The American Rhetorical Construction of the Iranian Nuclear Threat

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The American Rhetorical Construction of the Iranian Nuclear Threat

Also Available from Continuum: Communicating Conflict Edited by P. R. R. White and Elizabeth Thomson Evaluation and Stance in War News Edited by Linda Lombardo and Louann Haarman Language in the Media Edited by Astrid Ensslin and Sally Johnson


Jason Jones

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Jason Jones 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-2014-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in India

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Preface

ix

Chapter 1

Introduction: Executive Power, the Press, and Iran

Chapter 2

The United States Versus Iran: Stasis Theory and Defining the Nuclear Debate

28

Controlling the Discourse: Interviews with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

59

Chapter 4

Verbal Tug-of-War: An Interview with the Enemy

83

Chapter 5

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate : A Visual Analysis of News Coverage

109

Before World War III: Discourse Studies and Social Change

141

Chapter 3

Chapter 6

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Appendix A Excerpt from Interview on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos and Peter Jennings

150

Appendix B Interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News

153

Appendix C Excerpt from Interview with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News

158

Appendix D Excerpt from Interview on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer and Doyle McManus

160

Appendix E Excerpt from Remarks to the National Conference of Editorial Writers

162

vi

Contents

Appendix F Excerpt from Interview with Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News

165

Appendix G Excerpt from Interview with Andrea Koppel of CNN

167

Appendix H Excerpt from Interview with Barbara Slavin and Ray Locker of USA Today

171

Appendix I

173

Excerpt from Interview on the Sean Hannity Show

Bibliography

175

Index

187

List of Tables and Figures

Tables Table 2.1 Examined news stories in order of IAEA report and resolution dates

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Table 2.2 Newsmakers’ positions on Iran’s nuclear program

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Table 4.1 Arguments from the first 400 posts at CBSnews.com in response to the 60 Minutes interview prior to airing

99

Table 4.2 Arguments from the first 400 posts on CBSnews.com after the August 13, 2006, airing of 60 Minutes

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Figures Figure 5.1

New York Times Front Page Dec. 4, 2007

118

Figure 5.2

New York Times A14 Dec. 4, 2007

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Figure 5.3


122

Figure 5.4


123

Figure 5.5


125

Figure 5.6

Washington Post Front Page Dec. 4, 2007

128

Figure 5.7

Washington Post A12 Dec. 4, 2007

129

Figure 5.8


131

Figure 5.9


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Figure 5.10 Washington Post A29 Dec. 5, 2007

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Acknowledgements

I wish to express sincere appreciation to the Department of English, University of Washington, for broadening my intellectual horizons, Professor Candice Rai and Professor Sandra Silberstein for their invaluable feedback and support, and especially Professor Anis Bawarshi for his professional and scholarly guidance.

Preface

This project began on the Orange Line of the Washington, DC Metro during the winter of 2005. As a Master’s student at the University of Maryland, College Park, I would spend the hour-long commute from Arlington, Virginia, reading Express, a free, Washington Post-owned newspaper handed out on weekday mornings at the entrance of the Metro station. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been elected to office that summer, and it wasn’t long before his face and words were making regular appearances in my morning paper. From the assertion of wiping Israel off the map being attributed to him, to his denying the Holocaust, to Ahmadinejad’s speaking his mind about the Bush administration, I usually had a smile on my face or tried to hold back my laughter as I read about provocative remarks the Iranian president said, or supposedly said; I would think to myself, this guy either has to be the craziest man alive or the most courageous one, speaking the way he did about a White House that had just toppled regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I tried to ignore his comments about Israel so as to avoid taking them seriously, the thought was easier said than done. Every time Ahmadinejad’s name appeared in an article, it seemed that talk of him had to be situated in the context of wiping Israel off the map or challenging the existence of the Holocaust. What surprised me most was that all the hoopla over President Ahmadinejad’s bellicose rhetoric about Israel seemed to ignore the very similar language being used by then President George W. Bush. For me, the only difference between the two presidents’ public discourse was the American president had the capacity and willingness to back up what he said. It was then that I doubled back on my initial reaction to reading about Ahmadinejad. Instead of asking myself, “Is this guy crazy?” I began to ask, “Who does it benefit to think that Ahmadinejad is crazy?” And aside from the economic value of sensational news, what other purposes could the constant regurgitation in the American press of Ahmadinejad’s allegedly wanting to wipe Israel off the map serve? I couldn’t help but think of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the groundless accusations of his possessing weapons of mass

x

Preface

destruction used to justify the attack, and what many were arguing was the press’s compliance in helping to legitimize the White House’s specious arguments. This led to the main question that compelled me to write this book: Was something similar happening again? While a student at UMD, I worked at the Clarendon Barnes & Noble bookstore, where I found myself constantly walking past or ringing up Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle. Wanting to learn more about Iran and its nuclear program, to get a fuller account than what a free newspaper could provide, I used my bookseller discount to purchase the 400-page book and blazed through Pollack’s history of Iran that begins with the last ice age and ends with the controversy over Iran’s nuclear aspirations. Though I found his history of Iran interesting, I was troubled by how he came to understand Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program; what begins with his suspicion of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons abruptly jumps to his speaking with conviction of Iran developing nuclear weapons and what the United States government needs to do to prevent it from happening. Even if I weren’t working on a degree in Rhetoric, I think I would have looked askance at the way he leapt the logical gap between suspicion and certainty. More, however, will be said later about the Persian Puzzle and other books about Iran and its nuclear program. I don’t want to jump to conclusions. It wasn’t just the press and The Persian Puzzle telling me that Iran was developing nuclear weapons; the average Joe and Josephina were saying the same thing. On more than one occasion, I’ve had beers with people who have said with a straight face that the United States really should’ve invaded Iran, because the state wants to expand its power and is developing nuclear weapons. On a bus ride, an older woman and I had a conversation during which she asked about my studies. I told her I studied Rhetoric and was really interested in the debate over Iran’s nuclear program. She looked at me with a smile and said, “All you need to know about Iran’s rhetoric is not to believe a word they say.” I laughed and changed the subject. A year later, after my wife’s employer underwent a merger that relocated us to Seattle, I was sitting in traffic on I-5, headed home from the University of Washington. To my left, there was a bus with a radio station’s advertisement on its side. The placard was a fiery orange with a mushroom cloud rising from Ahmadinejad’s head; across the top read, “No Bull.” In the summer of 2009, I told a guy that I was writing about the debate over Iran’s nuclear program. He looked up from his lunch and said, “What debate?” His sentiments were mine exactly. With all the talk of Iran developing nuclear weapons, I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. As violence in Iraq raged on, it appeared

Preface

xi

that the same White House/American press tandem that disseminated knowledge needed to rationalize one invasion was paving the road to yet another conflict. As I worked toward my PhD in Language and Rhetoric at the University of Washington, I began to take Farsi lessons in hopes of expanding this project beyond a study of how the White House and the American press has constructed knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program and turning my attention toward Iran and its own press. Even if I managed to become fluent in Farsi, however, targeting my critical eye toward Iranian news and the public discourse of Iranian government officials would have been incomplete due to an unavoidable cultural deficit; there is no replacement for immersing oneself in the many cultures of another country to develop the literacy skills necessary to comprehend the nuances of language that cannot be taught in a classroom. My single focus on the United States, nevertheless, is a shift from many of the current books in circulation that purportedly direct our attention to the respective contributions of the United States and Iran to the storm surrounding the latter’s nuclear program, but which have typically had more to say about Iran. If knowledge is the handmaiden of power, is needed to control whoever or whatever that knowledge is about, then knowledge of Iran helps provide the grounds for the White House’s efforts to have power over the Islamic Republic of Iran, much like the knowledge produced on Iraq helped legitimize the U.S. invasion. But what happens when the same attention is paid to the United States government? What happens when we question portrayals of Ahmadinejad; not necessarily to present him in a positive light, but to listen to what he has to say other than what he has said about Israel? What happens if we take time to consider the evidence the White House has given to justify seeing Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program rather than simply nodding our heads in agreement? If Americans begin to think about the actions of our own government, not just the governments the White House seeks to manipulate or replace, then perhaps we can better influence the foreign policy choices of our political leaders.

Chapter 1


On March 18, 2003, then president George W. Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, demanding that he and his sons flee Iraq within fortyeight hours or face American military might. He warned the Iraqi military that they could avoid a similar fate if they allowed coalition forces peaceful access into the state to do away with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The cause for such impending action, Bush explained, was a matter of life or death: “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other” (2003b). Two days later, Operation Iraqi Freedom would initiate years of violence that continues to provide fodder for news and entertainment, fuels debate among our political leaders and pundits, and fills the earth with American and Iraqi bodies; during this ongoing violence in Iraq, Bush’s claims of Hussein’s possession and development of WMDs would go unconfirmed. While his groundless charge against Hussein led to the loss of countless lives, Bush voiced a similar allegation against Iran that would later be reiterated by his successor, President Barack Obama—the claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Rather than waiting for the war of words between Washington, DC and Tehran to escalate to a conflict of a different sort, the time, for quite a while now, has been right to turn a critical eye toward the Bush administration’s language used to construct Iran as a nuclear threat and the news media’s role in this process. To illuminate some of what helped manufacture the Iranian peril, this study will examine the rhetorical and discursive practices of the state and the press to excavate their common assumptions, catalogue the arguments that have been deemed acceptable, and the various ways language has operated epistemologically. Such an analysis is crucial to understanding how, without evidence, a rhetorical construction of Iran as a nuclear threat developed during Bush’s two terms in

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the face of changing contexts and how this discursively produced threat still functions in the Obama administration’s rhetoric today. At first glance, one might question the validity of pursuing such a project given the apparent consensus among the United States and European states that have come to identify Iran’s efforts as strides toward nuclear weapons. Moreover, Iran is currently facing UN sanctions for its unwillingness to suspend uranium enrichment, a process that is necessary for producing both civilian energy and weapons-grade materials. A consensus, however, does not mean that the states that are in agreement are right or that their motivations are not as insidious as their characterization of Iran’s intentions. Though sanctions have already been issued, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei claimed in a June 2009 statement that whether or not Iran is developing nuclear weapons remains a question: “We continue to receive new information. We also do not know whether the information is authentic or not” (2009a). Though ElBaradei’s own motivations could be questioned, I take up the director general’s call as this project is intended to promote a sense of skepticism toward the certainty of Iran’s nuclear ambitions that saturates American public discourse on the issue. Rather than asserting that Iranian officials are telling the truth and American leaders are lying, or vice versa, the pages that follow proffer an explanation of some of what facilitated the development of conditions that strengthened the believability of the Bush administration’s arguments about Iran and its nuclear program. These conditions have to do with more than the claims Bush and his political surrogates uttered throughout his time in office because their rhetoric functioned within larger discursive frameworks and accompanying power relations—significant factors that encourage a range of inquiries: How do journalists’ discursive choices influence the presentation of the nuclear debate in their news stories? How and why does an interviewer’s approach to an interview with American and Iranian officials differ and how do these interviewing styles help shape the interviewees’ rhetoric for audiences? What are the rhetorical implications of layout in newspaper coverage of the nuclear controversy? How does power operate in these various discursive environments and what are the potential consequences these power/ language relationships hold for the grounds Americans may use (knowingly or unknowingly) to deliberate on Iran’s nuclear program? Before providing answers to these questions and more, this chapter first historically contextualizes the nuclear controversy and speaks to the few discourse-centered studies that have weighed in on the matter. Because an understanding of power is vital to this project, the next section will engage


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with recent literature on the expansion of executive power that segues into a theory of governing that bridges the different perspectives discussed— Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality (2007a). In sum, governmentality is an amalgam of governing forces (e.g., the government and institutions such as the press) that encourage populations to take up particular subjectivities, to accept certain worldviews. This perspective positions my language analyses within a framework of power relations that enhances my explanation of the conditions that gave the Bush administration’s rhetoric an air of truth. The penultimate section of this introduction elaborates on the notion of the press as an institution and how institutional norms shape news media discourse. The final segment outlines the chapters to come.

Rhetorical Selectivity and the Iranian Nuclear Threat A year before the United States invaded Iraq, President Bush stood before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address in which he elucidated his plans for America’s future and identified the obstacles that stood in the way of achieving his principal goal for the nation—that in the final chapter of America’s war on terror “we will see freedom’s victory” (2002a). While thwarting the plans of terrorists and bringing them to justice sat atop the president’s list of priorities, he also emphasized the White House’s efforts to stop particular states from getting their hands on nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and sharing this dangerous technology with the terrorist organizations they were said to sponsor. Despite former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s condemnation of the September 11 attacks and Iran’s support of the ensuing mobilization of American armed forces in Afghanistan, Bush would ultimately recognize the Islamic Republic, along with Iraq and North Korea, as a constituent of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world” (2002a). For an American leader concerned with stifling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and fighting for freedom, the United States could not stand idly by, Bush told the American people, as “Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom” (2002a). Bush’s comments on Iran were yet another wedge inserted between two states who share over a half-century of antagonistic relations, from the 1953 American-supported coup of Iranian prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq to the 1979 hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran perpetrated by a group of Iranian students for 444 days.

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The president’s remarks also demonstrated one of the powers the Oval Office confers onto its occupier: the ability to propel particular issues to the center of national attention (Zarefsky 2004, p. 611). But how something becomes a matter of public concern is never free from the language used to draw attention to it. In the words of Kenneth Burke, “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent must function also as a deflection of reality” (1989, p. 115). Thus, the president’s capacity to give salience to matters of his choosing is intimately tied to the rhetoric upon which he relies in an effort to mold how the public perceives whatever is in focus. When Bush accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, the charge, like Iran’s nuclear program itself, was nothing new. Iran began developing its nuclear program in the 1950s, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi worked towards his nuclear goals with American, French, British, and other aid from the West (Ansari 2006, pp. 63–64). This assistance would cease following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in which the Pahlavi dynasty was overthrown and replaced by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Criticism of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program was soon to follow. “Since the mid1980s,” political scientist Gawdat Bahgat observes, “Israel, the United States, and other Western powers have accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons capability” (2006, p. 307). The subsequent accusations were unsurprising given that the newly formed government intended to function free of the foreign influence that characterized Iran’s previous governing body. Moreover, the timing of the censure speaks to the rhetorical selectivity that occurs when states determine who or what is a problem facing their populations or the international community at large. Despite the United States’ perception of Iran as developing a nuclear weapon for nearly two decades, no president believed the problem to be so pressing as to bring it before the public eye, at least on the same stage President Bush would choose to do. The last time Iran was mentioned in a State of the Union speech was in President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 address in which he expressed his regret for the Iran-Contra affair (1987). But with 9/11 vividly in the minds of Americans and the Taliban temporarily crushed in Afghanistan, President Bush had a prime opportunity to individuate other regional actors he deemed necessary to confront in order to secure what he believed to be American interests at home and abroad. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush attempted to influence the public’s knowledge of the dangers that stood beyond America’s borders so that he could increase his ability to act as he saw fit in the Middle East—actions that his discourse would help to sanction.


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Given the cachet of the presidency and the public approval he enjoyed for months following the September tragedy, Bush argued his stance on Iran’s nuclear intentions based solely on his credibility; no proof was necessary. One might assume that the president spoke of Iran with a perspective informed by sound intelligence that could not be shared, given the limited time allotted for speaking to the American people or the necessity to refrain from sharing sensitive information in a public space. Nevertheless, his power to categorize Iran as a nuclear threat was not limited solely to choices of language as he, via other US officials, would later accept information from an Iranian faction called the National Council of Resistance (NCR) at a conference held near the White House in August 2002. The NCR, the AP reported, revealed that Iran had two clandestine sites at Natanz and Arak “to support its nuclear weapons program” (Lumpkin, 2002). Though the revelations in no way proved Iran’s intent, they apparently were received as such. More importantly, American officials’ willingness to listen to the NCR, a group seeking regime change in Iran, demonstrated the flexibility, or hypocrisy, to which the government was open in gathering information about the Islamic Republic. The NCR is an organization aligned with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which the State Department listed then, and now, as a foreign terrorist organization (“Terrorist Groups,” pp. 104–5). According to stated Bush policy, negotiating with terrorists is never an option, but apparently accepting intelligence from them when it coheres with the president’s agenda was. The rhetorical selectivity Bush exercised with regard to Iran was within his right as president and unavoidable, as he is, in the end, human. Like anyone else who hopes to encourage others to share his or her perspective on a matter, presidents create arguments and draw on those of others they, and hopefully their audiences, recognize as credible to advance positions on domestic and foreign policy. In other words, part of what enables Bush or any other political leader’s rhetoric to be persuasive is the extent to which their language participates in what Susan Miller refers to as “infrastructures of trustworthiness” (2007, p. 2) that influence the level of trust audiences attach to language uttered within particular discursive matrices. On the one hand, Bush’s unmatched access to various institutional sites of discourse such as intelligence and news media and the intangible qualities joined to being the commander in chief helped to imbue his perspective on Iran with trustworthiness—a greater chance of being understood as truth than that of the average American citizen. On the other hand, the president was never the sole voice in the production of knowledge on Iran and its nuclear program. Apart from the judgment of individual Americans,

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there are institutions such as the news media that have the potential to mitigate or strengthen the president’s power to craft the public’s knowledge of foreign affairs through rhetorical means. With the existence of such forces, the knowledge produced on Iran for the American people throughout President Bush’s tenure was a dynamic, rhetorical process that has yet to be fully explored. Though Bush briefly placed the spotlight on Iran in January 2002, the Islamic Republic’s western neighbor Iraq was the chief concern among state actors for the Bush administration alongside its counterterrorism efforts. Fittingly, the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear agenda has been virtually absent in the vast scholarship on political rhetoric in the age of terror with the exception of a journal article authored by Foad Izadi and Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria (2007) and William Beeman’s The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs” (2005). Izadi and Saghaye-Biria provide a discourse analysis of American newspaper editorials on Iran’s nuclear program from 1984 to 2004. Beeman’s objective is to diagnose the problems of the decades-old “mutual demonization” between the United States and Iran to facilitate more productive communicative engagement between the two states. Similar to Izadi and Saghaye-Biria, I focus particularly on news coverage of the nuclear debate, but rely on rhetorical theory (particularly stasis theory and argumentation), discourse analysis, and other approaches to language and communication to demonstrate how the Bush administration rhetorically constructed Iran as a nuclear threat without empirical evidence. Beeman examines the language of both Washington, DC, and Tehran, but he only gives a short account of the nuclear debate in which he explains the weaknesses of the Bush administration’s claims of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon (2005, pp. 156–62). The present study, however, seeks to identify the forces that empower the White House’s rhetoric despite its shortcomings. Further, to focus analytical energy on the language circulating among American political leaders rather than accentuating the reciprocity of the demonization between the two states requires a recognition of the disparity in the respective means of the United States and Iran for acting on such discourse, especially with the United States having led regime change in two separate countries in a span of just a little over two years. To scrutinize discourse on Iran and its nuclear program in American news media is to consider the institution’s role in helping to generate knowledge on the matter and the possible effects the knowledge produced may hold for the American people in relation to the state. During President Bush’s two terms, the press—deliberately or not—was, for the most part, aligned with the Bush administration’s views of Iran, thus validating the


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White House’s language as truth before the eyes and ears of Americans across the country. However, knowledge is never without its consequences, as Edward Said maintained in Orientalism thirty years ago. Knowledge of the people and states of the Middle East, Said explained, has served as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978, p. 78). For Bush to control Iran, various institutional sources of knowledge on foreign affairs had to disseminate information that was in sync with his understanding of the Islamic Republic’s seeking a nuclear weapon, denying Iranians their freedom, and destabilizing the Middle East as a whole. With the press proffering such knowledge for public deliberation, the news media helped to increase the likelihood of Americans looking unfavorably upon Iran’s nuclear program and supporting the Oval Office in its efforts to take action against the alleged Iranian threat. In sum, knowledge aids in the expansion of governmental power, as it provides the grounds upon which its legitimacy can rest.

The Expansion of Executive Power and Governmentality In the wake of September 11, millions of Americans rallied “round the flag and seemed to grant President Bush a level of legitimacy that allowed him to put into motion what Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay (2003) of the Brookings Institute refer to as the “Bush revolution” in American foreign policy. This “revolution,” they argue, entailed “maximizing America’s freedom to act” and using “its strength to change the status quo in the world” (2003, p. 13). In order to achieve this maximization of power, the Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, challenged the Biological Weapons Convention, and “continued and even intensified its campaign to block the International Criminal Court from having jurisdiction over American citizens” (Daalder and Lindsay 2003, p. 81). In the 2002 National Security Strategy, the White House abandoned the constraints of Cold War deterrence, arguing that the strategy is anachronistic in today’s political climate because “deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations” (2002, p. 15). If the enemy cannot be deterred, then America’s only option is to take immediate, “preemptive” action. As the NSS explains, “Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack” (2002, p. 15).

