Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror

Abstract

Many have noted how the Bush administration’s linking of Iraq to the war on terror lent a certain degree of legitimacy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Few scholars who have noted this linkage, however, have theorised about the specific discursive mechanisms that allowed Iraq to be incorporated and normalised within the war on terror. This article utilises the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau to analyse how ‘Iraq’ was (re)constructed as a threat through the war on terror. The productive power of the discourses constructing ‘Iraq’ is examined in the wording of poll questions as sites of reproduction and naturalisation of the dominant understandings of Iraq and the war on terror. Rather than tools used to measure public opinion that exists independently of them, this article argues that polls are better viewed as vehicles through which foreign policy and security discourses are stabilised and naturalised.