Bush administration framed Iraq war using World War II analogies

Evidence

President Bush designated three nations—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—and “their terrorist allies” as the “axis of evil,” deliberately invoking the term that described America’s enemies of World War II to gain public support for the invasion of Iraq (Sanger, 2002). To bring the threat by comparative framing closer to home, Donald Rumsfeld likened the preemptive disarmament of Iraq to the Cuban missile crisis (Garamone, 2002). Condoleezza Rice also used the Hitler appeasement comparison to silence disputes between the United States and its allies on the UN Security Council about authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2331

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to framing theory in cognitive psychology and Lakoff’s work on political framing. — connects to: Nobel prestige surged after World War II as America’s Cold War science hegemony rose — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 455