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This understanding of preemption, however, was subject to Bush’s (or his strategists’) rhetorical selectivity and was adapted to the current moment since “rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means” (National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15). Consequently, redefining “preemption” entailed that the United States act not on the “visible mobilization” of the enemy, but in response to an “enemy who is suspected of plotting an attack at some unspecified time and place”—what William Keller and Gordon Mitchell recognize as the less politically palatable strategy of prevention (2006, p. 4). In addition to changing the meaning of “preemption” to increase the White House’s ability to act, terrorism suspects were labeled “enemy combatants,” enabling the United States to treat these people as neither American citizens nor prisoners of war as both the innocent and guilty, American and foreigner, were stripped of their rights, imprisoned indefinitely, and tortured during interrogation. Moreover, Bush’s prevention rationale in the guise of preemption provided discursive grounds on which he could identify supposed threats to the United States such as Iran before the Islamic Republic could develop the means to act on its said malevolent intentions. Delving deeper into the relationship of legitimacy and crises such as 9/11, Giorgio Agamben (2005) elucidates the measures taken by former President Bush through a theory of the state of exception. “The state of exception,” Agamben writes, “is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept” (2005, p. 4). Drawing on a range of historical cases, Agamben contends that it is not the law that provided presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush the opportunity to seize broader executive power. Opening the doors to such authority is that space between norms and the law that marks the unnatural connection between the two. “It is as if the universe of law [. . .] ultimately appeared as a field of forces traversed by two conjoined and opposite tensions: one that goes from norm to anomie, and another that leads from anomie to the law and the rule” (Agamben 2005, p. 73). What occupies that anomic space is the state of exception in which authority is enforced, but not with the force of law as the political leader becomes “living law.” Consequently, in a state of exception, “the normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that [. . .] nevertheless claims to be applying the law” (Agamben 2005, p. 87). Under such circumstances, legitimacy does not arise from norms or the law, but is self-generated. Agamben’s choice of examples, however, reveals the limits of his theory, because it requires


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crisis situations such as 9/11 for an executive to operate in a state of exception; but such crises are not always available. Even if a president can rhetorically maintain a sense of emergency by arousing fear through the identification of additional threats such as a nuclear-armed Iran, states of exception rest on the immediacy of a crisis more than the potentiality of one. Crises, though, are not the only explanations that have been offered up to enhance our understanding of the expansion of executive power; for even when popular support subsides with the temporal distancing of a crisis, executives continue to act with the power a crisis supposedly conferred upon them in the first place. While at once criticizing Congress for abdicating its institutional responsibility in the system of checks and balances, Andrew Bacevich (2008) cites an “ideology of national security” as part of what allows a president to act as he sees fit. This ideology comprises a Manichean worldview, the need to act on freedom’s behalf, and the belief that “for the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere” (Bacevich 2008, pp. 74–75). For Bacevich, this ideology facilitates the expansion of executive power, as it provides flexible grounds for action that help ease the bounds within which a president works. Though Bacevich makes a convincing case, it is extraordinarily difficult to pin the augmented freedoms of the Oval Office on one multifaceted ideology, no matter how much it imbues the discourse of American foreign policy. Further, regardless of how ideologically driven the discourse of American political leaders may be, this rhetoric has to be supplemented by other institutional sources of knowledge to strengthen its persuasive force as this study of news coverage of Iran’s nuclear program should demonstrate. The United States Constitution itself could also serve as a legal rationale for what President Bush managed to do during his tenure. As Max Weber (1978) argued in his explanation of the three types of legitimate domination (rational, traditional, and charismatic), domination on rational grounds rests “on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority)” (p. 215). But as Sheldon Wolin (2008) argues, what was originally written in a constitution cannot always account for circumstances past political leaders could not have possibly foreseen: “A war power may be authorized by a constitution drawn up more than two centuries ago, but “advances in weaponry” have altered dramatically the meaning of warfare without formally rewriting the authorization to use them” (p. 99). As Wolin goes on to explain, President Bush’s actions were based more on “extraconstitutional” justifications than constitutional ones “as the ascendance of

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Superpower is the weakening or irrelevance of democracy and constitutionalism—except as mystifications enabling Superpower to fake a lineage that gives it legitimacy” (2008, p. 101). The weakening of democracy and the empowering of the executive, what Wolin calls the “specter of inverted totalitarianism,” is, in part, achieved through discouraging mass political participation, a demobilization Wolin traces as far back as the United States’ founders. In the end, Bush is not the author of the so-called “Bush revolution,” but a benefactor of something that existed even before he took office: “In the inverted system the leader is a product of the system, not its architect; it will survive him” (Wolin 2008, p. 44). The problems Wolin cites, though, are more than the failings of democracy; they are strongly tied, as he subtly indicates, to the discursive landscape in which the executive branch’s language functions—a landscape in which other institutions are supposed to hold the executive branch accountable for its actions. When members of Congress and the press fail to provide viable alternative perspectives or question the rhetoric pouring from the White House on issues such as Iran’s nuclear program, the Oval Office’s perspective on such matters is strengthened. Thus, it is not just a matter of inherent deficiencies in American democracy that debilitates the American public, as Wolin contends; it is also a matter of the rhetorical resources made available for Americans to deliberate on grounds that the president does not necessarily determine. Despite the divergence among various explanations of what allowed the executive branch to go virtually unchecked during the Bush administration and granted power to those that preceded it, the arguments converge on the presumption that governmental action cannot be explained in and of itself, a position on the exercise of power that Michel Foucault spells out with his theory of governmentality. In the genealogy he provides during his 1977/1978 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault (2007a) traces governmentality to the emergence of two problems in the sixteenth century: the problems of government and of governing souls. Using Machiavelli’s The Prince as a foil, the writers of sixteenth-century treatises on government, according to Foucault, read Machiavelli as overly concerned with the sovereign’s ability to sustain power over a territory and population. What Foucault finds in the works that challenge The Prince is “that governing, the people who govern, and the practice of government, are multifarious since many people govern—the father of a family, the superior in a convent, the teacher, the master in relation to the child or disciple [. . .]” (2007a, p. 93). The prince’s act of governing is only one among many forms of government that society and the state encompass. Along with the multimodal


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accounts of government working to supplant the singular form Machiavelli articulates, the institutionalization of the Christian pastorate: gave rise to an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men, an art of monitoring and urging them on step by step, an art with the function of taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence. (Foucault 2007a, p. 165) The Christian pastorate placed primacy precisely on what the Prince did not: the people in their entirety were more important than the one who governed them; the shepherd puts the flock first, not vice versa. The embryonic stages of governmentality in the sixteenth century were not able to fully mature until the notion of population was realized as an object of inquiry. Through statistics and other modes of analysis, the routines, problems, and various phenomena related to populations were rendered quantifiable, enabling the government to act “directly on the population itself through campaigns, or, indirectly, by, for example, techniques that, without people being aware of it, stimulate the birth rate, or direct the flows of population to this or that region or activity” (Foucault, 2007a, p. 105). Grounded in a knowledge of populations and a constellation of governing activity, governmentality is when that array of governing forces within a given society is harnessed to exercise power over, to manage the conduct of, populations. With governmentality, “there will be no interest in trying to impose regulatory systems of injunctions, imperatives, and interdictions” because it is not a system of governing in that particular sense of coercion (Foucault 2007a, p. 352). Rather, governmentality works to create conditions that encourage members of a population to act or think in particular ways by making these subjectivities readily available for subjects to occupy. In this study, the governmentality explored is characterized by the White House, with the institutional backing of the press, goading Americans to fear a rhetorically constructed Iranian nuclear threat to marshal public support for whatever actions the White House deemed necessary to confront this evoked foreign danger. Counterarguments would be overwhelmed, not suppressed, by the ubiquity of the Bush administration’s charge against Iran which would offset the lack of supporting evidence for perceiving Iran’s nuclear activity as a weapons program. Because Foucault’s extant work on governmentality comes mainly from lectures and interviews, the art of government Foucault explicates is not without problems. Wendy Brown (2006), for one, takes issue particularly

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with what she perceives to be the absence of legitimacy in Foucault’s version of governmentality, an omission that, for her, renders the theory incomplete. For a fuller understanding of governmentality, Brown contends that it “would attend not only to the production, organization, and mobilization of subjects by a variety of powers but also to the problem of legitimizing these operations by the singularly accountable object in the field of political power: the state” (2006, p. 83). Though Brown is certainly right in her call for individuating the state because it is indeed the most publicly liable for its actions, there may be a discrepancy between the way the two view legitimacy. Foucault admits in his genealogy of governmentality that “there is no problem of origin, of foundation, or of legitimacy, and no problem of dynasty either” (2007a, p. 259). This is because, as Brown acknowledges, governmentality envelops all governing practices including that of the state; governmentality does not need to be legitimated, the state does. Furthermore, legitimacy entails the privileging of one set of power relations over another (e.g., the power of the people over government), an inversion that Foucault takes pains to avoid. Yet he hints to how we can understand the efforts a governing practice makes to attain some sort of legitimacy without referring to it as such: It is therefore not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how one would repress the other or how the other would abuse the one, but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system [. . .]. (2007b, p. 61) Truth and lies, legitimacy and illegitimacy, are not important; what is significant is the description of the conditions that make forms of government appear acceptable, which includes the rhetoric of the state, press, and other sites of discourse that can influence public deliberation in some way. Though I disagree with Brown’s position on legitimacy in Foucault’s governmentality, I share her approach to governmentality at the micro- as opposed to the macro-level at which Foucault approaches it—the level of the state instead of the entirety of governing forces acting on a population. In addition to approaching governmentality at the level of the state, I offer one caveat: the existence of governmentality does not guarantee its total effect on populations. In other words, there is a difference between guiding and determining the behavior of people; just because authorities place a “No U-Turn” sign on the side of a road does not mean that drivers will refrain from doing so. As Michel de Certeau asserts,


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A society is thus composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative institutions and of innumerable other practices that remain “minor,” always there but not organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional, scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others. (1984, p. 48) Given this division, a study of governmentality—the various practices and discourses conjoined to manage populations—should not ignore how people actually experience and appropriate those dominant practices and discourses. Foucault himself is aware of this distinction when writing of struggles against the Christian pastorate through “counter-conduct,” a term that, for him, does not arrange various conducts into a hierarchy as the word “misconduct” does nor lionize particular people or groups by referring to them as “dissidents” (2007a, pp. 201–202). To keep this in mind is to avoid overstating the reach of governmentality, as not all Americans see Iran as a nuclear threat, though the White House, with the help of the press, has encouraged fear of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Describing Conditions of Acceptability: Discourse and Governmentality Though understanding a public’s uptake of a discourse poses difficulties, it does not preclude an analysis that offers an understanding of the conditions of acceptability—that consubstantial relationship of knowledge and power. In “The Discourse on Language,” Foucault argues that truth is not self-evident, but rather willed into being. “This will to truth,” Foucault explains, “relies on institutional support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy—naturally—the booksystem, publishing, libraries, such as the learned societies of the past, and laboratories today” (1972, p. 219). These social practices help to determine what is knowledge, what is truth, for the members of a particular society who are trained to perceive institutions and the individuals they comprise as authorities on different matters who disseminate information to be consumed as knowledge and used for producing more knowledge by relying on a variety of accepted methods and shared assumptions. The institutions that influence what is knowable in the realm of foreign policy include the state and its cadre of spokespeople, think tanks, news outlets, literature, and so forth. Though the forces that help will to truth certain ideas and perspectives are distinct, not necessarily unified in some conspiratorial

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alliance, they can be exploited by the state or those who partake in such practices can, by their own accord, fall in line with the state’s agenda, whatever it may be. Fittingly, much of what has been written about Iran’s nuclear program over the years has worked to sustain the alarmist rhetoric the Bush White House communicated about Iran’s nuclear. Over the last half-decade, many of the books that have explored the ongoing nuclear debate demonstrate the institutional support Foucault speaks of in his understanding of the production of knowledge. Take, for example, the first book on American-Iranian relations to appear during Bush’s tenure—Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle (2004). This work’s independence from the White House might be presumed, as Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy for the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. However, Pollack’s explanation of Iran’s nuclear program belies that independence. He begins by citing the National Council of Resistance as the source of the Bush administration’s view of Iran as developing nuclear weapons (2004, p. 361), but avoids commenting on the problem of accepting intelligence from a group affiliated with what the United States considers a terrorist organization. Pollack then states that American intelligence confirmed Iran’s clandestine efforts to build nuclear weapons, as he cites an article from the bipartisan Washington Institute and a summary of 2002 WMD developments from GlobalSecurity. org. Neither provides evidence of Iran’s seeking nuclear weapons, but both report that US officials verified the NCR’s claim of Iran’s undeclared nuclear activity, a confirmation that, again, was not proof of Iran’s intent. It is also noteworthy that GlobalSecurity.org describes itself as a website for researching basic information and sources and is “not to be viewed as an exhaustive, ‘last word’ source for critical applications (such as those requiring legally defensible information)” (“Mission”). Even so, Pollack cites these sources among others to ground his characterization of Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program by deferring to sources who themselves defer to official US sources—independence via indirect dependence. Not once does he consider an alternative perspective. Even when he turns to the inspection reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, documents that could have been used to temper claims of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon, Pollack highlights only the faults the reports find, never the merits. After supplying his reading of the IAEA reports, Pollack goes so far as to affirm that, “in the fall of 2003, [Iran] seemed more determined than ever to acquire nuclear weapons [. . .]” (2004, p. 365). In November 2003, the IAEA reported, alongside its criticism of Iran’s lack of cooperation with the Agency, that there was “no evidence” pointing to a nuclear weapons program


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(ElBaradei 2003c, p. 10); there was no need, it seems, for Pollack to acknowledge this point. The Persian Puzzle, despite its problematic account of Iran’s nuclear “weapons” program and the relatively short time it took Pollack to research and write the book, ultimately gained currency as it remained on the Foreign Affairs bestseller list from December 2004 to June 2005 (2005, p. 178). Despite the popularity of The Persian Puzzle, Pollack was not the final word on American-Iranian relations in the context of the nuclear debate. The nuclear question—whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons—has been, for the most part, not a question at all, but a matter of fact. Shahram Chubin (2006) of the Geneva Center for Security Policy contends that Iran wishes to develop nuclear weapons and, if armed, will likely use them and will be emboldened in its support of terrorism (pp. 54–55)—a position directly aligned with the Bush administration’s stance. While acknowledging how Iran’s energy needs may be genuinely related to Iran’s nuclear activity, USA Today journalist Barbara Slavin (2007) shares Chubin and the former president’s position as she claims that “Iran with nukes—or thought to have nukes—would be a frightening prospect” because the Islamic Republic would likely use them first in a nuclear standoff and would pose a greater threat to Israel (p. 27). For Slavin, whether or not Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons does not even matter, because the mere thought of the state being in possession of nuclear weapons is a threat to international, or at least Israeli, security. Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist, and Meir Javedanfar (an Iranian expatriate and political analyst) (2007) do not believe Iran would use nuclear weapons if they acquired them, but certainly believe developing nuclear weapons is Iran’s ultimate goal and support regime change even if Iran were a nuclear power (p. 227). Though Melman and Javedanfar are not quite as alarmist as Chubin and Slavin, many other writers take the Iranian nuclear threat up a notch with their titles alone: Iran: the Coming Crisis (Hitchcock 2006), Showdown with Nuclear Iran: Radical Islam’s Messianic Mission to Destroy Israel and Cripple the United States (Evans 2006), The Apocalypse of Ahmadinejad (Hitchcock 2007), The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction (Ledeen 2007), The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis (Jafarzadeh 2008), and the list goes on. While there are a number of authors who have published books in which they are assured of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there are a few who have proffered counterarguments—or simply more evenhanded analysis—that have done little to silence the chorus of certainty. In Targeting Iran (2007), Alternative Radio’s David Barsamian interviews Ervand Abrahamian, a professor

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of Middle Eastern history, who argues that Iran’s nuclear goals have much to do with its energy problems. Those who see Iran’s nuclear program as militaristic often posit that the Islamic Republic, one of the top oil-producing countries, has no need for nuclear energy. However, oil is not renewable, and Iran, as Abrahamian explains, “is now actually importing a great deal of refined oil for energy” (Barsamian 2007, p. 77). Further, Abrahamian, like Tehran-based journalist Christopher de Ballaigue (2007) and others, sees Iran as taking the path of nuclear ambiguity; in other words, Iran is developing its nuclear program to the point of having the know-how of producing a bomb, but not actually doing so—a capability that could potentially serve as a deterrent to the United States and Israel. More starkly opposed to claims of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons is Scott Ritter (2006), a former United Nations weapons inspector who asserts that the source of what he sees as the hoopla over Iran’s nuclear program is Israel and that what is happening with Iran is a repeat of what happened with Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. The current dilemma with Iran, Ritter writes, “has not manifested itself beyond the hyperbole and speculative rhetoric of those whose true agenda lies more in changing the regime in Tehran than it does with genuine non-proliferation and disarmament” (2006, p. xxvii). Ritter is right in referring to much of what has been said as speculation, since virtually no concrete evidence has been produced. As Ali Ansari (2006), one of the few who have erred on the side of caution by not taking a side on the matter, says about those so sure of Iran’s intentions, “Where no evidence exists to substantiate the more outrageous claims, evidence is simply invented or the absence of evidence is taken as guilt” (p. 239). Put differently, when ambiguity rears its head, rhetoric is used to offset the lack of evidence that could more fully substantiate claims of illicit nuclear activity in Iran. Ritter and Ansari’s brief metacommentary concerning the constitution of knowledge on the nuclear issue is what has been missing from the literature as a whole and a gap that a rhetorical/discourse analysis can help remedy, as both authors unwittingly indicate. How rhetoric is understood here, however, is not bound by a Platonic definition of rhetoric as the “handmaiden of truth” nor is it understood as the sine qua non of truth that rhetoricians such as Barry Brummett (1999) and others have affirmed in past efforts to reclaim rhetoric’s truth-value. Some Americans, for example, recognized President Bush’s claims about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction as true before they could be verified, and some continue to see his rationale for war as true even after the charge against Iraq was proven false. In these circumstances, rhetoric plays a part in helping people accept what they are told as truth or knowledge, but it is not the only factor at work.


