Rhetorical Analysis of President’s Address To The Nation Post 9/11

1656 Words4 Pages

Rhetorical analysis assignment: President’s Address to the Nation Since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has been calling every citizens and every nations to support his Middle East policy. Nonetheless, the U.S. has been involved in the middle-east struggle for more than half of the century, wars were waged and citizens were killed. Yet, political struggles and ideological conflicts are now worse than they were under Clinton’s presidency. As “President’s Address to the Nation” is a speech asking everybody to support the troops to keep fighting in Iraq, I, as an audience, am not persuaded at all because of his illogical fallacy in the arguments. In this essay, I will analyze how and what are the illogical fallacies he uses in the speech. The “President’s address to the Nation” is a claim of policy. President Bush is asking people to support his policy that “we” have to keep fighting the war “until either we or the extremists emerge victorious.” To hold up his claim of such a policy, he uses three supports during the speech. The first support is that “if we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” To back up such an idea, he uses two backings. The first backing is “if we pulled out… they (the terrorists) will not leave us alone. They will follow us… they will gain a new safe haven; they will use Iraq’s resources to fuel their extremist movement” while the second backing is that the terrorists hate “us”. To come up with these backings, he assumes that terrorists will use nuclear weapons to attack us as soon as they can obtain nuclear weapons. The illogical fallacy of this assumption is cause an... ... middle of paper ... ...ng logic, it is hard to distinguish the logic from the issue because they are closely related. Nevertheless, I found out that the issue is that because of his personal values, assumption, and illogical reasoning, he deceives American citizens to push a Middle East strategy we otherwise would not have. Six years after the 9/11 attacks, Americans are still looking for reasons to keep the troops in Iraq. Besides real reasons, President Bush still needs to provide real evidence to support his claims. I, as an audience, am not persuaded at all. Bibliography Bush, George. “President’s Address to Nation/” The Fifth Anniversary of Septemer 11, 2001. 11Sept 2006. (http://whiteshouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060911-3.html). Reporters Without Borders. Press release: Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007. Paris: Reporters Without Borders, 2007.

Show More
Related

  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Current War Conflicts in The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien

    1333 Words  | 3 Pages

    The article “Officials: Al Qaeda tries to recruit Americans in Syria” is about how Al Qaeda is encouraging fighters in Syria to prepare them in the case that they will return home to carry out attacks. They are prepared to send the fighters home by train. There...

    Read More

  • War of the Words: Analysis of Two Speeches Declaring War Given by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Bush

    879 Words  | 2 Pages

    On the brink of two different wars, two United States’ Presidents rose up to the challenge of calming the American people and fighting for the belief of justice. A day after devastation on December 7, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt gives his “Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation”. At the beginning of a terrorist crisis in 2001, George W. Bush announces a “‘War on Terror’ Declaration”. Both Presidents have many similarities in common, yet their differences set them apart with uniqueness. These two speeches, separate by nearly sixty years, weave an outright and assertive tone into their diction and detail.

    Read More

  • Longitudes and Attitudes, by Thomas Friedman

    1020 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this book, Friedman presents a coherent picture of forces in the Middle East that have led to the Israeli- Palestinian confrontation and to bin Laden and his group of terrorists. Friedman’s articles describe meetings, discussions, and arguments he had with people at all levels of society through out the Middle East. From his extensive travels and through dynamic interactions with the people he derived intense insights into how 9/11 came about, why, and what should be done about it.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of George Bush 9/11 Speech

    1047 Words  | 3 Pages

    43rd President of the United States, George Bush, in his speech, “9/11 Address to the Nation” addresses the nation about the day of September 11, 2001. Bush’s purpose is to convey the events of September 11, 2001 and what was and will be done about them. He adopts a serious yet somber tone in order to appeal to the strong and emotional side of the public and to his listeners around the world.

    Read More

  • Bush and Blair 9-11 Speeches: Analysis of Rhetorical Devices

    955 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout the speech, the Former President George W Bush strives to empower Americans by instructing them to remain resolute, but to “go back to [their] lives and routines”. He uses the personal pronoun we and the common pronoun us repeatedly to indicate that the people of the United States, who either saw the event on television or experienced this event firsthand, were and still are involved in this national tragedy. He implements this emotional appeal into his speech to involve all Americans--people living in the United States of America, regardless of their ethnicity, race, or culture, and to acknowledge that the American people have endured this together, and that they will continue to advance after this event with stronger resolve, stronger than ever. In addition, he implements personification to motivate and empower the American people. “Our nation, this generation, will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future” (Bush, 2001). “This generation”, again a synonym for the American people, with its unwavering resolve, will fight for its freedom persistently. He intimates that the future of America and of democratic freedom is in the hands of the American people: that the American people have the power to control their fate. The next sentence leads into America’s “philanthropically” democratic nature: “We will rally the world to this cause, by our efforts and by our courage” (Bush, 2001). This statement has been followed up by action only a few years later, when the United States intervened in the Iraqi War, Libyan Revolution, and even more civil wars to ensure the freedom of citizens from dictatorships, which in Islāmic nations, were militant groups, like the Hamas and Taliban. Lastly, the president utilized anaphora, specifically a tripartite structure, by affirming that the American people “will not tire”, “will not falter”, and “will not fail”. He implies that the American people will relentlessly fight for the worldwide establishment of peace and democratic institutions, a promise which America has kept even in the face of its own national crisis.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of President Barack Obama's Speech To The Nation On Syria

