
In the relevant passage in the Iliad, wise Nestor calls Agamemnon and Achilles to
reconcile with this admonition: “A clanless, lawless, hearthless man is he that loveth dread
strife among his own folk” (9.63-64). Homer, The Iliad, trans. Arthur T. Murray (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). In Homeric times, as in Aristotle’s, those who stirred
polemos epidemios (war in one’s own country), rather than concentrating on war against the
common enemy, were expelled from the community.
69

within which irenic and eristic topics are discussed enables
publics to achieve and maintain credibility because, with a little good luck,
the, best decisions are deliberated and reached, whether as a means to
alleviate civic dissention or to calculate the best outcomes for addressing
strife in colonies or foreign lands.
Conclusion
The review of stasis establishes clash as a central element of the
classical inheritance of rhetoric. A generative view of stasis acknowledges
that systems of clash can be built for epistemic, institutional uses to
authorize peaceful conflict resolution. In time, these systems can be
developed, borrowed, and varied locally, as peaceful means of resolving
difference become routinized into the institutional structures of
argumentation, particularly forensics and the law. Stasis, too, can become
the focus of controversy because the structuring of which questions need be
answered to resolve a dispute itself presupposes a bundle of procedures,
written codes, unspoken agreements, and common practice. Stasis can move
from common place argumentation to strife when rules are confronted. Since
stasis is generative rather than a stipulated, schematized feature of
argumentation, questions of practice raise the interests of fiction, history,
philosophy, and social science. On the one hand, classical cultures provide
symbolic resources where the reasons offered in support of irenic or eristic
actions constitute orientations toward order, perform national and
70

international identities, and push results to homogeneous, consubstantial
enactments of solidary. On the other, schismogenesis can produce successive
rounds of differentiation, factionalization, and polarization within and
between groups tied together or falling apart. Stasis and clash thus carry
forward into situational contingencies that play out in rhetorical arguments
as these generate and move in tandem with irenic and eristic events.

71

Chapter Three: The Arc of Just War Thinking: Narration and Public
Moral Argument
The rhetoric of Just War creates a tightrope across which those
initiating, pursuing, conducting, and settling issues of violence must walk.
The call to justice arouses passion that multiplies when war itself results in
unexpected atrocities and pains of loss, appearing to escape rational control.
At the same time, the goal of justice constrains war by rendering it morally,
legally, strategically, and circumstantially useful. Shawn Parry-Giles and
Trevor Parry-Giles remind us of Karl Wallace’s understanding of good
reasons as the materials of rhetoric in order to contend that “war and civil
rights should occasion the intense scrutiny of public address scholars
interested in rhetoric’s power as the articulation and enactment of public
morality . . . in a US political context dominated by persistent concerns about
war and the civil rights of its citizens.”
128
Karl Wallace noted that good
reasons aspire to guide public actions by adjusting the ambitions of a
persuader to the values of an audience.
129
Good reasons provide the
substance of rhetorical encounters. Walter Fisher extended Wallace’s
observations to a “logic of good reasons,” where values enter into a situated

128
Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Introduction: Ethical and Moral
Judgment and the Power of Public Address,” in Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical
Studies in Ethical Tensions (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), xviii–xix.
129
Karl R. Wallace, “The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 49, no. 3 (1963): 239–49.
72

relation to actions.
130
Later, Fisher postulated the “narrative paradigm” as
the fundamental mode of human understanding.
131
Humans situate
themselves in time through self and other locations in stories that constitute
moments of conflict and cooperation, the rise and fall of tensions, dramas of
good and evil, and equations among symbols of good evil drawn among actors,
events, agencies, and decisions.
The logic of good reasons constituting public moral argumentation of
just wars constitutes a master narrative in the West. Master narratives offer
an overarching form of expression from which particular actions or events are
remembered, gathered into recognition, attributed scope and understanding,
and identified in stages, outcomes, and consequences. In this chapter I track
the Just War as a master narrative that develops over time through reflective
discourses that argue convincingly for reasonable constraints on the activities
of war and peace. Master narratives do not necessarily unfold in identical
logics of good reasons. Indeed, Just War narratives open plentiful
disagreement spaces on their own terms.
This chapter maps two generative institutions promising justice as an
end: religion and the law. Further, within each institution, the works of key
philosophers who tell the story of just wars (their causes, consequences,

130
Walter R. Fisher, “Toward a Logic of Good Reasons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
64, no. 4 (1978): 376–84.
131
Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of
Public Moral Argument,” Communications Monographs 51, no. 1 (1984): 1–22.
73

norms, and choices) are presented. Religious institutions vary, of course, in
terms of grounding the narratives of war and peace. I capture foundational
moments in the discussion in transition between Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas. Admittedly, the selection is narrow, only illustrative; however,
Augustine and Aquinas are central to the doctrinal development of Western
Just War narratives. In addition to its religious roots, the moral arguments
of the Just War doctrine have a procedural, principled development that
tends to the law of nations and international law. This chapter explores the
“logic of good reasons” to discover how public moral argument works within
institutional commitments to religion and to international law.
The Just War tradition is a complex and longstanding body of thought
about action. The tradition traces a “two-thousand-year-old conversation
about the legitimacy of war.”
132
Just War doctrines aim at systematizing “the
form of the appropriate cultural regulation of violence.”
133
American thinkers
led in the recovery of Just War reasoning in response to the rise of Nazism,
the intentional bombing of civilian populations by both Axis and Allied
powers during World War II, the development of nuclear weapons, and the
United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Historically, Just War
tenets have been an important influence on the development of international

132
Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006),
2.
133
James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and
Historical Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 44.
74

law. More recently, these principles underpinned the debate over
humanitarian as well as the emerging Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
norm.
134
Public debates over American-led military involvements in
Afghanistan and Iraq and against terrorism in general have encouraged a
wider interest in the Just War tradition, particularly in Western, English-
speaking countries.
135
Some commentators have reacted to these trends by
pronouncing the tradition the contemporary lingua franca of public moral
argument on military force.
136
For example, James Turner Johnson posited
that the Just War tradition has come to represent “the fundamental way we

134
Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and
International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving
Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
135
The body of scholarly literature on Just War is so massive that even a limited
review of contributions published in the last few years would extend well beyond the scope of
this project. For recent publications looking at Just War from a variety of perspectives, see,
for example, Alia Brahimi, Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010); Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012); Christopher J. Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to Resist: A Theory of Just
Revolutionary War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Helen Frowe and Gerald
Lang, eds., How We Fight: Ethics in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Caron E.
Gentry and Amy E. Eckert, eds., The Future of Just War: New Critical Essays (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2014); Michael L. Gross and Tamar Meisels, eds., Soft War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Anthony F. Lang, Cian O’Driscoll, and John
Williams, eds., Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2013); Eric Patterson, Ethics Beyond War’s End (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2012).
136
Writing in the early years of the twenty-first century, Michael Walzer declared
“the triumph of just war.” Michael Walzer, “The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the
Dangers of Success),” Social Research: An International Quarterly 69, no. 4 (2002): 932.
Richard Sorabji and David Rodin concurred in pronouncing Just War “the dominant
discourse on the ethics of war.” Richard Sorabji and David Rodin, “Introduction,” in The
Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions, ed. Richard Sorabji and David Rodin
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 2. See Nicholas Rengger, “On the Just War Tradition in the
Twenty-First Century,” International Affairs 78, no. 2 (2002): 353–63.
75

in the West think about the justification and limitation of violence.”
137
Alex
Bellamy extended the reach of Just War even further, contending that,
“whilst it has a Western and Christian heritage, the tradition today stretches
beyond the borders of Christendom. In one form or other, most of the world’s
state and social leaders accept [its] basic principles” and therefore it “is the
closest thing we have to a ‘common morality’ on the use of force.”
138

What constitutes a just war however remains an essentially contested
argument.
139
Michael Walzer’s formulation has gained wide recognition.
140

Lately, the tradition has been the target of several projects of radical
critique.
141
Some authors have questioned the continuing applicability and

137
Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, 329.
138
Alex J. Bellamy, “Is the War on Terror Just?” International Relations 19, no. 3
(2005): 282, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117805055407.
139
Building upon philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie’s notion of “essentially contested
concepts,” Eugene Garver defines essentially contested arguments as “arguments with
standards and methods of their own that differ fundamentally from but are not on that
account any less rational than the hypothetico-deductive arguments of science.” Eugene
Garver, “Rhetoric and Essentially Contested Arguments,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 11, no. 3
(1978): 168. For Gallie’s formulation of essentially contested concepts, see Walter Bryce
Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 56,
1956, 167–98.
140
Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical
Illustrations, originally published in 1977, has become required reading at US military
academies. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical
Illustrations, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
141
Margaret Denike highlighted the ways in which “the regulatory concept and
category of ‘man’” that legal theory borrows from the metaphysics and theology of Aristotle,
Augustine, and Aquinas – incorporating historical efforts “to restrict ‘man’ to men, and for
Aquinas, to Christian men, and to exclude women and others (slaves, barbarians, heretics,
and so on) that were presumed to be lacking in the capacity that is ‘most divine’ in us and
that endows us with dignity: reason” – is presupposed by “notions of ‘right authority,’ ‘right
reason,’ and ‘just cause’ for presumably peace-loving Christians to go to war and to kill or
enslave one’s enemies without falling from God’s grace – notions that are often metaphorized
through gendered tropes.” Margaret Denike, “The Human Rights of Others: Sovereignty,
76

usefulness of the Just War framework for twenty-first century counterterror
wars and their corollaries – preemptive strikes, preventive war, network
warfare, counterproliferation, and regime change.
142
To understand the
stakes of contestation, the critic needs to excavate various historical
authorities and definitions that contemporary authors draw upon as
resources of invention for present position. Without such work, contestation
becomes largely a series of iterative exchanges of views.

Legitimacy, and ‘Just Causes’ for the ‘War on Terror,’” Hypatia 23, no. 2 (2008): 97–98.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri characterized the current international scene as one in
which established boundaries between peacetime and wartime, war and politics, have
fundamentally eroded, leading to “a general global state of war.” Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005), 5
(emphasis in original). This generalized condition of war – which is characterized by the
blurring of temporal and spatial limits to war-making, by the merger, under the banner of
security, of domestic politics and international relations, and finally, by “a reorientation of
the conception of the sides of battle or conditions of enmity” – formed the motivating
background from which the idea of Just War has re-emerged today in public argument about
the war on terror in order to portray “the alliance of friends” as “expansive and potentially
universal.” Hardt and Negri, 15. For Hardt and Negri, “the renewed concept of just war”
and its “allied concept of evil” should be understood as “symptoms of the ways in which war
has changed and lost the limitations that modernity had tried to impose on it.” Hardt and
Negri, 16. See also: Jens Bartelson, “Double Binds: Sovereignty and the Just War
Tradition,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested
Concept, ed. Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 81–95; Anthony Burke, “Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic
Violence after 9/11,” International Affairs 80, no. 2 (2004): 329–53; Michael J. Butler, Selling
a “Just” War: Framing, Legitimacy, and US Military Intervention (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012); Andrew Gordon Fiala, The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusions of War
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Colin Flint and Ghazi-Walid Falah, “How the
United States Justified Its War on Terrorism: Prime Morality and the Construction of a ‘Just
War,’” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 8 (2004): 1379–99; Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, “‘Talking
Peace–Going to War:’ Peace in the Service of the Israeli Just War Rhetoric,” Critical
Discourse Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 1–18.
142
For example, Mary Kaldor argued that “just war theory is increasingly stretched
and difficult to apply in the context of those changes we lump together under the rubric of
globalisation,” especially concerning “new forms of overlapping political authority often
described as global governance involving states, international institutions, as well as civil
society and, indeed, individuals.” Mary Kaldor, “From Just War to Just Peace,” in The
Viability of Human Security, ed. Monica den Boer and Jaap de Wilde (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 21.
77

The Just War standpoint is generally characterized as occupying the
middle ground between realism and pacifism (a form of idealism). Francis
Beer and Robert Hariman observed that Just War makes available “a
nonrealist schema or framework to structure the global struggle for power
and the massive violence that goes with it, indexing a complex network of
related narratives.”
143
From a rhetorical perspective, realism and idealism
(and Just War) work as discursive reservoirs, inventional strategies, and
forms of argument.
Contemporary Just War discourses outline “a framework prescribing
the circumstances when violence is justified, the agents that may legitimately
employ it, the purposes to which it may be directed and the ways in which it
may be deployed.”
144
Just War argument can be analyzed as a social practice.
As John Kelsay has advanced, “as a type of historical rationality, Just War
argument proceeds with reference to the past, in an attempt to fashion
judgments about the present, with import for the future.”
145
Its proponents

143
Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, “Postrealism, Just War, and the Gulf War
Debate,” in Francis A. Beer, Meanings of War and Peace (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2001), 87. In philosophy, realism and idealism point to opposite ways of
relating to the nature of things, with realism understood as an orientation to see things as
they actually are, and idealism as a tendency to represent things in their ideal form. In the
realm of foreign policy, idealism as an attitude emphasizes building peaceful relationships
through incentives and institutions of international order. Realism is based on strategic
convenience of the powerful. See Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, eds., Post-Realism:
The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 1996).
144
Andrew Phillips, War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International
Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22.
145
John Kelsay, “Just War Thinking as a Social Practice,” Ethics and International
78

“seek to tie prudence to justice.”
146

Modern Just War distinguishes between narratives that offer
justifications for going to war (jus ad bellum) and justifiable acts in wartime
(jus in bello).
147
Jus ad bellum identifies a set of topoi or circumstances that
warrant resort to war. These are: right authority, proper declaration, just
cause, right intention, proportionality of ends, last resort, and reasonable
chance of success.
148
Rhetorically, these headings stem from lines of
questions, stasis issues in other words, to limit or restrain motives for
starting, expanding, intensifying, or settling conflict in ways that generate
more conflict. These commonplaces work from a classically organized,
church-developed stasis system. Its basic questions include: has a wrong
been committed? How bad is the wrong? Have all means been tried short of
war? Are the means of fighting proportional to the ends? Is the settlement of
the peace just? At the general level, a war effort is deemed legitimate if it
represents a defensive response waged discriminately by a competent

Affairs 27, no. 1 (2013): 69.
146
Kelsay, 71.
147
Jus in bello addresses questions about war conduct, articulated in two major
categories: discrimination and proportionality. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq,
124. For more on the origins of the pair, see Robert Kolb, “Origin of the Twin Terms Jus Ad
Bellum/Jus in Bello,” International Review of the Red Cross Archive 37, no. 320 (1997): 553–
62.
148
Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq, 121–24. The particular circumstances or
topics that make up the jus as bellum and their relative importance vary somewhat
depending on the author. For example, James Turner Johnson omits proper declaration, and
prioritizes the “four deontological criteria” of sovereign authority, just cause, right intention,
and end of restoring peace, to the three “prudential concerns” of proportionality, last resort,
and reasonable hope of success. James Turner Johnson, The War to Oust Saddam Hussein:
Just War and the New Face of Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 17.
79

authority in order to achieve an objective proportionate to the wrong suffered.
In contemporary iterations, “punishment of transgressors, the enforcements
of laws, the rectification of injuries and the enactment of shared conceptions
of justice each provides warrants for the legitimate use of violence
internationally.”
149

Discourse disciplines; from a rhetorical perspective, discourse invites
inventional activity. This dissertation sketches the Just War tradition as a
discourse formation, an inventional field that is continuously re-configured as
people continue to discuss and draw from it. In this, I follow G. Thomas
Goodnight’s invitation to conceptualize each broad tradition of war and peace
as “a distinctive discourse formation – a site of invention from which
arguments can be drawn forward and discourse fashioned to explain, justify,
support, and extend policy.”
150
Rhetorical arguments can reverse field, of
course. The very act of justification can reinforce the fight as virtuous, the
struggle as demanding commitment, and the question of peace made
equivalent to eliminating evil. From this perspective, the Just War tradition
can be understood as a rhetorical discursus, an open constellation of topoi
that are culturally available but do not constitute a closed philosophical set.
These topoi get configured and reconfigured in stasis bundles, loosely-

149
Phillips, War, Religion and Empire, 22–23.
150
G. Thomas Goodnight, “Strategic Doctrine, Public Debate, and the Terror War,” in
Hitting First: Preventive Force in US Security Strategy, ed. William W. Keller and Gordon R.
Mitchell (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 95 (emphasis added).
80

structured clusters of antagonisms that function strategically to produce
meaning, energize action, and shape political conflict, legitimizing some
forms of clash while proscribing others. In questions of relations among
states, the stasis is complicated enough. In situations involving a hegemon
and out-groups, the asymmetries of power make for complicated justification
of policy, interpretation of events, and enforcement of rules of engagement in
relation to goals. Complexity notwithstanding, Just War appeals lifts
international relations to a contest for the moral high ground.
As a narrative logic, the Just War tradition coalesced around efforts to
externalize violent conflict outside the boundaries of the political community.
As an ongoing discursus, Just War traveled across time to issue a variety of
topics, concerns, and means of address that distinguished legitimate war
from its other manifestations in an unfolding discussion of theory and
practice about tradition and innovation. Unlike stasis, which moved within
events and raised questions of order, just wars were imagined as part of a
providential economy. Disagreement spaces were ordered by constitutive
values, instances of choice incarnating concrete values – fulfilling duties to
protect and to punish. Honor and glory, reputation and credibility, shame
and infamy, confidence and panic, etc. comprise the constitutive glue of such
embedded rhetorical practices of peoples, nations, and empires. The Just
War does emanate from, resonate with, yet also transforms into moral
drama, the classical stasis into rhetorics of war and peace.
81

Ancient Antecedents: The Bible and Roman Bellum Iustum
Contemporary interpreters trace the Just War tradition back to early
Christian thinking. Standard histories start from the writings of Augustine
of Hippo in the fourth century CE, leap to the thirteenth century with the
thoughts of Thomas Aquinas, then move to early modernity with the Spanish
scholastic Francisco Vitoria and the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. According to
these accounts, Vitoria and Grotius secularized Just War ideas into natural
law claims in the context of the shift from the respublica Christiana to the
modern nation state. The secular and religious mix of this knot of competing
claims and visions unfolding over time is the subject of this chapter. My
chosen point of departure is a brief exploration of Just War themes in the
Bible and in ancient Rome. My intent is not to identify (ever elusive) origins
or first causes but rather to tap, so to speak, from two cultural ‘fountains of
youth’ whose waters make for the extraordinary longevity of the Just War
tradition.
Testaments to Public Moral Argument
The image of Yahweh in the Old Testament is one of divine king and
warrior. As Walter Brueggemann remarks, “the texture of the Old
Testament is deeply marked by violence.”
151
“Yahweh-is-a-Warrior,” Richard
Nysse noted, “is central to many of the tenets of the Old Testament,” and

151
Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 381.
82

grounds some of its central themes, such as the emphasis on liberation from
oppression, on creation and ongoing control of cosmic and historical chaos,
and on the imminence of divine judgment.
152
One major scriptural motif is
the divinely-commanded war fought on behalf and for the benefit of the
national god. The power of the deity in battle was a major aspect in early
Israelite worship, and the faithful were also expected to assist God in battle
and were subject to punishment if they refused. One example is the
narrative of the conquest of the Canaanites, or the peoples of the land, in
Deuteronomy. These wars were waged under herem, or ban – the practice
whereby the conquered enemy peoples were exterminated on God’s
command.
153
In scripture, the ban is interpreted along two main trajectories:
as divine sacrifice in exchange for victory, or, and this is the prevalent theme,
as just punishment for idolaters and sinners. For the Deuteronomic writers,
who reject the ban-as-sacrifice tradition, the ban becomes “a means of gaining
God's favor through expurgation of the abomination, through justly deserved
punishment of the subversive enemy, external to the people Israel or

152
Richard Nysse, “Yahweh Is a Warrior,” Word & World 7, no. 2 (1987): 194. See
also: Peter C. Craigie, The Problem of War in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1978); Millard C. Lind, Yahweh Is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient
Israel (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1980); Gerhard Von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel,
trans. Marva J. Dawn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991).
153
Michael Walzer, “The Idea of Holy War in Ancient Israel,” The Journal of
Religious Ethics, 1992, 215–28. See also John J. Collins, “The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible
and the Legitimation of Violence,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 1 (2003): 3–21,
https://doi.org/10.2307/3268089; Paul D. Hanson, “War, Peace, and Justice in Early Israel,”
Bible Review 3 (1987): 32–45.
83

internal,” in other words, they “place the ban in a just war context.”
154
Herem
is perceived and rationalized as the imposition of God’s justice, as the
enemies’ deserved punishment, as the rooting out of sin. Crucially, while the
ban-as-sacrifice theme is visited only upon non-Israelite foreigners, the ban
as God’s justice also can fall upon fellow Israelite cities that have been
‘contaminated’ by polytheistic cults.
155
In the Old Testament, then, the Just
War motif that conceives of warfare as deserved punishment, when applied to
relations within the group or city, “becomes a divisive ideology, destructive of
the body politic” that “pits one sort of unity against another and can lead to
disintegration and disaster.”
156
The conception of the foreigner as barbarian
renders far-away cultures external to reasoning and hence tilts dealings with
them toward force and necessity.
Next to this holy war doctrine there are also elements of a more
limited conception of warfare in the Old Testament. A major thread within
this more limited conception of war is represented stories of war as a contest
among heroes. This bardic tradition in the Bible narrates the life and deeds
of groups of mighty warriors, whose battles often take the form of the duel,
and include the warring practice of the taunt.
157
The most famous hero

154
Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 57.
155
Niditch, 62–66.
156
Niditch, 70.
157
Niditch, 90–97. See also Roland De Vaux, “Single Combat in the Old Testament,”
in The Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed. Roland De Vaux (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
84

narrative in this bardic tradition is the life story of David. The duel between
David and the Philistine champion Goliath in the Book of Samuel conveys an
image of war as competitive sport, a contest for prestige and status not only
for the warrior but also for his tribe and deity. At the same time the story
conveys a conception of divinely-commanded war as a test of faith in
Yahweh’s word.
158
This ideology of war as a men’s game, an individualized
contest for the skilled, is governed by a code of fair play that lays the basis for
an Israelite jus in bello. This code is followed in wars when the enemy is
from ‘within one’s group.’ Compared to the ideology of the ban as God’s
justice, “the warrior’s code of the bardic tradition begins to look more like a
secular, western just-war doctrine, to be contrasted with the religious
crusade.”
159
The New Testament finally provides a counterpoint of irenic
moderation, replacing retaliation with an ethic of nonresistance. Christ
exhorts his followers to turn the other cheek to blows, to love their enemies,
and to leave revenge to God. On the other hand, numerous passages in the
Gospels express an “unquestioning acceptance of soldiers and war.”
160

Similarly, pre-Constantinian patristic literature is replete with militaristic

1966), 122–35.
158
Elmer A. Martens, “Toward Shalom: Absorbing the Violence,” in War in the Bible
and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Richard S. Hess and Elmer A. Martens, vol. 2
(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 50.
159
Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, 97.
160
Michell Desjardins, Peace, Violence and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1997), 62.
85

imagery.
161
This ambiguity on the issue of warfare in the New Testament left
the door open for accommodation to the exigencies of Roman militarism.
Master Narratives of Republic and Empire
The ancient Romans sought to establish warfare as a realm of activity
outside the city and yet integrated with it through religious rituals that
worked to demarcate the temporal and spatial boundaries of hostilities.
162

Since its earliest iterations, the Roman conception of Just War focused on
proclaiming Rome’s righteous claim to what is owed.
163
In Rome’s early
history, traditional rites of diplomacy and war were entrusted to a college of

161
The Church Fathers described the church as an army, and Tertullian introduced
the Latin term sacramentum, used for the oath that Roman soldiers swore on the military
standard, to characterize baptismal vows. William Brede Kristensen, The Meaning of
Religion: Lectures in the Phenomenology of Religion, trans. John B. Carman (Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Springer, 1960), 453–55. Historians have long been divided on the issue of
early Christians’ attitude towards war. The modern threshold work is Adolf Harnack,
Militia Christi: The Christian Religion and the Military in the First Three Centuries
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). For an important study of the scriptural sources from a
Christian pacifist’s viewpoint, see Cecil John Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War: A
Contribution to the History of Christian Ethics (London: Headley Bros. Publishers, 1919).
162
Yvon Garlan, War in the Ancient World: A Social History, trans. Janet Lloyd
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), 41. The ius fetiale embodied the religious laws of war and
peace in early Rome. When a dispute arose between Rome and a foreign tribe, the rules
established that an emissary priest, the pater patratus, be sent to the potential enemy to
relay Rome’s demands. If, after thirty-three days, no redress was offered, the pater patratus
was tasked with establishing the fas – the confirmation that a war, or any other enterprise,
incurred divine favor – and with issuing, as orator, the formal declaration of war. The envoy
would return to the boundary of the hostile territory to recite a formula of war and throw a
spear onto the enemy’s territory. For the text of the fetial formula for declaring war, see
Frederic D. Allen, Remnants of Early Latin: Selected and Explained for the Use of Students
(Boston, MA: Ginn & Heath, 1880), 78.
163
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, “Censorship a Philological (and Rhetorical) Viewpoint,”
The Public-Javnost: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 11,
no. 2 (2004): 10. The process shows strong analogies to the legis actio, the ancient Roman
civil procedure characterized by particular forms of speech and the formal recitation of legal
formulas. See Alan Watson, International Law in Archaic Rome: War and Religion
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 24–27.
86

twenty priests-magistrates, called the fetiales, whose duties included also the
contracting of alliances, the foedus, and the setting of armistice conditions.
After the performance of the sacred rituals, the Roman Senate could declare
“pure and pious war” (purum piumque duellum) on a tribe or city in pursuit
of the republic’s due.
164
A Just War was an offensive war initiated by the
Romans to vindicate an injury.
165
The fetial ritual was performed only in
special cases to court divine favor for wars that Rome was not certain of
winning, notably the Punic Wars and the Macedonian wars against Philip V
and Perseus.
166

In the process of mastering vast swaths of neighboring territories, and
especially after the conquest of the Greek-speaking East in the second
century BCE, these ritual formulas fell in disuse. At the same time, the
Romans became more and more concerned with justifying their territorial
expansion. By the Late Republic (133-31 BCE), these pressures had
contributed to the emergence of a Roman Just War ideology. According to
this ideology, “all of Rome’s external wars were just ones, undertaken with
the purpose of defending allies (socii et amici) or answering aggression

164
Roger D. Woodard, “Fetiales,” ed. Roger S. Bagnall et al., The Encyclopedia of
Ancient History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013).
165
Later Octavian Augustus created the cult of Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger) to
mark his victory over Julio Caesar’s murderers and the recovery of Rome’s military
standards from the Parthians.
166
Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq, 19.
87

(whether actual or potential) on the part of Rome’s enemies.”
167
This
developing discursive repertoire included themes of Roman benevolence and
good faith, as well as claims that Rome fought only defensive wars and that
those conquered were unfit to rule themselves.
168
Among the common topoi
of Graeco-Roman Just War discourse, was the claim of spreading a higher
civilization and the affirmation of a just peace as the aim and expected result
of a just war.
169

In this period, Rome experienced intensifying civil strife as the elites
competed fiercely for the power and resources enabled by the expanding
empire. In this context, civil wars came to be an acceptable means of
securing liberty, “a regrettable but necessary last resort for the restoration of
political and social harmony within the res publica.”
170
Later on, the
Augustan notion of pax, “peace through victorious wars” (both civil and
foreign) emerged as the epicenter of this ideology.
171
The imperial pax

167
Philip De Souza, “Parta Victoriis Pax: Roman Emperors as Peacemakers,” in War
and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, ed. Philip De Souza and John France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 77. See also Bellamy, Just Wars: From
Cicero to Iraq, 19.
168
William Vernon Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome: 327-70 BC
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 171–72.
169
Jane Webster, “The Just War: Graeco-Roman Texts as Colonial Discourse,” in
Trac 94: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference,
Durham 1994, ed. Sally Cottam et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1994), 1–10.
170
De Souza, “Parta Victoriis Pax: Roman Emperors as Peacemakers,” 77.
171
This passage from Suetonius’ Life of Augustus serves as a succinct statement of
imperial rhetoric in this regard: “He never made war on any nation without just and due
cause, and he was so far from desiring to increase his dominion or his military glory at any
cost, that he forced the chiefs of certain barbarians to take oath in the temple of Mars the
Avenger that they would faithfully keep the peace for which they asked” (21.1). Suetonius,
88

romana represented a “direct concept of order (including the absence of
violence) and unity” radiating from the ruling metropolitan center.
172

Cicero’s works are among the best ancient sources available for clues of
the Roman ideology of war and peace.
173
The orator and statesman developed
the moral and legal principles of Just War from Greek antecedents. Aristotle
had been among the first to describe the characteristics of a just war in the
Politics.
174
The Stagirite stated that the telos of war should be peace: war is a
useful means to peace and the virtuous life, not an end in itself. Most
importantly, citizens should not imitate the Spartans and “study war with a
view to the enslavement of those who do not deserve to be enslaved,” but
rather to “provide against their own enslavement, and in the second place
obtain empire for the good of the governed . . . and in the third place they
should seek to be masters only over those who deserve to be slaves” (Politics
1333b40-1334a2). Conversely, for Aristotle “the art of acquiring slaves” was

Lives of the Caesars, trans. John Carew Rolfe, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1914).

172
Johan Galtung, “Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace,” Journal of Peace
Research 18, no. 2 (1981): 187.
173
De Souza, “Parta Victoriis Pax: Roman Emperors as Peacemakers,” 78. For more
on Cicero’s Just War thought, see William Charles Korfmacher, “Cicero and the Bellum
Iustum,” The Classical Bulletin 48, no. 4 (1972): 49–52.
174
Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975). Here is the relevant passage: “The art of war is a natural art of
acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practise
against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will
not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just” (Politics, 1256b22-26). Aristotle, The
Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. William David Ross (New York:
Random House, 1941).