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This fastening of rhetoric to truth, Kenneth Rufo (2003) observes, is a problem with past rhetoric-is-epistemic scholarship that elides the influence power has in affecting rhetoric’s capacity to function epistemologically (p. 82). Foucault’s work enables us to overcome this obstacle by directing our attention to power relations and concomitant institutional sources of knowledge. From this theoretical standpoint, the chapters that follow are not meant to prove that Iran’s nuclear program is purely civilian. Rather, this project shows how the connection between power relations and discursive practices produces conditions of acceptability for perceiving Iran as a nuclear threat without relying on material proof for support. Since truth is not the telos of this analysis, what is important is understanding how elements of the discourse on Iran serve as what Burke calls “terministic screens,” or ways in which language “directs the attention into some channels rather than others” (1989, p. 115). While approached and articulated in different ways, these concerns have characterized much of the scholarship on political rhetoric since the beginning of the War on Terror. In 2003, Rhetoric & Public Affairs published a special forum entitled “Evil in the Agora,” in which the contributing scholars provided their insights on how “evil is produced, deployed, used, and misused in public discourse, bracketing the question of the ontological status of evil itself” (Cloud 2003, p. 509). Robert Ivie continued this analysis at greater length, writing on the rhetoric of evil’s degenerative effects on democracy and public debate in Democracy and America’s War on Terror (2005). In the summer of 2007, Rhetoric & Public Affairs would compile another special issue in which rhetoricians examined the case for invading Iraq as they discussed the Bush administration’s evidence for war, the president’s capacity to exploit the press, and other related issues. Linguists have also weighed in on the post9/11 rhetorical climate. In War of Words (2002), Sandra Silberstein analyzes how the state’s mediated discourse helped to foster a sense of national identity after the fall of the Twin Towers. Norman Fairclough studies the discourse of American national security strategy within the context of globalization in Language and Globalization (2006). Even more on the language of the war on terror fills the pages of such journals as Discourse & Society and the Journal of Language & Politics. Regardless of the different disciplinary backgrounds of and the varying statuses Truth/truth holds for these scholars, the scholarship on today’s political rhetoric share a concern for how this discourse can enable and limit public deliberation and facilitate the aggrandizement of state power. Though the “Truth” is cast aside in this study, we as people still “feel justified in claiming ideas as ‘true’ or not [and] in indicting contexts and social

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groups as promoting untruths” (Brummett, 1999, p. 161). Brummett’s point is one that may indeed be leveled against this project as I critique the production of knowledge about Iran and its nuclear program. As Jean Baudrillard once put it in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, “The secret of theory is that truth doesn’t exist” (2007, p. 120). At best, Baudrillard explains, all “you can do is play with some provocative logic, working around ‘truth’ in order to make people occupy, as paradoxical as it may be, this uninhabitable space” (2007, p. 120). Playing with what I hope to be a “provocative logic” in this instance is necessary for demonstrating how the Bush administration managed to avoid having to produce solid evidence of Iran’s alleged development of nuclear weapons, yet nonetheless was able to sustain this claim as “truth.” After all, if American citizens as a whole, not just a small portion, could be arrested and jailed based solely on speculation, there would be outrage; this has not been the case with Iran, and certainly was not so with Iraq. Instead of tying rhetoric to Truth, I approach the circulating rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear program through an understanding of governmentality. The effectiveness of arguments and a discourse’s capacity to function as a terministic screen that directs people’s attentions in some directions rather than others are dependent on the power relations in which such language operates. Consequently, it is not just the White House’s discourse that enabled the Bush administration’s perspective on Iran’s nuclear program to gain currency, but the president and his political surrogates’ media access and their ability to harness and benefit from different institutional sources of knowledge production. Through a lens of governmentality then, it is necessary to examine the rhetorical choices of the state and the discursive practices of the institutions that mediate the former’s discourse in order to account for the conditions that could render the White House’s arguments acceptable despite years of inconclusive IAEA inspection reports and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate in which the US Intelligence Community (IC) stated that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

The News as Institution: Influences on News Media’s Discursive Practices While many books on American-Iranian relations can be found in libraries, bookstores, and online, it is the news media to which people are more likely to turn on a regular basis for accessible, less time-consuming information on foreign affairs. The news, as many political communication scholars


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have come to understand, is the product of an institution more than it is of individual journalists and corporations. Timothy Cook (1998) maintains that “news media, despite different technologies, deadlines, and audiences, are structured similarly in their internal organizations, the way they interact with sources, the formats they use, and in the content they provide” (p. 64). To paraphrase Cook, news media is institutional in that it occupies a space composed of individuals and organizations who partake in normalized activity and are governed by rules, spoken and unspoken, that allow for the efficient production of news from day to day; moreover, the rules and routines that characterize this sphere of human action have developed over time and space (1998, pp. 71–82). This view of news shared among “New Institutionalists” not only allows us to transcend the counterproductive dichotomy of liberal-conservative media bias—which is fitting, given that Democrats and Republicans agree on the Iranian nuclear threat—but encourages the consideration of the forces that influence the language choices that mold the information news media present to their audiences and provides an understanding of how the state can exploit the power of the press to increase its ability to act on a rhetorically constructed Iranian nuclear threat. According to Bartholomew Sparrow (1999), organizations the news media institution comprises operate in an environment of uncertainty that must be dealt with regularly to ensure their continued success. One of the uncertainties news outlets face “is simply whether they can secure access to important information about politics and government, given that it may be kept confidential by politicians or government personnel” (Sparrow 1999, p. 16). One of the ways journalists and their employers confront this obstacle is through the deferential treatment of newsmakers, particularly the upper echelon of our political leaders; but this respect given to such newsmakers is defined more by obedience than anything else. If a journalist steps out of line, he or she risks: (1) retaliation from the newsmakers relied upon for information; (2) losing the perquisites that accompany having a relationship with newsmakers that the sources of information perceive as cooperative; and (3) opening a space for competitors to thrive (Sparrow 1999, pp. 57–63). The consequences of not following suit were revealed in 2004 when Carole Coleman, Washington correspondent for RTÉ of Ireland, interviewed President George W. Bush in a manner that did not go as smoothly as the latter would have preferred. Prior to the interview, a White House press officer asked for a list of questions to be approved, and Coleman was told that after the interview she would likely have the chance for another with First Lady Laura Bush (Coleman 2005). When the interview

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began, Coleman forwent the small talk to ask more policy-oriented questions concerning Abu Ghraib and the abysmal state of affairs in Iraq to which the president responded with what Coleman felt to be the same unsatisfactory answers she had heard him provide elsewhere. To prevent the interview from heading in the direction the president was apparently taking it, Coleman “knew that if [she] didn’t challenge him, the interview would be a wasted opportunity” (2005, p. 10). She proceeded to interrupt him several times in an effort to get the answers she wanted. Following the interview, the president asked, “Is that how you do it in Ireland—interrupting people all the time” (quoted in Coleman 2005, p. 14). Bush was undoubtedly used to the treatment he received from the American press. Coleman was subsequently denied an interview with Laura Bush and no longer served as the Washington correspondent for RTÉ Radio, despite the network’s support of Coleman’s behavior during the interview. What Coleman’s interview and the interviews discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate is that the pressure on journalists to use language their newsmakers deem appropriate is undeniably present when reporting on consequential domestic and foreign policy such as the conflict in Iraq or, in terms of this project, Iran’s nuclear program. Moreover, the requisite deference in journalistgovernment interactions can help present American political leaders’ claims of an Iranian nuclear threat as a matter of fact, not a matter of question. In addition to deferential treatment, journalists sustain their access to information government officials can provide by avoiding what is known as “crusading,” or taking the initiative to provide a diversity of perspectives when newsmakers themselves fail to do so. To avoid “crusading,” W. Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston (2007) argue, the American press typically provides a range of ideas “when government is already weighing competing initiatives in its various legal, legislative, and executive settings” (p. 15). In other words, the press will report a variety of perspectives when there is internal debate within the government itself, but rarely will news reports offer ideas beyond the parameters of official agreement and disagreement. Thus, when debate is absent due to a consensus— actual or perceived—the press is weakened in its ability to present alternative points of view because the newsmakers to whom they turn for credible information are silent as a result of genuine agreement, political pressure that mutes dissent, or a number of other reasons. To prevent themselves from having poor relationships with newsmakers, “Elite news executives tend to worry that departing from reporting the record of government activity moves them dangerously close to being ‘crusaders,’ which is a


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negative term in mainstream journalism today” (Bennett et al. 2007, p. 35). The negativity associated with “crusading” unfortunately has dire consequences for the information the press offers for public deliberation, since it can result in the dissemination of one-sided, unchallenged views that take on the appearance of accepted knowledge that the state can use to justify its actions. The consequences of the absence of a vibrant debate among American political elites are discussed in the Chapter 2 analysis of news stories from the AP and other major news outlets. While the imbalance of power between the state and the press can lead to the production of uncontested knowledge, larger cultural practices have an influence on how the press produces knowledge as well. One such practice is that of storytelling, an act that has been present in human life from time immemorial. Given that narrative plays a vital role in our lives, it is not a coincidence that news organizations intending to maintain their respective audiences present information as “news stories,” not unrelated bits of data people must sort through and synthesize for themselves. The efficiency and appeal of narrative in the news, however, can work to the state’s advantage, especially in coverage of foreign affairs such as the nuclear debate. Gary Woodward (2007) notes that news narratives are typically conflict-driven as journalists narrate “actors moving through a sequence of events filled with victims, villains, heroes, and—sometimes—fools” (p. 36). But for news narratives to be forceful, they, according to Robert Entman, must be culturally resonant. In order to present compelling narratives, news organizations must use “words and images highly salient in the culture, which is to say noticeable, understandable, memorable, and emotionally charged ” (Entman 2004, p. 6). With Persians, Arabs, and Muslims typically depicted as uncivilized, lecherous, deceitful villains who victimize Westerners or who Westerners heroically defeat in Western literature, history, and film as discussed in such works as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs (2001), it is easy for news narratives to rehash the same themes in coverage of the nuclear debate by pitting the United States against Iran and ignoring other perspectives such as the skepticism of Director General ElBaradei. To reduce the complexity of the debate over the nature of Iran’s nuclear program to binaries that encourage Americans to choose between their own political leaders’ perspectives or Iran’s increases the likelihood of citizens supporting a White House seeking to control the Islamic Republic. At the same time, the polarization of the nuclear controversy is the byproduct of the absence of debate on the issue among American political leaders, arguments that journalists could relay to their readership if they were actually available.

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With the influence that the press has on the knowledge they produce for public deliberation on Iran’s nuclear program, the news media, as a function of governmentality, can direct audiences to particular points of view. But, as de Certeau would likely claim, the press cannot determine how people will actually take up that information. Sharing this position on the press, Ron Scollon (1998) explains that the news-viewer (sender-receiver) paradigm should not be the focal point of news media scholarship, because there are two, more significant interactions that occur within news media and news audiences respectively. On the side of news media, the primary interaction is among journalists, editors, the various employees that make up a news organization, other news organizations, and the newsmakers (politicians, eyewitnesses, etc.) who provide information to news outlets. Rather than being passive receptacles of information, news audiences “exercise agency in appropriating texts of the media in accomplishing mediated actions within their own communities of practice” (Scollon 1998, p. 5). Thus, an account of the interaction between the news institution and the state does not account for how people process news or the infinite number of possible contexts in which the processing takes place. Nevertheless, examining the interactions of news media and the state is still necessary for understanding how the production of knowledge about Iran and its nuclear program functions in creating conditions of acceptability for the expansion and exercise of governmental power.

The United States, the News, and Iran In the chapters to come, I will explore a wide variety of information about Iran and its nuclear program that has been communicated to the public through newspapers, television programs, radio shows, and web-based news media to determine the extent to which the news, to borrow Herbert Gans’s term, is “multiperspectival,” which “means making a place in the news for presently unrepresented viewpoints, unreported facts, and unrepresented, or rarely reported, parts of the population” (2003, p. 103). Whether people get their news from the New York Times, Sean Hannity’s radio show, or 60 Minutes, Americans as a whole do not rely on the same sources for information, so the archive in which this dissertation is grounded reflects that diversity. For examining such a variegated collection of news sources, the methodological approaches are equally diverse in order to provide different analytical angles for understanding the various ways newsmakers and news


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media consciously and unconsciously employ language that helped shape the Bush administration and other political elites’ construction of Iran as a nuclear threat. In the coming chapters, I rely on stasis theory as a framework for identifying points of disagreement in discourse in order to map out arguments that circulated in news stories and an online message board. By doing so, I am able to point out what ideas among a number of available arguments the press highlighted in their coverage of the nuclear controversy and to identify the range of opinions that members of a particular public conveyed in a digital space. I draw from discourse analyses of news interviews to encourage scholars to examine not only the arguments an interviewee expresses in an interview, but the discursive relations between the interviewee and interviewer, because their interactions are rhetorical as well. Treating the interaction between interview participants as rhetorical enables me to demonstrate how interviewers discursively mediate the perspectives an interviewee communicates in an interview rather than leaving aside these meaningful exchanges that help shape the messages conveyed to audiences. Additionally, I turn to visual grammar to analyze newspaper layout and to articulate the possible influence visual organization of the news might have on how readers go about reading and making sense of the information provided. By relying on the insights of argumentation, discourse analysis, and visual rhetoric with an understanding of power relations, I can exploit the respective strengths of the interdisciplinary approach used here to explicate some of the many ways Iran was discursively constructed as a nuclear threat during six years of Bush’s presidency. The study begins in 2002, when Iran announced its nuclear plans to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and ends in early 2008, shortly after the United States Intelligence Community released an intelligence estimate on Iran’s nuclear program that stood in contrast to President Bush’s position on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Moving chronologically from 2002 to 2008 provides an opportunity to account for how the Bush administration’s claim of Iran’s secret development of nuclear weapons was produced and sustained as truth largely with the complicity of the press over the course of six years in which the contexts continuously changed—the IAEA’s constant release of inconclusive inspection reports, Bush’s declining public approval ratings, the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other circumstances that arose over the course of little more than half a decade of American-Iranian tension. How the White House’s view of Iran was able to reach the prominence it has come to have gives testament to the power of institutions’ ability to “will to truth” certain ways of understanding political affairs that simultaneously work to legitimize the expansion of executive

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power not only for the Bush administration, but any group of people who have or will work in the Oval Office. While all of the chapters speak to this overarching theme, each chapter possesses its own discrete set of stakes that address in some way issues significant to the discipline(s) with which the chapter engages. In Chapter 2, “The United States vs. Iran: Stasis Theory and Defining the Nuclear Debate,” I draw on Rick Altman’s theory of narrative (2008) in which he offers two concepts, “following” and “narrative drive,” to enhance a stasis analysis of news stories about the nuclear debate. Stasis theory, a rhetorical theory that has existed in different forms for over two millennia, provides a framework for categorizing arguments. These theories are conjoined to explain how many of the substantial claims the United States and Iran exchanged in official statements circulated at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna from 2002 to 2004 were rendered insubstantial by the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and other news coverage. Like many New Institutionalists, I agree that an overreliance on political elites leads to the winnowing away of ideas that could further enrich the public’s understanding of political affairs, but an overemphasis on the newsmakers to which news media turn for information deemphasizes other ways the press simplifies the knowledge provided to their audiences. The synthesis of Altman’s narrative theory and stasis theory allows for a complementary explanation to that which New Institutionalists have offered, and at once articulates some of the ways news media purposely or inadvertently guide readers to take particular sides on an issue despite the inconclusive nature of the circumstances within which the United States and the Islamic Republic have debated one another. Chapter 3, “Controlling the Discourse: Interviews with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” discusses the important role secretaries of state play in working to shape the rhetorical climate in which presidential rhetoric operates and, unlike most rhetorical analyses, examines how and to what effect the discourse of interviewers influences the shape a political leader’s message takes during a news interview. Despite the power bestowed upon presidents to shape knowledge of foreign affairs due to the respect that comes with occupying the highest political office in the country, access to confidential information, and other ethos-heightening factors, presidents can squander that power. When Condoleezza Rice replaced Colin Powell as secretary of state in January 2005, she took on the role at a time when every member of the Bush administration with the exception of Rice herself and her exiting predecessor faced plunging public approval ratings as the death toll of American lives in Iraq increased day after day. In her new office as


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secretary of state, Rice frequently partook in news interviews to inform the public of the Bush administration’s position on foreign affairs in a way that positively represented the president’s efforts in the Middle East. Political interviews, however, allow journalists opportunities to engage political leaders rather than simply enabling the latter to use interviews as soapboxes from which their positions can be delivered without being questioned, even if the questioning does not happen in quite the same manner as that of Carole Coleman’s interview with President Bush. Employing the methods and insights of discourse analysis, I demonstrate that in nine interviews from 2005, there was an imbalance of power between Rice and her interviewers that led to their cooperation in setting up Iran as a foil to the United States by depicting the Islamic Republic as a nuclear threat bent on destabilizing the Middle East as opposed to American efforts to spread peace and democracy through multilateral diplomacy, thus distancing the Bush administration from charges of unilateralism it faced concerning Iraq. As Rice and her interviewers cooperated in constructing meaning for television, radio, and print audiences, the cooperation served as an invitation to, and encouragement for, audiences to believe Rice’s claims, even if the interviewers allowed them to go unsubstantiated. Further, the linguistic approaches open the door for reconsidering some aspects of rhetorical theory, particularly the epideictic genre and the rhetor function in the rhetorical situation. In Chapter 4, “A Verbal Tug of War: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes,” I provide a two-part study: a discourse analysis of Mike Wallace’s 2006 interview with Iran’s notorious president and an examination of a particular public’s response to the interview and understandings of the nuclear issue. According to Tamar Liebes, Zohar Kampf, and Shoshana Blum-Kulka (2008), a news interview with a political leader such as Ahmadinejad can be classified within a genre they call “interviewing the enemy,” a genre in which interviewers are usually excessively obsequious or overly aggressive toward the interviewee. These two extreme interview approaches, the scholars explain, usually lead to unproductive interviews that are characterized by an interviewee who has complete control of the discourse or an uncooperative communicative interaction that results from the interviewer’s hostility. My analysis challenges this earlier understanding of the “interviewing the enemy” genre and compares the Ahmadinejad interview with the Rice interviews to talk about the different interview approaches and the rhetorical effects of those variations. The main concern of this chapter, though, is grounded in a discussion of publics and their opinions. Building on Gerard Hauser’s conceptualization of public

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opinion in Vernacular Voices (1999), I examine the language on a CBSnews. com message board created for audiences to respond to the Ahmadinejad interview. Through this analysis, I elucidate this particular public’s uptake of the discourse and how their language confirms or contradicts my own academic reading of the interview. Furthermore, this study demonstrates one way to access the nuances of public opinion that are typically lost in opinion polls and surveys that are limited to the rhetorical options the creators of such opinion-gathering techniques make available rather than reflecting a public’s own available means. Chapter 5, “The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: A Failed Rhetoric of Resistance,” examines the media reception of perhaps the most surprising opposition to the Bush administration—a report issued from America’s own intelligence agencies. In December 2007, the United States Intelligence Community released its National Intelligence Estimate that stated unequivocally, “We judge with high confidence that in Fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” (p. 6). The breach in what appeared to be a Beltway consensus on Iran’s nuclear program as a nuclear weapons program was particularly significant, because two months earlier Bush, supposedly unaware of the report, warned, “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” (quoted in Stolberg 2007). The release of the NIE did more than weaken Bush’s war rhetoric; it inadvertently demonstrated how shaky our knowledge of Iran truly was, knowledge that had gone unchallenged because the right voice had failed to speak up. But which, if any, was the right voice? On the one hand, there was Bush with his extremely low approval rating telling the American people that he was conveniently unaware of an intelligence report before it reached the press. On the other hand, there was an Intelligence Community that scrutinizes new information every day, whose integrity was questioned after the invasion of Iraq, and whose political motives were unclear with the release of the estimate: objective report or face-saving maneuver? And if a third hand can be granted for the complexity of the situation, Democrats began to speak out with what may have been genuine dissent or political opportunism. With this epistemological dilemma as the backdrop, this chapter attempts to answer three questions. First, did the press use this moment to provide multiperspectival news? Second, how did print news sources such as the Washington Post and New York Times use their layouts to present this multiperspectival news, if at all, to their readers? As Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone explicate in The Form of News (2001), newspapers exercise power “on a metadiscursive


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level—not through what a story said but through how it was framed [. . .] and where designers positioned it in a flow of reading” (p. 211). Third, how did American political leaders, particularly those vying for the Oval Office, take up the NIE? Answers to these questions will help provide an understanding of the uptake of this controversy, at least among two major newspapers and powerful politicians, and how their responses helped secure the NIE’s failure to shift the nuclear debate. Chapter 6, “Before World War III: Discourse Studies and Social Change,” concludes the study by responding to a question that lingers in the previous chapter: what does the NIE’s failure tell us about the role academic scholarship plays in resistance to dominant discourses and the extent to which this resistance can effect change? To offer an answer to this question, I consider the role of futurity in academic work and engage with what some critical discourse analysts and rhetoricians have offered as ways for effecting change through scholarship.

Chapter 2

The United States Versus Iran: Stasis Theory and Defining the Nuclear Debate

Though there has been a lack of scholarly attention paid to the Bush administration’s language about Iran and the American news media’s coverage of the nuclear debate, there are people outside of academia who have refused to sit silently. Unsurprisingly, the first critique of American news coverage of Iran’s nuclear program occurred June 6, 2003, when Iran itself released a circular to the IAEA, the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog in Vienna. After then Vice President Reza Aghazadeh announced Iran’s plans to construct power plants over the course of two decades in September 2002 (p. 3), director general of the IAEA Mohammad ElBaradei made his initial visit to the Islamic Republic in early 2003 to begin inspections, after which a report on the inspectors’ findings was compiled. The report, however, did not remain confined to Vienna, as IAEA member states, particularly the United States, commented on the report in the American press. Aware of the impact the United States could have on how news audiences perceived the IAEA report, Iran issued an official response in which the Islamic Republic explained that “it was indeed not very appeasing to see a restricted report to be almost thoroughly discussed on CNN the day it was released” (“Iran Statement” 2003, p. 2). Though not explicitly pointed out, what Iran may have also taken issue with was the White House’s emphasis on Iran’s lack of compliance with the NPT—to which Iran has been party since 1970—while downplaying the Islamic Republic’s efforts to remain compliant. To challenge such criticism, Iran, relying on another IAEA report that more broadly identified the flawed records of a number of member states, stressed that “hardly any Member State can claim to be impeccable” (“Iran Statement” 2003, p. 3). Ultimately, Iranian officials made salient what is at stake when information is partially disseminated to the press or incompletely presented by the press, turning issues with its nuclear program “into international problems with far-reaching repercussions” (“Iran Statement” 2003, p. 3)—a smart argument to make a few months into Operation Iraqi

The United States Versus Iran

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Freedom, which was justified by spurious weapons of mass destruction (WMD) charges that the American press allowed to go unchallenged. As the news does not necessarily tell audiences how to think, but more likely what to think about, since it gives salience to some issues and ideas and silences (purposefully and inadvertently) others, the object of Iran’s apprehension is what I explore in this chapter: How did major news outlets present the debate between the United States and Iran over the nature of the latter’s nuclear program during the two years that followed Vice President Aghazadeh’s announcement of Iran’s nuclear ambitions? In order to provide an answer to this question, I analyze some of the arguments made by the United States and Iran in archived official statements to the IAEA from 2002 to 2004, then offer an explanation of how these informative arguments made in Vienna were shaped as they reached the press. To perform this task, I rely on a synthesis of Rick Altman’s theory of narrative and what is known in rhetorical studies as stasis theory, a combination that allows two observations to be made possible: First, we are able to capture some of the diversity that characterized the debate between the United States and Iran at the IAEA headquarters. Lacking the evidence needed to determine whether to take Iran’s or the United States’ side, the IAEA continued its inspections without referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council in 2003 and 2004. Despite the IAEA’s continued efforts to discover the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, the debate between Iran and the United States continued in Vienna as both drew on the inspection reports and other related arguments. In defending its nuclear program, Iran emphasized its cooperation with the IAEA, warned of the dangers of American unilateralism, and emphasized how too much American influence in the IAEA could corrupt the relations between the Agency and member states such as itself. American representatives, on the other hand, highlighted Iran’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA, Iran’s exploitation of an alleged loophole in the (Nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty, and stressed its commitment to multilateral engagement with Iran on its nuclear program. All of these claims were made in an effort to influence the way the IAEA Board of Governors would proceed from the inconclusive evidence the inspectors provided. The Board of Governors may have been the primary audience for the statements made in Vienna, but when, or if, the arguments reached the press, these ideas fell within the purview of the American people who could use this information as grounds for public deliberation. The second observation, then, consists of explaining how, why, and with what consequences certain arguments were winnowed away before reaching the pages

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of American newspapers. Covering the nuclear controversy, the American press’s linguistic practices amplified the Bush administration’s position while deemphasizing Iran’s claim that it is pursuing peaceful nuclear energy. The coverage also obscured a perspective that neither the U.S. nor Iran took though it was supported by the most evidence—the claim that the nature of Iran’s nuclear program was uncertain. Though news audiences certainly have the capacity to think independently about foreign affairs, what the press provided for deliberation on the nuclear issue could encourage them to see Iran’s nuclear program as the White House saw it, because claims of an Iranian nuclear weapons program were given the most visibility, even if the news outlets that reported these views did not actively endorse them. As Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) explain in their treatise on argumentation, “the thing on which the eye dwells, that which is best or most often seen, is, by that very circumstance, overestimated” (p. 117). What led to the press’s uneven coverage of the inspections, however, was not necessarily a conscious effort to align itself with the White House. Instead, it was their practice of narrative consistency as they steadfastly reported or “followed,” to use Altman’s term, a single stasis—the nature of Iran’s nuclear program—to the exclusion of other stases and substance that could justify newsmakers’ claims.