    1087 Words  | 3 Pages

    The night before the anniversary of 9/11 in 2013, Barack Obama delivered a speech to the United States of America on the subject of Syria’s inhumane use of chemical weapons on its own citizens. The United States’ intelligence analysts estimated that more than 1,400 civilians were killed due to the chemical warheads that were launched on the area right outside of Damascus. In President Barack Obama’s address to the nation on Syria, he attempts to persuade the American people to support his plan of a targeted air strike on Syria. By describing the victims of Syria, giving reasons for the inhumanity of the Syrian government, and reinforcing his credibility,

    Read More

  • Osama Bin Laden’s Claimed Motivations for 9/11 are False

    1167 Words  | 3 Pages

    Osama bin Laden refers to his reasons as facts. In his first fact he addresses the issue of the United States presence in Holy Middle Eastern places. He believes that the United States is there for the wealth and not only to harass Iraq, but other Muslim countries. Osama bin Laden must have forgotten that in Iraq invading Kuwait it was a breech of International Law and had that not happened the United States presence would not have r...

    Read More

  • George W Bush 9/11 Speech Analysis

    837 Words  | 2 Pages

    George W. Bush’s “9/11 Address to the Nation” is a speech in which he talks about the catastrophic event on September eleventh, 2001. Two airplanes crash into the Twin Towers in New York City on this day, shocking the entire world. He addresses this speech to the people of America on the night of the disastrous event, to let the people of the United States know what is going on. This speech explains how the United States is a strong country, the motives behind the event, as well as to bring the United States together and stronger.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis: We Will Degrade And Ultimately Destroy ISIL By Barack Obama

    1022 Words  | 3 Pages

    President Barack Obama delivered an address to the nation on the U.S. Counterterrorism strategy to combat ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) on September 10, 2014. The recent issue, which became the basis for this speech, has been President Obama’s response to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against diverse civilians. He delivered this speech to prove to the nation that he has an elaborate strategy along with several tactics to destroy the terrorist group. Obama described the ISIL in his speech by stating, “in a region that has known so much bloodshed, these terrorists are unique in their brutality.  They execute captured prisoners.  They kill children.  They enslave, rape, and force women into marriage.  They threatened a religious minority with genocide.  And in acts of barbarism, they

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Strategies Used by President George W. Bush

    1815 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...s audience’s emotions of fear and sadness, but also of patriotism through charged language and by compelling his viewers to identify with the victims, in order to galvanize a sense of anger and commitment to justice, which he is able to achieve this charged language through use of metaphor and periphrasis. By presenting his argument as one of policy and supporting this claim through the formal topics of definition and concomitant, Bush is able to ultimately use his address to argue that America should be defended, because defending America means defending the doctrine of freedom itself.

    Read More

  • The Meta-Narrative of American History

    800 Words  | 2 Pages

    Bush, G. H. W., & Scowcroft, B. (1998). A world transformed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

    Read More

  • President Obama’s Inaugural Speech: Rhetorical Analysis

    903 Words  | 2 Pages

    President Obama’s Inaugural Speech: Rhetorical Analysis. Barrack Obama’s inauguration speech successfully accomplished his goal by using rhetoric to ensure our nation that we will be in safe hands. The speech is similar to ideas obtained from the founding documents and Martin Luther King’s speech to establish ‘our’ goal to get together and take some action on the problems our country is now facing. As President Barack Obama starts his speech, he keeps himself from using ‘me’, ‘myself’, and ‘I’ and replacing it with ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘together’ to achieve his ethos.

    Read More

  • The Transformation of America

    1375 Words  | 3 Pages

    Most Americans believe that the troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is due to the terrorist attacks on the United States. And while it is hard to deny that the 9-11 attacks were the impetus for putting boots on the ground, it is imperative that the chain of events following the horror of September 11 are seen to reflect the willingness and wants of actors in control before the towers fell. In no field other than politics does the justification for action often come from a noteworthy event and the true cause stays hidden behind the headlines.... ... middle of paper ... ...

    Read More

  • The Legality of the US Invasion of Iraq

    2172 Words  | 5 Pages

    March 19th, 2003 marked the official start to the US invasion of Iraq. Prior to this, there had been a lot of tension and conflict building up in the Middle East. Just months prior, President George W. Bush said in his state of the union address, coined a term for three countries that were seen as potentially dangerous and threaten the peace of the world. He called them the Axis of Evil, and it consisted of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, with Iraq being the major topic of discussion. He said that Saddam Hussein was carrying weapons of mass destruction and further developing chemical and nuclear weapons. He claimed that they had already used on civilians, “leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children”. He painted a grues...

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Obama Speech

    1370 Words  | 3 Pages

    President Obama’s Address to the nation was presented on January 5, 2016. His speech was shown on all of the major network stations. The main goal of his speech was to get the point across to the nation about the increasing problem of gun use. His speech really focused on the issue of gun control and if it would benefit the country. Overall, the biggest idea of his Address was that gun control is a large issue in the United States. The way to prevent deaths caused by firearms can be prevented in other ways than taking peoples guns away. The examples brought up in this Address really stood out to me. The use of personal, national, and global examples really made his speech stronger on the topic of effectiveness.

    Read More

More about Rhetorical Analysis of President’s Address To The Nation Post 9/11

Open Document