89

“a species of hunting or war” (1255b38), a practice of acquisition.
In the treatise On Duties (c. 44 BCE), a sort of handbook for the ideal
statesman, Cicero tried to reconcile Rome’s early wars with philosophical
ideas about war and justice. He began with a succinct statement of the neo-
Stoic view of warfare:
Of justice, the first office is that no man should harm another unless
he has been provoked by injustice; the next that one should treat
common goods as common and private ones as one’s own. Now no
property is private by nature, but rather by long occupation (as when
men moved into some empty property in the past), or by victory (when
they acquired it in war), or by law, by settlement, by agreement, or by
lot. (On Duties 1.20-21)

The basic assumptions about the vindicative and judicial purposes of warfare
echo those of Greek philosophy.
175
Wars of conquest are justified “to enlarge
the boundaries of peace, order and justice.”
176
Implicit in this passage is also
the association between private property and warfare: conquest and plunder
are considered a legitimate means of acquiring property, provided that the
victors conquer in a just war waged at the provocation of a wrongdoer. On
the other hand, Cicero’s neo-Stoic orientation lacks a separate category of
total war of the kind advocated by the Greeks against barbarians and by
Aristotle against natural slaves.
The commonplace of peitho as privileged alternative to bia is
complemented by a view that sees the resort to force as legitimate or

175
Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare, 127.
176
Robert Nugen Wilkin, Eternal Lawyer: A Legal Biography of Cicero (New York:
Macmillan, 1947), 65.
90

inevitable once persuasion fails. Cicero distinguishes between two kinds of
conflict, one that “proceeds by debate [per disceptationem]” and the other “by
force [per vim];” after declaring that, of these, “the former is the proper
concern of a man, but the latter of beasts,” Cicero stipulated that “one should
only resort to the latter if one may not employ the former” (1.34).
177

Therefore, resort to war is legitimate only after diplomatic means have been
tried out and exhausted. “Wars, then,” he continues, “ought to be undertaken
for this purpose, that we may live in peace, without injustice [ut sine iniuria
in pace vivatur]; and once victory has been secured, those who were not cruel
or savage in warfare should be spared” (1.35).
178
These norms, according to
Cicero, are reflected in the “fair code of warfare” of the fetial laws, which
stipulated that “no war is just unless it is waged after a formal demand for
restoration [rebus repetitis], or unless it has been formally announced and
declared beforehand” (1.36). When compared to wars for the recovery of
property, the second type of wars, which are waged “for imperial dominance
[de imperio],” should also be prosecuted in the interest of peace, but less
brutally compared to wars for survival, “just as in civilian matters we may

177
Cicero, On Duties, ed. Miriam Tamara Griffin, trans. E. Margaret Atkins
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
178
As evidence of Roman restraint in war, Cicero also mentions the older practice of
referring to an enemy as hostis (guest, stranger), rather than using the harsher term
perduellis (foe, fighting enemy). Treaties are inviolable. As proof of this Cicero cites the
ancestors’ concern for respecting the agreements made with their enemies in war time, even
when a promise had been “constrained by circumstance” (1.37-39). On the other hand, one is
not bound to keep promises with pirates, “for a pirate is not counted as an enemy proper, but
is the common foe of all” (3.107).
91

compete in one way with an enemy [inimicus], in another with a rival
[competitor] (for the latter contest is for honour and standing, the former for
one’s civic life or reputation)” (1.38).
In the Ciceronian tradition, a just war is only waged as a form of
extraordinary justice to avenge a wrong and compensate for loss. Injustice
includes both acts of commission and omission: “Anyone who makes an
unjust attack on another, whether driven by anger or by some other
agitation, seems to be laying hands, so to speak, upon a fellow. But also, the
man who does not defend someone, or obstruct the injustice when he can, is
at fault just as if he had abandoned his parents or his friends or his country”
(1.23). Vindicating an injury done to one’s fellow man is a common moral
obligation to be pursued in accordance with fairness (aequitas) and humanity
(humanitas). Cicero idealized the commitment of the early Republic to serve
as a bulwark for those who needed protection, arguing that, in the past,
“wars were waged either on behalf of allies or about imperial rule; wars were
ended with mercy or through necessity. . . . In this way we could more truly
have been titled a protectorate [patrocinium] than an empire [imperium] of
the world” (2.26-27). Moreover, this altruistic mission is in the nature of
things, since it is natural for the strong to rule over the weak for the benefit
of the latter (On the Commonwealth 3.27).
179
In this and other passages

179
Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
92

Cicero gives voice to Rome’s ideological claims to legitimate authority in the
resort to military force. This legitimizing discourse served to distinguish
latrocinium (banditry) from patrocinium (protection), tyrannical usurpers
from rightful emperors, brigands from soldiers.
180

The fall of the Republic, the reign of empire, and the triumph of
Christianity offer an epochal narrative within which the fate of modern
democracies is sometimes rehearsed. The declinist theory of history projects
an apocalyptic end times to things. These political views do fuel extreme,
fundamentalist movements with attend rhetoric that calls for either active
intervention to move along to end times or passive withdrawal. On the other
hand, these rhetorics also shape the stasis of public policy argument. The
dissertation turns to four select moments in which there has been a
committed effort to define Just War in the West.
The City of God and the Natural City
In the remainder of the chapter I map the transition of the Just War
from the Augustinian synthesis of classical and religious views to its
rationalization by Thomas Aquinas. After a brief exploration of holy war and
the Crusades, I move to modern secular versions of the Just War embedded
in international law with Francisco Vitoria’s reformulation of Just War
notions in the context of the debate over the treatment of groups of

180
Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence
in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20. See also
Brent D. Shaw, “Bandits in the Roman Empire,” Past & Present, no. 105 (1984): 3–52.
93

indigenous peoples and Hugo Grotius’ establishment of sovereignty brought
into realization in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This assortment of
narratives poses public moral values as good reasons for choices to establish
reasonably productive practices when destructive actions may or may not be
a good and useful thing. Christian religion marshaled faith and reason to
construct narratives of choice and obligation for addressing war and peace.
Sometimes the broad orientation is irenic and moderating, other times it
feeds the deep antagonism (and identification) of holy war.
Augustine of Hippo and Just War in a Disordered World
Augustine of Hippo was one of the first to reconcile Christianity with
participation in warfare. He is considered the father of the Just War
tradition in the West.
181
Augustine reoriented the Roman notion of Just War

181
Aurelius Augustinus (354-430) was born in Tagaste in the highlands of Numidia
in North Africa. He received a fine classical education and started his career as a Quintilian-
influenced teacher of rhetoric. Since 396 Augustine was bishop of the North African province
of Hippo Regius. Augustine would become the leading theologian and apologist of the Roman
Church in North Africa, putting his mastery of classical eloquence at work to formulate a
theology suited for the Roman Empire and to defend the Church against internal and
external enemies. Augustine emerged as a prominent figure within the North African
Catholic Church, whose network of influential relationships included several high-ranking
imperial officials. While few authors match the influence of Augustine in the history of
Western thought, his writing style resists summary and schematization. The sheer amount
of scholarship and commentary concerning different aspects of Augustinian thought testifies
to the complexity involved. The standard modern biography is Peter R. Brown, Augustine of
Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For a view of the
historical political and social context in Augustine’s time, see Robert A. Markus, Saeculum:
History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988). For a picture of Augustine’s life as a bishop, see Gerald Bonner, St. Augustine
of Hippo: Life and Controversies (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2002). For comprehensive
studies of Augustine’s political and social thought, see, e.g., Herbert A. Deane, The Political
and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); John M.
Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
94

by shifting its grounds from a republican to a Christian warrant.
182
In this
process Augustine integrated elements of Ciceronian thought, and Stoic and
Platonic philosophy within a Christian theopolitical framework. Augustine
never developed a unified, systematic theory of Just War. Rather, he
presented his reflections on war in the context of his pastoral concerns and
his polemical engagements with pagans, schismatics, and heretical sects.
183

182
As John Mattox noted, “the whole Western just-war tradition that follows from the
fifth century AD on, in both its Christian and secular varieties, traces its roots not to Plato or
Aristotle, nor even to earlier Church Fathers, but rather to Augustine.” John Mark Mattox,
St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War (New York: Continuum, 2006), 2 (emphasis in
original). See also Jonathan Barnes, “The Just War,” in The Cambridge History of Later
Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism,
1100-1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
771–84. Contemporary Just War thinkers consistently trace the roots of the tradition to
Augustine rather than to the contributions of Graeco-Roman philosophy and of other early
Church Fathers. As Louis J. Swift remarked, “no writer of the early Church has contributed
more to the development of Christian attitudes regarding war, violence and military service
than Saint Augustine.” Louis J. Swift, The Early Fathers on War and Military Service
(Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983), 110. Similarly, according to James Turner
Johnson, the origins of the Just War tradition go back to “the classic Augustinian
understanding of politics and the grounding of that understanding in Augustine’s theology of
history as laid out in City of God.” Johnson, The War to Oust Saddam Hussein, 129. See
also Robert L. Holmes, “St. Augustine and the Just War Theory,” in The Augustinian
Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 323.
There is an extensive literature on Augustine’s Just War thought. See John Langan, “The
Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 12, no. 1
(1984): 19–38; David A. Lenihan, “The Just War Theory in the Work of Saint Augustine,”
Augustinian Studies 19 (1988): 37–70; Robert A. Markus, “Saint Augustine’s Views on the
‘Just War,’” Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 1–13; Paul Ramsey, “The Just War
According to St. Augustine,” in Just War Theory, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: New
York University Press, 1992), 8–22; Frederick H. Russell, “Love and Hate in Medieval
Warfare: The Contribution of Saint Augustine.,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 31 (1987):
108–24.
183
David Lenihan located eight major statements on war in the Augustinian corpus:
1) On Free Will 1.5; 2) Reply to Faustus, the Manichaean 22; 3) Letter 138; 4) Letter 189; 5)
Letter 222; 6) Questions on the Heptateuch 6.10; 7) Sermon 302; 8) City of God. Lenihan,
“The Just War Theory in the Work of Saint Augustine,” 42. Robert Holmes followed Lenihan
in identifying these as the main places where Augustine deals with the problem of war.
Robert L. Holmes, “St. Augustine and the Just War Theory,” in The Augustinian Tradition,
ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 339. Jonathan
Barnes identified the following Augustinian loci on war, arranged chronologically: Reply to
95

In the words of Peter Brown, Augustine’s foremost contemporary biographer,
Augustine’s thinking “never appears as a ‘doctrine’ in a state of rest: it is
marked by a painful and protracted attempt to embrace and resolve tensions”
and, as such, is best understood as “an ‘attitude’.”
184
In this light,
Augustinian thinking on Just War should be approached, not as a closed
theoretical system, but as an unfolding discursus, that is, ‘a running to and
fro’ and evaluating the pros and cons of war from a view that mixed current
events with Roman and Christian perspectives.
185
This Augustinian
discursus on war is a collection of movements circulating on different
trajectories at once that gets assembled and reassembled in later discursive
iterations with shifting emphases.
In the context of the late Roman empire, the main tensions involved in
Christian attitudes toward violence emerge in the context of pastoral works,
such as those examining whether converted soldiers could continue their
military service, and in polemical and apologetic writings about the nature of

Faustus, the Manichaean 22.74-8; Letter 138; City of God 15.4; 19.7, 12-15; Letter 189;
Sermon 302; Questions on the Heptateuch 4.44; 6.10; Letter 229. Barnes, “The Just War,”
771.
184
Peter R. Brown, “St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion,” The Journal of
Roman Studies 54, no. 1–2 (1964): 107.
185
Nevertheless, students of Augustinian Just War tend to approach Augustine’s
writings on war as a coherent whole. For example, Mattox suggested that “when woven
together, they constitute a remarkable tapestry,” particularly if examined in combination
with Augustine’s comments on “a number of themes allied to the topic of just war . . . such as
the use of violence by the state in the punishing of criminals or in coercing religious
practice.” Mattox, St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, 5.
96

Christian participation in public life.
186
Christian writers sought to recast
the Roman idea of aeternitas – a revised version of the ancient myth of the
Golden Age, according to which Augustus Caesar restores Rome to a
perpetual and universal pax romana – as the fulfillment of Rome’s historical
purpose as the center of Christianity.
187
The Christian emperors sought to
turn the Catholic faith into a new principle of social cohesion – one in which
the state served to defend “the peace of the Church.”
188

The early dialogue On Free Will, which Augustine started soon after
his baptism in 387 CE, established the link between war and theodicy in
Augustine’s thought.
189
In Book 1, chapter 5, Augustine examined the
morality of deliberate killing for public officials (soldiers, ‘police’ ante
litteram) and regular citizens. The question that animates this section of the
dialogue is: Is killing someone a sin, even when it is legal, such as in the case
of individual self-defense? At stake is the possibility, for Christians, to serve
as soldiers, judges, and executioners, that is, in those roles whose basic
function is to execute state authority.
190
The solution for Augustine rests on

186
James F. Childress, “Moral Discourse about War in the Early Church,” The
Journal of Religious Ethics 12, no. 1 (1984): 2–18.
187
Markus, Saeculum.
188
Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought
and Action from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 335–37.
189
The treatise is written for the educated elites of the Roman Empire and aims to
give a Christian response to the problem of evil that they would find more persuasive than
Manichaean dualism. In On Free Will, Augustine formulates his famous free-will defense.
190
James Q. Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the
Criminal Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 30.
97

the different motives of public officials vis-à-vis regular citizens. On one
hand, private citizens are morally prohibited to kill, even in self-defense,
because “they are free not to kill anyone for the sake of things which they can
lose against their will, and therefore ought not to love” (On Free Will 1.5
12).
191
The soldier and the public official, on the other hand, may perform
their duties, including killing, on behalf of authority. They are instruments
of the law, and therefore their motives and goals are untainted by corrupt
desires (libido).
192
In Letter 47 to Publicola (c. 398), Augustine, now the
bishop of Hippo for two years, reiterated this position: “As to killing others in
order to defend one’s own life, I do not approve of this, unless one happen[s]
to be a soldier or public functionary acting, not for himself, but in defence of
others or of the city in which he resides, if he act[s] according to the
commission lawfully given him, and in the manner becoming his office”
(Letter 47.5).
193

The system of rhetoric was incorporated into theology and the exegesis
of secular and sacred sources. Augustine’s understanding of war is refracted

191
Augustine, Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. John H. S. Burleigh, vol. 6, The
Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1953), 119.
192
In the process, Augustine’s arguments “allowed Christians to deny meaningful
personal agency: they could declare themselves to be acting not in their own persons but
merely as ‘ministers of the law.’” Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, 40. For a
different reading of the same passage, see Robert L. Holmes, On War and Morality
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 114–45.
193
Augustine, “Letter 47: Augustine to Publicola (398),” in The Confessions and
Letters of St. Augustin [Sic]: With a Sketch of His Life and Work, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J.
G. Cunningham, vol. 1 [1st Series], A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
of the Christian Church (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1886), 293,
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1903.
98

by his theory of res (things), signa (signs), and their relationship. While all
teaching is done through words and other signs, we can learn nothing by
means of words only. Words, and signs more in general, “bid us look for
things, but they do not show them to us so that we may know them,” since
“their meaning we learn not from hearing their sound when they are uttered,
but from getting to know the things they signify” (The Teacher 11.36).
194

Words remain meaningless unless the hearer knows the signified things in
themselves. As he wrote in On the Christian Doctrine (a treatise begun in
396, and completed only much later, in 427), “all instruction [doctrina] is
either about things or about signs”, and while, strictly speaking, a thing is
“that which is never employed as a sign of something else,” there are things –
such as “the wood which we read Moses cast into the bitter waters to make
them sweet,” or “the stone which Jacob used as a pillow” or “the ram which
Abraham offered up instead of his son” – which “are also signs of other
things,” and, finally, “there are signs of another kind, those that are never
employed except as signs: for example, words” (On the Christian Doctrine
1.2.2).
195
As Richard McKeon remarked in a landmark study of medieval
rhetoric, the three questions that Augustine identified as common to all

194
Augustine, On Free Will, 6:94. As John Rist pointed out, “what he [Augustine]
intends to make plain is that words (and more generally signs) are a necessary but not
sufficient condition of learning.” Rist, Augustine, 32.
195
Augustine, St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff,
trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the
Christian Church (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 523,
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2053.
99

inquiry after “Cicero’s three ‘constitutions of causes’ – whether a thing is,
that it is, and what sort.”
196
According to Augustine, the biblical fall from
grace made humans dependent on speech and other external signs as means
of communication. Words are necessary to live in communities whose
members are ignorant of each other and divided in their objects of love. As
Augustinian scholar Charles Mathewes posited, suffering for Augustine “is
quite literally ‘useful’ because it forces us to move from material or worldly
(or ‘carnal’) to spiritual affections . . . Sin, evil, and suffering are signs that
something is wrong in the world.”
197
Force and necessity, therefore, are all
part of that divinely-ordained economy of signs whose function is to
‘persuade’ sinners to live their lives according to the faith. This divine
discipline amounted to a sort of per molestias eruditio (teaching by
inconveniences). As Augustine himself pointed out, “learning [disciplina] is
derived from the verb ‘to learn’ [discere]” (The Teacher 1.2).
198

Ultimately, the spread of Christianity did not forestall the
disintegration of the imperial order. During Augustine’s life, that order was

196
Richard McKeon, “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 17, no. 01 (1942): 5.
See Confessions 10.10.17. Augustine, The Confessions and Letters of St. Augustin [Sic]: With
a Sketch of His Life and Work, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. G. Pilkington, vol. 1 [1st Series], A
Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Buffalo, NY:
Christian Literature Company, 1886), 146, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1903.
197
Charles Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 207 (emphasis in original).
198
Augustine, On Free Will, 6:114. Varro also links disciplina “instruction” to discere
“to learn.” Disciplina was commonly connected to discere, but it actually came from
discipulus, which derived from dis+capere “to take apart (for examination).” See translator
note to Varro, On the Latin Language 6.7.62. Marcus Terentius Varro, On the Latin
Language, trans. Roland Grubb Kent (London: William Heinemann, 1938), 230.
100

falling apart at the seams. In northern Europe and central Asia, migrating
tribes put pressure on the imperial frontiers and contributed to the outbreak
of civil wars within the provinces. In northern Africa, the empire was
threatened from without, by the incursions of Vandal tribes, and from within,
by native insurgencies. This state of social turmoil and dislocation influenced
Augustine’s pessimistic attitude about the possibilities of political
association. One way to formulate the question that animated Augustine’s
inquiry, as formulated by Robert Dyson, was this: “How are we to account for
the fact that relationships of power and dominion now exist even though God
did not intend that they should?”
199
This problem had turned increasingly
thorny after the conversion of emperor Constantine, as the faithful wondered
about the role of violence and soldiers in a Christian society.
200

This state of dislocation and turmoil influenced Augustine’s conception
of politics. Although he saw people as naturally gregarious, Augustine did
not conceive of political association as part of this natural, God-given human

199
Robert W. Dyson, St. Augustine of Hippo: The Christian Transformation of
Political Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), 52. This question has been and still is
today the starting point of theodicy, literally ‘the justice of God.’ This started a millennium
and a half ago as the preoccupation of Christian theologians looking for a convincing
explanation that would get an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God ‘off the hook’ for
the enduring presence of meaningless suffering and injustice in the world. The fundamental
concern of theodicy however is older even, at least as old as the question: Si deus, unde
malum? (If God exists, where does evil come from?). In a more general sense, the problem of
evil can be considered a sub-species of the “challenge of evil,” an historically common concern
that has troubled and keeps troubling the experience of ordinary people. It is a challenge
that exposes the deep ‘holes’ that puncture our notions of individual autonomy and moral
agency, the cracks in our subjectivist assumptions of mastery over “external” reality and also
over ourselves. See Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 25.
200
Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 25.
101

sociability. His vision of the original divine plan was for men to rule over
their families and the earth as equals, not to dominate others. Politics, in
Augustine’s view, emerged as an expression and product of libido dominandi,
the desire to dominate, and nocendi cupiditas, the urge to harm others. It
originates from strife and discord, and its practice thrives in conflict and
division. Therefore, political association is a tool of oppression, and, as such,
there is nothing ‘natural,’ in the sense of naturally good, in political
constitutions past or present. The existence of government thus is an
enduring testimony to human moral corruption. At the same time,
government and laws are also the means to remedy, albeit only partially, the
negative effects of our sinful nature, and, finally, they are instruments of
divine discipline for the reprobate and the righteous alike.
201
And so is war.
Augustine thought of Just War as “the punishment imposed upon a state and
upon its rulers when their behavior is so aggressive or avaricious that it
violates even the norms of temporal justice. Other states then have not
merely the right but the duty to punish these crimes and to act in the same
fashion as the judge, policeman, jailer, and executioner act within the

201
For Augustine, as for other pre-modern Christians, “law and war went together,”
and therefore “the theology of just judging was essentially identical with the theology of just
war.” Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, 30. These roles were associated to the act
of shedding blood. In the late fourth century, the theological focus gradually shifted from
concerns over pollution – how to purify judges and soldiers tainted with blood so that they
could take communion – to assessment of guilt based on certain criteria and circumstances.
In discussing killing Augustine avoided the language of blood pollution altogether in favor of
a different moral discourse which prioritized authority and intention.
102

state.”
202
Political action in matters of war is “exercise of authorized power”
through the frame of “compelling necessity.”
203
This means that Just War
reasoning in the Augustinian tradition does not function as an exculpatory or
licensing device but rather as a reasoning matrix to discern obligatory uses of
force rooted in a Christian theology of judgment.
The suffering caused by war has pedagogical and punitive functions.
204

This aspect of Augustine’s thought emerges from his defense of the morality
of Israel’s divinely commanded wars against the pacifism of the
Manichaeans.
205
In this oft-quoted passage, Augustine argues that the Old
Testament used war as an instrument to punish both the wicked and the
good:
What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any
case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere
cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling. The real evils in war are
love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild
resistance, and the lust of power, and such like; and it is generally to
punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment,
that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men

202
Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine, 156.
203
Charles Mathewes, The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 168 (emphasis in original).
204
Brown, “St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion.”
205
The Manichaeans were followers of Mani, a prophet who two centuries earlier had
founded a religious movement that Augustine himself had joined for a decade or so.
Manichaeism was characterized by metaphysical and moral dualism and by a pacifistic and
non-violent orientation. While the apologetic controversy with Faustus involved Augustine
in debate “over whether the Old Testament was to be received,” the dispute with the
Donatists “turned on how the Old Testament was to be received.” Michael Cameron, “The
Christological Substructure of Augustine’s Figurative Exegesis,” in Augustine and the Bible,
ed. Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 97–98
(emphasis in original).
103

undertake wars. (Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 22.74)
206

Ultimately, Augustine remarked, “the natural order which seeks the peace of
mankind, ordains that the monarch should have the power of undertaking
war if he thinks it advisable, and that the soldiers should perform their
military duties in behalf of the peace and safety of the community” (22.75).
Later in the same work Augustine further clarified his position. The New
Testament ethic of nonresistance, epitomized by Christ’s injunction to resist
no evil, does not address “a bodily action, but an inward disposition” of the
heart; yet the time of “our fathers, the righteous men of old,” called for “such
a regulation of events, and such a distinction of times, as to show first of all
that even earthly blessings,” such as territorial conquests and victories in
war, “are entirely under the control and at the disposal of the one true God”
(22.76).
The two events that exercised the most influence on Augustine’s
thinking about war were the Visigoth’s sack of Rome in 410 CE, and the
Catholic Church’s struggle with the schismatic Donatist faction. The sack of
Rome, which took place during the prime of Augustine’s life, shook the
epistemic and moral foundations of the Roman Empire.
207
Given emperor

206
Augustine, St. Augustine: The Writings against the Manichaeans, and against the
Donatists, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Richard Stothert, vol. 4, A Select Library of the Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature
Company, 1887), 301, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2116.
207
Jean Bethke Elshtain compared the shock of the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon to the fall of Rome in 410 CE. Elshtain’s analogy conveys the
perception of a radical shattering of taken-for-granted social (and metaphysical)
104

Theodosius I’s recent adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the
empire, many Romans saw the sack as the ancient gods’ punishment for
Rome’s repudiation of the temples.
208
Detractors took Christ’s injunction to
turn the other cheek as proof that Christianity was incompatible with
citizenship, for, they asked, “who would be unwilling to inflict evil, in the
form of a just war, as recompense for the ravaging of a Roman province?”
(Letter 136.2).
209
The event prompted Augustine to write The City of God
Against the Pagans, a lengthy apologetic, published in fascicules between 413
and 426, to vindicate God against those who blamed Christians for the
disaster and questioned their loyalty to Rome.
Around the same time, Augustine was also tasked with responding to
the pars Donati, a local secessionist movement of Christians who denied the
authority of the Catholic Church, destabilizing the empire’s north African

assumptions. However, a quick look into the recent history of references to the ‘sack of
Rome’ in the works of post-World-War-II Christian Realists suggests a pattern of continuity,
rather than rupture. As Charles Jones noted, “Augustine lived in a remote world, yet one
which came to be seen by many Christians of the mid-twentieth century as quite closely
analogous to their own. . . . era of total moral confrontation between the Church and the
secular totalitarian ideologies of Fascism and Communism.” Charles A. Jones, “Christian
Realism and the Foundations of the English School,” International Relations 17, no. 3 (2003):
375.
208
Church apologists defended against accusations that Christians enjoyed the
benefits of empire without sharing in the duty to protect it. This was the famous charge that
the second-century pagan critic Celsus leveraged against Christians, as quoted by Origen.
Origen, “Against Celsus,” in From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political
Thought 100-1625, ed. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1999), 41–45.
209
Marcellinus, “Letter 136: Marcellinus to Augustine (411/412),” in Augustine:
Political Writings, ed. E. Margaret Atkins and Robert Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 29.
105

periphery.
210
The Romanized elites in particular feared the so-called
Circumcellions, an extremist fringe of Donatist agonistici (militants) that
roamed the African countryside.
211
Augustine seemed torn on the issue of
whether persuasion or coercion should be used to deal with paganism and
heresy. At first, Augustine had advocated the use of peaceful persuasion
rather than force in dealing with the Donatists and sought personally to
engage Donatist bishops and laymen in public debates and epistolary
exchanges. As time went by, however, the Donatists still refused to come
back to the Catholic fold. This prompted Augustine to change course, going
to great lengths to persuade imperial authorities to intervene on the side of
orthodoxy.
For Augustine, there were two kinds of people distinguished by the
objects of their love. He described these two incommensurable groups with
the metaphor of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly. The earthly city
is divided against itself:
The earthly city is often divided against itself by litigations, wars,
quarrels, and such victories as are either life-destroying or short-lived.
For each part of it that arms against another part of it seeks to

210
Henry Chadwick, “Donatism,” in The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to
Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 382–93.
211
There is widespread disagreement among contemporary scholars concerning the
nature, causes and characteristics of Donatism and other popular religious movements in
late antique Roman North Africa. Part of the problem comes from the fact that most
documentary texts reflect the perspective of the Donatists’ opponents. It is interesting to
note here that the very term “Circumcellions” used by the Catholic leadership was meant as
a slur with evocations of low status, rootless men inclined to violence. See Brent D. Shaw,
Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
106

triumph over the nations though itself in bondage to vice. (City of God
15.4)

Indeed, as Augustine wrote, both the city of Cain and its later earthly
embodiment, the city founded by Romulus, were born of fratricidal acts. It
follows that civil war is the permanent condition of the city of man. And
what are the goods which the earthly city seeks? The foremost good that this
city goes to war for is “earthly peace for the sake of enjoying earthly goods;”
this peace, Augustine conceded, is desirable, “when victory remains with the
party which had the juster cause” (15.4). Achieving this peace, characterized
as the tranquility of order (tranquillitas ordinis) is the end of political life. In
the earthly present (saeculum), the two cities are intermingled. This
Augustinian topos of authority has developed in the enduring Western theme
of Just War that to this day associates the performance and renewal of
political authority with the duty to establish order out of chaos by a
measured application of force.
212

Augustine introduced his formula for the Just War only once in his
written corpus in the Questions on the Heptateuch (419 CE). Here Augustine
defined just wars as “those that avenge injuries, if some nation or state
against whom one is waging war has neglected to punish a wrong committed
by its citizens, or to return something that was wrongly taken” (Questions on

212
Ira R. Chernus, “Religion, War, and Peace,” in The Columbia Guide to Religion in
American History, ed. Paul Harvey and Edward Blum (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012), 184.
107

the Heptateuch 6.10).
213
Augustine followed Cicero in conceiving of a just war
as a means for seeking redress and for restoring the violated moral order, a
task which involves reforming the malefactor. At the same time, Augustine
also modified the Ciceronian formulation to fit the needs of the Christian
Roman Empire by identifying law (ius) with divine righteousness (vera
iustitia).
This earthly condition will not last unless the higher goods are also
pursued. A person of good intentions thus will not shrink from severely using
discipline to move a fellow being away from error and toward reformation.
The activity of keeping the imperial order through violence is analogous to
the legitimate use of violence by the father (pater familias) to maintain
household peace (pax domestica).
214
In this view:
If any member of the family interrupts the domestic peace by
disobedience, he is corrected either by word or blow, or some kind of
just and legitimate punishment, such as society permits, that he may
himself be the better for it, and be readjusted to the family harmony
from which he had dislocated oneself. . . . To be innocent, we must not
only do harm to no man, but also restrain him from sin or punish his
sin, so that either the man himself who is punished may profit by his
experience, or others be warned by his example. (The City of God,
19.16)

All this is coherent with, and indeed required by, one’s loving attitude. For
even if “everyone knows that a person cannot be condemned unless his evil

213
Quoted in Mattox, St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, 46.
214
Shawn Kaplan, “Punitive Warfare, Counterterrorism and Jus Ad Bellum,” in Just
War Theory in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Fritz Allhoff, Nicholas G. Evans, and Adam
Henschke (New York: Routledge, 2013), 236–50.
108

will deserves it,” Augustine maintained, “that is no good reason to abandon
those one loves to their evil will, by cruelly neglecting to punish them” (Letter
173.2).
215

Determined to stamp out the Donatists, Augustine ultimately came to
argue, in one of his letters to Boniface, a Roman military commander
stationed in Africa, that “there is such a thing as unjust pursuit, which the
impious inflict on the church of Christ, and there is such a thing as just
pursuit, which the churches of Christ inflict on the impious” (Letter
185.11).
216
Preserving the unity of the Church was a just cause warranting
the use of imperial violence; heretics and schismatics could be persecuted by
imperial decrees in order to liberate those who desired to rejoin the Catholic
Church but were fearful of violent retaliation at the hand of extremist
Donatists and to restore Catholic peace and order for the provincial
population. To those who “object that the apostles did not make such
requests of earthly kings,” Augustine retorted that it was then “a different
time,” when no ruler believed in Christ; now, however, a Christian emperor
has a double duty to God: “As a man, he serves by living faithfully, as a king
by sanctioning with suitable vigour laws that order just behaviour and

215
Augustine, “Letter 173: Augustine to Donatus (411/414),” in Augustine: Political
Writings, ed. E. Margaret Atkins and Robert Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 152–58.
216
Augustine, “Letter 185: Augustine to Boniface (c. 417),” in Augustine: Political
Writings, ed. E. Margaret Atkins and Robert Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 172–203.
109

prevent its opposite” (185.19). It was in the fulfillment of this service to God
that “the devout and pious emperor . . . chose to use fear and compulsion to
bring into Catholic unity those who were bearing the standards of Christ
against Christ, rather than to suppress only their freedom for violence, and
leave them the freedom to stray and be lost” (185.28). In Augustine’s view,
the emperor – who, since Augustus’ times, already styles himself as the
father of the country, pater patriae – derived its authority from a divine
warrant to uphold God’s interests on earth. For him, the Christian Roman
emperor has “an unquestioned right of cohercitio [coercion/correction], in the
strict legal sense, to punish, restrain, and repress those impious cults over
which God’s providence had given them dominion.”
217

