"Freedom" In George W. Bush Administration’s War On Terror

The9/11terrorist attacks dealt a heavy blow to Americans’ long-held valuesand beliefs. Responding to this challenge, the George W. Bush administrationlaunched a war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, provoking a tumult in the mediaboth in and outside the United States. Also eye-catching is the huge amount ofacademic attention to and enthusiasm with that war. Among the numerous subjectsaddressed, the propaganda strategy stands out as one which has been undercontinuous scrutiny. However, we still lack adequate scholarly investigation of howthe U.S. government makes use of American values and beliefs to sell the war. As amatter of fact, it is just in America’s war-related official propaganda that “freedom”,the core of American value system, received its redefinition as the right to security.The concept paints Bush’s war in a sacred color, playing an indispensable role in thesmooth operation of the entire propaganda mechanism. In an effort to illustrate thisdiscovery, we have carried out an evidential research into the actions, means, andprocess of the Bush administration’s war-on-terror propaganda.The first chapter of the thesis offers a panoramic view of the functions offreedom in the anti-terror war, with the contribution of the concept to domesticsolidarity and that between allies as the highlight. In the second and third chapters,the analytical spotlight shifts to freedom-related political rhetoric and iconic symbolsrespectively, revealing essential links of the propaganda process. We devote the lastchapter of the body to the effect of and mass response to those propaganda measures.We may reasonably conclude that through confusing “spread of freedom” and“national expansion,” the Bush administration managed to garner enough supportboth at home and abroad and succeeded in enlarging America’s national interestoverseas. Such a success can be attributed to three factors: first comes ordinaryAmericans’ revenge psyche, which has been readily fanned into a national sentimentby the government under the pretext of freedom; second, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union as the external enemy in the post-Cold War era, nationalistic zealhas been aroused by the terrorist attacks and in due time, turned rampant because ofgovernment encouragement in the name of safeguarding freedom; third, takingprotection of freedom as the excuse and conflating Christian universalism andnational expansion, the Bush administration satisfied the demand of religiousconservatism which experienced a revival at the end of the20thcentury and ensuredthe support of many religious-minded people.