Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Rhetorical Coercion and the Iraq War.

How and why did the Bush administration succeed in dominating the debate in the run-up to the Iraq War, and why was the potential political opposition relatively mute? Recent accounts have emphasized that the administration's efforts to inflate the Iraq threat succeeded because of the U.S. executive's inherent advantage in shaping the public agenda, but this overestimates the president's ability to sway public opinion. More importantly, these accounts devote too little attention to the rhetorical implications of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. We will explore how, out of the range of possible meanings, a particular interpretation of 9/11 came to predominate and how it reshaped the rhetorical playing field in such a way as to silence those one might otherwise have expected to oppose the administration in its quest for war with Iraq. Theoretically, this paper focuses on the processes by which meanings become established and thus certain interpretations of international events come to seem natural and undeniable. These questions have been marginalized by the constructivist "mainstream," but they should lie at the heart of the constructivist project. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]