Soldiering is also fully compatible with the Christian faith. “So others
are fighting invisible enemies on your behalf by praying, while you struggle
against visible barbarians on their behalf by fighting” (Letter 189.5), but the
struggle is the same; “if only everyone shared a single faith” (189.5),
Augustine continued, “the fight against the devil would become less
burdensome.”
218
Augustine’s advice to Boniface thus was to prepare for war
with a peaceful disposition: “Peace ought to be what you want, war only what
necessity demands. . . . Be a peacemaker, therefore, even in war, so that by

217
Brown, “St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion,” 110.
218
Augustine, “Letter 189: Augustine to Boniface (417),” in Augustine: Political
Writings, ed. E. Margaret Atkins and Robert Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 214–17.
110

conquering them you bring the benefit of peace even to those you defeat”
(189.6).
Augustine left us with three topics: just cause, public authority, and
right intention (inward disposition aimed at peace, not revenge). His
reflections on the criteria of authority, cause, and intention are modeled on
Old Testament wars and made to accommodate the irenic impulse of the New
Testament to the militaristic tendencies of the Old Testament. These ideas
were to be developed by the medieval canonists into a legal framework that
legitimized just and holy wars and endowed them with legal consequences.
219

In effect, Augustine’s discursus on the topic of organized violence coalesced
into two related discursive threads within the medieval institution of war:
‘‘just war’’ waged on lay authority and ‘‘holy war’’ ordered and sanctioned by
God.
Aquinas and the Rationalization of Just War
Augustine worked on the moral questions of war and peace by
balancing issues of justice against the contentions of practice and needs for
righteous decision. Augustine’s reflective letters found their way into code
through canon law. The law articulated stasis points and thus embedded the

219
Not long after his death, Augustine was credited as the author of the letter Gravi
de Pugna, in which a reluctant warrior was urged to battle with the confidence that God’s
favor would result in victory. The letter, now recognized as apocryphal, was among the most
cited early medieval texts on Holy War and lent support to the Germanic legal institution of
the ordeal, whereby the justice of a cause was proved by the result, and it became “common
opinion thereafter required that wars must serve religious ends in order to be justified, and
conversely viewed successful wars as indicators of divine favor.” Russell, The Just War in the
Middle Ages, 26.
111

stresses of stasis (conflict and resolution, eristic and irenic) in church
institutions. Stasis itself could not be put to question, as the structure of
reasoning reflected the order of natural law. Thomas Aquinas modified
Augustinian agonistics by articulating the view that dominion was grounded
in a reason-based natural law rather than in divine revelation.
220

In his masterpiece, the Summa theologiae (c. 1271-1272), Aquinas
claimed that to define a thing consists of assigning it a genus and then adding
the differentiae.
221
In his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,
Aquinas innovated the traditional Augustinian partition of all teaching
between knowledge about things and knowledge about signs by organizing
instruction into two categories, one concerned with things that have God as
their origin (exitus) and the other with things that have God as their end

220
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was born to a noble family in Roccasecca, close to
Naples. In 1244 he joined the Dominican order and was sent to France to study with the
German theologian Albert the Great. Once he completed his studies, Aquinas served as
master of theology at the University of Paris, Orvieto, Rome, Viterbo, and finally Naples,
where he died in 1274 at only forty-nine years of age. As this brief excursus shows, Aquinas’
career was shaped by the emergence, in Italy and France, of a new institution, the
universitas. The schools of higher learning, with their innovative scholarship on canon law,
Roman law, and theology, had a profound influence on western European thought. Also
important was the rediscovery and translation, starting in the mid-twelfth century, of the
complete works of Aristotle, and the integration into university curricula of works by the
Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes. “Operating on the basic assumption . . . that
‘grace does not contradict nature, but perfects it,’ Aquinas combined tradition, Scripture,
contemporary practice, and Aristotelian philosophical methods to produce a lasting and
influential ‘Thomistic synthesis’ in politics and legal theory.” Paul E. Sigmund, “Law and
Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore
Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 217–18. See Richard W. Southern,
Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Vol. 1: Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995).
221
Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 87.
112

(reditus). According to this neo-platonic scheme, reality therefore moves in
circle (circulatio).
222
The first cause and final end of all things is God.
Aquinas did not have much interest in the subject of war itself, and
much of his writings on Just War amount to restatements of Augustine and
other canonical opinions. Aquinas’ essay “On war,” quaestio 40 situated in
the second part of the second of the Summa Theologiae addressed the
theological virtue of caritas. Lack of Christian charity, or love, can lead to its
opposites, the vices of wrath, discord, or indifference. Aquinas defined just
cause implying that “those against whom war is to be waged must deserve to
have war waged against them because of some wrongdoing,” and quotes
Augustine’s Questions on the Heptateuch: “ ‘A just war is customarily defined
as one which avenges injuries, as when a nation or state deserves to be
punished because it has neglected either to put right the wrongs done by its
people or to restore what it has unjustly seized’ ” (Summa Theologiae IIa2ae,
Q.40, Art. 1).
223

Aquinas’ emphasis on the matter of legitimate authority reflects the
preoccupation with order that characterizes medieval thought. Given the
influence of Aristotelean philia, Richard Miller wrote, “it is no exaggeration
to say about Aquinas’s notions of temporal life what Alasdair McIntyre says

222
Jan A. Aertsen, “Aquinas’ Philosophy in Its Historical Setting,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16.
223
Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. Robert W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
113

about Aristotle’s: ‘Civil war is the worst of evils’.”
224
War against outsiders,
however, was acceptable. The answer that Aquinas gave to the standard
objection that war is incompatible with the Sermon on the Mount follows
Augustine’s emphasis on charity. In one respect, however, Aquinas departed
from Augustine’s thought. For Aquinas the objective injury no longer fulfills
the requirement of just cause, as Augustine held. Rather, he “demands some
fault on the part of the wrongdoer: his culpability which deserves punishment
is the justifying reason for going to war.”
225
Wars supported by just
arguments were things; unjust, quite another. Wars for private motives, like
profit or revenge, did not fall within the range of justified violence. Princes
have a dual obligation to use force ad intra and ad extra in order to safeguard
unity and promote collective virtue: ad intra against disturbers of the peace
and criminals, and ad extra against enemy attacks. The distinction between
good reasons and unacceptable ones produced a system of disputation,
elevated to canon law. By the fourteenth century, agreement had grosso
modo coalesced among theologians and canonists on the five main Just War
tenets or headings: auctoritas, persona, res, causa, and animus.
Fellow Travelers: Just War, Holy War, and the Crusades
Just War narratives grounded in religious thinking can be deployed to

224
Richard B. Miller, Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 60.
225
Joachim Von Elbe, “The Evolution of the Concept of the Just War in International
Law,” American Journal of International Law 33, no. 4 (1939): 669.
114

limit the frequency, scope, ambitions, and ends of warfare. The attachment
of righteousness to narratives of conflict, however, can reverse Just War’s
irenic intentions. The total war of crusaders and the limited war for rights
and interests are both medieval legacies. On one hand, the emerging, in the
early Middle Ages, of the knighthood – a specialized fighting class that also
formed a landed aristocracy – was accompanied by the gradual development
of codes of conduct that embodied the chivalric esprit de corp. Warfighting
was a legitimate occupation for Christians, however soldiers had to do
penance for their actions.
226
On the other, the customary rules of war
developed during this period were designed to apply only between Christian
warriors sharing the same status, culture, and faith.
227

The idea of holy war in Western Christendom coalesced out of manifold
cultural strands as well as political developments. The Carolingian kings,
and Charlemagne in particular, developed an apparatus of public liturgies
“designed to galvanize public support for military actions and to gain God’s
aid for Carolingian’s arms.”
228
The expansionist wars of Carolingian and

226
Two church movements that started at the end of the tenth century, the Peace of
God and the Truce of God, represented concrete attempts by the clergy to restrict the practice
of warfare.
227
François Bugnion, “Just Wars, Wars of Aggression and International
Humanitarian Law,” International Review of the Red Cross 847, no. 84 (2002): 523–46.

228
David S. Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War, c. 300-1215 (Woodbridge,
UK: Boydell Press, 2003), 33. See also: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in
Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1958); Michael McCormick, “The Liturgy of War in the Early Middle Ages: Crisis,
Litanies, and the Carolingian Monarchy,” Viator 15 (1984): 1–24.
115

Ottonian monarchs were also missions to extend Christianity by means of
forced mass conversion of conquered peoples. Charlemagne used the Saxons’
refusal to convert to Christianity as justification for attacking them. Later,
Pope Gregory VII popularized the idea that a war mandated by the pope “was
not merely justifiable but justifying and spiritually beneficial to those who
participated in it.”
229
The crusades emerged in the eleventh century as
military expeditions called by the pope on Christ’s behalf and waged under
the leadership of a papal legate. Since canon law prohibited wars of
conversion, a crusade was “proposed, like all justifiable Christian violence, as
a defensive reaction to injury or aggression or as an attempt to recover
Christian territories lost to the infidel.”
230
Sometimes, conquest by force of
arms was justified as a means to create the right conditions for voluntary
conversion. The core of this argument in its later iterations justified
overriding the natural law right of non-Christians to dominium on the basis
of the fact that the ‘infidels’ had been forced to convert to Islam, while
Europe’s conversion to Christianity had been voluntary.
Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of
Clermont in 1095, answering the request for military aid issued by the

229
James A. Brundage, “Holy War and the Medieval Lawyers,” in The Holy War, ed.
Thomas Patrick Murphy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), 100. The word
“crusade” is a non-medieval Franco-Spanish hybrid common in English-speaking countries
since the eighteenth century.
230
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1981), 1.
116

Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus. Urban called for the recovery of
Jerusalem, which had been ruled by Muslims since 638. Those who had
sworn to undertake the journey to Jerusalem were ceremonially granted the
cross, thus becoming ‘signed with the cross,’ crucesignati.
231
The enemies of
the faith, as varied as the Cathars of Languedoc, the Slavs and the Wends,
and the Ottoman Turks, were all similarly vilified as evil aggressors.
232

While the First Crusade was directed to the Holy Land, subsequent
crusading efforts also were aimed at heretics, schismatics, Christian lay
powers, and Catholic enemies of the pope in Europe. Although no crusade
was specifically targeted against Jewish communities, the crusading ideology
promoted anti-Jewish violence, as evidenced by the Rhineland pogroms in
1096 and in 1146–7 in England.
Canonical theory conceived of the crusade as bellum iustissimum, “a
particular kind of just war in which the just cause was defense of the faith
(broadly construed) and the right authority of the supreme head of the
Church.”
233
Christians were not merely permitted to participate in the

231
In the twelfth century, writers started to describe these wars as crozeia, crozea, or
crozada. Up the end of the fifteenth century, they also used ‘peregrinatio,’ ‘causa’, ‘bellum’,
‘iter,’ ‘negotium Christi.’
232
The scope of modern crusading studies is huge. See, for example, Carl Erdmann,
The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, trans. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the
Crusades? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1977); Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New
History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
233
Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, 168. See also John
Gilchrist, “The Papacy and War against the ‘Saracens’, 795–1216,” The International History
Review 10, no. 2 (1988): 174–97.
117

crusade, but rather they were exhorted, even commanded to fight. The war
was imagined as a penitential pilgrimage for the remission of sins, a
voluntary devotional activity open to all laymen. Those who embarked in the
crusading enterprise as milites Christi took a sacred vow and were promised
indulgences for eternal salvation as well as special temporal privileges.
234

The ideology of the medieval crusades is part of the broader discourse
of Christian holy war rooted in the Old Testament and in the more
immediate experience, in the eighth and ninth centuries, of military
confrontations with Magyars, Norsemen, and Muslims.
235
The synthesis of
Just War, Holy War, and penance into the institution of the crusade came by
“through an extended process of experimentation and bricolage.”
236
A pivotal
agent was the eleventh-century Church reform movement. After the collapse
of the Carolingian political order, Church reformers sought to renew
ecclesiastical institutions and to restore what they saw as the declining
fortunes of Latin Christendom, constantly besieged by internal enemies

234
James Muldoon and Helen Jane Nicholson, “Crusading and Canon Law,” in
Palgrave Advances in the Crusades (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 42.
235
There is a great deal of debate in the extant historiographical literature on the
definition of crusade, and consequently also on the degree to which the crusades were a sub-
species of Holy War and/or Just War. A good starting point to the debate is Norman J.
Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). See also Giles Constable, “The
Historiography of the Crusades,” in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the
Muslim World, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy P. Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton
Oaks, 2001), 1–22.
236
Andrew A. Latham, “Theorizing the Crusades: Identity, Institutions, and
Religious War in Medieval Latin Christendom,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 1
(2011): 235.
118

(corruption, schism) and external foes (Muslims polities and non-Christian
polities). A central tenet of the reformist popes held that the universal
Church of Peter had a duty to intervene actively in temporal affairs to
promote justice. History in the Old Testament was thought to offer a series
of exempla or models for action fitted with concrete details and informed by
general principles. Biblical militarism was repurposed with the use of
typologies that indicated Old Testament kings such as Josias, David, and
Solomon as models for the Christian prince.
237
Monks reflected on David’s
duel with Goliath as an allegory of their daily struggles with temptation.
Contemporary international law has been considerably influenced by
the way the Church sought to answer the central legal problem posed of the
Crusades, which Robert A. Williams summarized in this question: “Under
what circumstances might Christians legitimately dispossess pagan peoples
of their dominium?”
238
Pope Innocent IV's legal commentary on an earlier
papal decretal by Innocent III, Quod super his, is the most influential
statement of this view of the rights and duties of pagan nations under
natural law. Later legal theorists Francisco Vitoria and Hugo Grotius relied
extensively on Innocent IV's commentary in their treatments of the status of
non-Christian peoples under international law.

237
Marie-Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays
on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little
(Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 157.
238
Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The
Discourses of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13.
119

Just War Between the Colony and the State
The medieval Just War doctrines gave way to the secularizing
formulations of modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Initially, Just War discourses were framed within European theaters of
action and extended outward to work with various invading or invaded
peoples. In the sixteenth century, the discovery of the new world brought
about European wars of conquest against so-called primitive civilizations.
Just War discourses expanded to ask what should be the state of the art in
regard to indigenous peoples. The question created disagreement spaces
within which conquest, incorporation, settlement, and state intervention
were generated. The wars of the seventeenth century brought about
questions of state sovereignty, international law, and state duties toward
those peoples suffering conquest and sustaining resistance.
Two scholars, Francisco Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, worked from the
religious narratives of war and peace and toward the construction of
international law, an enterprise that found momentum in the nineteenth
century with the spread of corporate and state colonization. This history
offers a separate subject, but these scholars’ work is extremely important to
understanding how the Just War entered into the modern era in addressing
audiences in somewhat novel, constitutive constructions of an international
sphere of argument.
120

Francisco Vitoria and Just War in the New World
During the sixteenth century and until the early seventeenth century,
the theologians and jurists of the Spanish School – Francisco de Vitoria,
Domingo de Soto, Diego de Covarruvias, Fernardo Vazquez y Menchaca, Luis
de Molina, and Francisco Suárez – worked on adapting the Thomist Just War
tradition to the changing political landscape, characterized by the rise of the
modern state and the colonization of the New World. Pope Alexander VI’s
five Bulls of Donation of 1493 divided the world into Spanish and Portuguese
spheres, granting these sovereigns the title, divinely sanctioned, to occupy
foreign lands and rule over their non-Christian peoples. This jurisprudence
essentially extended to the Amerindians the medieval framework developed
over the centuries by the Holy Roman Church to address the question of the
legal status of the Saracens.
The debate about the legitimacy of the conquest of the New World in
its core was about the nature of world order. With the defeat of the comunero
revolt in 1521, the Castilian crown, secure of its own political legitimacy
within Spain, claimed the role of guardian of Christian unity against the
claims of heretical princes. A host of technological developments in warfare
enabled the Spanish conquista of the Inca and Aztec empires in 1519-1536.
The reign of Charles V, Catholic king of Spain and emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire, included Spain, the Netherlands, parts of Italy and
Germany, and all the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, America, and Asia.
121

The conquest of the New World opened up natural law, Catholic and
Protestant rationales to international questioning and debate, generating a
vast amount of literature about the legitimacy of the conquest and the rights
of the native peoples of the Americas. At the same time, scholastic
philosophy underwent a great revival of interest in Spanish universities.
The Dominican theologian and jurist Francisco Vitoria (1492-1546) is
regarded as one of the most influential exponents of the famed School of
Salamanca in Spain. Vitoria became the Chair of theology at the University
of Salamanca in 1524.
239
In this position, he was often called to advise the
King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Vitoria’s two famous
lectures “On the Newly Discovered Indians” (De Indis noviter inventis) –
henceforth “On the American Indians” – and “On the Law of War” (De jure
belli hispanorum in barbarous), both delivered in 1539, grappled with the
legal issues raised by the colonial relationship between Spaniards and

239
Francisco Vitoria (1483-1546) was born to a noble family in Burgos, Spain. He
entered the Dominican order in 1504 and was educated in Paris at the College Saint-Jacques
and trained in Thomistic theology. He taught theology in Paris for several years before
returning to Spain in 1522 to teach theology in Valladolid at the college of Saint Gregory,
where he taught many Dominicans training to be missionaries in America. Two years later
he became chair of theology at the University of Salamanca. Vitoria advised Charles V, the
King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and remained concerned with the ethics of the
conquista throughout his career until his death in 1546. See Norman Kretzmann et al., eds.,
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the
Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
For studies of Vitoria, see José María Beneyto and Justo Corti Varela, eds., At the Origins of
Modernity: Francisco de Vitoria and the Discovery of International Law (New York: Springer,
2017); James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria
and His Law of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).
122

American indigenous peoples.
240
Largely on the strength of these lectures, he
is remembered as “the father of International Law.”
241

“On the American Indians,” the first and more famous of the two
relectiones (lectures), dealt with the crucial question: “by what right the
barbarians were subjected to Spanish rule?” In order to do so Vitoria sought
to determine the legal status of indigenous peoples in the New World, and
proceeded to do so by considering three more questions: who counts as
sovereign? What are the powers and limits of the sovereign? Are the Indians
sovereign? What are the rights and obligations of the Indians and the
Spaniards? As with Aquinas, the issue in Vitoria’s days centered on the
definition and scope of dominium. Dominium is a right (ius), and as such it
can be held only by beings capable of receiving injury. Under what
circumstances might Christians legitimately dispossess pagan non-believers
of their lordship and property (dominium)? The answer to the question
whether the Amerindians qualified as sovereign depended on the answer
given to yet another question: can they own property?
Vitoria maintained that a universal law of reason bound nation states
together into a larger international community. Extending the work of
Aquinas, he called this law ius gentium, or the law of nations. His concern

240
The relectiones were lectures delivered at Salamanca at the end of the university
term. The two titles may be translated as “On the Indians Recently Discovered” and “On the
Law of War of the Spaniards on the Barbarians.”
241
Carlos G. Noreña, Studies in Spanish Renaissance Thought (Hague, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 137 (emphasis in original).
123

was not abstract theory, but the practical matter of the conduct of the
conquistadors, who had enslaved the native peoples of America and
appropriated their property. Pope Paul III’s recent encyclical Sublimus Dei
(1537) had already condemned these practices, but Vitoria went further in De
Indis, arguing that the matter was beyond papal jurisdiction and subject
neither to Roman nor canonical law but rather to this universal law of
nature, ius gentium. The debate, Vitoria argued, was not a question of the
sovereignty of the Crown of Castile but rather one of fundamental rights
(particularly property rights).
In doing away with universal papal jurisdiction, Vitoria concludes:
“Aquinas shows that unbelief does not cancel either natural law or human
law, but all forms of dominion derive from natural or human law; therefore
they cannot be annulled by lack of faith.”
242
Vitoria defines dominium,
rendered variably as ‘dominion’ or as ‘ownership’ in English translations, as a
legal right to dispose of something for one’s benefit. Wild beasts, slaves, and
other “irrational beings” do not possess true dominion, as evidenced by the
fact that they cannot be robbed of their property and therefore be victims of
an injustice (iniuria), or otherwise have mastery over their own actions. But
the Indians could not be denied true dominion on account of their unbelief, or,
again, due to an alleged lack of reason and capacity for self-government.

242
Francisco Vitoria, Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy
Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123.
124

Contemporary writers routinely characterized the new world natives
as irrational lunatics, children, slaves, animals, and heathens. Vitoria
rejected these judgments, arguing instead that the natives “are not of
unsound mind, but have, according to their kind, the use of reason. This is
clear, because there is a certain method in their affairs, for they have polities
which are orderly arranged and they have definite marriage and magistrates,
overlords, laws and workshops, and a system of exchange, all of which call for
the use of reason.”
243
Accordingly, Vitoria resituated the issue of indigenous
peoples’ status in the Spanish empire within the jurisdiction of the natural
law system of ius gentium, whose rules can de discovered with the use of
reason.
Vitoria argued that refusal to convert to Christianity was not a valid
basis for war. In considering what might be a valid basis, Vitoria first
considered obvious provocations. If, say, the native people attacked the
Spaniards first, or their governments refused to permit trade and interaction
(Vitoria believed in a universal right of all people to travel and dwell
anywhere peacefully, based on the inherent sociability of humanity and the
fundamental right of communication), then remedial war could be justified.
Vitoria believed that neither of these conditions were met. Further, however,
Vitoria laid the groundwork for humanitarian war, arguing that war could be
justified “on account of the personal tyranny of the barbarians’ masters

243
Vitoria, 127.
125

towards their subjects, or because of their tyrannical and oppressive laws
against the innocent, such as human sacrifice practiced on innocent men or
the killing of condemned criminals for cannibalism.”
244

In his discussion of the iusta causa, or just cause, Vitoria introduced a
canon law concept known as ignorantia invincibilis, the doctrine of ignorance.
Usually, both parties to a conflict think their cause is just. Objectively, only
one can be correct, but subjectively, both might be equally confident in their
belief in the rightness of their cause. Consequently, the distinction between
iusta causa and intentio recta becomes blurred.
245
This makes it easier to
acknowledge bellum iustum ex utraque parte, that a war can be just on both
sides. This concept was developed further by Hugo Grotius nearly a century
later, and it anticipated and refuted an objection to the doctrine of iusta
causa raised by Carl Schmitt in the mid-twentieth century.
246

Hugo Grotius and the Westphalian Order
Hugo Grotius was not the first to formulate an international public
sphere, but he was among a group of scholars to formulate a relation among

244
Vitoria, 287–88.
245
Laurens Winkel, “Francisco de Vitoria on Just War on Both Sides and on the
Legal Position of Burgundy,” Legal History Review 75, no. 3 (2007): 355–62,
https://doi.org/10.1163/157181907783054950.
246
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Including the Law of Nature and of
Nations, trans. A. C. Campbell (London: B. Boothroyd, 1814); Gabriella Slomp, “Carl
Schmitt’s Five Arguments against the Idea of Just War,” Cambridge Review of International
Affairs 19, no. 3 (2006): 435–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557570600869432.
126

states regulated by diplomacy and conflict resolution.
247
Key to this
extension of the Just War was the understanding that international
agreements constituting laws were superior to the costly use of force. Grotius
argued that war is an instrument of right, fully governed by law, beginning
when “judicial remedies cease to exist.”
248
In contrast to Vitoria, Grotius
posited that the law of nations is grounded not in universal reason or natural
law but in contract and consent. Through consent, one can make oneself into
a slave, and consent may be given passively by acquiescing to a violent
aggressor. Rather than finding justifications for the violence of war in
natural law as his predecessors attempted, Grotius argued that people have
the ability by agreement to suspend the natural law and provide permissions

247
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was born in Delft during the Dutch Revolt against
Philip II of Spain. Grotius received a classical Aristotelian education. A child prodigy, he
entered the University of Leiden when he was only eleven, and at sixteen, published his first
book, an annotated edition of Marianus Capella’s fifth century opus on the seven liberal arts.
The next year, he was appointed to The Hague as an attorney and then two years later, in
1601, became the official historiographer for the States of Holland. In 1604, he took a case
involving a conflict between Dutch and Portuguese merchants in East Asia, which began his
foray into international law. Later in his career, Grotius became involved in the Arminian
controversy in Calvinist Dutch Protestantism, which resulted in him being sentenced to life
imprisonment in 1619. Two years later, he escaped and fled to Paris. His theological
writings were highly influential in the development of Arminian-based Protestant
movements. He remained interested in international law, free trade, and theology until his
death in 1645. See Henk Nellen, Hugo Grotius: A Lifelong Struggle for Peace in Church and
State, 1583-1645, trans. J. C. Grayson (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015). For studies of Grotius, see
Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law
in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political
Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
248
Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Including the Law of Nature and of
Nations, 205.
127

for various conduct.
249
Thus, for Grotius, the community of nations was
grounded first and foremost in treaty obligations. Indeed, his theory of
international society formed the basis for the Peace of Westphalia and the
modern international order.
250
As Hedley Bull declared in 1992: “The idea of
international society which Grotius propounded was given concrete
expression in the Peace of Westphalia, and Grotius may be considered the
intellectual father of this first general peace settlement of modern times.”
251

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was racked by
international and civil wars (seen by many as wars of religion), culminating
with the eighty-year period between the Revolt of the Netherlands and the
Peace of Westphalia. The notion of a monarch’s absolute sovereignty was
introduced in order to prevent the outbreak of civil war in the new states
established in the wake of the gradual disintegration of the Holy Roman
Empire and its system of universal authority. The question then was: How
can the absolute monarch be restrained in external relations with other
states? A sovereign’s absolute freedom could lead to international chaos and
endless war. This worry was compounded by the growing number of new
problems introduced by the increased mobility of people and goods.

249
Sgeven Forde, “Hugo Grotius on Ethics and War,” The American Political Science
Review 92, no. 3 (1998): 639–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/2585486.
250
Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and Adam Roberts, eds., Hugo Grotius and
International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
251
Hedley Bull, “The Importance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations,”
in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, ed. Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and
Adam Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 75.
128

Like Vitoria, Grotius was less concerned with abstract theorizing than
with practical problems of international relations, many of which were the
fruits of colonialism. He wrote his Commentary on the Law of Prize and
Booty (De iure praedae) around 1605 with the objective of justifying the
Dutch East India Company’s capture of the Portuguese carrack Santa
Catarina two years earlier. On the Indies (De Indis) was a forceful defense of
Dutch imperialist activity in the East Indies against Spain and Portugal. At
the request of the Dutch East India Company, a part of it was published in
1609 as the Marem Liberum. The rest went unpublished until 1864, when its
first editors printed it with the title The Law of Prize. Grotius’ purpose with
the De Indis was to defend the seizure in 1602 by a private Dutch citizen of a
Portuguese trading vessel in the Singapore Strait.
His most important and systematic work on the subject was his three-
volume opus The Rights of War and Peace (De Jure Belli ac Pacis) published
in 1625. One of the main goals of this work, as for the De Iure Praedae, was
to legitimate war by appealing to the existence of a minimal but universal
foundation of international society in the right of self-preservation.
Individuals join societies for purposes of self-protection, and physical survival
remains the basic justification for resisting an unjust ruler. Beyond that,
people are subject to their government, regardless of its specific
constitutional form. It is not the content of different beliefs that matters,
because it is ultimately the product of particular circumstances, but the fact
129

that there is a clear source of authority. In the second volume of The Rights
of War and Peace, Grotius focused on valid justifications for war. It was his
“detailed and systematic elaboration of the ‘just causes of war’” that
distinguished Grotius in the history of Just War scholarship.
252
In
considering the valid grounds for war, he noted three categories: self-defense,
reparation of injury, and punishment. Like Vitoria, Grotius allowed for the
possibility of humanitarian war, even imagining a circumstance where it
would be unjust for people (who have accepted their sovereign’s authority) to
revolt, but just for foreigners to wage a war on their behalf to liberate them.
In this work, Grotius famously asserted that kings had universal ‘standing,’
so to speak, to prosecute and punish violations of natural law:
Kings, and those who are invested with a Power equal to that of Kings,
have a Right to exact Punishments, not only for Injuries committed
against themselves, or their Subjects, but likewise, for those which do
not peculiarly concern them, but which are, in any Persons
whatsoever, grievous Violations of the Law of Nature or Nations.
253

Grotius grounded this “right of just punishment” by positing an analogy
between the situation of states in international society and that of
individuals in a state of nature, before entering civil society.
254

Grotius’s international order, however, was a community made up of

252
G. I. A. D. Draper, “Grotius’ Place in the Development of Legal Ideas about War,”
in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, ed. Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, and
Adam Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 194.
253
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 2005), 1021.
254
Luke Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 45.
130

legally equal sovereign states without an external authority; modern
humanitarian intervention premised on the notion of a “failed states that are
unable to perform the functions associated with statehood” and sanctioned by
the supra-national United Nations arguably marks a “revival of the pre-
Grotian conception of world order associated with the medieval papacy.”
255

In any event, once in a just war, Grotius suggested that nearly anything
necessary to bring the war to a just conclusion is itself justified, including, for
example, various forms of deceit that would otherwise not be morally
permissible.
Grotius’s views on preemptive war were complicated. On the one
hand, he noted that an injury not yet committed is an injury nonetheless, and
so a “just cause then of war is an injury, which though not actually
committed, threatens our persons or property with danger.”
256
Grotius
approved of the theological notion of war as judicium Dei, and endorsed the
Augustinian position according to which it is the enemy’s unjust acts that
make a war just. Grotius treated preventive war as “war waged to punish
incipient crimes” (delicta inchoata), which as such could be valid. On the
other hand, Grotius criticized Alberico Gentili directly on the issue of
preventive war: “There is an intolerable doctrine in some writers that by the

255
James Muldoon, “Francisco de Vitoria and Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal
of Military Ethics 5, no. 2 (2006): 131, https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570600724529.
256
Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Including the Law of Nature and of
Nations, trans. A. C. Campbell (London: B. Boothroyd, 1814), 184.
131

law of nations we may rightly take up arms against a power which is
increasing, and may increase, so as to be dangerous. Undoubtedly, in
deliberating over war, this may come into consideration, not as matter of
justice, but as a matter of utility.”
257
An anticipatory attack could be justified
only if “the aggressor be taking up weapons, and in such a way that he
manifestly does so with the intent to kill.”
258
For Grotius, the idea that the
“the possibility of being attacked confers the right to attack is abhorrent to
every principle of equity. Human life exists under such conditions that
complete security is never guaranteed to us.”
259

Grotius provided narrative threads that established contextual norms
whereby stories of actors, actions, and events could be assessed as right or
wrong. The beginnings of international relations have moved from the
conceptualization of natural causes, but the material incentives of war and
peace still structure disciplinary thinking about conflict. The justification of
wars by states in the interests of self-defense and maintaining the integrity
of sovereign territory has become subsequently a matter of international law
and contestation among peoples whose territories have been arbitrarily
divided as a matter of conquest, negotiation, or intervention. Finally, the
common notion that all participants in a conflict are subject to common rules

257
Grotius, 68, Book II.XVII.
258
Grotius, 63, Book II.1.V.
259
Grotius, 68, Book II.1.XVII.
132

was developed over time into norms of military conduct with regard to
civilians and subject to arguments about reparations and war crimes in
postwar environments.
Conclusion
This chapter assembles selections of the work of four major figures who
were influential in the creation of the Just War “doctrine” – an imagined
singular discourse from which scholars draw opinions to define past events,
assemble the present, and project the future. Augustine presented the reader
with the transformation of classical stasis into questions of violence, the
faith, and pastoral care. Aquinas joined the logic of the schoolman to the
reasons rationalizing conflict. These reasons can constrain religion or release
crusades. Vitoria extended questions of justice to the treatment of conquered
peoples. The global expansion of empire was never met without resistance.
Legal and moral norms of response were used to justify and condition more
sustained interventions. Finally, with Grotius, the Just War was translated
into the norms of international society whose interests in peace followed
establishment of agreed to norms of conduct, governing laws of the sea and
the conduct of combat.
Rhetorical questions of justice address normative disagreements about
the purposes of initiating, participating, conducting, and ending a war.
Historically, wars are represented as defining master narratives in a national
history. Wars take on the qualities of lessons or moderating narratives when
133

the stakes are less fateful, perhaps involving an adjustment of frontiers or a
swap of colonies. Lessons are reduced to shibboleths – another “Munich” or
another “Vietnam” used liberally as short-cut narratives. Wars enter into the
realm of asymmetry in the time when post-war society does not restore
dialogue between winners and losers. Just War rhetoric cautions against an
unjust peace. Asymmetry expands as the concrete values to institutions of
justice on the part of religious and secular institutions become leveraged to
exploit peoples who are considered outside the span of a nation, the life of its
citizens. “Crusade” narratives rouse action against others deemed “savage,”
“barbaric,” or “uncivilized state.” Migrants, too, are drawn into conflagration
by promises that the just side will liberate or provide citizenship where
secondary status exists.
Questions of war and peace do provoke sincere narratives that
situate and transform conflicting story lines into debates, particularly as
wars linger with rising costs and diming prospects for resolution. But, the
machineries of modern state propaganda absorb a mix of religious and legal
terms to color narratives purifying the motives of a people’s leadership,
forces, and aims, while at the same time staining, shaming, or reviling the
leadership, society, deeds, and ambitions of foreign regimes. War-time
narratives often are replete with racism, xenophobia, and fear mongering of
the enemy as well as neighbors at home. The logic of good reasons cautions
against such factionalizing discourse by dissociating leadership of the people
134

being fought from the enemy-qualities of the people fighting. Public policy
argument generates stasis through multiplying issues. Public moral
argument generates narratives through arranging actions and events into
signs of the intentions and qualities of people with differing attributed
intentions, identities, motivations, and national character.