Methodology: “Following” Arguments in News Stories In 1922 Walter Lippmann observed that what lies at the root of a newspaper’s efforts to sustain the interests of its readers “is a problem of provoking feeling in the reader, of inducing him to feel a sense of personal identification with the stories he is reading” (pp. 223–24). Though narrative did not function as a crucial factor in Lippman’s work on the press in Public Opinion, he implied its significance and since then, scholars have made narrative a central element of their scholarship on news media. Similar to Lippman’s observation, Keren Tenenboim Weinblatt (2008) points out that journalists deploy different narrative strategies to keep readers engaged with the news. Narrative, according to Michael Schudson, also provides instruction “about what to attend to, and how to attend, within the growing concern of American political life” (1982, p. 111). What enables narrative to supply the guidance of which Schudson speaks are the various elements that constitute it. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman (2003) explain, “By arranging information into structures with antagonists, central conflicts, and narrative progression, journalists deliver the world to citizens


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in a comprehensible form” (p. 1). Increasing the comprehensibility of news narratives are their connections to larger narratives, as Jack Lule (2001) identifies in his study of the relationship of news and myth. Such narrative scholarship has provided great insights into how journalists make meaning, the cultural constraints on their meaning-making activities, and other significant contributions to the study of news. As Walter Fisher puts it, “humans are essentially storytellers” (1984, p. 7), and these stories influence the way we think about and act in the world around us; so it is crucial that we seek an understanding of something that plays such a vital role in news media that works to shape people’s worldviews. Stories and storytelling, however, are not the primary focus here, though they nonetheless inform parts of the analysis to come. Instead, I rely on Rick Altman’s theory of narrative to offer an explanation of how journalists select one point of contention, or stasis, among many in their coverage of the nuclear controversy. Characters and actions, according to Rick Altman, define narrative, but so do what he calls “following” and “narrative drive.” “Following” has to do with “the reader’s sense of following a character from action to action and scene to scene” (Altman 2008, p. 15). In the absence of “following,” there is only chaos, a space filled with potential narratives, as one has yet to select someone or something worthy of following. In a world teeming with political actors, journalists can only follow a limited number of people partaking in some activity deemed newsworthy in order to help their audiences make sense of domestic and foreign affairs; selection, even in our daily lives, is necessary to avoid drowning in the infinite stimuli of the world. Though following is distinct from narrative drive, the former is dependent on the latter because it cannot exist unless people will it into existence. Narrative drive, then, determines what one follows and “can derive from many sources: personal interests, professional mandates, or social expectations” (Altman 2008, p. 19). Fittingly, the institution of the mainstream press has its own tacit rules for who or what to follow in news coverage. The press’s reliance on indexing speaks to Altman’s claim about professionally mandated, or at least expected, parameters for “following.” As W. Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston (2007) explain, “the mainstream news generally stays within the sphere of official consensus and conflict displayed in the public statements of the key government officials who manage the policy areas and decision-making processes that make the news” (p. 49). Part of what drives journalists to follow political elites is the latter’s power, their perceived ability to effect change, which dictates “what gets into the news, what prominence it receives, how long it gets covered, and who gets a voice in the stories” (Bennett, Lawrence, and

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Livingston 2007, p. 49). While indexing remains an essential object of analysis for news criticism, it can be further enriched if we not only turn our attention to the newsmakers, but also to the arguments communicated to consider both what and who journalists follow. The press may indeed cover what stays within the scope of official consensus or disagreement as Bennett and his colleagues argue, thus abridging the scope of information that reaches audiences. But even as the press limits the number of voices reported in their news stories, journalists and their superiors also select which arguments among others to disseminate to audiences. In the coverage examined in this chapter, journalists mainly reported the newsmakers’ arguments that spoke to one particular point of disagreement: whether or not Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. Further, the grounds upon which the newsmakers’ positions rested were omitted and reduced to a mere taking of sides. Quoted newsmakers, however, often have more to say than the “yea” or “nay” that marks their position on a particular issue, and arguments are usually more complicated than the disagreement that appears to be at the core of a debate. Not only, then, are the views presented to news audiences limited to that of Washington’s power players, as the theory of indexing posits, but even those arguments, as the analysis to follow demonstrates, are rendered insubstantial as journalists fail to follow them beyond what is needed to demonstrate harmony or discord in the Beltway. Instead of following arguments along the various trajectories they take, the press follows the life of one argument from one mouth of the political upper echelon to the next. Thus, “narrative consistency” in this chapter has to do with journalists who provide news that sticks to one core stasis or point of disagreement. Fisher’s notion of “narrative fidelity” (1984), on the other hand, is used to describe elements of a news story that resonate with historically and culturally salient narratives in the society that encompasses news audiences (p. 8). If indexing helps us understand narrative drive in journalism, stasis theory provides a way to classify and “follow” the different paths of the arguments we see or may not see in the news. In 176 BCE, Hermogenes of Tarsus, greatly indebted to Hermagoras, wrote On Stases, which presented a model for arriving at the central issue between two competing claims. The questions that constitute the four primary stases, according to Hermogenes, are: (1) does a thing exists (fact); (2) is it perfect or imperfect (definition); (3) is the thing of rational or legal character (quality); and (4) what formal measures can be taken to deal with the thing (action) (Nadeau 1964, p. 393)? Earlier conceptions of stasis theory such as Hermogenes’s were often used to help settle legal disputes, but would later be used as an


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heuristic for college composition courses. Others, such as Nola Heidlebaugh (2001), have argued that stasis theory can help resolve problems of communicative incommensurability, as the model can help people bring new perspectives to deadlocked debates (p. 137). Rather than using stasis theory to add to the debate over Iran’s nuclear program, I deploy it in this study to shed light on the arguments the press included and excluded in its coverage of the nuclear debate. In classical approaches, the US-Iran debate stands in the definition stasis, as it is a known fact that Iran has a nuclear program, yet the dispute appears to be over how to define that program. But in Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor’s modern adaptation of stasis theory—the framework that is used here—the rhetoricians integrate the once separate fact and definition stases. As Fahnestock and Secor (1983) argue, “If we ask whether something happened, existed, or exists or not, then we already have a definition of it” (p. 140). As similar evidence is called upon to determine both the existence of something and how to label that something, both questions are simultaneously confronted by arguers. One cannot define Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful or militaristic without there actually being a nuclear program in the first place, but the nuclear program does not exist independently of how one perceives that program. In the index of Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle (2004), for example, the entry for “nuclear weapons program” under the Iran entry reads, “see nuclear program, Iranian” (2004, p. 524); the two categories are not treated as separate, but as one. Fahnestock and Secor also add another stasis that addresses issues of cause (what brought something into existence) and effect (what are the results of a thing’s existence), which opens the doors for such arguments as Iran’s pursuing nuclear weapons for aggressive purposes as alluded to in the 2002 National Security Strategy (p. 13) or Iran’s using nuclear weapons as a means of deterring United States aggression in the wake of the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as discussed in The Persian Puzzle (Pollack 2004, p. 365); a debate such as this rests on an agreement in the fact/definition stasis of Iran’s being in pursuit of nuclear weapons. After revising the first stasis, adding another, and slightly modifying the final two, the FahnestockSecor approach is as follows: (1) fact/definition; (2) cause/effect; (3) quality or value (a more general qualitative argument such as whether something is good or bad rather than the legal or rational quality as Hermogenes and his ilk proposed); (4) action (what, if any, action should be taken). Though stasis scholars tend to adhere to the original stases, Fahnestock and Secor’s approach is consonant with the findings of others outside the field of rhetoric, namely Robert Entman. While Entman (2004) relies on

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frame theory, not stasis theory, in his Projections of Power, his understanding of substantive frames, or viable positions that can oppose dominant frames in the media, depends on an actor’s ability to define an issue, identify its causes, take a moral position on the matter and propose an action (p. 5). Though the frameworks of Fahnestock/Secor and Entman parallel one another, they encourage two different types of analysis. Entman’s reasonable call for comprehensive, alternative frames in the press assumes that frames in their entirety actually make it into a news story, which is not always the case. Stasis theory, on the other hand, encourages us to identify and follow the places of disagreement, the smaller lines of argument that are more likely to reach the press than the larger ones they help constitute. Despite the usefulness of stasis theory, the model has its limits—particularly with questions of whether or not a matter is systatic or asystatic. As Hermogenes explicated, questions are asystatic when there is nothing to be judged, when there is a lack of strong evidence for either side, and when the case has been prejudged by the adjudicators (Nadeau 1964, p. 391). Otto Dieter adds that “such matters must be carefully avoided in the interests of a successful representation” (1950, p. 354). But such cases are typically not avoided, as arguments do not take place in a vacuum nor do people reason with each other via some rigid system of rationality. If we were to stick unwaveringly to such a systematic approach to argument, there would not be any arguments to have. Under the criteria for asystatic arguments promoted by Hermogenes, Dieter and the like, the debate between the United States and Iran would be pointless as the evidence for either side’s position was and still is incomplete. Since asystatic issues can potentially end a debate, to transform a systatic issue into an asystatic one, as George Pullman (1995) notes, can be exploited, particularly by the person or people who are accused of something (p. 224). Thus, Iran had more options than to just stay within the fact/definition stasis, arguing for its nuclear program as a peaceful one; if they could successfully make the debate asystatic, as some of their arguments leaned toward, the issue before the IAEA could be rendered moot. Another potential limitation of stasis theory is the hierarchical ordering of the four stases: (1) fact/definition; (2) cause/effect; (3) quality/value; (4) action. If there is a disagreement in the action stasis, parties can return to what they agreed upon in the cause stasis to assist in determining the type of action to be taken. If, for example, it is agreed that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is due to American aggression, threats from the White House are actions that probably will not encourage Iran to abandon its goals. Or if the United States is deliberating over whether to assist Iran with


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its nuclear program in some way, it is likely that the two parties have reached an agreement in the fact/definition stasis of Iran’s nuclear program as being a peaceful one. The problem is that if disagreement remains in the first stasis of fact/definition, there is no other stasis which an argument can fall back on. But debates exist in a larger network of arguments, or what David Goodwin calls “meta-stasiastic” arguments. For Goodwin, metastasiastic arguments have to do with “whether the debate can be relocated or transferred [. . .] to a different jurisdiction, system of rules and values, or procedural context, one more favorable to the case or more unfavorable to the claims of the opponent” (1989, p. 208). This is not to say that classical rhetoricians viewed stasiastic arguments as existing totally in a void. As Dieter explains in his history of stasis theory, “every stasis is an individual event, a real occurrence involving specific things, surrounded and supported by specific things which collectively are referred to as its peristasis and individually are designated as its peristaseis, or circumstances” (1950, p. 351). Since peristasis is not simply a given, the goal of meta-stasiastic argument is to arrange those circumstances in a particular way. Thus, “metastasiastic closure,” according to Goodwin, “is less an end than a beginning: it is more an orientation to the conduct of future discourse than a resolution of past differences” (1989, p. 212). What Iran and the United States were doing for their fellow IAEA members, and potentially for news audiences around the world, was offering meta-stasiastic arguments such as the United States’ influence as a delegitimizing force in the IAEA or Iran’s exploitation of a loophole in the NPT to build a nuclear weapon in order to shift the grounds upon which people understood the debate over Iran’s nuclear program. Similarly, the American press’s discursive practices provided meta-stasiastic arguments—even if unintentional—for readers who favorably contextualized the White House’s claims in the nuclear debate. But before examining what the press made available to American audiences, it is necessary to use stasis theory to map out arguments that were made available to the press in Vienna.

Iran Versus the United States: Vienna Since 2002, the United States and Iran have debated the latter’s nuclear program before the IAEA. While the press gives us a glimpse of some of what has been said by both parties, the IAEA has archived many of the official American and Iranian statements that offer detailed arguments concerning Iran’s nuclear program that were not always reported by major

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news organizations such as the New York Times and Washington Post. While the press most often reported the arguments that remained within the stasis of how to define Iran’s nuclear program—an adherence to the main issue that earlier stasis theories promote—the IAEA archives enable us to see the variety of meta-stasiastic arguments deployed for the purposes of persuading the Board of Governors to proceed on American or Iranian terms. While news coverage of the nuclear debate has typically reported arguments that are primarily in the fact/definition stasis, the disagreements extend beyond the characterization of Iran’s nuclear program to a range of other issues that prove the debate more complex than the question of how to define Iran’s nuclear activity. Before moving into a critique of how and why the press simplified the nuclear debate, this section provides a stasis analysis of American and Iranian statements in Vienna from 2002 to 2004 to demonstrate that there was indeed a multitude of arguments from which the press could choose one or more to follow. In September 2002, at the 46th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Vice President Reza Aghazadeh announced Iran’s goal of developing a nuclear program over the course of twenty years. The vice president opened his announcement with a list of the Agency’s values to which Iran claimed to be committed, namely the right of peaceful nuclear energy, fair treatment of nuclear and non-nuclear states, and their stand against the development and use of nuclear weapons (Aghazadeh 2002, pp. 1–2). From here, Aghazadeh transitioned into an indirect critique of the United States’ use of nuclear power, characterizing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “the atomic holocaust” and bemoaning “the sense of authoritarianism and unilateralism” that the world’s dominant nuclear state was exercising in the wake of September 11 (2002, p. 2). Four days prior to Aghazadeh’s statement, President Bush went before the United Nations General Assembly to outline his case for taking action against Iraq, pointing specifically to Iraq’s quest for weapons of mass destruction. According to Bush (2002b), even if Iraq cooperated with UN inspectors, the cooperation would only conceal Iraq’s true, insidious aims, because “Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country.” The president closed his address by declaring that the United States would stand against Iraq, even if the other members whom he addressed decided not to join in the fight. It is no coincidence, then, that Iran would take it upon itself to broadcast its nuclear plans to the global community and speak of being as “transparent” as possible in its cooperation with IAEA inspectors; “transparency” is the IAEA catchword for a member state’s demonstration of full cooperation with


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the Agency. Since Bush made it clear that cooperation with inspectors does not entail transparency of motives, Aghazadeh used this attitude as evidence of what he saw as the United States’ uncooperative relationship with inspectors and, consequently, its uncooperative relationship with the Agency. In an effort to prove Iran’s legitimacy as opposed to Bush’s delegitimizing categorization of the state as part of the “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea earlier that year, Aghazadeh worked to establish the United States as the illegitimate, rogue state—a fact/definition argument needed to strengthen its claims about the nature of its nuclear program. Several months later, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei met with then president Mohammad Khatami in Iran to visit the state’s nuclear facilities and to discuss what would be necessary to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program complied with the (Nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In the June inspection report that followed this meeting, inspectors concluded that Iran “failed to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with respect to the reporting of nuclear material, the subsequent processing and use of that material and the declaration of facilities where the material was processed” (ElBaradei 2003a, p.7). The report, despite inspectors’ efforts to remain objective, did not simply emphasize Iran’s failures, but at once noted Iran’s attempts to remedy those problems. For example, Iran initially failed to submit an inventory report of a small quantity of uranium metal, but did so in April 2003. According to a June 6, 2003 statement by Iran, the lack of an initial report was the result of “the subtle differences in the interpretation” of an article from the safeguard agreement that required the report of nuclear material in excess of one kilogram (“Iran Statement” 2003, p. 3). The uranium metal in question was less than a kilogram, but the safeguard agreement also calls for the report of all materials that have been or can be enriched, a requirement that contradicts the obligation to report only the nuclear material that exceeds one kilogram. Rather than allowing the more comprehensive rule to negate that which is more favorable to their position, Iran placed the argument in the fact/definition stasis as it highlighted the contradictory statements that led to these competing interpretations, or definitions. To highlight a “proposition and its negation within one and the same system,” as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca observe, is “to require anyone who wants to avoid the charge of absurdity to abandon at least certain elements of the system” (1969, p. 195). While the IAEA may not have abandoned any of the contradictory elements Iran pointed out, this meta-stasiastic argument was one of many that constituted a larger Iranian argument of how the, under American influence, discriminates against non-nuclear states.

