The Impossible Argument

            In most aspects of foreign policy, the population bases their opinions of the matter on information presented by a higher authority government. This is the direct source; government officials such as various ambassadors and the president are those who deal with other states and powers. This pathway enables the government to present information to their favor and therefore create a popular opinion of the citizens who trust elected leaders. As was the case of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the government created a perspective that immediately rallied the American people against the exact group they wanted to label as the enemy. In their article Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq, Ronald Krebbs and Jennifer Lobasz claim that the Bush administration shaped an argument for going to war with Iraq that was almost impossible to refute and therefore creating little to no opposition. This theory proposed by Krebbs and Lobasz is one that I agree with. I believe that in most cases of political decision-making, and especially those following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, information bias is the tool used by our government to implement a popular opinion in favor of what they are arguing.

            The attacks of September 11^th created a new league of terrorism in the eyes of the American people. As stated by Krebbs and Lobasz, “state power was severely attenuated, in which the threat of mass-casualty terrorism suddenly became very real.” An attack such as this seemed so formidable that going to war against the suspected perpetrators was not only an option, it was an unquestionable necessity. This perspective was largely created by the Bush administration to gain mass support for starting a war. President Bush explained to the American population after the horrendous attacks that the terrorists who calculated them were simply “evildoers.” Even the primary opposition of the Bush administration, the Democratic Party, scarcely argued against going to war with an enemy that was labeled as evil. Furthermore, because the administration labeled the struggle as a “War on Terror,” the opposition had no counter-argument to make against an enemy as inherently evil as terror. Krebbs and Lobasz analyzed the neutrality of any resistance against entering a war, stating, “…the post–9/11 War on Terror narrowed the space for sustainable political debate.” The government had painted a picture of the United States going to war with evil, to fight for the values and freedoms that were threatened. This picture tremendously helped persuade everyone, including the Democrats, that entering a war with Iraq was the only choice.

Ultimately, had these attacks not been deemed as a threat to American society and values, there might have been a larger political debate on whether war against Iraq was the right course of action. However, when fighting an enemy as arduous as evil, there is little an opposition can do to make such a war seem unjust. Because of this information, the American population, including both republicans and democrats, essentially made the unanimous decision to enter a war in Iraq, the goal of the Bush administration at the time.