135

Chapter Four: Just War/Stasis Bundles in the New World Order:
From the Panama Invasion to the Persian Gulf War
George H. W. Bush inherited the success of the long and dangerous
dialogue between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. He traveled to
Europe and spoke as a cheerleader for the Velvet Revolution in the spring of
rising democracies, 1989. At the year’s end, he and the Soviet Premier
announced the ending of the Cold War. The celebrated formal termination of
one dreadful discourse regime, however, does not set in place another. While
the Soviet Union dismantled much of its intelligence and propaganda
apparatus, the Bush administration seemed to play the part of cautious
bystander, concocting a foreign policy committed to traditional security aims
as well as the United Nations and other international institutions put into
place at the end of the World War II.
260
As Cold War stasis points no longer
reliably guided policy, the resonances of military interventions, democracy
and empire, and the dichotomies of national and international politics
remained in play.
This chapter maps presidential address that explained, justified, and
supported American intervention into Central America and the Middle East.
Panama and Iraq were the first tests of policy in the post-cold war world.
Thirty years have passed since these events. Administrations have come and

260
Stephen Kurkjian, “Still Searching for the Bush Doctrine,” Boston Globe, July 23,
1989, ProQuest.
136

gone. The United States has been on a roller coaster ride of foreign
interventions. A state of unresolved and ambiguously named warfare has
persisted for the past seventeen years with no end (or purpose) in sight. This
chapter revisits the initial moments of post-Cold War argumentation because
beginnings set in motion events and discourses that tumble forward. It is
useful to sort beginnings and to revisit through critical studies, national and
international policy, and moral arguments that, at the time, took on
importance in one way but are now more profitably addressed in another.
This study reconsiders episodes in the Bush 41 presidency not to
explain how the drama unfolded but to figure out why the discourse works as
a movement, a setting into place a vision by the coupling of words (through
public address) and deeds (military intervention). The argumentum of the
administration is revisited to investigate what sorts of controversies were
given momentum by the choices of the administration. The Bush foreign
policy movement is constituted in two interventions. The Panama invasion is
analyzed as a bilateral instantiation of international relations at the micro-
scale (although the OAS and UN offered were brought in line with support).
The intervention was short, successful, and of lesser notice to critics.
Nevertheless, the justification and actions of the United States set significant
precedents for ignoring sovereignty and forcing regime change. The Persian
Gulf War is analyzed on the macro-scale as a multilateral effort where
international consensus was orchestrated in its initial phase, Desert Shield;
137

then, domestic approval in the US cultivated for Desert Storm; and, finally
an international discourse regime unfolded in a Triumph movement at its
conclusion. Micro and macro-scale argumentation characterize the
heterogeneity of contemporary diplomacy with bilateral and multilateral
policies working at different odds and sometimes even cross-purposes. Many
of these chaotic structures, policies, and narratives emerge, I claim, at the
beginnings of the post-Cold War, post-realism, postmodern era.
Post-Cold War Rhetorics of War and Community Renewal
The changes in the international order between 1989 and 1991 were
breathtaking. Rarely does a mere two-year period contain such sweeping,
positive events. A totalitarian system of rule, the Soviet Union, was
disassembled. Democracies blossomed in a dozen countries. East and West
Germany began the long process of reunification. The winds of democracy
blew even to China, with democratic hopes demonstrably open. The leaders
of the Western alliance celebrated the disassembly of Cold War rhetoric. The
possibilities of a new world order furnished talking points for the news media
and aspirations for American foreign policy-making.
In the United States, the disestablishment of the Cold War produced
mixed feelings of hope, anxiety, and dismay. “Indeed,” Hal Brands writes,
“the Cold War was so familiar to Americans that many observers were
138

ambivalent about its seemingly imminent demise in the late 1980s.”
261
With
the dissolution of the Soviet Union it seemed that an entire rhetorical
universe was imploding too, leaving in its wake a powerful need, an exigency,
to craft a new narrative about the role of the United States in the life of its
citizens and in the world at large.
262
Many voiced the hope that the
international system would finally work as a bulwark for the newly-ushered
era of peace and stability, an end of history, even, in Francis Fukuyama’s
famous reading of the historical moment;
263
some remained suspicious of
Soviet capabilities and intentions;
264
a few urged a nationalist reorientation

261
Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post-
Cold War World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 8.
262
Mary E. Stuckey, “Remembering the Future: Rhetorical Echoes of World War II
and Vietnam in George Bush’s Public Speech on the Gulf War,” Communication Studies 43,
no. 4 (1992): 246–56.
263
The earliest iteration of this claim is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article “The End of
History?” Drawing on Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, Fukuyama argued that
ideologically-fueled great power conflict had become a thing of the past. Francis Fukuyama,
“The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18. In the book The End of
History and the Last Man, published in 1992, Fukuyama predicted that, “for the foreseeable
future, the world will be divided between a post-historical part, and a part that is still stuck
in history. Within the post-historical world, the chief axis of interaction between states
would be economic, and the old rules of power politics would have decreasing relevance. . . .
On the other hand, the historical world would still be riven with a variety of religious,
national, and ideological conflicts depending on the stage of development of the particular
countries concerned, in which the old rules of power politics continue to apply.” Francis
Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 276.
Fukuyama later came to repudiate the neoconservative policies he once espoused. Francis
Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). See also George F. Kennan, “After the Cold
War,” New York Times, February 5, 1989,
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/magazine/after-the-cold-war.html.
264
In an August 23, 1989 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention,
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney decried the House for defunding, among others, the B-2
Stealth bomber, the antimissile shield and the Midgetman missile program. “They have seen
some changes and apparently believe everything now is just fine,” Cheney remarked, “as if
they had decided to give away their overcoats on the first sunny day in January.”
139

away from foreign entanglements and interventions;
265
others still shifted
their polemical focus from defunct communism overseas to seemingly
surviving socialistic strains and liberal pathologies within the US.
266
As
“broad coalitions once defined around the Cold War factionalized and issues
which centered on the moral character of America emerged in the
foreground,” the national spotlight turned on issues such as education, drug
abuse, and the environment.
267
As Siobhán McEvoy-Levy writes, if, “from

Conciliatory rhetoric notwithstanding, he added, “the Soviet Union has been making major
improvements to every leg of its strategic arsenal.” John M. Broder, “Cheney Bitingly
Assails House Defense Budget,” Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1989, paras. 3, 10,
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-08-24/news/mn-1377_1_defense-budget. At the 1990
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Howard Phillips warned that “our leaders
are intoxicated by a spirit of premature self-congratulation which has clouded their judgment
and blinded their eyes to ominous reality.” David Corn, “Rift on the Right: Life without the
Red Menace,” The Nation, April 9, 1990, para. 3, Academic OneFile.
265
According to Pat Buchanan, for example, “the incivility and brutality of our cities,
the fading away of the Reagan Boom, the rise of ethnic hatred” meant it was time to put
“America First.” Patrick J. Buchanan, “Now That Red Is Dead, Come Home America,”
Washington Post, September 8, 1991, para. 20,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/08/now-that-red-is-dead-come-
home-america/8472fe75-02ba-4d7f-8936-c4f531c22f68/.
266
Writing on the National Review, Tom Bethell announced that “The new
conservative agenda is clear. With socialism on the ropes abroad, now is the time to focus on
socialism at home.” Tom Bethell, “Will Success Spoil Anti-Communists?” National Review,
March 5, 1990, para. 19. Irving Kristol expressed similar sentiments against US liberalism:
“We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American
democracy. Now that the other ‘Cold War’ is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far
less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our
victorious war against a global communist threat. We are, I sometimes feel, starting from
ground zero, and it is a conflict I shall be passing on to my children and grandchildren. But
it is a far more interesting cold war – intellectually interesting, spiritually interesting – than
the war we have so recently won, and I rather envy those young enough for the opportunities
they will have to participate in it.” Irving Kristol, “My Cold War,” The National Interest, no.
31 (1993): 144.
267
Roger Johnson, “Victory and Identity: The End of the Cold War in American
Imagination,” in United States Foreign Policy and National Identity in the Twenty-First
Century, ed. Kenneth Christie (New York: Routledge, 2008), 11. See Christopher Lasch, “The
Costs of Our Cold War Victory: It Destroyed the Public’s Trust,” New York Times, July 13,
1990, ProQuest.
140

one perspective, the Cold War’s resolution served to reveal domestic
problems, from another, the unwelcome result of triumph was international
disorder.”
268
Samuel P. Huntington’s statement at a hearing of the Foreign
Relations Committee in late 1990 exemplified contemporary anxieties.
According to Huntington, the emerging international scene would stage “a
welter of ethnic, national, religious, and cultural antagonisms.”
269
For
Americans, he averred, this new world would prove “a complex, ambiguous,
jungle-like world of multiple dangers, hidden traps, unpleasant surprises.”
270

One of the narratives that emerged to fill this rhetorical vacuum was
the fight against drug abuse. In his first prime-time address to the nation,
President Bush went ahead to declare a new international war on drugs, “the
gravest domestic threat facing our nation today.”
271
Who was the enemy?

268
Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy: Public
Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 40.
269
Relations in a Multipolar World: Hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, Day 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1990), 190 (statement of
Prof. Samuel Huntington, Director, John M. Olin institute for Strategic Studies and Eaton
Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA).
270
Statement of Prof. Samuel Huntington, 190.
271
George H. W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the National Drug Control
Strategy,” September 5, 1989, para. 1, APP,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17472&st=&st1=. The War On Drugs
traces back to President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 declared that “drug abuse is still public
enemy number one in America. . . . We have already made encouraging progress in the war
against drug abuse. Now we must consolidate that progress and strike even harder.”
Richard Nixon, “Radio Address About the State of the Union Message on Law Enforcement
and Drug Abuse Prevention,” March 10, 1973, paras. 12–17, APP,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=4135. Since the 1980s, the war metaphor had
proliferated in US public discourse (e.g. the trade war with Japan, the war on AIDS, the war
on crime) as a signifier of a unifying, all-out collective effort. See Michael S. Sherry, In the
Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1995).
141

For the president, it was “everyone who uses drugs, everyone who sells drugs,
and everyone who looks the other way.”
272
In prosecuting this war, Bush
continued, “we will help any government that wants our help,” and, if asked,
“we will for the first time make available the appropriate resources of
America’s Armed Forces.”
273
“Our outrage against drugs,” the president
stated, “unites us, brings us together behind this one plan of action – an
assault on every front.”
274
At the end of his ringing call to arms, the
president proclaimed that “victory – victory over drugs – is our cause, a just
cause.”
275
Only a few months passed before a real war followed the
metaphorical one. Oddly, the Panama intervention – a micro event by the
standards of international relations among states – was connected to the
corrupt and corrupting networks of drug production and sales reaching across
the globe and into the United States.
276

The Panama Invasion: Regime Change in New World Order
In the early hours of December 20, 1989 – while most of the world
focused it attentions on the vast changes ushered by the fall of the Berlin

272
Bush, “Address to the Nation on the National Drug Control Strategy,” para. 2.
273
Bush, para. 19.
274
Bush, para. 27.
275
Bush, para. 32.
276
In the jargon of international policy, drug trafficking qualifies as a so-called
intermestic issue – a problem that has both international and domestic policy dimensions.
See Bayless Manning, “The Congress, the Executive and Intermestic Affairs: Three
Proposals,” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 2 (January 1, 1977): 306–24,
https://doi.org/10.2307/20039647.
142

Wall just one month earlier – twenty-four thousand US troops stormed the
tiny Republic of Panama in a surprise strike to topple the government and
arrest its leader, General Manuel Noriega, on federal drug-trafficking
charges.
277
The invasion, code named Operation Just Cause, was a unilateral
strike launched without the sanctions of the United Nations and of the
Organization of American States. It followed two years of escalating tensions
in US-Panama relations. In 1987, the Reagan administration suspended
military and economic aid; in 1988, after two Florida grand juries indicted
Noriega on drug charges, the US government followed suit with a host of
economic sanctions whose combined effects wrought extensive structural
damage to Panama’s already struggling economy.
278
The Bush
administration put increasing pressure on Noriega. A few days before the
scheduled national elections in May 1989, Bush declared: “The days of rule by
dictatorship in Latin America are over. They must end in Panama as well. . .
. The people and Government of the United States will not recognize

277
The history of US interventions in the Panama Canal area and in the Republic of
Panama itself goes way back. The most notable incident occurred in 1903, when the US
supported the Panamanian oligarchy in their successful secession from Colombia. See
Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
278
Panama’s seven major banks were forced to shut down for a few months due to
lack of liquidity, while foreign banks moved their funds to other offshore havens. Between
June 1987 and September 1988, the country lost more than $1.5 billion to capital flight.
According to conservative estimates, in 1988 gross domestic product fell twenty percent,
while unemployment doubled to twenty-three percent. “GAO Review of Economic Sanctions
Imposed Against Panama – Statement of Frank C. Conahan Assistant Comptroller General
for National Security and International Affairs,” Pub. L. No. GAO/T-NSIAD-89-44, §
Subcommittees on International Economic Policy and Trade, and Western Hemisphere
Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs (1989), https://www.gao.gov/assets/110/102706.pdf.
143

fraudulent election results engineered by Noriega. The aspirations of the
people of Panama for democracy must not be denied.”
279

When Noriega voided the electoral results, citing foreign interference,
Bush dispatched an additional two-thousand US troops to the US Southern
Command in Panama. He motivated the move with the imperatives of
enforcing treaty rights and guaranteeing the safety of American residents: “I
will do what is necessary to protect the lives of American citizens. And we
will not be intimidated by the bullying tactics, brutal though they may be, of
the dictator, Noriega.”
280
The president further personalized the conflict by
publicly inciting the PDF to overthrow Noriega. During a press conference,
Bush openly called on the Defense Forces to “get him out,” and on
Panamanian citizens to rise up against the regime, for, Bush continued, “the
will of the people should not be thwarted by this man and a handful of these
Doberman thugs.”
281

Wimps and Thugs
From this time on, the confrontation became personal quickly, as the
administration staged a vociferous campaign of public vilification against

279
George H. W. Bush, “Statement on the Presidential Elections in Panama,” April
27, 1989, APP, para. 5,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16977&st=Noriega&st1=.
280
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters
on the Situation in Panama,” May 11, 1989, APP,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=17017. Panama was schedule to assume command
of the Canal Control Commission on July 1, 1990.
281
Bush, paras. 7, 9.
144

Noriega. In an early May interview on NBC “Today Show,” Deputy Secretary
of State Lawrence Eagleburger stated that “as far as we’re concerned, he’s a
gangster and ought to leave,” while National Security Adviser Brent
Scowcroft called the general “a thug” who “would stop at nothing” on CBS
“This Morning.”
282
During an official tour of Central America, Vice President
Dan Quayle warned that “the axis of Cuba, Nicaragua and Panama threatens
peace and democracy in this hemisphere;”
283
the president himself publicly
labeled the Panamanian government “the outlaw Noriega regime”
284
and
berated its head of state as “an indicted drug dealer.”
285
At this time,
however, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that the public was in no
mood for regime change.
286
When, on October 3, a coup attempt by PDF
officers turned into a fiasco, Republicans and Democrats alike faulted the
administration for failing to send US troops to help the rebels, and ridiculed

282
Richard Halloran, “US Steps up Its Anti-Noriega Drive,” New York Times, May
13, 1989, paras. 5, 10, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/13/world/us-steps-up-its-anti-noriega-
drive.html.
283
James Gerstenzang, “Quayle Assails Cuba, Panama and Nicaragua,” Los Angeles
Times, June 13, 1989, para. 6, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-06-13/news/mn-
2125_1_nicaragua-and-panama-sandinista-contra-military-commanders.
284
George H. W. Bush, “Statement on Panama-United States Relations,” September
1, 1989, APP, para. 3,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17465&st=Noriega&st1=.
285
George H. W. Bush, “Interview with Latin American Journalists,” October 25,
1989, APP, para. 97,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17698&st=Noriega&st1=.
286
Asked whether the United States should try to change a dictatorship to a
democracy where it can or stay out of other countries’ a ff airs, three-fifths of respondents said
the US should stay out and only twenty-nine percent supported intervention. Adam Clymer,
“Survey Finds Support for Dispatch of Troops,” New York Times, May 13, 1989,
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/13/world/survey-finds-support-for-dispatch-of-troops.html.
145

the president publicly as weak and unable to lead. The Senate passed a
resolution (99-1), sponsored by Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn
(D-GA), declaring support for “the President’s utilization of the full range of
appropriate diplomatic, economic and military options in the Republic of
Panama.”
287
Commenting on the episode, Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.),
chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, used
some mordant words: “There’s a resurgence of the wimp factor;” the handling
of Panama “makes Jimmy Carter look like a man of resolve.”
288
The White
House alerted the military to prepare for the invasion.
289

Operation Just Cause
On the first day of operations Bush addressed the nation with a speech
framed to answer two overarching questions: “What did we do in Panama?
Why?”
290
The president articulated four objectives for Operation Just Cause:
“The goals of the United States have been to safeguard the lives of
Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking, and

287
Sara Fritz, “Senate Dissatisfied with US Action in Coup,” Los Angeles Times,
October 6, 1989, para. 3, ProQuest.
288
Sara Fritz and James Gerstenzang, “Force ‘Never Ruled Out’ in Panama, Baker
Says,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1989, paras. 8–9, ProQuest.
289
Bernard E. Trainor, “Flaws in Panama Attack: Critics Cite Civilian Deaths,
Noriega Escape and High Rate of Special-Forces Casualties,” New York Times, December 31,
1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/31/world/flaws-panama-attack-critics-cite-civilian-
deaths-noriega-escape-high-rate.html.
290
Here I follow Roger C. Aden’s analysis of the overarching questions addressed by
this speech. Roger C. Aden, “Making Rhetorical Choices: The Parallel between
Extemporaneous and Presidential Speaking,” Argumentation and Advocacy 28, no. 4 (1992):
178–84.
146

to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty.”
291
The assembly of
reasons constitutes a case for invasion. The topoi of protecting citizens,
order, and democracy draw from traditional repertoire of gun-boat diplomacy
going back a hundred years in US relations with its Central American
neighbors. The drug topic was new. Publicly linking Noriega to drug
trafficking functioned as an effective demonization strategy for rallying US
audiences behind the effort, as President Bush put it, to arrest “this dictator
Noriega – Maximum Leader. . . . a fugitive drug dealer,”
292
“the drug
trafficker. . . . poisoning the children of the United States of America and
people around the world.”
293
The US forces that raided Noriega’s personal
residence gave the press a detailed report of their findings, including several
firearms, fifty kilograms of cocaine, “Israeli wine, homemade pornographic
photography, macabre artwork,” in addition to “two framed photographs of
Moammar Khadafy, the Libyan leader, and one large framed photograph of
Adolph Hitler.”
294
Journalists also were treated to a tour of Noriega’s
headquarters, where they could admire a Catholic chapel, some statues of the

291
George H. W. Bush, “Address to the Nation Announcing United States Military
Action in Panama,” December 20, 1989, APP, para. 2,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17965.
292
George H. W. Bush, “The President’s News Conference,” December 21, 1989, APP,
paras. 43, 55, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17972&st=Noriega&st1=.
293
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at a Barbecue in Beeville, Texas,” December 27,
1989, APP, para. 9,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17981&st=Noriega&st1=.
294
Walter V. Robinson, “Noriega’s Inner Sanctum Yields Pornography and Many
Guns,” Boston Globe, December 24, 1989, paras. 1, 9, ProQuest.
147

Virgin Mary, and “a closet containing priestly vestments.”
295

Administration officials modified their arguments in a cautionary way
to avoid critiques associated with the shibboleth, Vietnam. Also, memory of
the endless wars initiated by Reagan-backed paramilitary groups in Central
America was fresh, too. Secretary of State James A. Baker III said President
Bush decided to invade after reviewing unconfirmed intelligence reports that
Noriega planned to attack an American residential neighborhood. “If he
killed or terrorized a dozen American families,” Baker told journalists, “you
would be asking today why we didn’t act. There was more risk to American
citizens from inaction than there was from action.”
296
Bush characterized the
invasion as an effort “to support the democratic processes in Panama and to
ensure continued safety of American citizens,” and explained the decision to
use overwhelming force as motivated by the need to “be sure that we
minimize the loss of life on both sides and that we took out the PDF.”
297
The
stasis of policy argument applied effective means to defined ends. “Mission
creep” was not in the picture. The agonistics of a moral struggle were not
part of the pragmatic mix. In response to reports of Soviet cries of the return
of gunboat diplomacy, Bush mixed in special pleading and democracy to the

295
Robinson, para. 10.
296
Eloy O. Aguilar, “US Storms into Panama,” Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA),
December 20, 1989, para. 9, ProQuest.
297
George H. W. Bush, “The President’s News Conference,” December 21, 1989, APP,
paras. 5, 23, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=17972.
148

valiant defense of American womanhood:
Look, if they kill an American marine, that’s real bad. And if they
threaten and brutalize the wife of an American citizen, sexually
threatening the lieutenant’s wife while kicking him in the groin over
and over again, then, Mr. Gorbachev, please understand this President
is going to do something about it.
298

The White House’s rationale for the use of military force relied on a broad
interpretation of justified policy – anticipatory self-defense, with self-defense
understood to include the protection of endangered nationals abroad.
299
The
administration cited two incidents, Noriega’s “state of war” declaration in
response to US economic sanctions and military maneuvers, and the shooting
death by PDF guards of an off-duty Marine in civilian clothes, as evidence of
an imminent threat to the thirty-five thousand Americans residing in
Panama, and justified the invasion on self-defense grounds.
300
At the time,
the justification did not seem entirely out of place. It is likely that no one
anticipated the radical expansion of preemptive imminence in 2002 and 2003.

298
Bush, para. 80.
299
John Quigley, “The Legality of the United States Invasion of Panama,” Yale
Journal of International Law 15, no. 2 (1990): 276–315. Incidentally, the right to forcibly
protect nationals abroad has been used more recently by Russia to justify the invasion of
Georgia and occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 and the invasion of Eastern
Ukraine and occupation of Crimea in 2014. See Stephen Benedict Dyson, “What Russia’s
Invasion of Georgia Means for Crimea,” Washington Post, March 5, 2014,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/05/what-russias-invasion-of-
georgia-means-for-crimea/.
300
The shooting had taken place on December 16, 1989, when four US soldiers in
civilian clothes were stopped at a roadblock near the PDF headquarters in downtown
Panama City. Panama said the US soldiers had “broken through checkpoints and fired at
the headquarters building, wounding a soldier and two civilians, including a 1-year-old girl.”
Thomas L. Friedman, “Panama Shooting Condemned by US,” New York Times, December 18,
1989, para. 6, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/18/world/panama-shooting-condemned-by-
us.html.
149

The invasion succeeded in defeating the vastly outmatched
Panamanian troops in three days, but Noriega slipped through and went into
hiding, prompting the US to issue a $1 million bounty for his capture.
301
The
general finally turned himself over on January 3, 1990 and was swiftly flown
to Florida to stand trial. The existing Panama government was forcibly
removed and replaced with the group that had claimed victory in elections
earlier that year. Opposition presidential candidate Guillermo Endara was
sworn in by a Panamanian judge at Fort Clayton, a US base in the Canal
Zone, just minutes before the invasion started.
302

The US never released figures of Panamanians killed in the attack, but
other independent estimates show that the toll was steep. According to a
report by Physicians for Human Rights, the invasion resulted in several
hundred killed (half of them civilians), three thousand more wounded, and
eighteen thousand left homeless when the US attack destroyed most of El
Chorrillo, a heavily-populated neighborhood in downtown Panama City
where the PDF had its central headquarters.
303
A United Methodist Church

301
Jeffrey Good, “US Offers $1-Million Reward for Noriega,” St. Petersburg Times,
December 21, 1989, ProQuest.
302
Jim Mann, “Combat in Panama: Finally, Opposition’s Endara Gets His Chance,”
Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1989, http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-21/news/mn-
995_1_guillermo-endara.
303
Physicians for Human Rights, “Operation Just Cause: The Human Cost of
Military Action in Panama” (Boston, MA: Physicians for Human Rights, October 1991). An
independent inquiry by former US attorney general Ramsey Clark found that as many as
seven thousand people may have died. The toll for the US military was twenty-three dead
and 325 wounded. For a detailed narrative of the Panama crisis, see Eytan Gilboa, “The
Panama Invasion Revisited: Lessons for the Use of Force in the Post-Cold War Era,” Political
150

mission headed by former US senator Donald Stewart found that surviving
Panamanians were payed $6 per body to fill mass graves.
304
For Edward
Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the
Pentagon’s preference for overwhelming force, far from minimizing civilian
casualties as the administration claimed, instead contributed to the high
number of deaths among the Panamanian population: “The Army did what it
knows how to do. It went in with heavy firepower and troops trained for a
large-scale war on the plains of Europe, not the expeditionary wars of the
Third World.”
305
Overwhelming force appears as a way to sort winners from
losers, with the chaotic aftermath and ripple effects not really imagined as
part of post-intervention outcomes.
In the United States, however, the intervention was widely regarded
as a success in terms of speed and effectiveness. The invasion was well-
received by the US public, with Bush’s popularity ratings skyrocketing to 76
percent.
306
Both Houses of Congress also expressed overwhelming bipartisan

Science Quarterly 110, no. 4 (1995): 539. See also David Hoffman and Bob Woodward,
“President Launched Invasion with Little View to Aftermath,” Washington Post, December
24, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/12/24/president-launched-
invasion-with-little-view-to-aftermath/bf3a47ba-2a99-48d4-8b41-24e53d9bf36a/.
304
Charles B. Rangel, “The Pentagon Pictures,” New York Times, December 20, 1990,
ProQuest. See also “Mass Grave in Panama Puts US Toll in Question,” The Globe and Mail,
April 30, 1990, ProQuest.
305
Bernard E. Trainor, “Panama Invasion’s Rate of Casualties Stirs Concern,” Dallas
Morning News, December 31, 1989, para. 11.
306
Michael Oreskes, “Approval of Bush, Bolstered by Panama, Soars in Poll,” New
York Times, January 19, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/19/us/approval-of-bush-
bolstered-by-panama-soars-in-poll.html. According to William LeoGrande, a Latin American
affairs expert at American University, the US public’s strong aversion towards Noriega was
151

approval.
307
Celebration was heightened by continued vilification of Noriega.
For Rep. Bill Green (R-NY), “there comes a time when one has to chase the
bandit out of town.”
308
Congressman Howard L. Berman (D-CA) estimated
that, “in the long run, more American and Panamanian lives would have
been in jeopardy from letting the situation continue than the actual
casualties we are taking and foisting on the Panamanian people by the
intervention.”
309
Bill Thomas (R-CA) said Noriega “is getting what he asked
for”;
310
Duncan Hunter (R-CA) called the strike “the first major US military
involvement in the war on drugs.”
311
Just a handful of Congress members

due primarily to the “drug connection” and to Noriega’s status as “a dictator with a
reputation for brutality who, in the television era, looks the role.” Don Oberdorfer,
“Administration Draws American Support, Denunciations Abroad: Experts Say Special
Circumstances Explain Strong Public Backing,” Washington Post, December 22, 1989, para.
11, ProQuest.
307
George Skelton, “The Times Poll: Americans Strongly Back Bush on Panama
Invasion,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1989, ProQuest; Pat Towell and John Felton,
“Invasion, Noriega Ouster Win Support on Capitol Hill,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly
Report 47 (1989): 3532–34. Operation Just Cause involved the largest deployment of US
forces since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution (WPR) in 1973. The Bush
administration sidestepped the WPR provisions on Congress consultation as well as its
reporting requirements. Congressional response to Bush’s blatant disregard for WPR
obligation was mostly muted due to a number of reasons, including the popularity of the
invasion among the wider public and its quick operational success. Eileen Burgin,
“Congress, the War Powers Resolution, & the Invasion of Panama,” Polity 25, no. 2 (1992):
217–42.
308
Michel McQueen and David Shribman, “Bush Wins Praise for Ordering Panama
Invasion but Is Warned against Prolonged Involvement,” Wall Street Journal, December 21,
1989, para. 9, ProQuest.
309
Alan C. Miller, “Beilenson Among Few to Question Panama Invasion: Congress;
Democrats Berman and Waxman Join Republicans Gallegly, Moorhead and Thomas in
Supporting the President’s Decision to Send Troops,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1989,
para. 6, ProQuest.
310
Miller, para. 8.
311
“Bush Gets Bipartisan Support from Members of Congress,” San Diego Union-
Tribune, December 20, 1989, para. 18, ProQuest.
152

voiced reservations about Bush’s move. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), the
chairman of the House Narcotics Committee, issued a scathing critique of the
strike’s legal basis, and added: “I am of course distressed that prior to our
action, an American was killed, an American arrested, an American brutally
beaten, and an American military wife was threatened with rape. President
Bush said, ‘That was enough.’ If that is so, far more than that happens on
the streets of New York every day and night, and I say, that too is enough.”
312