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Iran’s disagreements with the IAEA were not limited to interpretations of the NPT and the safeguard agreement. By fall 2003 the IAEA had learned a little more about Iran’s nuclear program—particularly that it began in the 1980s after the Islamic Revolution—but there were still a number of question marks in the history of the program. As ElBaradei remarked, “information [from Iran] and access were in some instances slow in coming, piecemeal and reactive, and at times the information provided has been inconsistent with that given previously” (2003b). Regardless of efforts to portray themselves as “transparent,” Iran has never fully acted on this self-characterization. Rather, the Islamic Republic seems to have preferred “translucent” behavior, and they certainly were not the only ones doing so. ElBaradei, however, encouraged Iran to be more transparent by accepting additional protocols that “would allow the Agency prompt access to all sites and locations that the Agency deems necessary to visit” (2003b). But signing additional protocols does not guarantee access. As ElBaradei himself explained, the additional protocol, at the time, had “been signed by 75 countries, and is applied without difficulty in 35 countries” (2003b). Iran may not have been doing a good job of being transparent, but apparently forty other countries were guilty of the same thing but were not facing the same pressure from the United States or the IAEA. Iran’s attempts to convince the IAEA to keep its objectives separate from the politics of the United States were justifiable because there are a number of states with nuclear programs that are far from transparent, including that of the United States. But even more troubling for the Islamic Republic is the structure and power hierarchy of the IAEA. The director general of the IAEA reports the findings of the investigative teams sent to member countries to determine whether or not the investigated country is in compliance with the NPT and other safeguard agreements. Though the director general reports to the Board of Governors, the DG is not powerless. As former DG David Fischer (1997) explains, “An able Director General has great power to influence the course steered by an international body like the IAEA. His ability to guide policy usually increases with length of service; delegates come and go, he usually stays” (p. 84). Despite the DG’s potential influence, it is the Board of Governors that decides whether or not to bring issues of noncompliance before the United Nations Security Council. From there, the Security Council deliberates on what measures to take to remedy the transgressions (Fischer 1997, p. 84). Unfortunately for Iran, the United States is a member of both the Board of Governors and the Security Council. Fortunately for Iran, the United States is not the only member, so Iran’s meta-stasiastic arguments were not in vain. But as the Iraq war has shown,


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the United States does not always feel the need to go through such channels to achieve its foreign policy goals. Responding to the Iranian charge of politicizing the IAEA reports, American Ambassador to the IAEA Kenneth Brill maintained that the United States only wanted “to ensure that the IAEA meets its responsibilities” (2003, p. 5)—holding Iran accountable for what the United States saw as Iran’s noncompliance with the safeguards agreement which allows the IAEA more freedom in its inspections. As much of the debate between the United States and Iran demonstrates in the accessible web archives of the IAEA, a lot of the language has had to do with the former emphasizing what was not being done and the latter emphasizing what was being done to comply with the safeguards agreement. Both have made reasonable cases. Brill’s list of failures on the part of Iran in his September 2003 statement at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting did not invoke cooked-up evidence of Iran’s noncompliance, but drew directly from IAEA inspection reports. Rather than outright calling Iran’s nuclear program a weapons program, he maintained the IAEA’s concern for ensuring Iran’s compliance with the safeguards. As Brill pointed out, It is no secret [. . .] that the United States believes the facts already established would justify an immediate finding of noncompliance by Iran with its safeguards violations. We have taken note, however, of the desire of other member states to give Iran a last chance to stop its evasions, and have agreed today to join in the call on Iran to take “essential and urgent” actions to demonstrate that it has done so. (2003, p. 5) Brill not only underscored Iran’s choice not to partake in confidencebuilding measures with the IAEA, such as not introducing material to its Natanz nuclear facility, but also took on Iran’s meta-stasiastic argument regarding the definition of the type of cooperation the United States has with the Agency. Brill’s statement demonstrated the confidence-building measures the United States itself was taking with other member states over Iran’s nuclear program, a strategic move before the eyes of those who were well aware of the unilateralist approach the United States took with Iraq. Vice President Aghazadeh, however, viewed this multilateralism as “extreme unilateralism posed under a multilateralist cloak” (2003, p. 2). Rejecting a resolution adopted by the Board of Governors in early September 2003, the vice president argued that the resolution was spuriously constructed through American manipulation of other members behind closed doors. Aghazadeh added that the resolution exemplified the discriminatory enforcement of

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the NPT, as just a year earlier the Bush administration listed nuclear weapons as one of the options to which the United States could and would turn if deemed necessary. As can be gleaned from the forward to the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the United States, according to then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, still considered the use of nuclear weapons as a formidable mode of deterrence though the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) claimed that today’s enemies, rogue states such as Iran and terrorists alike, could not be deterred because they are irrational actors (2002a, p. 15). With nuclear weapons always on the table and the preemptive (preventive) doctrine put forth in the 2002 NSS, Aghazadeh’s concerns were real. As the Iranian vice president observed, “there is sufficient threat of hostile acts by the United States or its client Zionist regime against our interest and National Security” (2003, p. 4). In this instance, Aghazadeh appeared to insinuate that Iran was considering withdrawing themselves from the NPT for the sake of their national security. As written in Article X of the NPT: “Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country” (Treaty, 1970, p. 5). Despite this option, Iran continued its cooperation, to varying degrees, with the IAEA. Abandoning the NPT would have only reinforced the suspicions of the United States and others; more importantly, Iran would have been more vulnerable to the possibility of American or possibly Israeli force than it would have been if it continued to operate within the legitimate channels of the international community. The IAEA, then, was caught in a tug-of-war (pun intended) between Iran and the United States, between charges of discrimination and noncompliance, between continued steps toward transparency and steps toward the Security Council. In an effort to further demonstrate its cooperation with member states, Iran met in late October 2003 with Britain, France and Germany to reaffirm its commitment to the fight against nuclear proliferation. Roughly two weeks later, in November, Iran consented to the additional protocol for which the IAEA had been pushing and temporarily suspended enrichment activities at Natanz and other nuclear facilities according to the November 10, 2003, inspection report. However, with more transparency came a longer list of failures, from the undocumented import and processing of natural uranium to withholding designs for some of its facilities. But as the November IAEA report made clear: “To date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons program” (ElBaradei 2003c, p. 10). At the same time,


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the report cautioned that Iran’s continuous reluctance to open themselves fully to inspections only worked to sustain the IAEA’s apprehension. What was most disconcerting to the Board of Governors, as stated in their November 26 resolution, was “that Iran enriched uranium and separated plutonium in undeclared facilities, in the absence of IAEA safeguards” (2003, p. 2). Taking note of Iran’s argument that nuclear technology is its national right, the Board of Governors identified Iran’s enrichment activities as being serious problems because they were conducted without the IAEA’s knowledge, not simply because Iran went about carrying on such activities. Although 2003 closed with a Board of Governors deadlock on whether or not to refer Iran to the Security Council, President Bush brought in the new year by speaking of Iran as being in pursuit of nuclear weapons alongside North Korea. In his 2004 State of the Union address, the president briefly mentioned Iran, but within the context of an implied threat. In December of the previous year, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi had given up his quest for weapons of mass destruction, and Bush interpreted Gadhafi’s abandonment of his weapons program as evidence of the power of American credibility in the wake of the Iraq war: “For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America” (2004a). Though Bush spoke of Iran’s nuclear program as a nuclear weapons program, ElBaradei commended Iran for its increased cooperation in his March 2004 statement to the Board of Governors. With greater access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, the IAEA was beginning to increase its understanding of the scope of Iran’s nuclear program, but what was becoming the running theme of Iran’s interaction with the Agency surfaced yet again. Each cooperative gesture shed light on yet another questionable element of Iran’s program. At the moment, ElBaradei was concerned about centrifuge designs that were withheld from the Agency back in October 2003 (2004a). Iran’s response to the director general was that they did not withhold information, and if information was not provided, the act was validated by the safeguard agreement. According to Iranian representatives to the IAEA, Iran, in its reading of the safeguard agreement, did not believe it necessary to report the designs to which ElBaradei referred “since neither construction of a nuclear facility nor nuclear material was involved” (“Communication of 5 March 2004,” p. 7) —a meta-stasiastic argument that echoed one made in June 2003 concerning unreported nuclear material. To the chagrin of Iran, the Board of Governors expressed its disappointment in its March 2004 resolution, “noting with serious concern that the declarations made by Iran in October 2003 did not amount to the complete

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and final picture of Iran’s past and present nuclear program” (p. 2). In spite of such a problem, the Board remained open to further investigation by the IAEA. The United States, however, wanted Iran to stop all of its enrichment activities to demonstrate its cooperation with the international community. Although ElBaradei’s February 2004 report is restricted, excerpts from the March 2004 IAEA Board meeting explained that the inspectors found similarities between Iran’s and Libya’s nuclear programs: “Given those similarities and the fact that Iran had been involved in the same black market network as Libya, the question arose as to whether Iran, like Libya (as reported by the Director General), had acquired a design for a nuclear weapon” (“Excerpt from the Record” 2004, p. 7). The United States did not believe that it was a matter of debate, but a matter of fact. To make this case, Ambassador Brill argued that inspectors discovered Iran’s production of “polonium 210, a rare and toxic material that can serve as a neutron initiator in nuclear weapons, but has very few civilian applications, none of which is plausible in the Iranian context” (2004). Brill concluded that Iran was being duplicitous in its cooperation with the Agency as he referred to Iranian efforts as “tactical diversions” that, one can infer, were allowing Iran to move closer and closer to a nuclear weapon. Brill’s meta-stasiastic arguments thus addressed the cause of Iran’s cooperation with the Agency and the quality of their cooperation. During the prior month, Bush made the same case at the National Defense University. According to the president, Iran was exploiting a loophole in the NPT that enabled them to pursue a nuclear weapon under the guise of a program for civilian energy (Bush 2004b). To close this supposed loophole, the president proposed that nonnuclear states be denied their right to enrich material as provided by the NPT. Instead, “the world’s leading nuclear exporters should ensure that states have reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors, so long as those states renounce enrichment and reprocessing” (Bush 2004b). While Bush’s loophole argument was plausible, the proffered alternative to an autonomous nuclear program appeared to be solely in the favor of nuclear states, as they would have an energy monopoly; and as we have seen in these times of increased fuel costs, being dependent on other states for energy is not the most auspicious position to be in. Contrary to Bush’s loophole position and Brill’s connecting Iran’s production of polonium 210 to serving as a neutron source for a nuclear weapon, Iran reasserted its commitment to nonproliferation and justified its production of the material in question. As Amir Zamaninia of Iran’s Foreign Ministry pointed out, “Even as a neutron source, [polonium] has


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widespread civilian applications including, in particular, for oil and gas logging” (2004). In addition to such comments, Zamaninia, displaying Iran’s sensitivity to Western news media, identified its concerns with what the Islamic Republic perceived to be the hyperbole and misrepresentation circulating in news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. For Zamaninia, misinformation in Western news and that pressure from the United States was only corrupting what would otherwise be a salutary relationship between Iran and the IAEA—at least in the Islamic Republic’s eyes. In the June 1, 2004, inspection report, Iran faced another set of concerns put forth by the director general, primarily high-enriched and low-enriched uranium contamination found on components at three of its nuclear facilities (Elbaradei 2004b, p. 6). While Iran contended that the contamination occurred in the states from which the components were exported, ElBaradei called for more cooperation from both Iran and the other states involved to help provide a clear, coherent explanation of this issue—an explanation that still was not fully provided by September of that year. Further, the report indicated that Iran had postponed a mid-March inspection until mid-April, which encouraged the United States and others to see such behavior as another attempt to conceal illicit activities. But Iran explained that they did not delay inspections. Rather, the inspectors had been in Iran since March 27, and “the Agency inspectors, by their own choice, inspected P2 components only after mid-April 2004” (“Communication of 13 June 2004,” p. 6). By September, Iran planned to pursue further enrichment activities despite calls for it to do otherwise as a confidencebuilding measure. Though concerned that Iran had not stopped enrichment, the Board of Governors abstained from taking action once again, until November. Two weeks before the November Board resolution, Iran signed an agreement with France, Britain and Germany, pledging to suspend all enrichment activity (“Communication dated 26 November 2004”). Additionally, as ElBaradei explained in his November 2004 statement to the Board, Iran allowed the IAEA to “put surveillance cameras in place to monitor the 20 sets of centrifuge components” it planned to use for research and development (2004c). Contrary to what the Bush administration hoped for, no further action was sought in the resolution except the continued investigation of Iran’s nuclear program and the verification of its suspension of enrichment activities. As the Board of Governors repeatedly remained deadlocked on whether to report Iran to the UN Security Council, their choice to do so made clear the uncertainty within which they operated. Although the inspection

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reports declared that there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, the constant unearthing of new questions in their inspections combined with Iran’s selective release of information and limited granting of access to facilities, sustained views of the reports as being incomplete and Iran’s cooperation as being translucent, not transparent. Despite the incompleteness of the peristaseis, or circumstances, the asystatic character of the debate over Iran’s nuclear program did not stop the arguments from moving in different directions. The various exchanges between the United States and Iran demonstrated that their disagreement spread beyond the core issue of how to define Iran’s nuclear program to meta-stasiastic arguments about how to define Iran and the United States’ respective relations with the IAEA, the effect of such relations, their quality and, by implication, the action of how the IAEA should proceed in dealing with the central argument—on American terms or Iranian terms. Although it would seem that the close of 2004 was on France, Britain and Germany’s terms, Iran’s move to reach an agreement with the trio was no more an attempt to build confidence in the Islamic Republic’s cooperative attitude, as was the United States’ willingness to go along with the measure an effort to display their commitment to multilateralist engagement with Iran.

Press Coverage of Iran, the United States and the IAEA Though the archives of the IAEA help to provide a detailed look at some of what was said on record in Vienna between 2002 and 2004, equally important is how the press mediated that language for audiences, as Americans are more likely to turn to news organizations than the IAEA web archives for information that can serve as grounds for deliberation on the nuclear controversy. The primary question that guides this section, then, has to do with what ideas were given salience and what perspectives were downplayed in the press. To provide a picture of what was going on in the news at this time, I used the LexisNexis database to locate American newspaper and wire coverage during the first 48 hours following the release of each IAEA inspection report or Board resolution during 2003 and 2004, which came to a total of twelve publication dates (Table 2.1). Forty-eight hours after each report and resolution serves as the timeframe because the time it takes for a story to unfold in Vienna and reach the pages of American newspapers can be delayed a day or two depending on the time and day of the week a newsworthy event transpires. However, I examine articles from the


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Table 2.1 Examined news stories in order of IAEA report and resolution dates June 6, 2003, IAEA Inspection Report Barringer, Felicity. “Iran for a Reactor Pose Concerns about Arms.” New York Times, June 7, 2003, late ed.: A8. Kirka, Danica Kirka. “U.N. Nuclear Agency Says Iran Has Failed to Comply with Safeguards.” Associated Press, June 7, 2003. Dareini, Ali Akbar. “U.N. Experts Arrive in Iran.” Associated Press, 7 June 2003. Behn, Sharon. “U.N. Faults Iran’s Nuclear Program; Washington Demands Complete Disclosure.” Washington Times June 7, 2003, final ed.: A1. August 26, 2003, IAEA Inspection Report Jahn, George. “U.N. Nuclear Watchdog Still Concerned about Iran’s Atomic Program.” Associated Press August 26, 2003. Barringer, Felicity. “Traces of Enriched Uranium are Reportedly Found in Iran.” New York Times, August 27 2003, late ed.: A1. Avni, Benny. “Traces of Highly Enriched Uranium Found in Iran, U.N. Aide Says.” New York Sun, August 27 2003, 1. Warrick, Joby. “Iran Admits Foreign Help on Nuclear Facility; U.N. Agency’s Data Point to Pakistan as the Source.” Washington Post, August 27, 2003, final ed.: A17. September 12, 2003, Board Resolution Jahn, George. “Atomic Agency Meeting Moves Toward Setting October Deadline for Iran.” Associated Press, September 12, 2003. Barringer, Felicity. “Iranian Envoy Blames U.S. for Nation’s Reticence on Nuclear Plans.” New York Times September 12, 2003, late ed.: A6. Warrick, Joby. “Iran Given Deadline to Lay Bare Nuclear Program.” Washington Post September 13, 2003, final ed.: A1. November 10, 2003, IAEA Inspection Report Bellaby, Mara D. “Iranian Official Announces Temporary Suspension of Uranium Enrichment.” Associated Press, November 10, 2003. Jahn, George. “AP Exclusive: U.N. Nuclear Watchdog Agency Says ‘No Evidence’ Iran Was Trying to Make Atomic Arms.” Associated Press, November 10, 2003. Warrick, Joby and Glenn Kessler. “Iran Had Secret Nuclear Program, U.N. Agency Says; ‘No Evidence’ of Arms Plans; Probe Continues.” Washington Post, November 11, 2003, final ed.: A1. “Iran Has Made Plutonium, U.N. Reports.” New York Times, November 11, 2003, late ed.: A6. Carter, Tom. “U.S. Urges ‘Appropriate Action’ on Iran’s Nukes; U.N. Report Cites Program’s Pattern of Violations.” Washington Times, November 12, 2003, final ed.: A1. La Guardia, Anton. “Report Lists Iran’s Nuclear Lies.” Chicago Sun-Times News, November 12, 2003, special edition: 34. Dareini, Ali Akbar. “Iranian President: UN Report Proves Iran Free of Nuclear Bombs.” Associated Press, November 12, 2003. Schweid, Barry. “Official Says Iran Could Produce Nuclear Weapons before End of the Decade.”Associated Press, November 12, 2003. Kessler, Glenn and Joby Warrick. “After Report, Iran Acknowledges ‘Minor’ Breach of Nuclear Pact.” Washington Post, November 12, 2003, final ed.: A18. (Continued)

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Table 2.1 Cont’d November 26, 2003, Board Resolution Jahn, George. “UN Atomic Agency Censures Iran for Past Nuclear Cover-ups.” Associated Press, November 26, 2003. “Iran: U.N. Agency Condemns Atomic Secrecy; Other Developments.” Facts on File, November 26, 2003, 964B3. Kralev, Nicholas. “Powell ‘Happy with’ Nuke Compromise; U.S. Seeks ‘Trigger’ in Resolution.”Washington Times, November 26, 2003, final ed.: A9. Whitmore, Brian. “UN Agency Faults Iran on Nuclear Research.” Boston Globe, November 27, 2003, third ed.: A1. Landler, Mark. “U.N. Atom Agency Gives Iran Both a Slap and a Pass.” New York Times, November 27, 2003, late ed.: A22. March 13, 2004, IAEA Board Report and Board Resolution Dudikova, Andrea. “IAEA Board of Governors Criticizes Iran for Continuing to Hide Some Suspect Nuclear Activities but Stops Short of U.N. action.” Associated Press, March 13, 2004. Jahn, George. “Iran Freezes U.N. Nuclear Inspections to Protest Critical IAEA Resolution.” Associated Press, March 13, 2004. Smith, Craig. “Iran Postpones a Visit by U.N. Nuclear Inspectors until April.” New York Times, March 13, 2004, late ed.: A1. Dareini, Ali Akbar. “Iran Indicates It May Harden Its Position Against U.N. Nuclear Watchdog.” Associated Press, March 14, 2004. Warrick, Joby. “Iranians Bar Further Nuclear Inspections.” Washington Post, March 14, 2004, final ed.: A19. June 1, 2004, IAEA Board Report Jahn, George. “Iran Admits Importing Equipment to Enrich Uranium.” Associated Press, June 1, 2004. Dareini, Ali Akbar. “Iran Largely Welcomes IAEA Report, Optimistic Nuclear Dispute Will Soon Be Closed.” Associated Press, June 2, 2004. Broad, William J. and David E Sanger. “Iran Still Making Nuclear Materials, U.N. Says.” New York Times, June 2, 2004, late ed.: A6. Slevin, Peter. “Watchdog Blasts Iran on Nuclear Program.” Washington Post, June 2, 2004, final ed.: A21. June 18, 2004, Board Resolution Dudikova, Andrea. “Iran Faces Rebuke with IAEA’s Harsh Resolution.” Associated Press, June 18, 2004. Jahn, George. “Iran Rebuked in IAEA’s Harsh Resolution; Diplomats Say Photos May Show New Nuclear Cover-up. “ Associated Press, June 18, 2004. Landler, Mark. “UN Agency to Rebuke Iran for Obstructing Inspections.” New York Times, June 18, 2004, late ed.: A13. September 1, 2004, IAEA Board Report Guggenheim, Ken. “Iran Poses Vexing Problems for the Next Administration.” Associated Press, September 1, 2004. Schweid, Barry. “Officials Say Iran Preparing to Enrich Enough Uranium for Four Nuclear Weapons.” Associated Press, September 1, 2004. Linzer, Dafna. “Evidence on Iran Called Unclear; IAEA Report on Nuclear Program is Not Conclusive, Officials Say.” Washington Post, September 1, 2004, final ed.: A11. (Continued)


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Table 2.1 Cont’d September 1, 2003, IAEA Board Report Sanger, David E. “Pakistan Found to Aid Iran Nuclear Efforts.” New York Times, September 2, 2004, late ed.: A12. Slavin, Barbara. “Nuclear Agency Says Iran Making Precursor to Bomb Fuel.” USA Today, September 2, 2004, final ed.: A12. Warrick, Joby. “Rejecting International Pressure, Iran to Process Uranium.” Washington Post, September 2, 2004, final ed.: A13. Behn, Sharon. “Uraniu, Tests Planned Despite Suspension Pledge.” Washington Times, September 2, 2004: A17. September 18, 2004, Board Resolution Dudikova, Andrea. “EU AND U.S. Agree on Draft Resolution at Key U.N. Meeting on Iran.”Associated Press, September 18, 2004. Jahn, George. “UN Atomic Agency Demands Iran Suspend All Uranium Enrichment and Related Activities.” Associated Press, September 18, 2004. Smith, Craig. “Nuclear Agency’s Action on Iran Falls Short of U.S. Goal.” New York Times, September 18, 2004, late ed.: A3. Linzer, Dafna. “Allies at IAEA Meeting Reject U.S. Stand on Iran; Draft Asks for Suspension of Nuclear Work.” Washington Post, September 18, 2004, final ed.: A22. November 15, 2004, IAEA Board Report Jahn, George. “Iran Promises UN That It Will Fully Suspend Uranium Enrichment.” Associated Press, November 15, 2004. Dareini, Ali Akbar. “Iran Says Nuclear Suspension Is a Voluntary Measure, Not Obligation.” Associated Press, November 15, 2004. Sciolino, Elaine. “Iran Gives Pledge on Uranium, But Europeans Are Cautious.” New York Times, November 15, 2004, late ed.: A6. Linzer, Dafna. “Iran Vows to Freeze Nuclear Programs; In Return, Europeans Guarantee Freedom From U.N. Sanctions.” Washington Post, November 15, 2004, final ed.: A1. Whitmore, Brian. “UN Finds No Proof of Nuclear Weapons in Iran U.S. Remains Skeptical of Tehran’s Intentions.” Boston Globe, November 16, 2004, 3rd ed.: A26. Behn, Sharon. “U.S. is Skeptical of Europe-Iran Nuclear Solution.” Washington Times, November 16, 2004: A15. November 29, 2004, Board Resolution Jahn, George. “Iran Agrees to Full Enrichment Freeze, Say Diplomats.” Associated Press, November 29, 2004. Schweid, Barry. “Bush Administration Adopts Show-me Stand on Iran’s Nuclear Promises.” Associated Press, November 29, 2004. Sciolino, Elaine. “Iran Backs Away From a Demand on A-bomb Fuel.” New York Times, November 29, 2004, late ed.: A1. Linzer, Dafna. “Iran Agrees to Suspension of its Nuclear Program; But Resolution Lacks U.S.Sought Terms” Washington Post, November 29, 2004, final ed.: A10.