Of the potential 1992 Democratic Presidential candidates, only the Rev. Jesse
Jackson came out unequivocally against the attack, quipping that “the
Noriega mania and the glee over his capture is blinding us to the cost we are
paying for the invasion and the occupation and the instituting of a
Government under our military vigilance.”
313
Many saw high public support
as proof that Bush had finally managed to kick the “wimp” label.
314
As New
York Times’ R. W. Apple noted, “whatever the other results of this roll of the
dice in Panama, it has shown him as a man capable of bold action.”
315

312
Thomas L. Friedman, “Fighting in Panama: Reaction; Congress Generally
Supports Attack, but Many Fear Consequences,” New York Times, December 21, 1989, para.
13, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/21/world/fighting-panama-reaction-congress-generally-
supports-attack-but-many-fear.html.
313
Michael Oreskes, “President Wins Bipartisan Praise for Solution of Crisis over
Noriega,” New York Times, January 5, 1990, para. 16,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/05/world/noriega-s-surrender-fallout-president-wins-
bipartisan-praise-for-solution-crisis.html.
314
David Shribman and James M. Perry, “GOP Greets Bush’s Panama Success with
Joy; Democrats Give Grudging Praise, Worry over ’92,” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 1990,
ProQuest.
315
R. W. Apple Jr., “War: Bush’s Presidential Rite of Passage,” New York Times,
December 21, 1989, para. 5, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/21/world/fighting-in-panama-
153

Showing a heightened awareness of the benefits of media management
after the Vietnam debacle, military leaders sought to control the public
narrative by contrasting “US motives with the injustices of the Noriega
regime.”
316
The Pentagon originally code-named the invasion Blue Spoon but
eventually switched it to Operation Just Cause. As then Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Gen. Colin Powell later wrote, “you don’t risk people’s lives for
Blue Spoons;” on the other hand, “even our severest critics would have to
utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.”
317
The strategy worked: US media
mostly jumped on the government bandwagon with news reports portraying
Panamanians cheering and kissing soldiers and repeating US officials’
bashing of Noriega as “a corrupt, debauched thug.”
318
The Wall Street

the-implications-war-bush-s-presidential-rite-of-passage.html. See also William Randolph
Hearst Jr., “President Bush’s Great Panama Victory Worthy of Nobel Prize,” Seattle Post-
Intelligencer, December 31, 1989, ProQuest.
316
Gregory C. Sieminski, “The Art of Naming Operations,” Parameters 25, no. 3
(1995): 90. The attack on Panama also saw the first implementation of the national media
pool system. The Pentagon flew a pre-selected pool of journalists from Washington, DC to
Panama on the day of the invasion. The plan was to grant them controlled access to the first
forty-eight hours of combat operations before other reporters arrived on site. In the end,
however, pool reporters were stuck watching CNN, or on tours of Noriega’s quarters
peppered with details about the General’s interest in voodoo and pornography, until the
invasion was well under way. Kevin Merida, “The Panama Press-Pool Fiasco,” Washington
Post, January 7, 1990, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/01/07/the-
panama-press-pool-fiasco/b67326de-fc0f-4691-a8df-1243d40b55a5/.
317
Colin L. Powell, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 413.
In a similar spirit, Operation Blind Logic, the contingency plan for post-Noriega stability and
nation-building operations was renamed Operation Promote Liberty before implementation.
318
Stanley Meisler and Thomas B. Rosenstiel, “Epithets, Voodoo Reports Help US
Demean Noriega,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 1989, para. 4,
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-31/news/mn-288_1_american-public. See also Thomas B.
Rosenstiel, “Combat in Panama: Invasion Gives New Meaning to ‘Live’ TV,” Los Angeles
Times, December 21, 1989, ProQuest. In his analysis of US media coverage of the Panama
invasion, Jonathan Mermin showed how the news “frames the outcome of a presidential roll
154

Journal editorial was blunt: “There are limits to the uncivilized behavior that
the United States will accept or endure.”
319
George Will celebrated the
military action as “a good-neighbor policy” and “an act of hemispheric
hygiene” consonant with America’s renewed commitment to “militant
democracy,”
320
while David Broder heralded the invasion as proof that
“Americans really have come together in recognition of the circumstances in
which military intervention makes sense.”
321

The White House’s legal rationale for the Panama invasion was
justified on two grounds: (1) The reassertion of the contested right of self-
defense as protection of nationals abroad; and (2) the redefinition of the
meaning of “sovereignty,” which in turn altered the cast of characters who
can violate sovereignty.
322
By supplanting territorially-based sovereign

of the dice as open to question, but does not present the decision to roll the dice as open to
critical analysis and debate. What this critical angle encourages, in other words, is
spectatorship, not deliberative citizenship.” Jonathan Mermin, “Grenada and Panama,” in
Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post-
Vietnam Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 56 (emphasis in original).
319
“Civilization’s Limits,” Wall Street Journal, December 21, 1989, para. 1, ProQuest.
320
George Will, “Intervention Good for US and for Panama,” The Register-Guard,
December 21, 1989, paras. 1–2, ProQuest.
321
For Broder, the best expression of this renewed consensus was the Weinberger
doctrine, the standards for military intervention outlined in 1984 by the then Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger. David S. Broder, “Panama: An Intervention That Made Sense,”
Washington Post, January 14, 1990, ProQuest. As Tom Farer underscored, the Weinberger
doctrine rests on utilitarian, rather than legal or moral, grounds; thus, “unlike the powerful
Acquinian Just War paradigm, it requires no just cause.” Tom J. Farer, “Panama: Beyond
the Charter Paradigm,” American Journal of International Law 84, no. 2 (1990): 541
(emphasis in original).
322
Bush’s December 21 letter notifying the invasion to Congress restated the same
web of justifications in legal terms: “The deployment of US Forces is an exercise of the right
of self-defense recognized in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter and was necessary to
protect American lives in imminent danger and to fulfill our responsibilities under the
155

rights with those derived from popular will, Bush claimed for the United
States the authority to wage war, not only on behalf of US citizens, but also
on behalf of Panamanians, against an unjust usurper. Rather than claiming
any right to Panama’s territory, the White House asserted its right to speak
for the people of Panama. At the UN Security Council, US Permanent
Representative Thomas Pickering thundered: “The question before us has
never been our commitment to Panamanian sovereignty nor is it today. For
the sovereign will of the Panamanian people is what we are here
defending.”
323
The shift in argumentation is important. The presidential
regime redefines the United States’ role in the international sphere from that
of one democratic nation among many to that of a hegemon, a self-announced
superpower able to impose order based on what it determines to be good for
other peoples, the invasion of a sovereign country notwithstanding.
At an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States
(OAS), US Ambassador Luigi Einaudi extended the White House’s
humanitarian rationale about the obligation to protect US nationals to

Panama Canal Treaties. It was welcomed by the democratically elected government of
Panama. The military operations were ordered pursuant to my constitutional authority with
respect to the conduct of foreign relations and as Commander in Chief.” George H. W. Bush,
“Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the
Senate on United States Military Action in Panama,” December 21, 1989, APP, para. 7,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17973.
323
Thomas R. Pickering, “Statement to UN Security Council” (December 20, 1989),
Security Council, United Nations, UN Doc. S/PV.2899, reprinted in US Department of State,
Bureau of Public Affairs, Panama: A Just Cause, Current Policy No. 1240 (Washington, DC:
US Department of State, 1990), 1.

156

include the moral duty or necessity of protecting foreign nationals.
324
On
that occasion, Einaudi’s speech took a flavor of vanguard rhetoric, as he
warned his fellow delegates not to stand in the way of history:
There are times in the life of men and of nations when history seems to
take charge of events and to sweep all obstacles from its chosen path.
At such moments, history appears to incarnate some great and
irresistible principle. . . .

Today, we are once again living in historic times, a time when a great
principle is spreading across the world like wildfire. That principle . . .
is the revolutionary idea that the people, not governments, are
sovereign. This principle is the essence of the democratic form of
government. It is by no means a new idea. But it is an idea which has,
in this decade, and especially in this historic year – 1989 – acquired
the force of historical necessity.

It was not too long ago that many governments and regimes usurped
the sovereign right of their peoples in the name of all-encompassing
ideologies. Those pretensions, those mystifications, have now been
unmasked for the fraud that they are. Democracy today is
synonymous with legitimacy the world over; it is, in short, the
universal value of our time.
325

After qualifying the United States as “champions of democracy, but not the
gendarme of democracy,” Einaudi proceeded to claim that “we acted in
Panama for legitimate reasons of self-defense, and to protect the integrity of

324
Gregory A. Raymond, “Duties Beyond Borders? Appeals to Moral Necessity in
Statecraft,” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society
for the Study of Argumentation, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren et al. (Amsterdam: Stichting
Internationaal Centrum voor de Studie van Argumentatie en Taalbeheersing, 1999),
http://rozenbergquarterly.com/issa-proceedings-1998-duties-beyond-borders-appeals-to-
moral-necessity-in-statecraft/.
325
Luigi R. Einaudi, “Remarks to Organization of American States” (December 22,
1989), reprinted in US Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Panama: A Just
Cause, Current Policy No. 1240 (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 1990), 2-3.
157

the Canal Treaties.”
326
The contrast between juxtaposed moral arguments
and appeals to interested expedience could hardly be more strident.
Most governments on and off the American continent saw things
differently and denounced the invasion as a blatant violation of the norm of
nonintervention in the internal affairs of another country.
327
Nicaragua
sponsored a resolution censuring the action, only to see it vetoed by the
United States, Britain, and France.
328
A similar resolution, however, was
adopted by the General Assembly by a vote of 75 to 20.
329
Einaudi’s appeal
fell on deaf ears as the delegates voted 20 to 1 “to deeply regret [deplorar
profundamente in the Spanish official version] the military intervention in
Panama.”
330
Guatemalan President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo gave voice to a
common sentiment: “We have not been told why, when Europe is on the
peaceful road to democratization, force is still used in Latin America.”
331
In

326
Einaudi, 3.
327
The principle of nonintervention is enshrined in a number of international treaties
to which the US is a signatory. In addition to the USN Charter, two treaties are particularly
relevant to the Panama intervention: the 1947 Inter-American (Rio) Treaty of Reciprocal
Assistance and the 1948 Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS).
328
Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was one of the few heads of state to
praise Bush’s “courageous decision,” stating that “the rulings of democracy should be
upheld.” Margaret Thatcher, “Remarks Supporting US Invasion of Panama,” Margaret
Thatcher Foundation, December 20, 1989, 51,
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107856.
329
Paul Lewis, “Security Council Condemnation of Invasion Vetoed,” New York
Times, December 24, 1989, ProQuest.
330
John M. Goshko and Michael Isikoff, “OAS Votes to Censure US for Intervention,”
Washington Post, December 23, 1989.
331
Richard Boudreaux, “Combat in Panama: Top Latin Leaders Roundly Condemn
US Military Attack,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1989, para. 6, ProQuest.
158

an interview on January 14, 1990, Peruvian President Alan Garcia asked
rhetorically: “By what authority does the United States kidnap citizens and
judge them?” He predicted that, to the peoples of Latin America, Noriega
would look like “a barbarian brought before a court of imperial Rome” on the
way to his “circus” trial in Florida.
332
Bush’s reply to these protests sounded
half-hearted. “The truth,” the president asserted, “is that we are not
reverting to just a willful – what’s the word I’m groping for here – use of force
that has no rationale. But when it comes to the protection of American life,
please – our friends south of the border – understand this President is going
to protect it.”
333
Faced with Soviet condemnation, Secretary of State Baker
sought to justify the invasion by appealing to shared democratic
commitments: “The difference is that the Soviet Union supports democracy
by staying out of countries and thus permitting democracy to proceed,” while,
“in this one and very unique instance, the United States did it by going in to
assist a democratically elected government against a dictator.”
334
Baker also
argued that “if the president had failed to act as (he) did and Noriega’s
dignity battalions had killed or terrorized a dozen American families in
Panama, you would be asking us today, ‘Why didn’t you act to prevent this

332
James Brooke, “Peruvian Still Outraged by Invasion of Panama,” New York
Times, January 14, 1990, para. 4, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/14/world/the-us-and-
panama-peruvian-still-outraged-by-invasion-of-panama.html.
333
George H. W. Bush, “The President’s News Conference,” January 5, 1990, APP,
para. 34, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18008&st=Noriega&st1=.
334
Susan Bennett, “Panama Intervention Gets Mixed Reactions,” St. Paul Pioneer
Press, December 21, 1989, para. 12, ProQuest.
159

kind of violence against our citizens?’ ”
335

The debate extended from representatives of nations to the sphere of
legal scholarship. International law experts were almost unanimous in
regarding the assault a disproportionate response to the threat alleged by US
officials. Many maintained that Washington should have pursued
alternatives short of full-scale aggressive war and regime change, such as, for
example, the evacuation of all Americans to US bases.
336
Others took
exception with the proposition that the United States could invade a country
in order to arrest its leader on federal criminal charges when no treaty
existed that would extend US law to that jurisdiction
337
(not to mention the
doubts raised by US laws that prohibit the use of military forces to execute
arrests
338
). On the day of the attack, law professor Robert K. Goldman

335
Bob Hepburn, “Was Gunboat Diplomacy by Bush Justified?” Toronto Star,
December 21, 1989, para. 8, ProQuest.
336
See, for example, “Invading as Means to Nab Suspect Faulted,” San Diego Union-
Tribune, December 21, 1989, ProQuest; Abraham F. Lowenthal, “Are There Rules Just for
Us?,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1989, ProQuest; Charles Maechling Jr.,
“Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” Foreign Policy, no. 79 (1990): 113–31,
https://doi.org/10.2307/1148680; David G. Savage, “Legality of US Invasion Spurs Debate,”
Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1989, ProQuest; David J. Scheffer, “Defensible, but Only to
a Degree: Panama; Noriega’s State of War Could Not Be Tolerated Very Long If the Canal’s
Neutrality Were Truly to Be Protected. Still, the Legal Case Is Far from Sound,” Los Angeles
Times, December 21, 1989, ProQuest.
337
International law only recognizes a handful of major crimes – such as piracy, air
terrorism, and war crimes – for the purpose of conferring international jurisdiction.
338
In June 1989, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a legal
opinion concluding that US law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, could apprehend
fugitives abroad without the consent of the country involved. On November 3, the Justice
Department issued a second opinion in which it argued that the Posse Comitatus Act, an old
law barring the military from executing arrests or from engaging in other police operations,
was not applicable outside US borders. Michael Isikoff and Patrick E. Tyler, “US Military
Given Foreign Arrest Powers,” Washington Post, December 16, 1989,
160

expressed his doubts in the form of a thought experiment: “Can you imagine .
. . how we would react if another nation asserted the right to have its military
engage in surreptitious kidnappings of Americans in this country?”
339
To
international law scholar Harold Berman, the invasion brought to mind the
more personal conception of war typical of feudal times, whereas a senior
lawyer at the International Court of Justice saw a parallel with “the Romans
leading back defeated leaders and taking them to the circus to be
displayed.”
340
Another analogy proposed by international law experts was to
the modus operandi of the British Empire in the nineteenth century.
341

“What we do now will succeed,” said Larry Pippin, a specialist in US-
Panamanian relations at the University of the Pacific, “but what is in
jeopardy is our international relations in the world at a time when the Soviet
Union is backing off this bullying thing, while we are using military force to
solve a problem that would have taken care of itself.”
342

While many international lawyers openly questioned the legal grounds

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/12/16/us-military-given-foreign-arrest-
powers/9ff56a09-9271-4778-ae99-03c60b3b1f0b/.
339
Savage, “Legality of US Invasion Spurs Debate,” para. 17.
340
Neil A. Lewis, “The US and Panama: Legal Issues; Scholars Say Arrest of Noriega
Has Little Justification in Law,” New York Times, January 10, 1990, paras. 8–9,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/10/us/us-panama-legal-issues-scholars-say-arrest-noriega-
has-little-justification-law.html.
341
Lewis, para. 19.
342
Tony Walker, “Panama Invasion Will Hurt US Later, Expert Says,” Modesto Bee,
December 21, 1989, paras. 2–3, ProQuest.
161

offered by the White House, there were notable exceptions.
343
The case in
defense of the Panama invasion advanced by W. Michael Reisman,
international law professor at Yale Law School, and published in a 1990
editorial comment in the American Journal of International Law, is worth
elaborating since it makes some of the same key moves illustrated by the
presidential rationale. Reisman contended that a new understanding of
sovereignty based on popular consent and human rights had replaced the
older notion of sovereignty as de facto control of territory. The idea that
sovereignty draws its legitimacy from popular (electoral) consent, Reisman
maintained, had been ushered by the American Revolution and later was
enshrined in the UN Charter as one of the foundations of modern political
legitimacy. This and other developments in the post-World War II
international legal order express “a radical decision that henceforth the
internal authority of governments would be appraised internationally”
according to its conformity to popular electoral wishes.
344
From all this, it
flows that “when those confirmed wishes are ignored by a local caudillo who
either takes power himself or assigns it to a subordinate he controls, a jurist

343
For example, Anthony D’Amato defended the Panama invasion as a major step
“along the path to a new nonstatist conception of international law that changes previous
nonintervention formulas.” Anthony D’Amato, “The Invasion of Panama Was a Lawful
Response to Tyranny,” American Journal of International Law 84, no. 2 (1990): 517,
https://doi.org/10.2307/2203464.
344
W. Michael Reisman, “Sovereignty and Human Rights in Contemporary
International Law,” The American Journal of International Law 84, no. 4 (1990): 867,
https://doi.org/10.2307/2202838.
162

rooted in the late twentieth century can hardly say that an invasion by
outside forces to remove the caudillo and install the elected government is a
violation of national sovereignty.”
345
On the contrary, under the new
requirements, the invasion could be said to reaffirm, in Reisman’s view, that
very (popular) sovereignty that had been subverted by the usurper. How
does the unilateral US invasion of Panama fare in light of these constitutive
changes? According to advocates of a unilateral right of pro-democratic
intervention, the 1989 invasion offers the paradigmatic example of their
theory at work. First and foremost, General Noriega had refused to accept
the results of the May 1989 elections; secondly, the opinion polls taken by US
organizations in the wake of the invasion indicated that most Panamanians
welcomed the intervention as a “liberation.”
346
These claims rely on two
widely held Western assumptions about what makes a government
legitimate: (1) the consent of the governed, (2) as established by transparent
and fair procedure. As New York University history professor Greg Grandin has
contended, by relying on democracy promotion as rationale for aggressive war,
the Bush administration “was in effect radically revising the terms of
international diplomacy.”
347

345
Reisman, 871.
346
Reisman, 873. See Michael R. Kagay, “Panamanians Strongly Back US Move,”
New York Times, January 6, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/06/us/the-noriega-case-
public-opinion-panamanians-strongly-back-us-move.html.
347
Greg Grandin, “How the Iraq War Began in Panama,” NACLA, December 24,
2014, para. 16, https://nacla.org/news/2014/12/24/how-iraq-war-began-panama.
163

Not only was Operation Just Cause the first post-Cold War military
intervention justified primarily in terms unrelated to Communism;
348
it also
turned out to be, in the words of Carl Stiner, the commander who led the
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) capture operation, “one of the
most intensive manhunts in history.”
349
In this respect it does illustrate the
judicial logic of one strand of the Just War tradition, with its emphasis on the
stasis of quality and attention to the circumstances of the alleged injury.
According to one author, Operation Just Cause represents the return to an
older, pre-Cold War “aterritorial international logic of an increasingly moral-
juridical type.”
350
Yet, the move also opens intervention into other unruly
peripheries, or failed states, where the US operates as a hegemonic power
setting in place governance determined by Washington’s views of the will of
the people. Ultimately the executive did not base the legal rationale for
invasion in the right of pro-democratic intervention, relying instead mainly
on the right of self-defense and of preserving the integrity of the Canal
treaties. The indictment of Noriega stretched well beyond his failure to lead

348
See Thomas Hollihan’s article on the late-seventies public debate over the new
Panama Canal treaties for analysis of the rhetorical dramas that circulated in American
foreign policy discourse on Panama just a decade before the invasion. Thomas A. Hollihan,
“The Public Controversy over the Panama Canal Treaties: An Analysis of American Foreign
Policy Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 50, no. 4 (1986): 368–87.
349
Sean D. Naylor, “Inside the Pentagon’s Manhunting Machine,” The Atlantic,
August 28, 2015, para. 3, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/jsoc-
manhunt-special-operations-pentagon/402652/.
350
Stewart Sutley, “The Revitalization of United States Aterritorial International
Logic: The World Before and After the 1989 Invasion of Panama,” Canadian Journal of
Political Science 25, no. 3 (1992): 461.
164

the Panamanian people. In this context, there is not a chance that the
immediate objective of the invasion was arresting and extraditing a state
leader who had been deemed morally unfit to govern. The indictment did not
have anything to do with war crimes or crimes against humanity. Drug
trafficking was it. Pragmatic necessity dominates the justification. The
rationale for invasion was first and foremost a political argument embodying
“a resurrection of the Roosevelt Corollary.”
351
Noriega ended up in a US
prison.
In this context, the White House’s appeals to the democratic
aspirations of the Panamanian people ring hollow. In her analysis of
presidential rhetoric related to the Panama crisis, Denise Bostdorff notes
that Bush’s definition of the invasion featured it as a means “to remedy the
crisis scene by achieving both pragmatic (the protection of lives, the
apprehension of Noriega, the alleviation of drug trafficking) and idealistic
(the preservation of democracy and the integrity of the Panama Canal
Treaty) goals.”
352
Additionally, Bostdorff finds that this blending and
balancing of idealism and pragmatism is a recurrent feature of presidential
crisis rhetoric whereby “presidents avoid the perception of passivity and
ineptitude that purely idealistic talk may encourage and the perception of

351
Maechling Jr., “Washington’s Illegal Invasion,” 125.
352
Denise M. Bostdorff, The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 209.
165

unprincipled expediency that purely pragmatic discourse may conjure.”
353

The analysis offered here complements these findings by broadening the
scope of inquiry to account for 1) the specifically political arguments
advanced by administration in order to provide a legal justification for the
attack, and 2) the parallels between the language used to justify the offensive
action at the UN and at the OAS and the discourse articulated by the White
House around the same time to hail the end of the cold War and the dawning
of a new world order.
Panama itself was left “in immediate and long-term disarray.”
354
After
Noriega’s arrest, the widespread looting unleashed by the invasion continued
unabated. The new government coalition collapsed almost immediately
under the weight of internal feuding and because of a legitimacy gap that left
it incapable of addressing Panama’s depressed economy and post-invasion
security vacuum.
355
In a 1993 review of the performance of US post-conflict
operations in Panama, Richard Shultz Jr., associate professor of
international politics at Tufts University, gives a sobering assessment: “A
review of the Panamanian political setting before 1989 reveals that
restoration of democracy was an inaccurate description of what was to take

353
Bostdorff, 216.
354
Waltraud Queiser Morales, “US Intervention and the New World Order: Lessons
from Cold War and Post-Cold War Cases,” Third World Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1994): 86.
355
Steve C. Ropp, “Things Fall Apart – Panama after Noriega,” Current History 92,
no. 572 (1993): 102–05.
166

place following the dismantling of the Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) and
the removal of Manuel Noriega.”
356
According to Shultz, planning for post-
conflict restoration (the operation successively code named Krystal Ball,
Blind Logic, and Promote Liberty) focused primarily on short-term
operational matters, while failing to consider crucial historical and contextual
issues, such as: “what kind of democracy was possible in Panama? How long
would it take to establish and secure? What were the major obstacles that
had to be overcome? Would an operative civil government exist once the PDF
was destroyed?”
357
The decision to dismantle the six thousand five hundred-
strong, US-trained, Panamanian Defense Force left Panama in a security
vacuum. The Endara government struggled with infighting and charges of
widespread corruption and money laundering. Drug trafficking continued
unabated and even increased. The Bush intervention of overwhelming force,
quick victory, unplanned recovery, and thin propaganda returned US policies
to the bygone days of ‘big stick’ gunboat diplomacy, but this time the
intervention was an entanglement in an international struggle of a hegemon
against networks of quasi-regimes, partly into governance and partly into the

356
Richard H. Shultz Jr., In the Aftermath of War: US Support for Reconstruction
and Nation-Building in Panama Following Just Cause (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air
University Press, 1993), 5.
357
Shultz Jr., 17. The author also quoted Gen. Maxwell Thurman’s diagnosis of
Blind Logic as “a plan based on the hope that life would quickly return to normal, people
would go back to work, and schools would reopen. Unfortunately, this was a faulty premise.”
Shultz Jr., 18. The faulty premises of Blind Logic/Promote Liberty would come back to haunt
US military leaders in the aftermath of the 2002 Iraq invasion.
167

dark economies of contraband exchange that polluted the public imaginary of
the war on drugs.
The Persian Gulf War: Iraq against the (New) World (Order)
The Gulf crisis was the first non-hemispheric predicament to come
after the Cold War. The Bush administration saw it as the first major test of
the new world order imagined at the end of the Cold War.
358
Scholars have
stressed the crucial role of rhetoric in shaping how the Gulf crisis unfolded.
359

Public moral arguments held a privileged position, ultimately.
360
Bush put
the presidency in a rhetorical movement that had three phases. Desert
Shield involved fall planning, diplomatic negotiations with Iraq, and building
up support from the United Nations for withdrawal of Iraqi forces from
Kuwait. The arguments of the White House built unification through
persuasion in order to put the onus of Hussein to withdraw or go to war as an
act of last resort out of necessity. Desert Storm was the term for the winter

358
Eric Miller and Steve Yetiv contended that “the end of the Cold War and the Gulf
crisis contributed fundamentally to the development of the concept of a new world order.”
Eric A. Miller and Steve A. Yetiv, “The New World Order in Theory and Practice: The Bush
Administration’s Worldview in Transition,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2001):
57.
359
As McEvoy-Levy argued, the Gulf crisis put on display “the vital role of rhetoric as
an accompaniment to military action and as a form of intervention in itself.” McEvoy-Levy,
American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy, 71.
360
Writing two years after the war, David Campbell remarked that “there have been
few conflicts in recent times so replete with ethical reasoning as the Gulf War.” David
Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 7. Strobe Talbott judged that “the end of the Cold War
created the conditions for a new brand of moralpolitik, or at least a more vigorous and far-
reaching one.” Strobe Talbott, “Post-Victory Blues,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 1 (1991): 56,
https://doi.org/10.2307/20045110.
168

launch of war and the short battles in the desert. The administration shifted
communication strategies to public moral argument by crafting a narrative
that unfolded a drama in which support for US troops should be paramount.
The final phase of the administration’s movement was the culmination of
victory in a presidential address to Congress that strove to fuse public policy
and moral narrative into a “vision” of a new world order in which the United
States would oversee the rise of democracies throughout the globe.
A particular public address exists as a strategic choice to foreground
one and background the other by either featuring narrative or issue
development. A public address with a vision works through a number of
strategic speeches to different audiences in order to achieve a rhetorical
legacy that fuses the two. Hence, I examine Bush’s UN speech as a stasis
driven argument, his speech to the National Religious Broadcasters group on
eve of war as a moral narrative, and his victory speech as a failed triumph
that announced a vision of future American foreign policy. The success of
presidential address is mapped for the first two movements, along with the
oppositional discourses it generated. The failure to harvest the victory into a
coherent, strong, affirmative democratic discourse constitutes a puzzle that is
addressed in the end through retrospective, critical appraisal.
Desert Shield
On August 2, 1990, more than one hundred thousand Iraqi troops
crossed the border with Kuwait and quickly overran and occupied the tiny
169

kingdom, marking the first time that an Arab country military invaded and
conquered another Arab state.
361
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his
officials motivated the invasion with the need to gain access to the Gulf
waters, and to retaliate against the emirate’s alleged slant drilling under
Iraq’s Rumaila oil field and overproduction of OPEC oil quotas.
362
This event
inaugurated the start of the Gulf crisis.
363
The pre-Desert Storm debate
unfolded over several months. This period saw the administration test a
variety of vocabularies of motives for war that ranged from securing access to
oil to upholding international law. At first the White House explained the
stakes in terms of national interest (oil, helping allies) and international law
(aggression). When, in late October, public momentum seemed to ebb, Bush
began to shift to moral argument.
To the Western powers, the threat of an erratic regional player
controlling twenty percent of the world’s oil reserves was hard to ignore.

361
F. Gregory Gause, “The Gulf War as Arab Civil War,” in The Gulf War of 1991
Reconsidered, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Efraim Inbar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27.
362
For more on Iraq’s contentious relations with Kuwait, see Majid Khadduri and
Edmund Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, 1990-91: The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). On President Hussein’s war rhetoric, see Jerry M.
Long, Saddam’s War of Words: Politics, Religion, and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2004).
363
The literature on the history of the Gulf crisis and war is extensive. See, for
example, Andrew J. Bacevich and Efraim Inbar, eds., The Gulf War of 1991 Reconsidered
(New York: Routledge, 2002); Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict,
1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993); Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside
Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995); Dilip Hiro, Desert Shield
to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (New York: Routledge, 1992); Steve A. Yetiv, The
Persian Gulf Crisis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).
170

Prime Minister Thatcher declared Iraq’s invasion to contradict “every
principle for which the United Nations stands,” and warned that, were
Hussein’s gamble to succeed, “no small country can ever feel safe again. The
law of the jungle would take over from the rule of law.”
364
On the day of the
invasion, US Ambassador to the UN Thomas Pickering called for an
emergency meeting of the Security Council; in just a few hours the Council
adopted Resolution 660, condemning Iraq’s aggression and demanding
immediate unconditional withdrawal. On August 5, Bush declared: “This will
not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”
365
The next
day the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 661 under Chapter VII of
the UN Charter, which imposed a worldwide embargo on trade with Iraq and
foreign-asset freeze.
366
In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Cheney flew to

364
Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to the Aspen Institute,” Margaret Thatcher
Foundation, August 5, 1990, 3091, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108174.
Other countries from Africa all the way to the Middle East feared that Iraq’s seizure of
Kuwait, if successful, could embolden other irredentist challenges to the legitimacy of their
own post-colonial borders.
365
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks and an Exchange with Reporters on the Iraqi
Invasion of Kuwait,” August 5, 1990, APP, para. 40,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18741&st=&st1=. In the late 1980s,
Kuwait had become a hub of United States policy in the Gulf. By asking the US to protect its
tankers against Iranian attacks (Kuwait was Iraq’s main ally and financier in the Iran-Iraq
War), it had given the US with the opportunity to increase its military presence in the area.
See John H. Cushman, “Weinberger Urges Bases in Gulf Area for US Air Patrol,” New York
Time, May 25, 1987, ProQuest; Don Oberdorfer, “Soviet Deal with Kuwait Spurred US Ship
Role; Protection of Oil Exports Rooted in Rivalry,” Washington Post, May 24, 1987, ProQuest;
John Kifner, “US Move in the Gulf: More Firmly on Iraq’s Side,” New York Times, June 12,
1987, ProQuest.
366
“United Nations: Security Council Resolutions Concerning Iraqi Aggression,”
International Legal Materials 29, no. 5 (1990): 1323–36. Article 41, chapter VII of the UN
Charter states: “The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of
armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the
Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or
171

Jeddah to convince the Saudis that Iraq was on the verge of invading Saudi
Arabia and to get formal permission to deploy US ground forces there.
367

King Fahd was persuaded.
On August 7, the US and its NATO allies launched Operation Desert
Shield, which involved a massive transfer of troops (more than one hundred
fifty thousand in a few weeks, soon to reach five hundred forty thousand) to
Saudi Arabia to ‘shield’ it from the imminent threat of Iraqi aggression, and
the dispatch of carrier warships to the Red Sea to blockade Iraqi oil exports
and most other imports.
368
In announcing the operation, Bush framed the
situation as a time when “we’re called upon to define who we are and what

partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and
other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.” Before 1990, the
UN Security Council had imposed sanctions only twice, on southern Rhodesia (1966-1977)
and on South Africa (1977).
367
Maureen Dowd, “The Longest Week: How the President Decided to Draw the
Line,” New York Times, August 9, 1990,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/09/world/confrontation-gulf-longest-week-president-
decided-draw-line.html. Why Hussein should have deemed it necessary to take Kuwait in
order to invade Saudi Arabia is unclear, since Iraq and Saudi Arabia share a long border.
Years later, severe doubts emerged about the quality of the intelligence reports used to
justify Desert Shield. Scott Peterson, “In War, Some Facts Less Factual,” Christian Science
Monitor, September 6, 2002, https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html.
368
The troop deployment, the largest of this kind since Vietnam, was orchestrated
quickly and in rather secretive fashion. Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) was the only member of
Congress to be notified before the launch of the operation. In an interview with the New
York Times, Chairman of the Chief of Staff Colin Powell characterized his thinking in the
context of planning Desert Shield as follows: “The American people want their interests
protected and they want their values protected and they are willing to help others who are in
need and for whom we may have some responsibility. . . . But at the same time, being very
reasonable, practical people, they hope we will do it quickly, efficiently and successfully. The
quicker you can do it, the better off you are. That means making sure you have clear
instructions for what you are being asked to do and then putting in the necessary force to do
it.” Andrew Rosenthal, “Military Chief: Man of Action and of Politics,” New York Times,
August 17, 1990, para. 11, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/17/us/confrontation-gulf-
washington-work-military-chief-man-action-politics.html.
172

we believe,” and asked the nation to rally behind his decision “to stand up for
what’s right and condemn what’s wrong, all in the cause of peace.”
369
US
troops were taking “defensive positions in Saudi Arabia. . . . to assist the
Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.”
370
Furthermore,
the president continued, Washington would tolerate no “puppet regime
imposed from the outside” nor “the acquisition of territory by force.”
371
Bush
then proceeded to outline “four simple principles” guiding US policy: (1) Iraq’s
“immediate, unconditional, and complete withdrawal” from Kuwait; (2)
restoration of “Kuwait’s legitimate government;” (3) commitment “to the
security and stability of the Persian Gulf” (in line with the Carter doctrine)
and (4) protection of “the lives of American citizens abroad.”
372
After
reminding Americans of their dependence on imported oil, Bush went on to
claim that “appeasement does not work,” for, “as was the case in the 1930s,
we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors”
and whose “promises mean nothing.”
373
On the same day, the Ba’ath
Revolutionary Command Council in Baghdad formally annexed Kuwait,
reasserting Iraq’s historic claim to its “nineteenth province” and pronouncing

369
George H. W. Bush, “Address to the Nation Announcing the Deployment of United
States Armed Forces to Saudi Arabia,” August 8, 1990, APP,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=18750.
370
Bush, para. 2.
371
Bush, para. 4.
372
Bush, para. 5.
373
Bush, para. 7.
173

a “comprehensive and eternal merger” between the two countries.
374

The core of the administration’s rationale was defense against cross-
border aggression, the quintessential just cause in twentieth-century versions
of the Just War doctrine. US government officials stressed the defensive
character of the buildup. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater
declared the government had intelligence reports “showing that Iraqi forces
are (on the Saudi border) in considerable quantity and they are in an
offensive posture and we believe that there is an imminent threat to Saudi
Arabia.”
375
A senior administration official said that the purpose of Desert
Shield was to position a ground force “sizable enough to give the Iraqis pause,
but not enough to kick them out.”
376
The deployment however had a second,
and largely unstated, objective. Rep. Les Aspin (D-WI), chair of the House
Armed Services Committee, hinted at this additional goal when he declared
approvingly that the stationing of US troops would discourage “Iraq from
doing the wrong thing militarily,” all the while pushing “the Saudis to do the

374
Adam Roberts, “The Laws of War in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict,” International
Security 18, no. 3 (1993): 152. Iraq’s claims to Kuwait were symbolized by the slogan
“Kuwait is a branch of the [Iraq] trunk.” Khadduri and Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, 1990-91,
122.
375
Janet Cawley and Nicholas M. Horrock, “US Forces to Mideast: Bush Acts to
Prevent Iraq Invasion of Saudi Arabia,” Chicago Tribune, August 8, 1990, para. 28,
ProQuest. Later, doubts emerged about the veracity of these alleged intelligence reports.
See Peterson, “In War, Some Facts Less Factual.”
376
Michael R. Gordon, “Bush Sends US Force to Saudi Arabia as Kingdom Agrees to
Confront Iraq: Bush’s Aim’s: Deter Attack, Send a Signal,” New York Times, August 8, 1990,
para. 17, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/08/world/bush-sends-us-force-saudi-arabia-
kingdom-agrees-confront-iraq-bush-s-aim-s-deter.html.
174

right thing economically,” that is, increase oil production.
377
On the other
hand, the buildup sparked a surge of nationalistic opposition to Western
hegemony. In the eyes of “many Arabs, the prospect of a US military
presence shifted the political argument from the issue of Iraqi aggression to
the issue of Western neocolonialism.”
378

A week later, on August 12, the US moved unilaterally with the naval
blockade of Iraq’s oil shipments without seeking the authorization of the UN
Security Council (two weeks later the Council adopted Resolution 665, which
retroactively authorized such action).
379
Shortly thereafter, Bush
rearticulated the stakes for resisting Iraq. Desert Shield “is not about
religion, greed, or cultural differences, as Iraq’s leader would have us
believe;” rather, the stakes involve “preserving the sovereignty of nations”
and “standing by old friends,” as well as “maintaining access to energy
resources that are key, not just to the functioning of this country but to the
entire world,” in the conviction that “our jobs, our way of life, our own
freedom, and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all
suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of that one

377
Gordon, para. 19.
378
Ann Mosely Lesch, “Contrasting Reactions to the Persian Gulf Crisis: Egypt,
Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians,” Middle East Journal 45, no. 1 (1991): 37. Ironically,
one of the outcomes of the Persian Gulf War was the further decline of pan-Arab nationalism.
379
Michael R. Gordon, “Bush Orders Navy to Halt All Shipments of Iraq’s Oil and
Almost All Its Imports,” New York Times, August 13, 1990,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/13/world/confrontation-gulf-bush-orders-navy-halt-all-
shipments-iraq-s-oil-almost-all-its.html.
175

man, Saddam Hussein.”
380

The specter of high gas prices and a protracted hostage crisis (three
thousand five hundred Americans were held against their will in Iraq and
Kuwait) loomed high in the White House’s list of concerns. The US economy
was already showing signs of malaise in the first half of the year. In June,
the president was forced to go back on his “read my lips: no new taxes”
campaign pledge in rocky negotiations with Congress over a belt-tightening
budget deal. During the Gulf crisis, the sharp spike in oil prices and
plunging consumer confidence triggered a recession that, while lasting
officially only eight months, left in its wake a sluggish recovery and anemic
job growth. Speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference in
Baltimore, Bush drew a further connection between war aims and the battle
on Capitol Hill over military budget cuts: “What Desert Shield has shown is
that America can ensure the peace by remaining militarily strong.”
381
The
bloated public debt that was in part the legacy of President Reagan’s defense
spending would find no reprieve in a post-Cold War peace dividend. “The
budget deficit is a threat to our vital interests at home and won’t be made
easier by today’s threat abroad,” Bush acknowledged, but “let us never forget
that our strong national defense policies have helped us gain the peace. We

380
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks to Department of Defense Employees,” August 15,
1990, APP, para. 8, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18768&st=&st1=.
381
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the Annual Conference of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars in Baltimore, Maryland,” August 20, 1990, APP, para. 24,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=18774.
176

need a strong defense today to maintain that peace.”
382
Bush’s conclusion to
the speech incorporated a quote from General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
Address to the D-Day Forces. Bush asked:
Will it take time? Of course. For we’re engaged in a cause larger than
ourselves, a cause perhaps best shown by words many of you
remember – words spoken by one of the greatest Americans of our time
to allied soldiers and sailors and airmen. “The eyes of the world are
upon you,” he told them. “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving
people everywhere march with you.” And then he concluded with this
moving prayer: “Let us all beseech the blessing of almighty God upon
this great and noble undertaking.”
383

Eisenhower’s Order of the Day started with the famous line: “You are about
to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these
many months.” Resonances of holy/total war were in the air.
At a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in early
September, Secretary of State James Baker portrayed “Iraq’s unprovoked
aggression” as “a political test . . . of how the post-Cold War world is going to
work.”
384
Baker put the situation in terms of a clear choice between “a world
where aggression is made less likely because it is met with a powerful
response from the international community,” and another “where aggression
can go unchecked,” where “a dictator . . . acting alone and unchallenged,

382
Bush, paras. 25–26.
383
Bush, para. 31.
384
Crisis in the Persian Gulf: Hearings and Markup before the House Committee on
Foreign Affairs, 101st Cong. 2nd session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office,
1990), 7 (statement of James A. Baker III, Secretary of State).
177

could strangle the global economic order.”
385
The objectives of Operation
Desert Shield “are to deter” an attack on Saudi Arabia, to safeguard the
“effective implementation” of sanctions, “to protect American lives,” and to
respond with force “should Iraq escalate its aggression.”
386
In focusing on
Iraq’s belligerence, the White House placed its argument in line with the
longstanding American tradition according to which “the justice or injustice
of war has turned upon the circumstances immediately attending the
initiation of force,” with little considerations given to historical factors.
387

The administration however worried that the US public would not get
behind an offensive military action to restore the reactionary al-Sabah
dynasty.
388
Unsurprisingly, neither Bush nor his officials made any
references to Panama or to democracy restoration as they elucidated White
House policy in the Gulf. Asked whether the US was fully committed to
bringing back the deposed al-Sabah family, the president was adamantly
curt: “That’s a matter for the Kuwaitis to decide. Of course, they should be

385
Statement of James Baker, 7–8.
386
Statement of James Baker, 10.
387
Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation: The New
World Order and America’s Purpose (Council on Foreign Relations, 1992), 133.
388
Writing in 1992, Kenneth Vaux describes contemporary Kuwaiti socio-political
structures as follows: “Ruled over by the al-Sabah family, none of the thousand members of
the Emir’s ruling family appeared to perform socially useful work. The work of the society . .
. was carried out primarily by Palestinians, Philippinos, and other aliens, none of whom had
any legal rights. Today only 10-15 percent of the population – males who can trace their
lineage to the 1920s – have the right to vote. Even after the establishment of a constitution
and parliament in 1962, all MPs were from the royal family.” Kenneth Vaux, Ethics and the
Gulf War: Religion, Rhetoric, and Righteousness (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 4. In
1987, Emir Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah dissolved the parliament and imposed press
censorship.
178

restored. I suppose that you might say that’s true of any country. . . . there’s
no compromise on the question of getting legitimate government back and
getting the illegitimate invaders out.”
389
When asked, during a September 23
interview, whether the White House would allow a new government in
Kuwait, Secretary Baker characterized such a scenario as “appeasement,”
and added: “I wouldn’t want to see the world go down that road.”
390
On their
part, Iraqi officials insisted that the emir could not be allowed to return to
Kuwait, proposing instead to hold a plebiscite, and calling repeatedly for an
international peace conference on the Middle East.
391

389
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session with Reporters
in Kennebunkport, Maine, Following a Meeting with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of
Canada,” August 27, 1990, APP, para. 68,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18787&st=&st1=. When it emerged that
the US was barring press pools from joining the troops leaving for Saudi Arabia due to the
Saudis’ refusal to admit Western reporters, the Pentagon quickly reversed its course.
“Getting Behind ‘Desert Shield,’” New York Times, August 11, 1990, ProQuest. A number of
coalitions and lobbying efforts emerged in support of Bush’s confrontational posture. Former
Defense Department official Richard Perle, together with Democratic Rep. Stephen Solarz,
former ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Ann Lewis, a former political director
of the Democratic National Committee, formed the Committee for Peace and Security in the
Gulf with the objective of promoting US intervention and pushing war aims to include the
destruction of Iraq’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs. An influential pro-
intervention lobby was the Kuwait-sponsored Citizens for a Free Kuwait, an organization
that engaged in an extensive PR campaign in support of Bush’s Gulf policy, including
supplying witnesses for a congressional hearing on Iraqi-perpetrated atrocities in Kuwait
and funding the shipment of two-hundred thousand copies of its book “The Rape of Kuwait”
to US troops in Saudi Arabia. Jill Abramson, “Crisis Has Birds of a Feather, Hawks,
Flocking Together in Lobbying Groups,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 1991, ProQuest.
For more on the pro-war lobbying effort, see John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship
and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004).
390
John M. Goshko, “Mitterrand Proposes Peace Plan,” Washington Post, September
25, 1990, para. 7, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/09/25/mitterrand-
proposes-peace-plan/40e25494-a025-4541-9538-819e38fae4db/.
391
William Beecher, “Some Question Demand for ‘Unconditional’ Iraqi Pullout,” Star
Tribune, September 26, 1990, ProQuest. Shortly after invading Kuwait, Hussein had
proposed “that all issue of occupation . . . be resolved in accordance with the same . . .
179

Faced with a wavering Congress and uncertain domestic public
opinion, the White House suddenly turned to the United Nations to build
support around its cornerstone strategy for the political and economic
isolation of Iraq. After all, one main feature of the envisioned new world
order was cooperation between the two superpowers in solving a host of Third
World conflicts – such as the Arab-Israeli dispute, and strife within El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and other countries – on which
they had previously been at odds. Here too, however, the White House found
its appeals to international leaders increasingly undercut by independent
efforts to find a peaceful solution to the stalemate outside the US-led military
framework. The European Community, the UN, France, and several Arab
states launched diplomatic overtures to avert war. Feeling that the White
House was shifting away from the agreed goal of restoring Kuwaiti
sovereignty toward a more comprehensive plan of Iraqi regime change,
French President François Mitterrand went to the UN with a proposal for
negotiated settlement of the Gulf stalemate.
392
The plan proposed that Iraq’s

principles . . . set by the UN Security Council,” declaring that Iraqi troops would leave
Kuwait in return for an Israeli pullout from the occupied territories and Syria’s departure
from Lebanon. Baghdad radio, August 12, 1990, quoted in Lesch, “Contrasting Reactions to
the Persian Gulf Crisis,” 37.
392
Ronald Tiersky, François Mitterrand: A Very French President (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 199. In a September 16 interview with the Los Angeles Times,
the then Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Michael Dungan, said that US air force build-up in the
region had reached levels comparable to the fleet defending Europe at the height of the Cold
War. Dugan also described the Pentagon’s war plan in the Persian Gulf as based on a
massive offensive air campaign aimed, among other things, at decapitating the Iraqi regime
in Baghdad: “You would attempt to convince his population that he and his regime cannot
180

pledge to withdraw from Kuwait be reciprocated by US support for an
international conference on the Palestinian issue.
393
The White House
rejected the proposal, insisting that any concession would be a reward for
aggression.
394
On the same day, Bush told a group of Arab-Americans at a

protect them. . . . If there is a nation that cannot defend its people against these intruding
foreigners – protect their lines of communication, their means of production, their cities –
that brings a great burden for their ruler.” “US Combat Advantage up in the Air,” Los
Angeles Times, September 16, 1990, para. 14, ProQuest. In order to achieve these goals,
Dugan explained, the list of targets had been expanded to include Saddam Hussein, his
family, mistress, and personal guard. This interview costed General Dugan his job. See
“Sack the General to Save the Strategy,” New York Times, September 18, 1990,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/18/opinion/sack-the-general-to-save-the-strategy.html.
393
Mitterrand presented his proposal on September 24 at the opening of the forty-
fifth UN General Assembly meeting. After defining the crisis unambiguously in terms of “a
choice between the law of the jungle and the rule of force,” and expressing France’s
preference for regional governments to solve the dispute among themselves, Mitterrand set
to outline his proposal for peace in the Middle East. François Mitterrand, “Address to the
Forty-Fifth UN General Assembly Session” (September 24, 1990), General Assembly, United
Nations, UN Doc. A/45/PV.4, September 27, 1990, 36–37,
http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/45/PV.4. The first stage would begin
with Iraq affirming “its intention to withdraw its troops and free the hostages; then, “at the
second stage,” Mitterrand continued, “the international community . . . would be able to
guarantee the withdrawal of Iraqi forces, the restoration of Kuwait’s sovereignty and
exercise of the democratic will of the Kuwaiti people.” Mitterrand, 41. These two steps
would be followed by a third one aimed at replacing “confrontation in the Middle East with
the dynamics of good-neighborliness and security and peace,” most notably with regard to
Lebanon and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where “we must take up the
idea of an international conference as the catalyst and the guarantor of the implementation
of any successful negotiation.” Finally, the fourth stage would involve “a mutually agreed
reduction of armaments in the region, the beginning of co-operation from Iran to Morocco,
from the Middle East to the Atlantic, and stability and prosperity.” Mitterrand, 42. After
addressing the UN General Assembly, Mitterrand embarked on a trip to the Gulf to engage
in diplomatic talks with regional powers. Following Mitterrand’s proposal, Gorbachev also
sent Yevgeny Primakov, a member of his Presidential Council, on a mission to the Middle
East to continue the search for a diplomatic settlement of the crisis. Khadduri and Ghareeb,
War in the Gulf, 1990-91, 146–47.
394
Mitterrand’s plan was widely perceived to contradict two key components of
Bush’s policy, namely, the administration’s steadfast insistence on unconditional withdrawal
and categorical refusal to consider either democratic regime change in Kuwait or an
international peace conference on the Middle East as face-saving concessions in a negotiated
settlement with Iraq. On their part, the Kuwaitis and Saudis were displeased and alarmed
by Mitterrand’s public reference to the Kuwaiti people’s democratic aspirations. Paul Lewis,
“Mitterrand Says Iraqi Withdrawal Could Help End Mideast Disputes,” New York Times,
September 25, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/25/world/confrontation-gulf-
181

White House meeting that he was “not going to yield one inch” on his
demands for Iraq’s unconditional and complete pullout and the restoration of
the emirate. After observing that “Iraq is no . . . model of democracy, nor was
Kuwait,” the president maintained that “that isn’t the question here. The
question is international law and respect for one’s neighbor.”
395
As then
senior Middle East specialist on the National Security Council Richard Haass
later put it, there was a widespread perception that “the crisis had lost its
newness and the whole focus in the Security Council was being deflected by
the Israeli-Palestinian thing.”
396

On October 1, 1990, Bush addressed the forty-fifth session of the UN
General Assembly. The speech announced that the fulfilment of grand post-
war goals was at hand. The opening is quoted at length, to capture the scope
and ambition of the presidential movement as well as to underscore how
much was being placed on the table for reversing Hussein’s invasion:
The founding of the United Nations embodied our deepest hopes for a
peaceful world, and during the past year, we’ve come closer than ever
before to realizing those hopes. We’ve seen a century sundered by
barbed threats and barbed wire give way to a new era of peace and
competition and freedom.

The Revolution of ‘89 swept the world almost with a life of its own,
carried by a new breeze of freedom. It transformed the political

mitterrand-says-iraqi-withdrawal-could-help-end-mideast.html.
395
Mark Matthews, “Bush Acknowledges Flaws of Ousted Kuwaiti Regime,” The
Sun, September 25, 1990, para. 3, ProQuest.
396
Thomas L. Friedman, “Mideast Tensions: How US Won Support to Use Mideast
Forces the Iraq Resolution; A US-Soviet Collaboration,” New York Times, December 2, 1990,
para. 15, ProQuest.
182

climate from Central Europe to Central America and touched almost
every corner of the globe. That breeze has been sustained by a now
almost universal recognition of a simple, fundamental truth: The
human spirit cannot be locked up forever. The truth is, people
everywhere are motivated in much the same ways. And people
everywhere want much the same things: the chance to live a life of
purpose; the chance to choose a life in which they and their children
can learn and grow healthy, worship freely, and prosper through the
work of their hands and their hearts and their minds. . . .

This is a new and different world. Not since 1945 have we seen the
real possibility of using the United Nations as it was designed: as a
center for international collective security.
397

The president laid out a grand narrative; yet, the completion of the story
was the announcement of an opportunity for the United Nations to seize
its initiative as a policy-making space that authorized and hence
legitimated global interventions into regimes to unchain the aspirations
of the people.
Bush asked the General Assembly: “Can we work together in a new
partnership of nations? Can the collective strength of the world
community, expressed by the United Nations, unite to deter and defeat
aggression?” The question was urgent because, Bush continued, “the cold
war’s battle of ideas is not the last epic battle of this century.”
398
The
proposed “new partnership of nations” was a working relationship of
interventions to correct or reverse the activities of rogue regimes (and,

397
George H. W. Bush, “Address Before the 45th Session of the United Nations
General Assembly in New York,” October 1, 1990, APP, paras. 3–5,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18883&st=Assembly&st1.
398
Bush, para. 9.
183

under Clinton, failed states). The argument worked by dissociating the
leadership of the rogue regime from its citizens. As Bush stated, “our
quarrel is not with the people of Iraq. We do not wish for them to suffer.
The world’s quarrel is with the dictator who ordered that invasion.”
399

The Just War principle of right intention was further underscored: “we
seek no advantage for ourselves,” said the president.
400
So, the UN policy
was based on recognition of an overarching principle. The president put
it bluntly: “the world’s key task – now, first and always – must be to
demonstrate that aggression will not be tolerated or rewarded.”
401
“Iraq’s
unprovoked aggression is a throwback to another era, a dark relic from a
dark time. It has plundered Kuwait” and executed thousands of its own
people “on political and religious grounds, and even more through a
genocidal poison gas war.”
402
Peaceful means of persuasion were to be
tried first through condemnation and sanction, but, in case of failure,
force needed to follow.
Bush raised the stakes enormously: “As a world community, we
must act not only to deter the use of inhumane weapons like mustard and
nerve gas but to eliminate the weapons entirely.”
403
A hint of nuclear

399
Bush, para. 13.
400
Bush, para. 14.
401
Bush, para. 16.
402
Bush, para. 17.
403
Bush, para. 18.
184

capacity was thrown in. These Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs, a
figure of Bush 43) was accorded agency and targeted, like Hussein, for
control or elimination. The offensive option achieved stasis by
confronting the UN with a necessary decision because “the present
aggression in the Gulf is a menace not only to one region’s security but to
the entire world’s vision of our future. It threatens to turn the dream of a
new international order into a grim nightmare of anarchy in which the
law of the jungle supplants the law of nations”
404
The either/or binary
underscored the dichotomous choice offered in debating a proposition of
action. The crucial task of the speech was to “indict” the regime for its
present and past actions, in order to get a conviction that would translate
into a legal mandate to invade the country and topple its government
(punishment) if need be.
By mid-October the administration was still worried about losing its
momentum. Despite the domestic and international arguments, the US
public was deeply divided over the prospect of going to war to dislodge Iraq
from Kuwait. Considered the muted, if not supportive, US reaction to Iraq’s
attack on Iran just a few years earlier, why was Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait
in 1990 a threat to world peace? What changed? The White House faced
mounting criticism from people concerned that Bush’s response to the crisis

404
Bush, para. 24.
185

was determined by a paramount preoccupation with oil.
405

The president attempted to clarify the stakes on the campaign trail for
the coming November 6 midterm elections. On October 20, thousands of
people marched in a coordinated protest in sixteen American cities against
the military build-up. The protest slogan was “no blood for oil,” a reference to
what was offered to be the genuine motivating factor for US concerns. To the
people wielding “no war for oil” signs, Bush replied that “the holding of
hostages, innocent men and women whose only mistake was to be in Kuwait
or be in Iraq when the invader took over Kuwait . . . goes against the
conscience of the entire world.”
406
He also mentioned recent reports of
atrocities committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, some of which included the
removal of patients from their dialysis machines so the machines could be
shipped to Baghdad and the throwing of babies out of their incubators “so
that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled. So, it isn’t oil that we’re
concerned about. It is aggression. And this aggression is not going to
stand.”
407
In a separate speech a few days later, Bush returned on the issue

405
It was a reasonable inference to say the least. In an Aug. 20 Time article, a Bush
adviser stated that “even a dolt understands the principle. We need the oil. It’s nice to talk
about standing up for freedom, but Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not exactly democracies,
and if their principal export were oranges, a mid-level State Department official would have
issued a statement and we would have closed Washington down for August.” Michael
Kramer and Michael Duffy, “Read My Ships,” Time, August 20, 1990, para. 13, EBSCOhost.
406
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at a Republican Fundraising Breakfast in
Burlington, Vermont,” October 23, 1990, APP, para. 25,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18954.
407
Bush, para. 28. There were many accusations at the time about Iraqi forces’
abuse and human rights violations in Kuwait. Many were substantiated by human-rights
186

of hostages and reiterated that the protesters “got it wrong. We’re not
talking about oil. We are talking about standing up against aggression. And
if the United States can’t do it and cannot lead, nobody can.”
408
As Brent
Scowcroft later acknowledged, “one criticism was that we had failed to
explain why out troops were in the Saudi desert, why the United States had
to lead the response to Iraq’s aggression. Even supporters would tell the
president that public backing would be there, but that we had to state our
case more clearly. Too much of the reasoning, they argued, seemed
abstract.”
409

More and more critical outsiders kept coming out publicly against the
war, eventually forcing the administration to reassert and defend the
legitimacy of its increasingly offensive posture. Among the most prominent
naysayers were the leaders of several mainline Protestant denominations and
the National Council of Churches. At a meeting with the White House,
Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning of the Episcopal Church (Bush’s own

monitors, but some turned out to be baseless. A famous example is the October 10, 1990,
testimony before the congressional Human Rights Caucus by a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl.
The girl, identified only by her first name “Nayirah,” said that Iraqi soldiers were stealing
hospital incubators, leaving scores of babies out to die. Later it emerged that the girl was
Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and that her remarks to
the Caucus were part of a PR campaign paid for by the Kuwaiti-sponsored group Citizens for
a Free Kuwait. After the war ended, the incubator story, which was also backed by other
sources at the time, could not be verified. “Deception on Capitol Hill,” New York Times,
January 15, 1992, sec. editorial, ProQuest.
408
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at a Republican Campaign Rally in Albuquerque,
New Mexico,” November 3, 1990, APP, para. 20,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18992.
409
Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 398.
187

religious leader) urged restraint, predicting that, if war came, “the Middle
East will be scorched beyond belief, and the recovery of such destruction
would be almost impossible.”
410
The president replied by asking the bishop if
it was “morally responsible” to stand by as Iraqi forces tortured and executed
with impunity in Kuwait, pointing to evidence from a recent Amnesty
International report.
411
US Catholic bishops and the Vatican also pressured
US officials to give economic sanctions more time to work.
412
The then US

410
Laurie Goodstein, “US Church Leaders Urge Against Gulf War,” Washington Post,
December 22, 1990, para. 10,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/12/22/us-church-leaders-urge-against-
gulf-war/3b3c6ac5-6a8f-46ab-8bfc-54bed0bc6e56/.
411
Goodstein, para. 12.
412
In a November 29 letter addressed directly to the president on behalf of the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk made the case for
economic sanctions rather than war, on the grounds that resorting to military force against
Iraq would violate the just-war principles of last resort and proportionality. Daniel Pilarczyk
and US Catholic Bishops, “Letter to President Bush: The Persian Gulf Crisis,” in War in the
Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics, ed. Richard B. Miller (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 445–48. The letter in particular objected to the
number of US troops deployed in the Gulf, arguing that the deployment was out of proportion
to the objectives articulated by the White House. In his Christmas message, John Paul II
called for world leaders to halt the drums of war: “The light of Christ is with the tormented
nations of the Middle East. For the area of the Gulf, we await with trepidation for the threat
of war to dissipate. Those responsible should be persuaded that war is an adventure with no
return! With reason, with patience, and with dialogue, and with respect for the inalienable
rights of peoples and of nations, it is possible to identify and travel the paths of concord and
of peace. The Holy Land, too, has been awaiting this peace for years: a peaceful solution to
the whole matter that concerns it, a solution that takes into account the legitimate
expectations of the Palestinian people and of the people that live in the State of Israel.” John
Paul II, “Message of John Paul II Urbi et Orbi Christmas 1990,” December 25, 1990, para. 6,
https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/messages/urbi/documents/hf_jp-
ii_mes_19901225_urbi.html. Below is the original passage in Italian: “La luce di Cristo è con
le Nazioni tormentate del Medio Oriente. Per l’area del Golfo, trepidanti, aspettiamo il
dileguarsi della minaccia delle armi. Si persuadano i responsabili che la guerra è avventura
senza ritorno! Con la ragione, con la pazienza e con il dialogo, e nel rispetto dei diritti
inalienabili dei popoli e delle genti, è possibile individuare e percorrere le strade dell’intesa e
della pace. Anche la Terra Santa attende questa pace da anni: una soluzione pacifica
all’intera questione che la concerne, una soluzione che tenga conto delle legittime aspettative
del popolo palestinese e di quello che vive nello Stato di Israele.” The translation is mine.