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Associated Press to offset the real-time limitation of print news coverage as the AP reports news twenty-four hours a day and provides information to online news audiences and “1,700 U.S. daily, weekly, non-English and college newspapers” (Associated Press 2008). Although reading AP articles from a database certainly does not replicate the reading experience of a news website or local newspapers, it can still give us an idea of what and how news is disseminated to audiences across the United States. In addition to the AP and smaller news outlets, articles were collected specifically from the New York Times, one of the largest circulating newspapers in the United States, and the Washington Post, the largest circulating newspaper in the metro Washington, DC area. Aside from their circulation, the journalists these news outlets employ are among the few having access to the newsmakers who participated in the debate in Vienna and to the political elites in the Beltway. From the 48-hour window following publication of IAEA inspection reports and Board resolutions, I gathered a total of 58 news stories (Table 2.1) with 400-plus word counts in order to separate news stories from news summaries and to allow articles to have more substantial quotes from newsmakers than would be possible in shorter news stories. Further, I avoided reprints of coverage and multiple news stories from the same journalist on the same day. There is, however, one exception: the 48-hour timeframe was extended to 72 hours for the November 10, 2003, IAEA inspection report. This was the first report to state that there was “no evidence” of a nuclear weapons program, and I used the extra day to get a better glimpse of how this point would be taken up by the press. As the debate over Iran’s nuclear program in Vienna appeared to have mainly been a fact/definition debate, I looked for the frequency with which newsmakers were directly quoted as identifying Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program or a civilian energy program and also documented the number of times newsmakers remained undecided on the matter (Table 2.2). What constitutes an instance of arguing for a particular view of Iran’s nuclear program includes primarily forthright characterizations and, to a lesser extent, indirect characterizations that speak of Iran’s program as adhering to its obligations or as a threat. The following are examples that speak to the three positions sought out in the news stories: Weapons Program- Following the June 18, 2004, Board resolution, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher is quoted as saying that Iran “has gone to the extent of bulldozing entire sites to prevent the IAEA from discovering evidence of its nuclear weapons program.” (Dudikova 2004)


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Table 2.2 Newsmakers’ positions on Iran’s nuclear program (*Numbers indicated frequency throughout entire corpus.) Quoted as Saying Iran’s in Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons

David Albright (President of Institute for Science and International Security) (7)*, John R. Bolton (Undersecretary of State) (9), Richard Boucher (US State Department Spokesperson) (4), President George W. Bush, Kenneth Brill (US Ambassador)(3), Ari Fleischer (White House Spokesman), Corey Hinderstein (of the Institute for Science and International Security), Rep. Tom Lantos, Rep. Edward J. Markey, Michael Levi (Brookings Institute) (2), Rep. Edward J. Markey, Jackie Sanders (US Delegate to the IAEA), Anonymous Senior State Department Official (2), Anonymous Diplomat in Vienna, Anonymous Senior US official, Anonymous Bush Administration Official. Total=36

Quoted as Saying Iran’s in Possession of a Civilian Program

Hamid Reza Asefi (Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson) (4), President Mohammad Khatami, Georgy Mamedov (Russian Deputy of Foreign Affairs), Khalil Mousavi (Atomic Energy of Iran Spokesman), Hasan Rowhani (Head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council) (3), Ali Akbar Salehi (Rep. to the IAEA), Iranian Delegate Amir Zamaninia, Javad Zarif (Iranian Permanent Rep. to the UN). Total=13

Undecided

ElBaradei (6) Total=6

Civilian Program- June 7, 2003, Atomic Energy of Iran spokeman Khalil Mousavi told the AP that “We [Iran] have not violated the NPT ((Nuclear) Non-Proliferation Treaty). A person who hasn’t done anything wrong will not be worried about such allegations.” (Dareini 2003) Undecided- 2 June 2004, the New York Times quoted Director General ElBaradei as saying, “The jury is out on whether the program has been dedicated exclusively for peaceful purposes or if it has some military dimension [. . .]. We haven’t seen concrete proof of a military program, so it’s premature to make a judgment on that.” (Broad and Sanger 2004, p. A6) To quantify only direct quotations comes with the loss of paraphrases and other forms of indirect attribution that play a significant role in the constitution of news articles and the meanings they convey. Such a move, however, prevents the discourse of newsmakers from being confused with

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that of the journalists and vice versa. Ultimately, the point is not to charge journalists with taking a particular stance on the nuclear debate, but to highlight the arguments, including meta-stasiastic claims, that journalists gave salience to and downplayed. In the 58 articles collected, 36 newsmakers identified Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program, 13 identified it as a civilian energy program, and six remained uncertain; each appearance a newsmaker made, even if the same newsmaker appeared in more than one article, all constitute the total number of newsmakers documented. Many of the voices the press presented to the American public were unsurprisingly those of Capitol Hill elites. All of the quoted American newsmakers appear to be unanimous in their view of Iran as pursuing a nuclear weapon. The press, then, “indexed” these newsmakers, as their news stories simply “reflect levels of official agreement and consensus” (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007, p. 100). If for some reason there is a lack of debate among Beltway power players, alternative perspectives are rarely publicized, since a journalist who asks challenging questions can be criticized for failing to be objective. Giving further evidence to the theory of indexing, the news outlets in this study provide readers with a number of statements from American political experts whose views are aligned with President Bush’s, thus allowing the White House’s position on Iran to be the most dominant. This is not to say that all those who spoke in favor of viewing Iran as in pursuit of nuclear weapons were influenced by the White House’s claim in the fact/definition stasis, as not every quoted newsmaker was connected to Bush by party ties or employment. However, it does portray American leadership as being in consensus on the definition of Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program and that there evidently was not a single politician in Washington, DC, who remained uncertain of the nature of Iran’s nuclear activity. This is particularly problematic, given that neither side of the debate had fully demonstrated that Iran’s nuclear program was wholly peaceful or militaristic. Responding with a meta-stasiastic argument to the White House’s charges of Iran’s having a nuclear weapons program, Atomic Energy of Iran spokesman Khalil Mousavi is quoted as saying, “Repetitions of U.S. allegations will not make it true” (Dareini 2003). But repetition of such allegations undoubtedly gave the White House’s claims the appearance of truth as the charges fell from the lips of a variety of American sources whose truthfulness is connected to their being official sources or experts, not necessarily the evidence they supplied in support of their claims. In a June 7, 2003, AP article, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher “refused to give details of what the United States found unsettling”


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about Iran’s nuclear program (Kirka 2003). Similarly, a November 29, 2004, Washington Post article pointed out that “a recent CIA report on weapons of mass destruction says the US government is convinced Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon but offered no concrete evidence” (Linzer 2004, p. A10). Of the 58 articles, these are the only two times when the journalists identify such crucial points for readers’ understanding of the debate. Only once, in fact, does an article even identify the source of Washington’s certainty of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon, as Barbara Slavin of USA Today wrote, “An Iranian opposition group revealed two years ago that Iran had been secretly building a large facility for uranium enrichment” (2004, p. A12). Slavin, however, omitted that the “opposition group” to which she alluded, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, is part of the larger Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization, which, according to Ali M. Ansari, “had been banned as a terrorist organization in several European countries and the United States” (2006, p. 198). To have highlighted the lack of evidence supporting claims of Iranian nuclear weapons development or the questionable sources from which American officials received information could have worked meta-stasiastically to offer American audiences information that could have mitigated the persuasive force of American newsmakers’ apparent consensus on the debate. But to follow the arguments of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon beyond newsmakers’ mere unsupported utterances is a Pandora’s Box that can result in denied access to the official statements needed to write a story, as journalist Lara Finnegan (2006) argues in her work on post-9/11 news coverage and other scholars have discussed elsewhere. While journalists’ fear of ostracism presents one possible explanation for the repetition of Iran’s allegedly seeking nuclear weapons in the press without evidence, another explanation has to do with efforts to be objective. Situating objective journalism in a historical context, Richard Kaplan (2006) dates the push for objective reporting to the Progressive Era (1900– 1919). The Progressive movement, as Kaplan explains, challenged the role corrupt political parties played in public life, and, in an effort to break from partisan lines, “Progressive reformers believed that social problems were a question of facts and technical solutions best left to impartial, informed experts” (2006, p. 180–81)—an effort that the press would mirror as it abandoned its partisan roots. But it was not only the political climate that encouraged journalistic objectivism. As Richard Streckfuss (1990) contends, the scientific method had a hand in the push toward objectivity: “For the decade of the 1920s saw the flourishing of scientific naturalism, a school of thought holding that there are no a priori truths, that attempts to explain the universe in metaphysical terms foster not understanding but ignorance and

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superstition, and that only knowledge gained by scientific investigation is valid” (p. 985). During the 1920s, one of the biggest proponents of scientific naturalism, or positivism, in journalism was Walter Lippmann. Writing of democracy and the press in Public Opinion, Lippmann concluded “that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today” (1922, p. 31). For Lippmann, journalistic objectivity comes from relying on the supposedly unbiased observations of experts such as political scientists, or members of “an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible” to the reading public (1922, p. 31). This objectivity via a reliance on experts to make “unseen facts intelligible” is still practiced today as journalists rely on political leaders for their expertise—though their bias can be assumed—and scholars from think tanks that purport to be nonpartisan. The problem with reporting expert “observations” (they’re really arguments) without the grounds upon which their observations rest is that there is no need for the expert to provide evidence, as it is their perspective that is most important, not what led them to that perspective; the tacit assumption appears to be that if evidence is wanted, a reader can turn to the op-eds. What justifies an argument in these news reports, then, is the number of times and the variety of people who confirm a position, not their reliance on intelligence reports or other sorts of evidence. With the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Brookings Institute fellow, the State Department spokesman, the White House spokesman, the US energy secretary, and a number of others confirming that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons, the repeated views of these newsmakers work in a meta-stasiastic manner to encourage readers to view their shared argument as true, despite the lack of accompanying evidence. Though there is clearly an imbalance between the numbers of newsmakers who referred to Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program (36) compared to those who defined it as a civilian energy program (13), it would be unfair to argue that the civilian energy argument was silenced. Yet, when a news outlet allows a particular voice to be heard, there is no guarantee that a newsmaker’s words will be presented in a favorable light or heard on auspicious grounds. Not only can a news organization frame a newsmaker’s comments in ways that reduce the credibility of what is said, but the content of one’s words are often only as credible as the one who utters them. In the news coverage gathered for this study, the majority of newsmakers who understood Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful were Iranian officials. The exception was Georgy Mamedov, Russian deputy of foreign affairs, who characterized the program as peaceful. Although none


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of the news stories examined for this study explicitly portrayed the Iranian and Russian newsmakers in a negative light, how journalists depicted Iranian and Russian political actors in the past can still potentially influence an American audience’s reception of their ideas today. The vilification of Russian political actors in American media almost goes without saying, given the history of the Cold War and the threat of the Red Scare. American media also vilified Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis. The United States may be the “Great Satan” to some in the Islamic Republic, but American news coverage of Iran, according to Edward Said in Covering Islam (1997), has usually presented the state as “militant, dangerous, and anti-American” (p. 83)—coverage which parallels that of other states whose populations are predominantly Muslim. With American newsmakers in agreement on Iran’s development of nuclear weapons juxtaposed with Iranian and Russian newsmakers arguing the opposite, coverage, though not necessarily the conscious choices of journalists, maintained narrative fidelity with themes that have circulated in American news media for decades—a narrative fidelity that could encourage audiences to align themselves with the unsubstantiated perspectives of quoted American officials. The results of a more recent study of American news coverage of Iran and its nuclear program do not stray far from that of Said’s earlier work. Examining New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post editorials from 1984 to 2004, Izadi and Saghaye-Biria (2007) found that the editorials typically spoke with certainty of Iran’s program as a weapons program like the overwhelming majority of American newsmakers discussed in this study. Further, “all three newspapers argue [in their op-ed columns] that such a government cannot be trusted with nuclear technology” (Izadi and SaghayeBiria 2007, p. 150) because of the same stereotypes (dangerous and untrustworthy) associated with Islam and people of the Middle East that Said’s Covering Islam (1997), Karim Karim’s The Islamic Peril (2000), and other media studies have shown time and again. With many of the op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post arguing that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, working in conjunction with American newsmakers whose news stories make similar arguments, though not relying on stereotypes, the notion that Iran is developing nuclear weapons becomes even more compelling for readers. Though the 58 articles analyzed in this study lacked the stereotyping that Izadi and Saghaye-Biria identified in their work on the editorials of major newspapers, narrative fidelity, as pointed out earlier, can still encourage audiences to draw connections that a news organization may or may not have intended. In the fall of 2003 the theme of Iran as deceitful and

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dangerous arose yet again in the headlines. A November 10, 2003, IAEA inspection report explained that there was no evidence of Iran having a nuclear weapons program. This moment should have been a pivotal one for both journalists and those politicians who espoused a position contrary to the dominant perspective among American newsmakers quoted in the press. One factor, according to Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston, that enables more journalistic independence is when “dramatic, spontaneous events [occur that] embolden the news media to bring challenging questions into mainstream discourse” (2007, p. 76). Rather than allowing this finding on the part of the IAEA inspectors to serve as an opportunity for the press to demonstrate some skepticism toward the White House’s arguments, the news outlets found a way to incorporate this new information in a manner that could sustain the dominant narrative of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon. November 11, 2003, headlines for the New York Times and Washington Post read respectively, “Iran Has Made Plutonium” and “Iran Had Secret Nuclear Program, U.N. Says: ‘No Evidence’ of Arms Plans; Probe Continues.” The next day, the headlines were “Surprise Word on Nuclear Gains by North Korea and Iran” (New York Times) and “After Report, Iran Acknowledges ‘Minor’ Breach of Nuclear Pact” (Washington Post). What is most important in these stories, as that is what headlines usually convey, is not that the IAEA did not find evidence of Iran’s having a nuclear weapons program, but Iran’s deceit (“secret nuclear program” and “surprise”), the implication of Iran’s steps toward a nuclear weapon (they’ve made plutonium), and its failure to adhere to the NPT; even the November 11 Washington Post headline that actually mentioned the IAEA finding of no “arms plans” spoke of Iran’s secrecy first. In the actual news stories, journalists did recognize that the IAEA found no evidence of a weapons program, but the majority of the stories themselves offered readings of the report that emphasized Iran’s acts of concealment. Thus, the potential to question any certainty of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions was ultimately squandered as the newspapers presented stories that remained faithful, even if unconsciously so, to stereotypical notions of the Middle Eastern Other as deceptive and secretive. While the nature of Iran’s nuclear program continued to be the object of the reports, the nature of the Bush administration’s claims of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon remained uninvestigated. If the IAEA report did not provide evidence of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, then where was the White House getting its evidence for defining the program as such? And since it was not offered by any of the American newsmakers in any of the 58 articles studied here, what exactly was that evidence? When specious


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arguments of one side are pitted against specious arguments of another, the side that is (historically) presented as dishonest loses. Despite the number of times Iranian officials were quoted as saying Iran was pursuing peaceful nuclear energy, the weight that the news in this particular instance placed on their alleged untrustworthiness, along with a history of such arguments in the press as explored by Izadi and Saghaye-Biria (2007), the New York Times and Washington Post subtly offered meta-stasiastic arguments that devalued whatever it was that Iranian officials had to say. While Robert Entman (2004) calls for news that provides counter-frames that provide “culturally resonant words and images, [frames] that attain sufficient magnitude to gain wide understanding as a sensible alternative to the White House’s interpretation[s]” (p. 17), those frames must also be spoken by someone who does not bear the burden of cultural stereotypes that can dissuade American audiences; otherwise, the only position that will appear sensible is that of the Oval Office. But the finger cannot be pointed solely at the press, as they cannot report voices that are unavailable for offering different perspectives. When the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) declared that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003 (p. 6), a number of political leaders at the time, including Senators Barack Obama, John Edwards and Joseph Biden, took positions that countered the Bush administration’s aggressive approach toward Iran, though not necessarily the White House’s definition of Iran’s nuclear program. The IAEA report, however, did not generate nearly as much opposition as the 2007 NIE, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. One of the most significant differences between 2007 and 2003 is that Senator Obama and his competitors were campaigning for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, and the disunity between the intelligence community and the White House gave Democratic nominees the chance to assert the differences between themselves and Republicans, although Democrats had never made Iran’s nuclear program a red/blue issue before. Another is that the 2007 NIE did not disagree with the Bush administration’s definition of Iran’s nuclear program; rather than saying that Iran never pursued a nuclear weapon, the estimate claimed that Iran had ceased to pursue a nuclear weapon. Thus, the estimate provided a position that challenged facts concerning the end of a specific element of Iran’s nuclear program, but not the Bush administration’s definition of the program. This enabled Democrats to weigh in on policy matters as they argued for diplomacy rather than more war before an American citizenry whose outlook on Iraq had grown sour as the toll the war took on American lives continuously grew. What may have been the most significant difference

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that helped to maintain the silence of opposing voices, if there were any in 2003, was that the IAEA report was information provided by a nonAmerican agency. If the meta-stasiastic argument that President Bush made before the United Nations in 2002 still held sway among American political actors, the claim that American intelligence affirmed Iraq’s pursuit of WMD regardless of the UN inspectors’ presence (“Bush 2002b) then once again the information acquired by UN inspectors would play understudy to that of in-house intelligence—or wherever the administration got its information—on the American political stage. Although we cannot be certain of whether or not the opposition of Democrats in 2007 was held in abeyance until the right moment presented itself or if their speaking out was simply political opportunism, 2003 should have been an earlier wake-up call. With the exception of Obama, whose senatorial career had yet to begin, where were the voices that could challenge the apparent political cohesion toward Iran that the press presented to its readers? If our leaders will not speak their minds for fear of political bullying, careerism or any other silencing mechanism, there is much to be said about the state of American leadership.

Stasis Theory and the News Through a synthesis of Altman’s theory of narrative and stasis theory, I mapped out the stases—the various points of disagreement—that were being debated in Vienna from 2002 to 2004. Charting the circulating arguments helped me provide an overview of the many claims that were available to members of the press to report so that I could demonstrate how many of these positions were whittled down to unsubstantiated claims when they were finally presented to news audiences across the country. Regardless of the criticism leveled against news organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, they were successful in doing what stasis theorists have advocated for centuries—sticking to the core issue of how to define Iran’s nuclear program. Whether one’s interests lie in understanding the nature of Iran’s nuclear program or the need to know of the United States’ handling of foreign affairs, as the government’s international actions can affect our domestic concerns, the newspapers in this study performed a public service. Reporting on an issue worthy of public deliberation was necessary, as the consequences of the exchanges at the IAEA headquarters could reach beyond Vienna with sanctions against Iran (currently in effect), possible American military mobilization against Iran, and so forth. While a dogmatic proponent of stasis theory would bemoan the continued report


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of an asystatic question in the news, as the evidence for Iran and the Bush administration’s respective positions were incomplete, political leaders always have the potential to act on incomplete information, as having complete knowledge is rarely possible; since the debate continued, journalists rightfully continued covering it. Though their coverage encouraged readers to think about the central disagreement between the United States and Iran, this narrative consistency reduced the debate to a dyad, obscuring other positions that were, and still are, equally relevant—specifically ElBaradei’s claim about the uncertainty of the nature of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Though I treat ElBaradei’s statements and the IAEA inspection reports as a sort of baseline for analyzing American and Iranian arguments in this chapter and the others to come, I at once recognize the director general and the inspection reports’ discourse as highly rhetorical. Commenting on his rocky relationship with the Bush administration in an interview with Foreign Policy, ElBaradei remarked, There is always an effort by people to use and abuse what you say. So you have to walk on very thin ice in terms of exactly measuring every word you author and every action you take—that doesn’t mean politicizing the work of the agency, but that means understanding the context in which you are operating. When I get a piece of intelligence, for example, I have to be very aware that there is misinformation and that there are people who like to hype the issues for their own political ends. (2010) With the United States having invaded Iraq on inflated WMD allegations and Iran’s halfhearted cooperation with IAEA inspectors and claims of discriminatory enforcement of the NPT, it was absolutely necessary for ElBaradei to communicate the IAEA’s position in ways that neither overstated nor understated the findings of the IAEA inspection reports. Exaggerating or underestimating the nature of Iran’s nuclear program could potentially have disastrous consequences as the invasion of Iraq and the case of North Korea have shown. Despite the director general’s efforts to make neutral rhetorical choices, the US’s and Iran’s appropriation of the reports for their own arguments was unavoidable and so was the press’s ability to shape the debate for news audiences in ways that drowned out ElBaradei’s attempt at neutrality. While the press presented some of Iran’s and the United States’ metastasiastic arguments, the ways in which the press disseminated information to the public served as its own meta-stasiastic argument, whether intentional

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or not. With various American voices chanting the phrase, “nuclear weapons,” against culturally discredited Iranian officials and a nearly muted IAEA director general, the press was not telling readers how to think, but the disproportionate weight of expert voices were trying to do so. With little resistance to the White House’s definition of Iran’s nuclear program, the press helped “will to truth,” to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, the militaristic definition of Iran’s nuclear efforts. But the press’s role in assisting the White House’s attempts to encourage Americans to see Iran as a nuclear threat were not limited to the news stories of the AP, New York Times and Washington Post.