188

ambassador to the Holy See, Thomas P. Melady, later gave this account of a
November 1990 meeting in the Oval office when he informed Bush of Pope
John Paul II’s unambiguous opposition to offensive military action against
Iraq:
I said, “I know we would like to have the Pope agree that it is a ‘just
war.’ And there are six criteria for a just war.” “The sixth one,” I said,
“he doesn’t accept proportionality. You have to do what’s in proportion.
He thinks we should prolong the embargo, strategy, etc.” The
president more or less told me there was no change in plan, that we
were going to proceed with whatever we were going to do.
413

On his part, Bush restated on several occasions his commitment “to go the
extra mile for peace,” while also reasserting the nonnegotiable demand for
the restoration of the status quo ante bellum, Iraq’s complete and
unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait.
414
The principle of proportionality
involves a relationship between means and ends. What seems clear in
abstract discussion of the proportionality equation, however, becomes more
confused in practice, as attempts to apply the principle inevitably prompt the
question “proportionate to what?” In jus ad bellum, the proportionality
principle aims at maximizing international stability and peace. The
underlying basis of modern jus in bello proportionality instead prioritizes

413
Charles Stuart Kennedy, “Interview with Ambassador Thomas P. Melady,”
January 13, 1995, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Association for Diplomatic Studies &
Training, 37, available at https://www.adst.org.
414
See, for example, George H. W. Bush, “Statement on a Proposed Meeting Between
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz of Iraq and Secretary of State James A. Baker III,” January 3,
1991, APP, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19186&st=&st1=; George H.
W. Bush, “Radio Address to the Nation on the Persian Gulf Crisis,” January 5, 1991, APP,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19193&st=&st1=.
189

humanitarian considerations with a focus on individuals.
415
Nevertheless,
there is a lot of variation in the literature. In matters of self-defense, for
example, the decision to go to war must be proportional for Rosalyn Higgins
to the injury received,
416
for Derek Bowett to the danger posed to essential
state rights,
417
and for Sir Humphrey Waldock to what is “required for
achieving the object.”
418

International jurists reject the notion that proportionality in self-
defense means equivalence between the strength and scale of force used by
the aggressor and the defensive response. Rather, there is substantial
consensus that the correct approach is to focus on what is proportionate to
the desired end result (halting or repelling an armed attack) and that will
necessarily vary depending on the particular circumstances of the case.
419

Indeed, as jurist Roberto Ago explained, “the action needed to halt and
repulse the attack may well have to assume dimensions disproportionate to
those of the attack suffered.”
420
To require otherwise, Ago maintained, would

415
Judith Gardam, Necessity, Proportionality and the Use of Force by States
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 16–19.
416
Rosalyn Higgins, Problems and Process: International Law and How We Use It
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 231.
417
Derek W. Bowett, Self-Defence in International Law (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1958), 269.
418
Humphrey M. Waldock, “The Regulation of the Use of Force by Individual States
in International Law,” Recueil Des Cours 81, no. 2 (1952): 463–64, quoted in Judith Gardam,
Necessity, Proportionality and the Use of Force by States, vol. 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 12.
419
Gardam, Necessity, Proportionality and the Use of Force by States, 159.
420
Roberto Ago, “Addendum. Eight Report on State Responsibility by Mr. Roberto
190

deprive states of flexibility, potentially leading some to reject the norm of
proportionality altogether. Many contemporary Just War theorists also
define jus ad bellum proportionality in terms of the balance between a war’s
anticipated costs for soldiers and civilians and the value of its ends. In cases
of self-defense against aggression, which stands at the core of Michael
Walzer’s Just War paradigm, the goal of self-defense is the restoration of the
status quo ante, minus the threat posed by the aggressor. As Walzer posits,
these “restoration plus” legitimate aims reach to the destruction of the
adversary’s armed forces, but do not extend to the overthrow of its
government.
421

The United States intensified its efforts to mobilize the support of the
UN Security Council for a resolution authorizing the use of force by the US-
led coalition, an ad hoc alliance of states determined to oppose Iraq.
422

However, several allies continued to argue that diplomatic efforts should be
given more time. Soviet leaders recommended against a US-led attack, but
did not exclude the use of force, demanding instead that military action be
placed under UN auspices. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also urged a
slower approach, arguing that the coalition should give sanctions “at least

Ago, Special Rapporteur, UN Doc. A/CN.4/318/ADD.5-7,” Yearbook of the International Law
Commission 2, no. 1 (1980): 69.
421
Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2004), 96.
422
The coalition was made up of twenty-eight countries, including Egypt, Morocco,
Niger, Oman, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
191

two to three more months.”
423
After meeting with Turkey’s President Turgut
Özal, Secretary Baker declared that at stake was “the credibility of the
United Nations” in the Gulf, maintaining that “it’s very important that when
the United Nations takes action . . . those resolutions and actions (for
military force) be implemented.”
424
On November 8, Bush announced his
decision to double the number of US combat troops in Saudi Arabia “to
ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should
that be necessary to achieve our common goals,” later adding that “this is in
the best security interests of our people that are there and of the coalition.”
425

On that occasion the president also denied that he needed to secure
additional UNSC resolutions before ordering offensive action against Iraq.
On November 29, the Security Council voted to approve Resolution
678, authorizing the use of force against Iraq after January 15, 1991, the UN-
imposed deadline for withdrawal. Just one day before, during a hearing of
the Senate Armed Services Committee, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff David C. Jones compared the situation in the Gulf to the early stages
of World War I, and warned that the administration’s strategy of
“maintaining the ‘offensive military option’ could create irresistible pressures

423
“Baker Seeks Soviet Backing on Use of Force against Iraq,” Telegram & Gazette,
November 8, 1990, para. 11, ProQuest.
424
“US to Seek UN Authority to Use Force,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 8,
1990, paras. 3–4, ProQuest.
425
George H. W. Bush, “The President’s News Conference on the Persian Gulf
Crisis,” November 8, 1990, APP, paras. 7, 42,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19019.
192

to initiate combat irrespective of the progress of the UN sanctions.”
426

William J. Crowe Jr., Bush’s own former chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff,
testified that “we should give sanctions a fair chance before we discard them
if, in fact, the sanctions will work in twelve to eighteen months instead of six
months, a tradeoff of avoiding war, with its attendant sacrifices and
uncertainties, would in my estimation be more than worth it.”
427

On a PBS interview with David Frost that aired on January 2, just ten
days away from the deadline, Bush declared that “there has been nothing like
this since World War II, nothing of this moral importance since World War
II.”
428
He also pledged that, if war was to come, “the generals’ hands will not
be tied;” this “will not be another Vietnam.”
429
At the same time, the White
House was escalating pressure on Congress to pass a resolution authorizing
the use of force against Iraq. Asked if he would go to war without
congressional approval, the president replied that, as far as Saddam Hussein
was concerned, the administration had “the authority to fully implement the

426
Crisis in the Persian Gulf Region: Hearings on US Policy Options and
Implications, Day 4, before the Senate Committee on Armed Services 101
st
Cong., 2
nd
session
(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1990), 185 (statement of General David C.
Jones, USAF Retired, former chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff).
427
Crisis in the Persian Gulf Region, 195 (statement of Admiral William J. Crowe,
Jr., USN retired, former chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff).
428
Gerald F. Seib, “Bush Stays Calm, Cool as Jan. 15 Looms, Fielding Criticism with
a Deep Resolve,” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 1991, para. 7, ProQuest.
429
Gerald F. Seib, “Baker Is Preparing for Mideast Trip; New Initiative for Iraq
Talks Readied,” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 1991, para. 5, ProQuest.
193

United Nations resolutions.”
430

After considerable wrangling on a suitable meeting day – Bush
thought that Hussein’s proposed date, January 12, 1991, was too close to the
UN deadline – the administration announced that it would send Secretary
Baker to Geneva to meet with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. The
proposed talks were meant, as Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater put it, to
demonstrate that the president was “ready to make one last attempt to go the
extra mile for peace.”
431
At the same time, Fitzwater clarified that Baker’s
goals for the mission were restricted to showing US resolve and commitment
to Iraq’s full withdrawal. There would be “no negotiations, no compromises,
no attempts at face-saving and no rewards for aggression.”
432
The offer of a
meeting in Switzerland was interpreted as an attempt by the White House to
discourage the European Community from sending an envoy to Iraq.
433
In
Geneva, Secretary Baker told Aziz that Washington would reject any linkage
between the resolution of the Gulf crisis and Palestine, even if all the Iraqis
asked in return for pulling out of Kuwait was an international conference on

430
George H. W. Bush, “The President’s News Conference on the Persian Gulf
Crisis,” January 9, 1991, APP, para. 36,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19202&st=&st1=.
431
Gerald F. Seib, “Bush Proposes Baker, Iraqi Aide Meet in Geneva,” Wall Street
Journal, January 4, 1991, para. 3, ProQuest.
432
Seib, para. 15.
433
Ronald G. Shafer, “A Special Weekly Report from The Wall Street Journal’s
Capital Bureau,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 1991, ProQuest.
194

the Middle East.
434
After the meeting, Baker announced that he had “heard
nothing today that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility.”
435
On January 12,
1991, three days before the UN deadline, hundreds of thousands of people
staged demonstrations in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland,
Sweden, and Norway, demanding that more time be given to economic
sanctions.
436
On the same day, Congress approved the “Authorization for Use
of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution” by a narrow margin (by the Senate
52-47 and by the House 250-183).
437
Still, it was not a formal congressional
declaration of war, and most Democrats voted against it.
438

434
Thomas L. Friedman, “Baker-Aziz Talks on Gulf Fail; Fears of War Rise; Bush Is
Firm; Diplomatic Effort to Continue,” New York Times, January 10, 1991,
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/10/world/confrontation-gulf-baker-aziz-talks-gulf-fail-fears-
war-rise-bush-firm.html.
435
R. W. Apple Jr., “Gloom in Washington: Bleak Geneva Outcome Seems to
Convince Many Skeptics That War Is Now Likelier,” New York Times, January 10, 1991,
para. 15, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/10/world/confrontation-gulf-gloom-washington-
bleak-geneva-outcome-seems-convince-many.html.
436
Alan Riding, “Crowds in European Cities Protest a War in Gulf Area,” New York
Times, January 13, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/13/world/confrontation-in-the-
gulf-crowds-in-european-cities-protest-a-war-in-gulf-area.html. Meanwhile, in Lithuania
and Latvia Soviet troops cracked down on pro-independence demonstrators, killing a total of
nineteen people and injuring hundreds more. See Don Oberdorfer and Ann Devroy,
“Lithuania Under Soviet Curfew; Latvia, Estonia Brace for Attack; Bush Decries Action,
Sees Effect on Ties,” Washington Post, January 14, 1991, ProQuest; Michael Dobbs, “Soviets
Seize Latvian Ministry; Five Dead, Nine Wounded in Attack; Moscow Demonstrators
Demand Gorbachev’s Resignation,” Washington Post, January 21, 1991, ProQuest.
437
Adam Clymer, “Congress Acts to Authorize War in Gulf,” New York Times,
January 13, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/13/world/confrontation-gulf-congress-
acts-authorize-war-gulf-margins-are-5-vote s-senate.html. The resolution was enacted on
January 14. “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Pursuant
to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678,” Pub. L. No. 102–1, 105 Stat. 3 (1991).
438
House Democrats voted 86 to 179 in favor of the motion authorizing use of
military force; in the Senate, only 10 of 55 Democrats supported it. Before that, both the
House and Senate rejected an alternative measure proposed by Democrats that called for
continued economic sanctions rather than military force. Sara Fritz and William J. Eaton,
“Congress Authorizes Gulf War: Historic Act,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1991,
195

Desert Storm
A day after the UNSC-imposed deadline expired, the coalition
launched a massive air campaign. In announcing the start of the bombing
campaign to the American public, Bush began by setting the temporal arch of
the unfolding drama: “This conflict started August 2
nd
when the dictator of
Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. Kuwait – a member of the Arab
League and a member of the United Nations – was crushed; its people,
brutalized. . . . Tonight, the battle has been joined.”
439
Insisting on the
collective nature of the effort, Bush then proclaimed: “Now the twenty-eight
countries with forces in the Gulf area have exhausted all reasonable efforts to
reach a peaceful resolution – have no choice but to drive Saddam from
Kuwait by force.”
440
In answer to some who “may ask: Why act now? Why
not wait?” the president offered three reasons: (1) “The world could wait no
longer;” (2) “sanctions, though having some effect, showed no signs of
accomplishing their objective;” and (3) “we have before us the opportunity to
forge . . . a new world order – a world where the rule of law, not the law of the
jungle, governs the conduct of nations.”
441
As Roger Stahl has persuasively

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-13/news/mn-374_1_persian-gulf.
439
George H. W. Bush, “Address to the Nation Announcing Allied Military Action in
the Persian Gulf,” January 16, 1991, APP, para. 2,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19222.
440
Bush, para. 4.
441
Bush, para. 6. Here I follow Roger C. Aden’s reading of the three reasons offered
by the speech in reply to its stated questions. Aden, “Making Rhetorical Choices.”
196

argued, this passage illustrates how deadline/countdown tropes function as a
rhetorical form to structure “the initiation of war through the ritual of
authority and submission.”
442
From a rhetorical standpoint, it shows how
peitho meets its limits and transforms into bia, from options to choose when
influenced to necessities of force enacted.
Air strikes lasted for thirty-nine days, followed by a quick four-day
ground war – the so-called “one-hundred-hour war” – and the restoration to
power of the emir. The outbreak of war did not quell controversy about the
president’s decision to go on the military offensive. In this context, Bush
turned to the Just War tradition to justify his Gulf War policy.
443
The chosen
occasion was the forty-eighth annual convention of the National Religious
Broadcasters (NRB) “Declaring His Glory to All Nations.”
444
Bush’s address,
delivered on January 28, 1991, was a precursor to the State of the Union
speech the coming day. It followed the staging, just a day earlier, of the
largest anti-war protests in the US to date.
445
The speech foregrounded

442
Roger Stahl, “A Clockwork War: Rhetorics of Time in a Time of Terror,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 94, no. 1 (2008): 91.
443
See Kenneth T. Walsh, “Bush’s ‘Just War’ Doctrine,” US News and World Report,
February 4, 1991, LexisNexis.
444
The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) is an international lobbying and
advocacy group of largely protestant Christian TV and radio stations with over one thousand
four hundred members. The National Association of Evangelicals, a group of conservative
evangelical Christians, founded NRB in 1944 with the purpose of ensuring access to the
airwaves for an array of conservative Evangelical media groups. Christine J. Russo,
“National Religious Broadcasters,” Afterimage 22, no. 7-8 (1995): 6.
445
Jennifer Cusack, “At USC, Protest Shows Its Many New Faces, as Party-School
Image Fades,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-
27/opinion/op-143_1_gulf-war; Elsa Walsh and Paul Valentine, “War Protest Draws Tens of
197

public moral argument in a narrative that dramatizes sacrifice, battle, and
support.
Bush started by defining the roles in the dispute, emphasizing that “it
is not Iraq against the United States, it’s the regime of Saddam Hussein
against the rest of the world.”
446
Likewise, “the war in the Gulf is not a
Christian war, a Jewish war, or a Muslim war; it is a just war. And it is a
war in which good will prevail.”
447
Only a few days earlier, President
Hussein had delivered his “Mother of All Battles” radio address in which he
exhorted “all Arabs, all the faithful strugglers, and all good supporters
wherever they are” to fulfill their “duty to carry out holy war and struggle in
order to target the assembly of evil, treason, and corruption everywhere.”
448

Thus, Bush’s address labored strategically to dissociate itself from the
crusade narrative, arranging purpose into democratic ideology – even while
evoking the Christian religious narrative in other parts of the address. The

Thousands Here,” Washington Post, January 27, 1991, ProQuest.
446
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Religious
Broadcasters,” January 28, 1991, APP, para. 8,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19250.

447
Bush, para. 8. Shortly after the speech the NRB board issued a resolution “to
wholeheartedly stand in prayer and in support of our president and government . . . as they
do all that is necessary, though costly, to bring genuine peace in the Middle East.” National
Religious Broadcasters, “NRB '91: Preparing for New World,” Broadcasting, February 4,
1991, 43, quoted in Amy Tilton Jones, “George Bush and the Religious Right,” in The
Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 2006), 156.
448
Saddam Hussein, “The Mother of All Battles,” January 20, 1991, reprinted in The
Encyclopedia of Middle East Wars: The United States in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and
Iraq Conflicts, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 1657.
.
198

president explicitly referenced the origins of Just War precepts in “classical
Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato and Cicero” as interpreted later on
“by Christian theologians as Ambrose, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas.”
449
The
US war effort against Iraq, Bush maintained, was waged with just cause –
“our cause could not be more noble. We seek Iraq’s withdrawal from
Kuwait”
450
– and right intention: “we seek nothing for ourselves. . . . US
forces will leave as soon as their mission is over, as soon as they are no longer
needed or desired.”
451
The president sought to reassure his increasingly
worried Arab allies, particularly Egypt, about the true aims of the intensive
bombing campaign: “we do not seek the destruction of Iraq. We have respect
for the people of Iraq, for the importance of Iraq in the region. We do not
want a country so destabilized that Iraq itself could be a target for
aggression.”
452
Bush also, and crucially, reaffirmed that the war was one of
last resort:
Some ask whether it’s moral to use force to stop the rape, the pillage,
the plunder of Kuwait. And my answer: Extraordinary diplomatic

449
Bush, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Religious
Broadcasters,” para. 9. Daniel H. Heimbach, who at the time was serving as deputy
executive secretary of the White House Domestic Policy Council, has been credited with
drafting the memorandum on Just War theory that informed President Bush’s decisions
during the Gulf crisis. Daniel R. Heimbach, “The Bush Just War Doctrine: Genesis and
Application of the President’s Moral Leadership in the Persian Gulf War,” in From Cold War
to New World Order: The Foreign Policy of George H.W. Bush, ed. Meena Bose and Rosanna
Perotti (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 441–64.
450
Bush, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Religious
Broadcasters,” para. 10.
451
Bush, para. 11.
452
Bush, 11.
199

efforts having been exhausted to resolve the matter peacefully, then
the use of force is moral.
A just war must be a last resort. As I have often said, we did not want
war. But you all know the verse from Ecclesiastes – there is “a time
for peace, a time for war.”
453

The president also pointed to the principles of discrimination and proportion
as guiding posts of the war effort:

War is never without the loss of innocent life. And that is war’s
greatest tragedy. But when a war must be fought for the greater good,
it is our gravest obligation to conduct a war in proportion to the threat.
And that is why we must act reasonably, humanely, and make every
effort possible to keep casualties to a minimum. And we’ve done so. . . .
We are doing everything possible . . . to avoid hurting the innocent.
Saddam’s response: wanton, barbaric bombing of civilian areas.
America and her allies value life.
454

In concluding, Bush declared: “I firmly believe in my heart of hearts that
times will soon be on the side of peace, because the world is overwhelmingly
on the side of God.”
455

The speech was well received by convention attendees, an audience
including many fundamentalist Christians. After hearing the speech,
Richard John Neuhaus, the editor in chief of First Things, took to the pages
of the Wall Street Journal to assert, against the anti-American crypto-
pacifists at the National Council of Churches, that, “on the basis of just-war
principles and with reasonable trust in the prudential judgment of our

453
Bush, paras. 15–16.
454
Bush, 17–18.
455
Bush, para. 25.
200

leaders, we may confidently proceed in the belief that our course is just.”
456

Richard Land, executive director of the Christian Life Commission of the
Southern Baptist Convention, contended that “on balance . . . approximately
one month into hostilities, the criteria laid down for conduct of a just war
have been met.”
457
In a newsletter distributed to the members of the
National Association of Evangelicals, Director of Public Affairs Robert P.
Dugan Jr. argued that the president’s speech had made a “clear and
compelling case that the war against Iraq does meet the just-war criteria.”
458

Bishop Browning, however, remained unconvinced, and restated his position
that if the administration “had given sanctions a longer period of time, a
political solution could have been found.”
459

Bush’s appeal to Just War sought to alleviate concerns about the
morality of launching Desert Storm vis-à-vis its alternative, the continued
stand-off with Iraq backed by economic sanctions. In this respect, it served
different but equally important political objectives at home and abroad.
Bush’s Just War proclamations sought to legitimize the war by evoking
“religious and politically virtuous imagery” for domestic audiences used to

456
Richard John Neuhaus, “Just War and This War,” Wall Street Journal, January
29, 1991, ProQuest.
457
Peter Steinfels, “Church Leaders Reaffirm Opposition to War,” New York Times,
February 15, 1991, para. 12, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/15/us/war-in-the-gulf-the-
home-front-church-leaders-reaffirm-opposition-to-war.html.
458
Steinfels, para. 14.
459
Jeffery L. Sheler, Joannie M. Schrof, and Dorian Friedman, “Holy War Doctrines,”
US News and World Report, February 11, 1991, para. 3.
201

thinking that “their collective morality can be joined with military force for
just causes.”
460
In a context whereby morality is closely tied to religion,
Bush’s argument combined the vocabulary and reasoning of the Just War
tradition to the language of American civil religion.
461
In this way, the
president sought to weaken his critics’ bite on the question of last resort by
appealing directly to the public. The discourse was heavily dependent on a
gendered hierarchy because the audience was invited to identify with the
structurally masculine, and, at the time, traditionally white persona of the
commander in chief and its attendant attributes of power and control.
462

The presidential speech to a religious group did not aspire to the
height of new world order rhetoric at the United Nations. The Just War
doctrine fit within the ambit of providential faith, troop support, and national
destiny. The dissociation with religious wars was necessary diplomatically,
of course; however, this gesture did not disrupt the public moral argument

460
David J. Scheffer, “Use of Force after the Cold War: Panama, Iraq, and the New
World Order,” in Right v. Might: International Law and the Use of Force, ed. David J.
Scheffer, 2nd ed. (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1991), 135.
461
Adelyn Kaye Fullerton, “Out of the ‘Moral Thicket’: The American Christian
Religious Leaders and the Persian Gulf War” (PhD dissertation, Purdue University, 2001),
40–45. Political scientist Ellis West’s definition of civil religion is useful: “A civil religion is a
set of beliefs and attitudes that explain the meaning and purpose of any given political society
in terms of its relationship to a transcendent, spiritual reality, that are held by people
generally of that society, and that are expressed in public rituals, myths, and symbols.” Ellis
M. West, “A Proposed Neutral Definition of Civil Religion,” Journal of Church and State 22,
no. 1 (1980): 39 (emphasis in original).
462
See Anne Orford’s analysis of post-Cold War hero narratives as used by advocates
of humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. Anne Orford, “Muscular Humanitarianism:
Reading the Narratives of the New Interventionism,” European Journal of International Law
10, no. 4 (1999): 679–711, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/10.4.679.
202

that characterized the wartime addresses of the American presidency.
Overwhelming force, achievable objectives, quick victory defined and limited
the ends of combat. This would be no Vietnam, but what would be the results
of strategic foreshortening? This question apparently was not a controlling
concern.
Operation Desert Storm started with massive bombardments all over
Iraq. In the first twenty-four hours of the five-week air campaign, the
coalition flew more than a thousand bombing sorties, and the US launched
one hundred fifty-one cruise missiles.
463
Before the end of the air campaign,
the US Air Force fired more than half of its stock of non-nuclear missiles.
464

During a briefing on January 30 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the commander of
US-led forces in the Gulf General Schwarzkopf remarked that, although Iraqi
civilians were dying in the bombardments, “we have never said that there
won’t be any civilian casualties. What we have said is, the difference
between us and the Iraqis is we are not deliberately targeting civilians, and
that’s the difference. There are going to be casualties. Unfortunately, that’s
what happens when you have a war.”
465
Voicing concern that the coalition’s

463
Jeffrey McCausland, “Operation Desert Storm,” The Adelphi Papers 33, no. 282
(1993): 24.
464
Yetiv, The Persian Gulf Crisis, 32.
465
“Excerpts from Report by Schwarzkopf on the Fighting in the Persian Gulf,” New
York Times, January 31, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/31/world/war-gulf-military-
briefing-excerpts-report-schwarzkopf-fighting-persian-gulf.html. Judith Gardam argued that
“the interpretation of proportionality by the coalition forces . . . reflects the perception that
their use of force was a legal response to the unlawful resort to force by Iraq.” Judith
Gardam, “Proportionality and Force in International Law,” American Journal of
203

war strategy might end with the obliteration of Iraqi infrastructure, Soviet
Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh called for a ceasefire followed by a
negotiated settlement. French Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement
resigned in protest, accusing the anti-Iraq coalition of overstepping UN-
authorized war objectives in an effort to overthrow Hussein and destroy
Iraq’s society.
466

On February 24, 1991, the coalition launched the land invasion of
Kuwait and southern Iraq with the goal of immobilizing the Iraqi army. As
Powell put it, “our strategy to go after this army is very, very simple. First,
we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”
467
Badly mauled by
thirty-eight days of non-stop air strikes, Iraqi troops were quickly overrun.
468

After one hundred hours from the start of the land offensive, US, British, and
French troops had reached within one hundred fifty miles of Baghdad. On
February 27, Bush ordered a cease-fire.
469
US and allied soldiers stood by as

International Law 87, no. 3 (1993): 394.
466
Alan Riding, “French Defense Chief Quits, Opposing Allied War Goals,” New York
Times, January 30, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/30/world/war-in-the-gulf-france-
french-defense-chief-quits-opposing-allied-war-goals.html.
467
Eliot Brenner, “Powell: ‘We’re Going to Cut It off ... Kill It,’” UPI, January 23,
1991, para. 7, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/01/23/Powell-Were-going-to-cut-it-off-kill-
it/9990332341450/.
468
R. W. Apple Jr., “Allies Report Fast Advances in Iraq and Kuwait, with Little
Resistance; Thousands of Iraqis Taken Prisoner,” New York Times, February 25, 1991,
ProQuest.
469
Andrew M. Rosenthal, “Bush Halts Offensive Combat; Kuwait Freed, Iraqis
Crushed,” New York Times, February 28, 1991, ProQuest.
204

the Iraqi regime crushed Kurdish and Shiite rebellions.
470
One factor in the
president’s decision to stop the attack was emerging news about the
coalition’s mass ‘turkey shoots’ of retreating Iraqi soldiers on the so-called
“highway of death.”
471
As Richard Haass later commented, “we didn’t want to
be accused of piling on once the whistle had blown.”
472
The call proved
controversial. Critics accused the president of casting aside his new world
order aspirations of worldwide freedom and democracy in the name of
regional stability and realpolitik, but Bush retorted that “the United States
isn’t going to intervene militarily in Iraq’s internal affairs and risk being
drawn into a Vietnam-style quagmire.”
473

The Triumph
A triumph is a Roman custom where returning legions march in the
streets with slaves and captives transporting the fruits of victory. The march
signals glory, valor, award, and joy that the duration of jeopardy has passed.
The return of the troops affords the victorious leader of an empire the
opportunity to harvest the awards of victory. In the immediate aftermath of
Desert Storm, Bush declared: “It’s a proud day for America. And, by God,

470
Andrew M. Rosenthal, “US, Fearing Iraqi Breakup, Is Termed Ready to Accept a
Hussein Defeat of Rebels,” New York Times, March 27, 1991, ProQuest; Patrick E. Tyler,
“‘Clean Win’ in the War with Iraq Drifts into a Bloody Aftermath,” New York Times, March
31, 1991, ProQuest.
471
Steve Coll and William Branigin, “US Scrambled to Shape View of ‘Highway of
Death,’” Washington Post, March 11, 1991, ProQuest.
472
Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990-1991, 405.
473
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks on Assistance for Iraqi Refugees and a News
Conference,” April 16, 1991, APP, para. 11, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19479.
205

we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
474
The president’s
approval ratings reached a stunning ninety percent.
475

On March 6, 1991, Bush spoke before a Joint Session of Congress on
what was officially titled “The Cessation of the Persian Gulf Conflict.”
Thanking House Speaker Thomas Foley, the president invested the victory in
a story of world destiny:
Tonight, I come to this House to speak about the world – the world
after war. The recent challenge could not have been clearer. Saddam
Hussein was the villain; Kuwait, the victim. To the aid of this small
country came nations from North America and Europe, from Asia and
South America, from Africa and the Arab world, all united against
aggression.
476

International order was the unifying theme, while moral argument about
character was the focal point. Hegemony blends the whole against the part:
Bush’s speech sent the message that whole-part conflicts will precipitate the
future. Other would-be “Saddam Husseins” need to find alternative non-
sovereign spaces from which to fight. Terrorists are goaded into thinking
critically. A second best powerful army is still second best. Nontraditional
spaces of the imagination are prompted, unintentionally. The president
continued:

474
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council,”
March 1, 1991, APP, para. 15, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19351.
475
“The President’s Popularity,” New York Times, March 5, 1991, ProQuest; David S.
Broder and Richard Morin, “Bush Popularity Surges with Gulf Victory,” Washington Post,
March 6, 1991, ProQuest.
476
George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the
Cessation of the Persian Gulf Conflict,” March 6, 1991, APP, para. 8,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19364.
206

Tonight in Iraq, Saddam walks amidst ruin. His war machine is
crushed. His ability to threaten mass destruction is itself destroyed. . .
. And this I promise you: For all that Saddam has done to his own
people, to the Kuwaitis, and to the entire world, Saddam and those
around him are accountable.
477

Moral discourse divides. Cult, evil, and singularity undermine polarity and
generate heterogeneity, a mix of motives with the aim of subverting or
aggressively challenging the call of accounting and accountability. The speech
pivoted from the victim moral narrative – organized around the Just War
trope of excessive, unjustified force – to the stasis structure of future
challenges that isolate the points for future debate.
The speech identified and laid out an assortment of “key challenges” to
initiate policy.
478
Security arrangements were to become a matter of “joint
exercises,” perhaps signifying capacity that deters aggressions.
479
The
unspoken limited objectives (leaving Hussein in power) were merged into the
ambiguous stasis of regional security, setting in place future contestation.
Joint exercises served as signs of readying. Simulations, not battlefields,
came to define spaces of conflict. The second challenge identified by the
president was “to control proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” with
fears of a new arms race hanging in the balance.
480
Of course, arms sales
increased, as did nuclear efforts and diplomacy. These problems interacted

477
Bush, para. 9.
478
Bush, para. 12.
479
Bush, para. 13.
480
Bush, para. 14.
207

with and undermined efforts at regional stability. Rather than contracting,
the competition for arms sales in the region expanded after the
demonstration of arms was shown, particularly new arms. The practice of
great power weapons sales went unmentioned. The pursuit of Middle East
“peace and stability” was identified as the third challenge, with territorial
integrity a first principle – a principle that was affirmed by confronting
Saddam on Kuwait. The cost of affirming this principle was high, though, as
the reviled dictator was left in power. Rhetorical gestures to peace achieved
legitimacy as an aspiration. A nod toward peace to the vanquished
accompanies the history of the victors. The state of exception was attributed
to the war, which represented but the first in a sequence of battles and
counter strikes. The fourth challenge was for economic development with
more efficient extraction of natural resources, oil, and education of
populations (Westernization). The assembly of stasis points did create a
limited regime of accounting for policy work. The address however fell far
short of harvesting the fruits of victory and aspiring to a resonant global
narrative of a new world order. The narrative of war and the challenges
facing ahead amalgamated Just War and stasis argumentation, resulting in a
vision that was profoundly at odds with itself, and did not maintain enough
force for Bush to win the presidential re-election.
The winning of the war created a vision. “The consequences of the
conflict in the Gulf reach far beyond the confines of the Middle East,” Bush
208

asserted:
Twice before in this century, an entire world was convulsed by war.
Twice this century, out of the horrors of war hope emerged for
enduring peace. Twice before, those hopes proved to be a distant
dream, beyond the grasp of man. Until now, the world we've
known has been a world divided – a world of barbed wire and
concrete block, conflict, and cold war.

Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which
there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words
of Winston Churchill, a world order in which “the principles of
justice and fair play protect the weak against the strong. . . .” A
world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is
poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which
freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all
nations. The Gulf War put this new world to its first test. And my
fellow Americans, we passed that test.
481

The Cold War “stalemate” had furnished the stases around which events
could be named, policies justified, and the future anticipated. The speech
removed, but did not replace, policy stasis. Utopian dreams were spoken,
while it was asserted that a meaningful test had been passed.
In June 1991, the National Victory Celebration parade in Washington,
DC drew crowds of two-hundred thousand to cheer for eight-thousand battle-
clad troops in the biggest victory celebration since World War II.
482

Onlookers could admire a packed display of tanks, fighter jets, missiles,
helicopters, and jeeps, as well as one surveillance drone. Victory marches
also were staged in Chicago and New York. Reflecting on the Gulf parades a

481
Bush, paras. 21–22.
482
William J. Eaton and Beth Hawkins, “Two Hundred Thousand Cheer Victory
Parade Through Capital,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991-
06-09/news/mn-986_1_victory-celebration.
209

few years later, Colin Powell contended that, while “no doubt out of
proportion” – after all, “we had not fought another World War II” – these
celebrations nonetheless reflected the country’s desire for victory after
Vietnam: “We had given a clear win at low casualties in a noble cause, and
the American people fell in love again with their armed forces.”
483
The nation
was redeemed, but the new world order still looked very much like the old
after all. The event was ready made for network television coverage.
The Persian Gulf War turned out to be “among the most lopsided in
history.”
484
The Iraqi military sustained between twenty-five thousand and
one hundred thousand combat deaths (the actual figure is undetermined).
Iraqi civilian deaths amounted to two thousand two hundred seventy-eight.
Coalition casualties totaled two hundred eleven dead troops. In the war’s
aftermath, multiple independent investigations found that the coalition’s air
campaign had inflicted catastrophic damage on Iraq’s infrastructure,
including its electric power grid, water pumping stations and purification
plants, and sewage facilities. Contrary to US military leaders’ claims –
widely publicized in the Western media – bombing efforts using “smart
weapons” comprised only eight percent of the air strikes.
485
A UN report on

483
Powell, My American Journey, 518.
484
Spencer C. Tucker and Dino E. Buenviaje, “Desert Storm, Operation,” ed. Spencer
C. Tucker, The Encyclopedia of Middle East Wars: The United States in the Persian Gulf,
Afghanistan, and Iraq Conflicts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 358.
485
Nicholas J. Cull, “Gulf War,” in Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical
Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present, ed. Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert, and David Welch
210

the Greater Baghdad area observed that “most means of modern life support
have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come,
been relegated to a pre-industrial age.”
486
The coalition also bombed Iraq’s
civil telecommunications system, TV and radio installations, oil refineries,
railroads and bridges (also in Baghdad), hydroelectric dams and nuclear
power plants (in violation of Protocol I, which the US did not ratify),
microwave relays, telephone-switching facilities, and government buildings of
any kind.
487
In light of the difficulty of assessing the military value of many
of these targets, proportionality was determined by “a global view of the
coalition’s military advantage gained from successful attacks.”
488
This
calculus aimed at incapacitating an entire society. The political rationale for
“turning the lights off in Baghdad,” for example, reportedly included the aim
of undermining civilian morale by “letting the Iraqi people know that even on
the first day of the war Saddam Hussein could not protect them and their

(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 157.
486
“Report to the Secretary-General on Humanitarian Needs in Kuwait and Iraq in
the Immediate Post-Crisis Environment by a Mission to the Area Led by Mr. Martti
Ahtisaari, Under-Secretary-General for Administration and Management,” UN Security
Council Official Records (United Nations, March 20, 1991), 5,
http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/background/reports/s22366.pdf. For an overview of the reports
on the civilian impact of the Persian Gulf War, see Roger Normand and Chris Jochnick, “The
Legitimation of Violence: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War,” Harvard International Law
Journal 35, no. 2 (1994): 387–416.
487
The bombing of the Al Firdos leadership bunker in Baghdad on February 13, 1991,
killed between two-hundred and three-hundred civilians, including one-hundred children.
488
Michael W. Lewis, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War,”
American Journal of International Law 97, no. 3 (2003): 493.
211

way of life from the coalition.”
489
Faced with criticism, Defense Secretary
Dick Cheney defended the legitimacy of the targeting policy. Once war
began, he argued, “while you still want to be as discriminating as possible in
terms of avoiding civilian casualties, your number one obligation is to
accomplish your mission and to do it at the lowest possible cost in terms of
American lives.”
490
There is also evidence that the Pentagon integrated legal
advice thoroughly in the planning of the air campaign.
491
Nevertheless, as
William M. Arkin, co-author of a Greenpeace report criticizing the bombings,
contended, “this war challenges us to ask ourselves whether or not the
lethality of conventional weapons in modern, urban, integrated societies isn’t
such that . . . what is ‘legitimate’ is inhumane.”
492
Critics contested the
coalition’s use of fuel-air explosives and the bombing raids against retreating
troops in the days before the ceasefire.
493
US and British forces fired three

489
Lewis, 504.
490
Barton Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq,” Washington Post, June
23, 1991, para. 20, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/06/23/allied-air-
war-struck-broadly-in-iraq/e469877b-b1c1-44a9-bfe7-084da4e38e41/.
491
See Stephen Graham, “Demodernizing by Design Everyday Infrastructure and
Political Violence,” in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, ed. Derek
Gregory and Allan Pred (New York: Routledge, 2007), 309–28. Air campaign planning was
informed by Col. John A. Warden’s influential “five strategic rings” strategy for the use of
aerospace power. The strategy recommends targeting the leadership of an enemy state first,
skipping confrontation with its military forces. For the troubling consequences of this
strategy as practiced by the US-led coalition in the Gulf War, see J.W. Crawford, III,
“Capitol,” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 21, no. 2 (1997): 101–20. The strategy traces back
to Gen. William ‘Billy’ Mitchell’s airpower doctrine. See William Mitchell, Winged Defense:
The Development and Possibilities of Modem Air Power-Economic and Military (New York: G.
P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925).
492
Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq,” para. 14.
493
The US dropped thirty-four thousand cluster bombs, eleven BLU-82/Bs, also
212

hundred twenty tons and less than one ton of depleted-uranium munitions
(DU), respectively.
494
It was the first time that depleted uranium, a
radioactive and toxic waste, was employed in active combat.
495

As George Lakoff has shown, Bush’s Persian Gulf War rhetoric
prioritized a view of the Gulf crisis through “the state is a person”
metaphorical lens.
496
This common metaphorical structure enacts the state
“as a person, engaging in social relations within a world community” with
“neighbours, friends and enemies,” and displaying certain “inherent
dispositions.”
497
The associated “the ruler stands for the state” metonymy
was at play in the Gulf crisis scenario as Saddam Hussein was cast as one of
the central characters of the drama.
498
Within this system, a just war takes

known as ‘daisy cutters.’ See Matthew R. Basler, “Bombs, Cluster,” ed. Spencer C. Tucker,
The Encyclopedia of Middle East Wars: The United States in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan,
and Iraq Conflicts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 230; Spencer C. Tucker, “BLU-
82/B Bomb,” ed. Spencer C. Tucker, The Encyclopedia of Middle East Wars: The United
States in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq Conflicts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO,
2010), 256.
494
Adam Koniuszewski, “Land Degradation from Military Toxics: Public Health
Considerations and Possible Solutions Paths,” in Land Restoration: Reclaiming Landscapes
for a Sustainable Future, ed. Ilan Chabay, Martin Frick, and Jennifer Helgeson (Waltham,
MA: Academic Press, 2016), 122.
495
Depleted uranium ignites at about five thousand four hundred degrees upon
impact, penetrating armor more effectively than other material. As a waste product from
nuclear reactors, DU is also cheap. Weapons manufacturers get it for free from nuclear-fuel
processors, which would otherwise have to follow regulated disposal procedures. Among
veterans of Operation Desert Storm, DU exposure has been connected to a host of symptoms
under the umbrella name of Gulf War syndrome. To date there is no treaty or customary law
rule regulating DU weapons, but their legality under the general principles of International
Humanitarian Law is debated.
496
George Lakoff, “Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in
the Gulf,” Peace Research 23, no. 2/3 (1991): 25–32.
497
Lakoff, 26.
498
Lakoff, 27. See also Tim Rohrer, “The Metaphorical Logic of (Political) Rape: The
213

the shape of “combat for the purpose of settling moral accounts.”
499

Character roles comprise villain, victim, and hero, all involved in a plot in
which “the hero defeats the villain and rescues the victim. The moral balance
is restored.”
500

The personal of moral drama keyed the justification of the Panama
invasion as well. Thus, at micro and macro levels, the rhetoric resonated
with a doubling down on regime change as guiding objective of American
foreign policy. Aristotle’s Politics hinted at the work of a hegemonic power to
evaluate and decide among policies to ignore, indirectly support, or intervene
into a polity where conflict exists or is imminent. It turns out that the new
world order was underwritten by enduring rhetorical practices that link
peitho and bia in the decisions of war and peace.
On various occasions Bush characterized the Iraqi leader as the
“renegade” ruler of an “outlaw” regime. In the second half of the nineteenth
century, the term was used in the American Southwest to label the Apaches
as bands of ‘fleeing hostiles’ who defied the US Army by crossing reservation
borders to raid and terrorize local settlers. After the end of the Apache wars
the figure of the Apache “renegade” evolved into the villain archetype of

New Wor(l)d Order,” Metaphor and Symbol 10, no. 2 (1995): 117–18.
499
Lakoff, “Metaphor and War,” 26.
500
Lakoff, 26.
214

nostalgic ‘Old West’ folklore.
501
The term renegade is the anglicized form of
the Spanish renegado, and traces to the Medieval Latin renegatus (past
principle of renegare, “to deny”), a word used to identify Christian converts to
Islam. In early modern Europe, the renegados were a minority group of
Christians who, having been in contact with foreign peoples and cultures
beyond their religious frontiers, occupied a liminal status. Many pirates who
roamed the Mediterranean were renegados who had renounced their faith to
enroll in the Barbary states’ Corsair fleets. They were considered rebels,
thieves, apostates, and traitors.
502
The casting of Saddam Hussein as the
‘renegade leader’ of a ‘pirate state’ ultimately obscured the fact that military
operations of the magnitude of Operation Desert Storm targeted populations,
not single individuals.

501
Leah Candolin Cook, “The Last Apache ‘Broncho’: The Apache Outlaw in the
Popular Imagination, 1886-2013” (Master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 2014).
502
Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English
Nation,” ELH 67, no. 1 (2000): 45–69, https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2000.0002.
215

Chapter Five: The New Wor(l)d Order: George H. W. Bush’s
Rhetorical Legacy
This study examines, loosens, and unties fusions of classical and
Christian inheritance in the Just War rhetorical tradition and stasis
arguments in order to see more clearly the resources that sustain argument
ecologies. This chapter highlights the core achievements of this study – much
of which turns on the contradictions embedded in the partially fused
rhetorical ecologies – reports on findings, confirms initial propositions,
extends discussion to the interaction between legacy studies in presidential
address and conjectures about the future horizons for rhetorical inquiry in
international relations.
The new world order was predicated on versions of Fukuyama’s “end of
history” thesis. In their famous study Power and Interdependence: World
Politics in Transition, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye had already
proclaimed declining utility of war in the new era of state interdependence.
503

In Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, John Mueller
announced that war was bound to join slavery and dueling in the dustbin of
history.
504
This proved to be more chimera than savvy prediction, however.
The 1990s dispelled the hopes of a future free of war, as the crumbling of

503
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics
in Transition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1977).
504
John Muller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York:
Basic Books, 1989).
216

Cold War geopolitics re-opened and foregrounded enduring antagonisms of
ethnic, religious conflicts and tribal-like rivalries across the globe.
505

The surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on
September 11, 2001 were heralded as a new Pearl Harbor.
506
The reversal of
a peacetime system, airline travel into a weapon of war, touched off nearly
two decades of asymmetrical conflicts. State allied and waged war on entities
that crested on the waves of communication sustaining the circulation of
people, objects, disruptions, and violence. In short, justifications for military
interventions into Panama and Iraq preambled conflicted situations
characterized by hegemony and resistance, in what Samuel Huntington cast
controversially as the “clash of civilizations.”
507
This clash furnishes an
antagonistic imaginary that inspires and provokes ongoing acts of domination
and blowback within the United States and across the globe.
Twenty-first century American presidents built up, dismantled, then
built a war on terror without resolution or peace. This world has been
searching for terms to name, frame, and tame networked causes and
successive episodes of explosive disruption and strategic violence. Post-
modern justifications for war and peace mix, combine, and fuse disagreement

505
Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

506
See, for example, Richard K. Betts, “Fixing Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1
(2002): 56.
507
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
217

spaces in unsatisfactory and incomplete ways. A war of words accompanies
American interventions. What is being done to whom and for what reasons
remains at best opaque through the last seventeen years of war, issuing from
the attacks September 11. Whereas Lyndon Johnson worked successfully on
behalf of the Great Society, the new world order proved a chimera that
escaped the hopes and best intentions, particularly as the Panama invasion
anticipated a chain of network-connected drug trafficking, money laundering,
and state corruption. The unfinished Iraq invasion resulted in a decade of
wasted expenditure of blood and treasure. This rhetoric study illustrates
how the fusion of elements produces an initiating rhetoric with long-lasting
consequences that need being to be unpacked.
A rhetoric of war and peace is never an easy feat for a group, people,
nation, or alliance. No society seems safe from violence. Its debated causes,
changing techniques, and means of control are subject to breakdown. The
presidency of George H. W. Bush oversaw a momentous transition away from
rapidly-receding Cold War horizons. At this transitional juncture, the
administration was faced with a complex exigency: to promote US interests
as well as international stability, while also responding to growing public
anxieties about the possibility of national renewal. Bush’s life trajectory –
from youngest Navy pilot in World War II, to Yale graduate, ambassador to
the United Nations, chief US liaison to the People’s Republic of China, CIA
director, and Ronald Reagan’s vice president – point to a capacity to straddle
218

widely divergent worlds and aptitude for navigating complex exigencies and
assuming multiple roles. The Bush presidency managed the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Bush and his decision makers did assemble a discourse of
foreign policy invested in the Persian Gulf War. Unfortunately, the
amalgamations of Just War, public moral argument and stasis public policy
rationalizations defined security interests mixed to yield many reactions and
counter-reactions that came to plague presidential administrations, fuel
interventions, and co-construct an unfinished, never-ending war for the
twenty-first century.
The collapse of a long-standing, complex relation of rivalry among
nations constitutes a moment of transition because the very language within
which networks of international ties are framed changes. The old order
changed nearly thirty years ago. What has become of the rhetorics of war
and peace meanwhile? This question propels the work of communication
industries that merge academic inquiry with media studies to generate
multiple histories, announcements of praxis, and critical studies. Legions of
journalists, public intellectuals, and scholars diagnose turbulence and
disorder in world politics and advance alternative explanations for a world in
disarray. A number of authors have suggested that the post-World War II
consensus is unraveling, that American leadership is in retreat, and that the
resurgence of populism trumps internationalism. In his recent book World
Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History,
219

former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned that “the order
established and proclaimed as universal by the Western countries stands at a
turning point. Its nostrums are understood globally, but there is no
consensus about their application. . . . The result is not simply a multipolarity
of power but a world of increasingly contradictory realities.”
508
In A World in
Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, Richard
Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that ours
is “a world in which centrifugal forces are gaining the upper hand.”
509
In
order to reverse this trend, Haass, who served as senior Middle East
specialist on the National Security Council under President Bush and as
State Department director of Policy Planning during the run-up to the
Second Gulf War, proposed to reconceive sovereignty as obligation, that is, to
redefine state sovereignty to include “not just the rights but also the
obligations of sovereign states vis-à-vis other governments and countries.
The world is too small and too connected for borders to provide cover for
activities that by definition can affect adversely those who live outside those
borders.”
510
One rule is fundamental: “sovereignty must remain the bedrock
of international order.”
511
The problem with this prescription, modeled as it

508
Henry Kissinger, World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the
Course of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 364–65.
509
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the
Old Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 12.
510
Haass, 226.
511
Haass, 232.
220

is after the Bush administration’s policy in the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis, is that
it does not take into account the problems and legacies of that intervention.
The question becomes how to recover rhetorical resources sufficient to guide
or enable American foreign policy at a time of heterogeneity, centrifugal
forces and drives to disorder.
The dissertation opens new questions about war discourse. I take up
the transitional post-Cold War state to show how the cultural resources of
classical stasis and Just War discourses were melded together to shape
powerful, but ultimately incoherent narratives of American international
relations. The grain on a rhetorical legacy is raised when critical inquiry
examines the cultural resources deployed to articulate, enact, and extend a
presidential administration’s self-stated goals. The significance and meaning
of such statements change over time. In this case, I find in the peculiar mix
of stasis and narrative that constitutes President Bush’s discourse resonates
with the contemporary disarray and undoing of the post-war order initiated
in the late 1940s. Re-reading Bush’s articulations of post-Cold War rhetoric
should support a learning curve that explains how such unreasonable and
disorderly circumstances appear to have been produced.
Key Findings
Dialectical Hermeneutic Strategy
By examining the dialectical relationship of stasis theory and Just War
narratives, we may distinguish between public policy arguments and public
221

morality arguments. Ideally the two are not separate, but in practice one is
emphasized over the other. Either policy arguments appear as talking points
to legitimate actions and events as consistent, smart, and effective, which
then might be explained or contextualized within a narrative, or alternatively
moral narratives emerge within which particular policies achieve meaning
and the rationales become restricted to those favoring those narratives.
The study employed a hermeneutic strategy of reading through two
ecologies of argument that offer grounds for the invention of international
public policy and public moral argument. These rhetorical ecologies
frequently fuse together, but this study pulls them apart to reveal the kind of
judgments that are being made in the speech. In the stasis ecology, I found
that the issues addressed by rhetoric are hegemony and factionalization,
stasis and stalemate, peitho and bia, and the multiple resources for public
policy clash. In the Just War ecology, I found an historical movement
beginning with Augustine’s classical orientation toward violence, evolving
through Thomistic rationalization and, entering modernity, in the Salamanca
school’s questions of justice and native peoples, culminating in Westphalia
with Grotius’s respect of sovereignty and contractually grounded
international law.
The collapse of a stasis system is an historical event. What will take
its place is contingent. The dialectical interpretive method permits reading
and understanding how policies work out with intentional and unintentional
222

consequences over the long run. Public policy argument revolves around
points of stasis/clash lodged in multiple cultural resources of discourse.
These stases can be used intuitively or can comply with the institutional
logics of a branch of government. When stases square off, debates become
focused, issues and cases evolve. Lessons are learned, and a multitude of
discourse and stories spring up. In a global society micro and macro events
are interpreted by major powers and minor powers. The media spreads the
heterogeneity by dramatizing personal animosity, setting a scene in which
selected horrors of conflict can be rendered meaningful.
Public moral argument is embedded in narratives, and the main
narratives of international relations shaping the meaning of conflict derive
from Just War doctrine. The Just War tradition evolved from religious to
legal institutions. The Just War can be used to constrain violence, but it also
can be used to cleanse it and make it more acceptable. New beginnings bring
change, but continuity persists. The Just War discourse resonates always
with the spirit of Western policies, the uses of force deployed toward just
ends. However, the rhetoric is gamed strategically to elicit bargaining
responses in negotiations. Just War persists as a tool of policy argument by
decision-makers who deploy it as a way of dressing up threats to dress down
opponents. Echoes of holy war themes resonate in US presidential
223

rhetorics.
512
In the wake of the Cold War, American presidents continued to
re-articulate the circumstances that would warrant armed intervention but
absent the Soviet arch-enemy. Washington could not avail itself anymore of
the discourses of ideological, global polarization by which presidents had for
nearly half a century come to define national threats, whatever their shape
and magnitude. This situation has led presidents, at key moments in the
post-Cold War scenario, to justify the use of military force by inflating the
efficacy and morality of military intervention, while downplaying its costs. In
this context, the vocabulary of the Just War tradition has been incorporated
in public policy argument with consequences that emerge to this day.
Rhetorical Legacy Studies
This project extends analysis of rhetoric to the study of legacies,
rereading the meaning and implications of address as it unfolds over time.
Legacy studies are not finite, nor do I suggest that policy argument and
moral argument are all there is to the international public sphere. What this
dissertation does is to open inquiry so that we appreciate the generative
power of words and deeds. Bush entered into a period of heterogeneity rather
than a new world order and the condition of international policy and
diplomacy are working within its possible continuing outcomes. Legacy
criticism does not make causal claims. Bush’s rhetoric triggered, defined,

512
Suzanne M. Daughton, “Metaphorical Transcendence: Images of the Holy War in
Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79, no. 4 (1993): 427–46.
224

and influenced. I have mapped the discursive space and institutional
changes at a micro and macro levels across national and international
audiences. Responses emanate from states and the multitudes.
Critics need to harvest the kind of discourses and legacies that are put
in place by the administration. As discussed in the first chapter, in his
essays “‘Coriolanus’: And the Delights of Faction” and “Antony in Behalf of
the Play,” Kenneth Burke showed that the meaning of a speech, which is an
active relationship between speaker and audience, changes as its context
changes over time. I examine what served the administration at the time of
the conflict, identifying the kind of discourse and narratives that were put
into play, withholding judgment with an eye to empirical outcomes. Critics
as connoisseurs of rhetoric offer their taste and can dazzle us with insight on
unusual points of views and perspectives. However, for rhetoric studies to
have depth, they must look at the narratives and logics for which the
speeches drew.
The case study approach distances theory and practice in a reciprocal
hermeneutic test or interpretation. This study reconstructs theoretical
discourse and institutional narratives in order to get at the complexities of
practices as opposed simply to explaining them away. This provides a
learning curve to criticism that depends on the assembled perspectives of
chosen artifacts. I put forward propositions that examine both a micro-
intervention and a macro level intervention by the first Bush administration.
225

The examination of micro- and macro-level interventions include their
unanticipated effects. The common elements are personalization, disruption,
and the destruction of infrastructure. The study of micro and macro levels
supersedes the older dichotomy between the bilateral and multilateral, a
distinction that dissolves because consequences intersect, so that the micro
consequence of the multilateral move was to leave Saddam Hussein in power.
The use of case study to explore rhetorical history through developing
ecologies can be put into conversation with critiques that rush to judgment.
As David Zarefsky showed, and as I hope to gesture toward with this study,
presidential rhetoric constitutes a rhetorical movement. There could be other
readings of the legacy of the Bush administration. I do not believe that
retrospective critique results in a master narrative, but rather there are
possibilities for building ecologies. The examination of presidential legacy
rhetoric is iterative; for example, we could reexamine Bush’s discourse from
the standpoint of energy technology.
President Bush’s Contradictions
The first Bush administration sought a new world order but fell short
as its interventions were at odds with this rhetorical vision. In Panama, the
United States used overwhelming force but did not anticipate the long-term
consequences of drug wars and the instability that still continues. In Iraq,
Desert Shield, viewed theatrically, was the dramatic fulfillment of the
purpose of the United Nations. Once the conflict entered the Desert Storm
226

phase, facing criticisms that the military effort was about oil acquisition or
power projection, Bush appealed to the Just War tradition to sacralize the
mission but was largely ineffective at dissociating from the suspicions of
unseemliness. The triumph speech left Saddam Hussein in place, and
illustrates the military effectiveness of destroying infrastructure, perhaps
providing a blueprint for the enemies of the United States in the upcoming
war on terror.
In the interplay between the Just War and stasis ecologies, this study
identifies several key characteristics of Bush’s rhetorical moves. Bush made
wars personal, harkening back to contest between sovereigns and vilification.
This is not entirely a pre-modern move, as many of the conflicts of the
twentieth century were driven by powerful personalities, but relative to other
conflicts, personal animosity between the sovereign heads of state seemed to
outweigh impersonal animosity between nations. Moreover, Bush’s
interventions set aside the principle of sovereignty. The United States
asserted its claim to universal extraterritorial jurisdiction, claiming broad
legal privileges to decide about the legitimacy of foreign governments, and to
interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. The irony is that the
impetus for the conflict was the violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty by Iraq. To
deal with this performative contradiction, Bush’s deployed rhetorical
strategies of disassociation to attempt to purify American motives. He used a
quasi-religious narrative domestically, while at the same time denying it to
227

international audiences.
Further, and in conflict with the fundamental Grotian assumptions of
Westphalia, Bush developed a category of states outside the international
order, anticipating failed states. Yet at the same time, fearing charges of
nation-building, Bush left post-intervention plans vacant. This has two
results: first, the domestic order was disrupted internally in the invaded
country; second, the regional balance of power was left on its own. Civic
strife and factionalization within the intervened country was left unresolved.
The massive force of the United States military was designed to effect
overwhelming victory. Bush emphasized both the decimation of
infrastructure and the minimization of direct human casualties. All of these
moves are amplified as the administration created propaganda narratives
and aggressively drove them through media narrations. By restricting news
coverage, the press became hungrier for more and subject to fantasy
explanations, which the administration eagerly provided. At the micro level,
Bush focused on specific ends that spread into network effects and outcomes,
doing what was convenient at the time but then took on a life of its own,
interacting with developing foreign policy positions with unanticipated
repercussions.
Finally, by identifying the new world order as fulfillment of the UN
mission Bush set in place the stasis of opposition that ultimately ended by
dismantling the post-war US legacy and softening US leadership. Thus,
228

Bush set in place discourse of war and peace that anticipated the twenty-first
century and its mutating ecologies of argument across global biomes.
Rhetorical Inquiry in International Studies
Rhetoric at its base, whether as discourse or narrative, is manifest in
dissoi logoi. I strengthen the contextual view by reminding propagandists,
policy makers, and other moguls of opinion that, to use a colloquialism, what
goes around comes around. Rhetoric finds unintended consequences, and in a
heterogeneous world where centrifugal forces blow back with magnifying
effects, the sources of this blowback become a critical object of inquiry. In an
age of asymmetry, when a person’s forces are turned into weaknesses,
rhetoric traffics in the poetics of power. Dissoi logoi does not end in a
positivistic classification.
513

The Just War discussion grinds up resources rather than opening them
because it does not know how to deal with presidential address and looks at
discourse as theoretical as opposed to something developing historically over
time in practice. It is a mélange of connoisseurs who try to refine by
synthetizing everything. A rhetorical approach to Just War renews its
possibilities over time. This study also complements work in media studies
about how to reduce war to the appearance and dissemination of messages.
This inquiry complements these studies by examining how arguments

513
Order and disorder is a dialectical pair or dissoi logoi at conceptual level. Other
dialectical pairs that one can use to do the work of dissoi logoi include permanence and
change, part and whole, things and concepts, homogeneity and heterogeneity.
229

themselves both enable and trap policy makers and national narratives into
needless acts of violence. I take media studies into a normative area
connected to peace studies, recalling Kenneth Burke’s motto, ad bellum
purificandum.
Conclusion
The study is preliminary to engagement with ongoing critique of
presidential rhetoric using methods of criticism or theoretical colonization.
Such discussion would look at the legacies of the rush to criticism in relation
to the outcomes and transformations of regimes of discourse. Carol Winkler
is a major theorist in this area. My study hopes to complement and advance
Winkler’s work by showing how presidential legacies anticipated the war on
terror in unexpected ways.
514
Terrorism is an important topic, but at the
same time it is important to recognize that it was infrastructure destruction
that created a space for the terrorist imagination.
A major objective of this study is to keep criticism from becoming
sedimented where you have a rush to judgment and then do not speak to the
legacies. One limitation to this study is that, while conversant with scholars
working who have written on war and peace, it does not seek to extend their
ideas. Reconstructive projects are not one and done affairs. Retrospective
studies need to be extended to the rhetorical histories of the Clinton, Bush

514
Carol K. Winkler, “Parallels in Preemptive War Rhetoric: Reagan on Libya; Bush
43 on Iraq,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (2007): 303–34,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2009.11821707.
230

43, and Obama administrations. These can marshal the resources of stasis
and the Just War doctrine and engage with the range of short-term critical
responses by looking at legacies. These projects are worthwhile but beyond
the scope of this study.
The overwhelming victory, targeting of vulnerable infrastructure,
demonization strategies – all elements fueling the success of Bush’s policies –
were not lost on the enemies of the United States. As Andrew Bacevich put
it, the upshot of the Persian Gulf War “created conditions more conducive to
disorder than order, confronting both Bush and his successors with situations
that each would view as intolerable,” and ultimately ushering in “a period of
unprecedented American military activism,” ranging from military actions in
Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, and Kosovo, among others.
515
As
Bacevich underscored, these events “rendered the Powell doctrine obsolete
and demolished expectations that the Persian Gulf War might provide a
template for the planning and execution of future US military operations.”
516

We are still now untangling the consequences of the rhetorical movements set
into action during the first few years after the conclusion of the Cold War.
Irenic and eristic moves occur among people and within nations over

515
Andrew J. Bacevich, “‘Splendid Little War’: America’s Persian Gulf Adventure Ten
Years On,” in The Gulf War of 1991 Reconsidered, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich and Efraim Inbar
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 153. See also Barbara Salazar Torreon, “Instances of Use of
United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2017” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research
Service, October 12, 2017), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42738.pdf.
516
Bacevich, “‘Splendid Little War,’” 154.
231

time. Despite Steven Pinker’s optimistic view, violence continues, anxiety
grows.
517
This is a study of a moment in time when a fifty-year-long war
disassembled, and a new opportunity arose. This study investigates the hope
of a new world order and its failure. In my judgment, Bush did not seize that
hope’s moment.

517
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New
York: Penguin Books, 2011).
232

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Creator Alberti, Laura (author)

Core Title George H. W. Bush and the new world order: on stasis, the just war & rhetorical legacy—“a world in disarray”?

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 09/28/2020

Defense Date 08/18/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bush, George H. W.,foreign policy,just war,new world order,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-Cold War,presidential rhetoric,rhetoric of war,stasis

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Advisor Goodnight, Gerald Thomas (committee chair), Hollihan, Thomas (committee member), Lake, Randall (committee member)

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