Chapter 3

Controlling the Discourse: Interviews with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Unlike news stories in which the opinions of newsmakers are often presented in brief quotes, news interviews provide newsmakers the opportunity to speak at length on particular issues, providing more substantial chunks of discourse to be examined. In this chapter, I focus specifically on interviews with former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to analyze her rhetoric and the interviewers’ mediation of her language. Studies of a secretary of state’s rhetoric, albeit scarce, are nothing new, since the individual who occupies this position produces discourse that represents what an administration believes to be America’s best interests in foreign affairs for both international and domestic audiences. One of the common themes of the few rhetorical analyses of secretary of state discourse is that presidents rely on them to prime American citizens and those abroad for a more favorable reception of a president’s messages or actions. During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, as Donald Douglas explains, pushed for the “Good Neighbor Policy” at the 1933 Seventh Conference of Inter-American States in Uruguay to dispel notions of the United States’ taking interest in South American “problems only as they related to North American concerns” (1970, p. 205). President Reagan, confronted with negative comparisons of his foreign policy in Central America to Vietnam, had Secretary George Shultz speak on the tenth anniversary of the Vietnam War. Rather than succumbing to the Vietnam-asfailure interpretation that served as the foundation for “Vietnam Syndrome,” Secretary Shultz, according to George Dionisopoulos and Steven Goldzwig, offered a revised historical account of lessons he believed Americans should have learned from Vietnam and used this revision “to validate the policies of the Reagan administration in Central America” (1992, p. 73). Prior to the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush decided to have Secretary of State Colin Powell make the case for military mobilization

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before the United Nations Security Council. Bush’s decision to use Secretary Powell to provide the rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom, David Zarefsky argues, was due to the secretary’s global respect and “his reputation as a skeptic on Iraq, if not an outright ‘dove’ within the administration, [that] enhanced his credibility” (2007, p. 279). As these past studies demonstrate, the rhetoric deployed by a secretary of state plays an important role in working to shape the landscape in which presidential rhetoric operates, a function that President Bush once again employed with regard to Iran and its nuclear program when he appointed Condoleezza Rice to the position in 2005. Though the aforementioned scholarship has added to understandings of the rhetorical function(s) a secretary of state serves, the analyses are limited to speeches past secretaries have given and exclude other means of representing the White House before audiences, particularly through news interviews. Although rhetoricians have used interviewing techniques to gather information or to examine the verbal cues of interviewees, as Dana Cloud (1999) does in her analysis of former mill workers’ rhetoric in the documentary The Uprising of ’34, rhetoricians have ignored the news interview genre for the most part and often do not consider the language of an interview other than an interviewee’s responses. The lack of attention paid to this genre of communication in rhetorical criticism of secretary of state rhetoric and rhetorical scholarship on news media in general is not necessarily due to a lack of tools available in rhetorical theory, but a failure to integrate rhetorical studies with other analytical approaches that can account for how interactions between an interviewer and interviewee help shape messages the latter tries to convey. In other words, the communicative interaction of an interview is just as rhetorical as what the person being interviewed says in response to an interviewer’s question, and that interaction can influence the way audiences perceive the interview participants, their language, and the issue(s) being discussed. In this chapter, I extend the jurisdiction of rhetorical studies by intertwining elements of discourse analyses of news interviews with rhetorical theory, principally the epideictic genre. Through this disciplinary synthesis, I discuss the arguments former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put forth on Iran and its nuclear program and offer an explanation of how her interviewers mediated her rhetoric in a way that gave Rice’s positions an air of truth in need of no substantial support. Upon becoming secretary of state, Rice became the Bush administration’s mouthpiece on American-Iranian relations. In interview after interview with television, radio, and print news sources, Secretary Rice articulated the

Controlling the Discourse

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White House’s stance toward Iran through media that could reach audiences beyond the president’s annual State of the Union and his press conferences. In the interviews scrutinized for this study, Secretary Rice used her media access as a platform to encourage audiences to see Iran’s nuclear program as a nuclear weapons program, often with the complicity of her interviewers and always without evidence. When asked, if at all, to reflect on American actions toward Iran, Rice, staying within the broader topic of American-Iranian relations, shifted the discussion to Iranian actions to keep Iran, not the United States, at the center of talk because the less discussion there was of past, current, and potential American actions against Iran, the more options—even the potentially problematic ones—could be kept on the president’s table. Instead of promoting reflection, Rice pushed audiences to fear the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran so that Americans would be concerned with the question of how to prevent what the White House considered to be a destabilizing event from happening; most of the interviewers, conscious or not of their cooperation, modeled this strictly forward-looking approach as well. Enveloping it all was Rice’s face-saving effort to rebuild a positive image of the White House, as she presented the United States as a proponent of multilateral diplomacy toward Iran as opposed to her portrayal of the Islamic Republic as a rogue state.

Secretary Rice as President Bush’s Political Surrogate Despite the December 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the January 2005 Iraqi elections, violence in Iraq raged on. It came as no surprise, then, that Bush spoke primarily on the state of affairs in Iraq and the success that he believed was in the making when he turned to foreign policy in his 2005 State of the Union address. Though Iraq was central to his talk of spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East, Bush did not fail to touch on a point that was reiterated in all of his State of the Union addresses since 2002, Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. With the same categorical certainty he used when speaking of Iraq’s having weapons of mass destruction prior to and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the president stated, “Today, Iran remains the world’s primary state sponsor of terror—pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve” (Bush 2005). Unlike his approach to Iran’s neighbor to the west, Bush emphasized America’s cooperation with European allies in dealing with Iran and alluded to what some understood as a call for an Iranian revolution: “And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own

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liberty, America stands with you” (2005). Although Bush was apparently eschewing the unilateral military action of 2003 for multilateral diplomacy, the president continued to rely on three of the same ingredients used for making the case against Iraq: a dash of tyrannical regime, a pinch of connection to terrorism, and a smidgen of weapons of mass destruction. But the third ingredient was significantly different in the Iran case. Bush never said that Iran actually possessed weapons of mass destruction, as he claimed of Iraq. His argument concerned the motives underlying Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a stance that did not necessitate that he produce concrete evidence to make his case; the argument could not be weakened by the failure to uncover a nuclear weapon or signs of such a weapon. Instead, Bush exploited three points of ambiguity: the indefinite findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the difference between civilian nuclear and nuclear weapons programs, and Iran’s nuclear goals. Since the IAEA began its inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities in 2003, they had yet to determine the nature of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear research and development. As reported in the September 2005 inspection report, the IAEA was working to ensure that Iran declared all nuclear materials and enrichment activities, particularly “the origin of LEU [low-enriched uranium] and HEU3 [highly enriched uranium] particle contamination found at various locations in Iran” and the history and extent of Iran’s efforts to acquire and develop centrifuges (ElBaradei 2005, p. 4). As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter (2006) explains, uranium-235—a uranium isotope—is enriched to 3.5 to 5 percent for energy purposes, while highly enriched uranium for weapons purposes is uranium-235 “enriched to over 90 percent (although high enriched uranium, or HEU, is defined by the IAEA as being U-235 enriched to levels greater than 20 percent)” (p. 37). Though the inspection report did not state the enrichment percentage of the HEU contaminants, it did make clear that despite two years of inspections, the IAEA’s knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program remained incomplete. Rather than sharing the IAEA’s ambivalence, Bush, even before the IAEA began its inspections, asserted that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons. Ambiguity, it seemed, was not something to be resolved with further inspections, but an opportunity to be seized by communicating the White House’s certainty of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. Because one of the differences between nuclear power for civilian energy and nuclear weapons is the degree to which uranium is enriched, it is easy for most to confuse the two equally abstruse processes. It is undeniable that having the capability to generate peaceful nuclear power is a step toward the capability to develop nuclear weapons, but actually taking that step is


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not inevitable. Yet, Bush conflated the civilian and military ends of nuclear research and development to capitalize on the one thing any American knew for sure—that Iran does indeed have a nuclear program. If, as Ritter explains, Americans associate nuclear power with the atomic slaughters of World War II and other ominous contexts, it would be much easier for the former president to succeed “in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear energy technology and nuclear weapons” (2006, p. 203). But even without the specter of death hovering in the minds of Americans paying attention to what the Bush administration said about Iran’s nuclear program during his two terms in office, the positions of officialdom taken by Bush and his cabinet could still render audiences who lack the technical knowledge of nuclear power more susceptible to claims that equated efforts to acquire nuclear energy with efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The third point of ambiguity is that of Iran’s intentions. As someone’s motives cannot be extracted from his or her head, sealed in a plastic bag, and placed on a table as “exhibit A,” Bush relied on a rhetorical strategy that determined what was driving Iran’s mission for nuclear power through defining it as an illegitimate, rogue state. If Iran, as gleaned from the president’s remarks, sets itself apart from the international community by aiding and abetting terrorists and ignoring human rights abuses, the Islamic Republic was certainly not afraid of defying international norms by developing a nuclear weapon and using it. According to Bush, Iran’s NPT signature was far from a guarantee of the Islamic Republic’s upholding its obligation to stand against nuclear proliferation. Ironically, Bush, in his work to enforce the treaty on certain states—never the United States, of course—demanded that Iran give up what the treaty does in fact grant the Islamic Republic—the right to civilian nuclear power. Iran, however, was part of an “axis of evil” whose nefarious plans hid behind the sheep’s clothing of the NPT. The sole voice communicating the idea of Iran’s having a nuclear weapons program, however, could not have been President Bush’s, as he spent much of his foreign policy talk addressing the situation in Iraq, and his approval ratings were in a continuous decline even after the 2004 elections. Though both a Washington Post-ABC News poll and the Harris Poll reported a virtual even split in the president’s job approval rating in February 2005 (“President Bush’s Approval” 2005; “President Bush’s Job” 2005), a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll reported a 37 percent job approval rating by November of that year (“Poll” 2005). Following the departure of Colin Powell, the cabinet member with the highest approval rating going into

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2005 and throughout the rest of the year was Powell’s replacement, Condoleezza Rice. Unlike her colleagues, Rice’s approval ratings never dropped below 50 percent during her first year as secretary of state according to the 2005 Harris polls (“President Bush’s Job” 2005). With the most favorable cabinet member discussing Iran’s nuclear program in the press, Bush increased the likelihood of a positive reception of his stance toward Iran among American news audiences.

Methodology: A Discursive Approach to “Negotiating for Newsworthiness” Although Secretary Rice took center stage to speak about American-Iranian relations before the American people, her doing so was not mediation-free. As Timothy Cook writes, newsmakers such as Secretary Rice are usually the go-to sources for political issues, as they are the political cognoscenti, but the media determines whether or not something is newsworthy. Thus, there is a struggle for power in what Cook calls the “negotiation for newsworthiness” (1998, pp. 90–91). These “negotiations” occur when news outlets revise stories, cut hour-long interviews to five minutes, and take other actions to determine the level of salience they should give to some aspect of what a newsmaker is saying or doing. What the public ultimately sees, hears, and/or reads are the products of these negotiations for newsworthiness that often take place behind the scenes. Interviews, however, provide audiences with a form of negotiation that unfolds before them, even if an interview is not presented in its entirety. Furthermore, the interactional control of an interview, as Norman Fairclough points out, “embody specific claims about social and power relations between participants” (1992, p. 152) that can influence the way audiences perceive the information communicated in negotiations for newsworthiness. To make use of Cook’s “negotiation for newsworthiness” in a rhetorical approach to news interviews, the rhetorical situation must be redefined to accommodate the inclusion of interviewers as participants in the construction of an interviewee’s message. The rhetorical situation, as Lloyd Bitzer (1968) explicated, is “a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance” (p. 5). Over the years, a number of scholars challenged this earlier conception of the rhetorical situation. Richard Vatz (1973) disputed Bitzer’s idea that an exigence, or a problem that calls forth an utterance, exists independently of those who perceive it. Barbara Biesecker (1989), through a thematic of différance, later


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argued that understanding the persons of a rhetorical situation as fragmented subjects enables more discussion about how change can occur as the result of rhetoric. Though many have debated the rhetorical situation, some of the elements Bitzer introduced have remained stable in the field: a speaker, a message, and an audience. This understanding of the realm of rhetoric, of course, preceded Bitzer, as Aristotle (1954) emphasized these aspects of the rhetorical situation before it came to be named as such. Though the singular speaker component has endured for over two millennia, the idea of one rhetor must be abandoned in favor of the inclusion of multiple rhetors in order to better understand how rhetoric functions in interviews. Using advertisements to explain the relationship of multiple rhetors, Keith Grant-Davies (1997) posits that “we can distinguish those who originated the discourse, and who might be held legally responsible for the truth of its content, from those who are hired to shape and deliver the message, but arguably all of them involved in the sales pitch share the role of rhetor, as a rhetorical team” (p. 269). While those who have their hands in the crafting and delivery of a message serve as rhetors, the idea of a rhetorical team implies a conscious effort of all parties involved to communicate a particular message, thus giving a group of rhetors a common purpose they might not otherwise share. An interviewee, for example, might create a particular message he or she wishes to communicate to an audience, a message that a rhetorician can use as the sole object of analysis. But interviewers, as linguists have shown, have the power to influence the way an interviewee’s message is presented to an audience. To take into consideration the possible impact an interviewer can have on an interviewee’s rhetoric requires the interview’s rhetorical situation to have multiple speakers who work together to produce a message that may not be the one an interviewee intends. To account for the function of multiple rhetors in news interviews necessitates the use of linguistic scholarship on political interviews that demonstrates how aspects of these linguistic exchanges function rhetorically. For Paul Chilton (2004), the interaction between interviewer and interviewee can invite audiences to accept or reject what the latter communicates during an interview. Discouraging an audience’s openness to information occurs when interviews take on the appearance of what Chilton observes of political interviews in the United Kingdom, “a clash between two institutions—the media and the political elite [as] each makes a claim to legitimacy” (2004, p. 78). The cooperative, albeit conflicting, relationship between the government and the press in such instances can push audiences

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to be skeptical of the ideas politicians communicate in interviews. On the other hand, a cooperative relationship between a consenting, or simply passive, press and the government can lead audiences to be more receptive to the information presented, as the parties communicating the information appear to be in agreement, even if there is disagreement off the record. Such is the case in many of the interviews discussed in this chapter. The first characteristic of a news interview this study examines to determine the quality of the interviewers’ interactions with Rice is the opening question of a topic shift, a subset of opening sequences. Opening sequences to news interviews, as Steven Clayman (1991) explains, identify the interviewee, the newsworthiness of the topic to be discussed, and set “an agenda for the interview; they both define and delimit the parameters of permissible discussion” (p. 71). These three elements of an opening sequence thus serve different rhetorical functions. Identifying an interviewee helps to construct an interviewee’s ethos as: (1) a participant in, or an observer of, an event; (2) a certified expert; and/or (3) a person with a particular position on an issue (Clayman, 1991, pp. 61–-63); other aspects of an interviewee’s ethos will also emerge throughout the course of the interview. To identify the newsworthiness of something helps determine whether or not the topic has exigence, or must be addressed by the interviewee(s) because it “is an imperfection marked by urgency” (Bitzer 1968, p. 6). Also, setting an agenda can potentially open and shut the door to new information and alternative perspectives or arguments. Though opening sequences serve particular functions, the construction of ethos, the establishment of newsworthiness, and agenda-setting continue to occur throughout an interview, particularly when interviews cover a range of topics, as many of the interviews in this study do. When attention is turned to a new topic, the interview participants provide clearer reasons for speaking on the matter and the interviewers have more opportunities to set the parameters of the ensuing discussion in a different way than they may have done for other topics in the same interview. Given the dynamic, yet structured, character of news interviews, it is not just the opening sequence, then, that establishes the presumptions upon which the discourse rests, but the initiation of topic changes as well. When an opening question for a particular segment of an interview presumes a position to be common knowledge, the interviewer and interviewee can reinforce these potentially disputable ideas as truth from which their discussion can move forward. Thus, I will examine the presumptions embedded in opening questions of topic shifts, because they play a vital role in the production of meaning and


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invite audiences to share the common ground on which the interview participants’ discourse unfolds. The second characteristic of news interviews this chapter analyzes has to do with topics and scope. While “topics,” according to Fairclough, “are introduced and changed only by the dominant participant” (1992, p. 155), both interview participants, especially during interviews with powerful political leaders, negotiate the scope in which a topic is discussed. As Shoshana Blum-Kulka (1983) argued, the advancement of an interview depends on whether or not the interviewee supportively participates, which includes his or her willingness to remain within the scope of the topic being discussed. An interviewer, then, may ask a broad or narrow question on a topic, but the interviewee can, in addition to not answering at all, offer a general or specific response to the question. If the interviewee refrains from offering a detailed answer yet stays within the scope of the topic, he or she is likely avoiding a question without necessarily straying from the topic. The interviewer, however, can ask a follow-up question in hopes of compelling the interviewee to narrow his or her response. Thus, the scope of a topic provides the interviewee an opportunity to inform audiences more fully on a particular matter or a way to evade questions by staying within the general scope of a topic. In addition to elements of the communicative interaction between Rice and her interviewers, I also scrutinize her discursive portrayal of both the United States and Iran. Given Rice’s role as secretary of state, part of her mission was to present the United States in a positive light. Positive portrayals of oneself or one’s group, however, are often accompanied by negative representations of others (van Dijk 2008, p. 200). Thus, I explore how Rice set up Iran as a foil to buttress her rhetorical construction of the United States as a multilateralist force for stability in the Middle East.

Interview Selection For this study, I have selected Secretary Rice’s interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Peter Jennings on ABC’s This Week; Andrea Mitchell of NBC News; Jonathan Karl of ABC News; Bob Schieffer and Doyle McManus on CBS’s Face the Nation; the National Conference of Editorial Writers; Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor; Andrea Koppel of CNN; Barbara Slavin and Ray Locker of USA Today; and the Sean Hannity Show. Of the nine interviews, the first five occurred during the first four months of 2005, and the last four

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are from the four closing months of the same year. The summer months are excluded since there was little talk of Iran in those interviews. Given that audiences do not turn to the same places for news, the interviews used for this study take place on television, radio, and in print. Though one of this study’s weaknesses is its lack of an account for the ways different media affect how the interviews communicate messages to audiences, the interviews are aligned generically and topically, thus warranting a discussion of them in relation to each other rather than separately. One exception among the interviews is Secretary Rice’s question and answer session at the National Conference of Editorial Writers. Rice’s interaction with the editorialists was not presented in print, television, or radio, but made available by the State Department website. It was chosen because turn-taking between the questioners and Secretary Rice enabled those attending the conference see the negotiation between her and the other editorial writers, and, though not publicized by a popular news outlet, the linguistic interaction helped to inform the opinions of columnists whose work would appear in major and smaller American news media. The transcripts used in this analysis were taken from the State Department’s web archives, excerpts of which are provided in Appendix E because the links are no longer active. Relying on State Department transcripts unfortunately results in the loss of a collection of painstakingly produced transcriptions of the most efficient linguist who marks every stutter, pause, elongated syllable, and other meaningful nuances of discourse. Although these aspects of Rice and her interviewers’ language are important, I am more concerned with larger units of the communicative interaction discussed in the previous section: opening questions of topic shifts, the relationship of topics and scope, and the discursive representations of the United States and Iran. These objects of inquiry, borrowed from discourse analyses of political interviews, should help demonstrate the extent to which the interview participants cooperated in producing a message that worked in the Bush administration’s favor.

Presumptions and “Truth” in Opening Questions of Topic Shifts In seven of the nine interviews, the interviewers broached the topic of Iran’s nuclear program in one of four ways: (1) direct characterization of the program as a weapons program; (2) indirect characterization of the program as a weapons program; (3) direct characterization as a civilian


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program; or (4) an ambiguous characterization; the exceptions were the Andrea Mitchell and Jonathan Karl interviews in which neither interviewer turned the discussion to Iran’s nuclear program; Secretary Rice did. The O’Reilly, Schieffer/McManus, and Hannity interviews all straightforwardly identified Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program: Mr. McManus: Secretary Rice, let me switch to Iran for a moment. The administration has now given the Europeans an endorsement for offering the Iranians incentives to—positive incentives if they stop their nuclear program. But you haven’t put a timeline down. You’ve been very careful not to put a timeline down. They’re still working on nuclear weapons so time is not on our side. Are you giving a signal that the Europeans have an indefinite amount of time to work on this? (Rice 2005d) Less direct in his characterization of Iran’s nuclear program was Herb Field, an attendee at the National Conference of Editorial Writers: Question: Herb Field, Patriot News, Harrisburg. I wonder if you could speak a little about Iran and in the context of—well, if Pakistan has a nuclear program and India have a nuclear program and they’re not supposed to have nuclear programs, why can’t Iran, which is a proud nation— why can’t they have a nuclear program? And also, would you respond to the pressure that the United States and the European states are putting on Iran to deal with this nuclear issue and the threats of an oil crisis that an Iranian official made about a month ago that, if the United States takes this to the Security Council, there will be an oil crisis? (Rice 2005e) Although Field did not mention nuclear weapons in his description, his reference to two nuclear weapons states that refused to sign the NPT indirectly aligned Iran’s nuclear program with the programs of India and Pakistan. Two other interviews (Koppel and Stephanopoulos/Jennings) offered ambiguous descriptions of Iran’s nuclear program, and Barbara Slavin was the only one to speak of Iran’s nuclear activities in non-weapons terms: Ms. Slavin: Right. But certainly if you look at positions on civilian nuclear power, there’s an acknowledgement that North Korea can have it at some point, and Iran there’s been quite a substantial shift. I recall talking to you just on the trip a month or so ago, where you were very leery of the notion that Iran could continue converting uranium into

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uranium hexafluoride. Now my understanding is the U.S. is supporting a Russian proposal that would allow Iran to continue to convert. (Rice 2005h) The seven interviews certainly were not homogenous in their respective opening questions for generating talk about Iran’s nuclear program, but the heterogeneity in the way the interviewers asked their questions did not prevent them from having similarities. For a presumption to remain accepted knowledge in a communicative exchange, both parties must ratify it. As Chaïm Perelman and L. OlbrechtsTyteca (1969) point out, “When a speaker selects and puts forward the premises that are to serve as foundation for his argument, he relies on his hearers’ adherence to the propositions from which he will start” (p. 65). If a member of an interview rejects a premise, a participant can, in one form or another, apprise the other party of this discord. Excluding the Slavin/ Locker interview, Secretary Rice proceeded to discuss Iran’s nuclear research in terms of nuclear weapons in the other eight interviews. In response to Stephanopoulos’s opening question, which did not characterize Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful or militaristic, Secretary Rice explained “that the world understands that there has to be unity in getting the Iranians to see that they cannot be part of the international system and pursue a nuclear weapon at the same time” (2005a). Rather than asking Rice to elaborate, even for a brief moment, on how she and the Bush administration had come to understand Iran as pursuing nuclear weapons or perhaps why the Islamic Republic would try to achieve such a goal in the first place, Stephanopoulos and the other interviewers did not ask such questions and thus tacitly validated the weapons characterization as fact. Unlike the other interviews, Slavin’s question did not collaborate with Rice in affirming Iran as pursuing a nuclear weapon. Part of what enabled this to occur was that Slavin’s question focused specifically on a civilian understanding of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. By narrowing the discussion to the use of the fuel cycle for civilian energy, Slavin managed to obtain a response that stayed within the parameters she set with her question. Instead of talking about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, Secretary Rice explained that Iran had “a credibility problem with the international community as to the fuel cycle” (2005h). This position was closer to that of the IAEA as the Agency has pushed for greater transparency on the part of Iran and its nuclear program since inspections began in 2003. The claim of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon, one that none of the IAEA reports during and prior to 2005 had substantiated, was not mutually communicated and corroborated by the interviewer and interviewee in this exchange.


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By allowing Secretary Rice to speak of Iran’s pursuing a nuclear weapon without providing evidence, the interviewers demonstrated their lack of concern for forensic rhetoric, or arguments that require an audience to look to the past in order to judge the present (Aristotle 1954, p. 32). The attitude toward Iran’s nuclear program the interviewers and Rice constructed for audiences took on a more epideictic role. Although epideictic rhetoric, from Aristotle to the present, has often been discussed in terms of reinforcing an audience’s values, the shared characteristics of epideictic rhetoric and education that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca identify allow for epideictic discourse’s functions to span beyond the strengthening of values: “In education, whatever its object, it is assumed that if the speaker’s discourse does not always express truths, that is, theses accepted by everyone, it will at least defend values that are not a matter of controversy in the group which commissioned him” (1969, p. 53). Though Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca retain the traditional understanding of epideictic rhetoric as language that instills values, their bringing education into the discussion hints at alternative ways of conceiving epideictic discourse. As Celeste Condit would later provide in her expanded definition of the genre: “Epideictic discourse can be located by its tendency to serve three functional pairs—definition/understanding, display/entertainment, and shaping/ sharing community” (1985, p. 288). The components of this tripartite explanation are applicable to all but the Slavin interview, in that Secretary Rice and the interviewers collaborated in defining and reinforcing an understanding of Iran’s nuclear program. The collaboration between Rice and her interviewers to present Iran as seeking nuclear weapons was displayed on television, radio, and print not necessarily to entertain, but to inform. And through this display of shared knowledge between the interview participants, the interviews worked to bridge Rice and her interlocutors with the different audiences who were listening/reading/watching the interviews. While we must keep in mind what Robert McKenzie (2000) emphasizes in his work on the epideictic discourse of television talk shows—that audiences have the capacity to create their own meaning—an audience member may have difficulty seeing alternative perspectives when the language of the interviewer lacks signals of discord such as follow-up questions that ask for more detail of the grounds upon which the Bush administration’s charges against Iran rested. The more “educational,” apparently unquestionable, information these interviews communicated to audiences may not have determined the perspectives audience members would ultimately take on the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, but the interviews certainly invited audiences to share Rice and the interviewers’ uncorroborated consensus of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon.

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Through this seemingly epideictic construction of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the interview participants, as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca observe of epideictic rhetoric, worked “to strengthen the disposition toward action” (1969, p. 50). Pushing the audience to want action, however, did not take place through “increasing the adherence to the values [the discourse] lauds” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, p. 50), but rather the fear that accompanied the presumption that the interviews presented as truth. Whether audiences were alarmed of the possibility of an “axis of evil” state’s getting its hands on a nuclear weapon or the more general concern of nuclear proliferation, these assumptions provided exigence for the discussion of Iran’s nuclear program. With an absence of forensic arguments and the presence of quasi-epideictic exchanges (the reinforcement of questionable facts, not values) that attempted to secure the perception of Iran’s having a nuclear weapons program, the interviews then turned to deliberative, or future-oriented, arguments that enabled Rice to discuss, with little reflection, what actions the United States would take toward the Islamic Republic. To look backwards was to risk being exposed to contradictions, gaps in knowledge, and other possible obstacles that could have impeded action—something that was problematic for a president who had to keep every possibility on the table.

Exploiting a Topic’s Scope, Evading Questions of American Policy In addition to the presumptions embedded in an opening question for discussion about a particular topic, the direction(s) an interviewer asks an interviewee to look in a question and the direction(s) to which an interviewee actually turns in his or her response has to do with the scope with which a topic is approached. At the National Conference of Editorial Writers, Field asked Rice to speak of Iran in the larger context of India and Pakistan. To avoid falling into a web of contradiction that could lead an audience to question American actions toward Iran, Rice limited the scope of her response: The Iranian nuclear program is a very serious matter. We would have preferred that the NPT had constrained other states as well, but because you weren’t able to constrain states in the past doesn’t mean that you have to stop trying to constrain states in the future, particularly one like Iran that has a very long history and rap sheet when it comes to terrorism.


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This is, after all, probably the most important supplier—important supporter of terrorist rejectionist organizations, for instance, in the Middle East. (2005e) In order to elude the hypocrisy of the United States’ stance on the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs, Rice identified the NPT as the force that failed to constrain India and Pakistan’s rise to nuclear power to shift the responsibility away from the United States and to reinforce President Bush’s position that signing the NPT was not evidence of Iran’s commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. Rice then offered an explanation of the criteria that she and others in the Beltway used to define Iran as a rogue state to refocus the audience’s attention on her negative portrayal of Iran instead of the possible contradictory motivations that have guided the United States to treat Iran, an NPT signatory, differently from India and Pakistan, two non-signatories of the NPT. Secretary Rice’s response to Field’s question was typical of what she had to say when asked to consider American actions against Iran in a manner that went beyond simply keeping all options on the table. Since any question along these lines had to do with the broader topic of American-Iranian relations, Rice avoided limiting the scope of her answer to American actions by shifting the talk away from American policy to exploit the broader topic that included Iran, then refocusing the discussion on Iran’s actions. Through this linguistic maneuvering, Secretary Rice demonstrated that it was not American policy that should be questioned or reconsidered, only that of Iran. Rice used the same tactic in the Slavin/Locker interview. Concerned with the potential impact that “blanket sanctions” as opposed to “targeted sanctions” could have on the Iranian population, Slavin asked whether or not the latter was a better way of achieving change in the Iranian government’s actions, since Iranian citizens would suffer for their government’s actions under blanket sanctions. Secretary Rice responded: Well, obviously nobody has a desire to isolate the Iranian people. That’s not the point. The problem is that the Iranian government is one that pursues policies that are antithetical to the interests of the United States and interests of a stable Middle East. (2005h) Rice went on to highlight other actions of the Iranian government, but spent no time discussing what Slavin asked Secretary Rice to address in the first place. When Slavin interrupted with a “but,” Rice would not cede

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control, saying, “Well, now you’ll just have to let me finish” (2005h). Similarly, Jonathan Karl, contextualizing American-Iranian relations within the nearly three decades of mutual silence between the two, asked, “how do you encourage a country to change you’re not even sitting down and talking to” (Rice, 2005b)? Secretary Rice: “Well, it’s not hard to encourage change in a country when it [Iran] should look around and see that the rest of the region is going to move on” (2005b). Again, it was not about what the United States should do differently, but what Iran should do differently. By using the larger scope of the topic to refocus the discourse, Secretary Rice was able to respond within the parameters of the discussion without necessarily being constrained by the parameters of the question. Though interviewers are not always successful at keeping the responses of interviewees within the bounds of a question, interviewers, in their negotiations for newsworthiness, do have the power to refocus the talk on some element of an interviewee’s broad response. This does not mean that the interviewer must ask questions in a manner that gives the interview the appearance of politicians and the press vying for legitimacy, as Chilton (2004) has observed, but rather interviewers can ask follow-up questions in a way that is benignly information-oriented, not hostile in intent. In five of the nine interviews, Secretary Rice, when speaking about the Iranian nuclear question, reiterated the United States’ commitment to ensuring that Iran lived up to its “international obligations.” None of the interviewers managed to ask one simple question: “What exactly are those international obligations?” According to the November 29, 2004, IAEA Board Resolution, Iran’s obligations were to become more transparent in declaring aspects of its nuclear program, and they were encouraged to halt enrichment activities; the suspension of these activities, though, would serve as a “voluntary confidence building measure, not a legal obligation” (ElBaradei 2004b, p. 2). The call for more transparency and the suspension of enrichment activities did not change by the close of 2005, and the NPT (1970) remained unchanged in its granting signatories “the inalienable right of all Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination” as long as the parties involved allow the IAEA to monitor this development. The interviewers’ failure to inquire about the details of the obligations to which Secretary Rice alluded enabled her to take advantage of the ambiguous relationship between nuclear research and development for civilian and weapons purposes. She could say, as Rice did in the Stephanopoulos/ Jennings interview, that the goal of her European counterparts was “stopping whatever the Iranians are doing” (2005a) because Iran was presumed


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to be enacting the highest violation of the NPT—nuclear proliferation— not the less alarming infraction of incompletely reporting its developments in civilian nuclear technology to the IAEA. Just as the enrichment of uranium for energy or weapons differs in terms of the degree of enrichment, so do the violations of the NPT in terms of the degree of danger. The IAEA, however, did not share the White House’s alarmist language, as the Board of Governors had yet to refer Iran to the UN Security Council since Iran’s nuclear program became an issue of primary concern in 2002. At the National Conference of Editorial Writers, Secretary Rice raised the “obligation” point again, even going so far as to briefly put it in the context of civilian energy without the attending editorialists’ provocation, but instead with the anticipation of a question that could take the talk in a direction unfavorable to the Bush administration’s position: Let’s leave aside the question of why Iran, sitting on top of all that oil with which they sometimes want to threaten, would need civilian nuclear technology. Let’s leave that question aside and let’s note that there is a presumption of access to civilian nuclear technology for states that are in compliance with their Nonproliferation Treaty obligations. But what is at question is whether Iran is, indeed, in compliance with its international obligations in this regard. (2005e) The columnists and Secretary Rice had to “leave aside” the question of civilian nuclear technology because she presumed, yet at the same time gave, the answer to the implied question: Oil-rich Iran did not need such technology, thus Iran was breaking its Treaty obligations as it worked to develop nuclear weapons. To refrain from leaving the question aside could potentially have given presence to a notion that would have worked against the White House’s claim that Iran imports a great deal of fuel for its civilian energy needs and that nuclear energy, unlike fossil fuels, is renewable. If the question of civilian energy and the extent to which a nuclear program could make Iran more self-sufficient in terms of fuel were not left aside, the question of treaty obligations quite possibly could have turned against the United States on the grounds of encouraging the IAEA to discriminatorily enforce the NPT, which is another way of breaching the agreement. Ultimately, Secretary Rice never had to provide a detailed understanding of Iran’s international obligations because the interviewers were, at least in the language of the interviews, already in agreement about Iran’s aims, despite the recorded positions of the IAEA Board of Governors and Director General ElBaradei.

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Image-(Re)Building the US Through Them Although Iran’s obligations remained ambiguous throughout the interviews in which Secretary Rice referenced them, she was anything but unclear about the negative character of the Iranian government as she expounded upon President Bush’s categorization of the Islamic Republic as part of the “axis of evil.” During an interview on CNN, Andrea Koppel asked Secretary Rice whether she agreed with Ambassador John Bolton’s charge that Iran would supply nuclear weapons to terrorists if the former were in possession of them. Rice responded: “Well, whenever you have nuclear weapons in the hands of a state that is irresponsible where it comes to terrorism, that is certainly a concern” (2005g). Although Rice was answering to a hypothetical situation which itself rested on the presumption that Iran was secretly developing nuclear weapons, the idea of Iran’s irresponsibility in areas other than nuclear research and development was an enthymematic component of the response that reinforced the assumption she, her interviewee, and Ambassador Bolton shared. If Iran was irresponsible when it came to terrorism, human rights, democracy, and the other problems the Bush administration identified with Iran, then how could we expect the state to be responsible with the fuel cycle? This position became a lot easier to support when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was voted into office in the summer of 2005. On the Sean Hannity Show, Hannity, as other interviewers and news outlets who do not share his conservative political leanings, made salient what seemed to have defined, at least in the United States, Ahmadinejad’s presidency—his fiery words about Israel: Let me ask about Iran for just a minute here. I mean, first of all, this Iranian President saying that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map. Now comments have been made dismissing the Holocaust as a myth, saying that the Jewish state should be moved as far away as Alaska. (Rice, 2005i) The evil with which President Bush aligned Iran was no longer an amorphous, unidentifiable Other; now it was embodied by President Ahmadinejad whose face had been virtually ubiquitous in American news media. “For what the Orientalist does,” according to Edward Said, “is to confirm the [maniacal, uncivilized] Orient in his readers’ eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions” (1978, p. 65). Fittingly, the New York Times ran an article (not on the front page) reporting that the meaning of President Ahmadinejad’s words, what was translated as “wiping Israel off


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the map,” was debatable while the journalist simultaneously reaffirmed that the wording of the English translation was correct (Brommer 2006, p. A4). Rather than immediately questioning the possible incommensurability of Ahmadinejad’s remarks in what became the prominent translation from Farsi to English, media personalities such as Hannity and actual journalists alike enabled Rice and other members of the Bush administration to use the Iranian President’s language to confirm that Iran was seeking a nuclear weapon though Iran’s nuclear program existed long before Ahmadinejad took office. As Rice remarked following Hannity’s comment, “I think our goal has to be, as a civilized international community, to just condemn this and to take it as a warning about the Iranian regime and about its policies, and to make certain that they are not going to get a nuclear weapon” (2005i). If actual evidence could not be produced of Iran’s nuclear intentions, then the newly elected Iranian President would have to suffice. The argument that Iran was irresponsible with nuclear research and development due to its irresponsibility in other areas of domestic and foreign policy appeared strong because it relied on a network of other presumed truths that gave the claim substance. If an interviewer were to have introduced perspectives that challenged prevailing attitudes toward the Islamic Republic’s record on democracy or human rights, the case that Iran was consistently reckless across the board could have been supplanted by the inconsistent definition of democracy or expectations for a state’s enforcement of human rights that have been used to defend American pressure on the Islamic Republic. With regard to the United States’ charge of Iran’s backing terrorists, the lack of a clear-cut definition of terrorism that is applicable to any state, including the United States, was part of what gave the White House the opportunity to criticize Iran on this matter. As John Collins (2002) points out in his critique of the use of “terrorism” in American political discourse, “any definition of ‘terrorism’ could be used to identify and condemn the action of the United States and many of its allies” (p. 166), but only if these definitions are applied self-reflexively. Similar problems would occur if we were to follow Mahmood Mamdani’s lead and scrutinize the difference between “good” Muslims and “bad” Muslims. According to Mamdani (2005), “good” Muslims are pro-American, but pro-American historically has been the violent support of American foreign initiatives with impunity. “Bad” Muslims are those who strive to achieve modernity autonomously, which is why Iran has been seen as a negative force since the Iranian Revolution, a revolution “that was not only Islamist and anti-Communist but at the same time fervently nationalist, determined to act independently of all foreign influences, particularly the United

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States” (Mamdani 2005, p. 122). In the end, what distinguishes the “good” from the “bad,” supporters of terrorism and freedom fighters, is a state’s openness to American influence, not some normative, religious, or legal sense of “good” and “bad.” To draw attention to this, however, would have potentially undermined the White House’s ability to do to Iran as it saw fit. This self-serving understanding of democracy, human rights, and terrorism was present in Secretary Rice’s response to a point Andrea Mitchell made about Rice’s calling Iran “loathsome” for its human rights abuses, while other states with which the United States was allied remained unscathed. As Mitchell pointed out, “Some of our allies—Egypt, Saudi Arabia—do the same thing without that kind of harsh criticism” (Rice 2005c). Although Mitchell did not introduce this point of view with as much substance as she could have, the move was still commendable because she introduced an alternative position over which her audience could ruminate. But the comment did not go unanswered: Rice: Well, we’ve been very clear that we expect a lot from our friends as well. And we are seeing throughout the Middle East that the conversation is changing about what must be done. That even at the Arab League meetings last year, there was a conversation about reform. That is why when the American President puts something on the agenda of this sort, it begins to change the way that people talk and the way that people behave. But the Iranian regime is special in its internal behavior and in its external behavior, that seeks the nuclear weapon, that is engaged in supporting the very terrorists who are trying to destroy the peace process that we’ve just been talking about. (2005c) Faced with the possibility of appearing hypocritical, Secretary Rice categorized Iran differently from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Whether or not the other states Mitchell highlighted were actually “doing” something was irrelevant because they were “talking” about these human rights issues; “to change the way that people talk,” according to Rice, will change “the way people behave.” More importantly, it was President Bush, the so-called leader of stabilization, who catalyzed Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s willingness to improve their human rights record. Juxtaposed with states that were said to be in the nascent stages of effecting positive change within their borders was the intransigent, destabilizing force of Iran, the state that has resisted American influence for decades. In the words of Edward Said, “For the Orient (‘out there’ towards the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, ‘our’ world” (1978, p. 67).


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Rice’s response to Mitchell, however, did more than try to validate the Bush administration’s stance toward Tehran. Sharing Said’s observation, Wendy Brown (2006) explains that “we do not tolerate what is outside of our reach, what is irrelevant to us, or what we cannot do anything about” (p. 29). She then adds that “tolerance is a selected alternative to actions or reactions of a different sort: rejection, quarantine, prohibition, repression, exile, or extermination” (Brown 2006, p. 29). A state’s being a rogue, consequently, has less to do with the norms of an international community and more to do with the self-interests of the global hegemon. Part of what prevented the United States from labeling Egypt and Saudi Arabia as rogues was their tolerability, their being within the bald eagle’s wing. This rhetorical positioning of Egypt and Saudi Arabia as tolerable and Iran as intolerable was, in the end, a rationale for a sustained American military presence in the region—hegemony veiled in self-generated legitimacy. Though Secretary Rice’s language subtly justified the flexing of American muscle, she emphasized in all of the interviews the Bush administration’s embrace of multilateral diplomacy to mitigate American exceptionalism as exhibited through the unilateralist invasion of Iraq. Throughout the year, she reassured audiences of the Iranian nuclear question’s being resolved diplomatically, that the world’s leaders shared a “common purpose,” and that there was shared suspicion of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Her repetition of Iran’s failure to work with the international community served as a foil to the United States’ cooperation with other Western states and the IAEA. As she said in response to McManus’s inquiry about Iran’s rejection of an American-backed proposition from the EU-3 (France, Britain, and Germany), “Well, the Iranians, I am quite certain, are uncomfortable with the notion that they have failed to split the United States and Europe on this matter” (Rice 2005d). Turning down the deal apparently had nothing to do with problems Iran found with the package, just the Islamic Republic’s living up to its noncooperative, destabilizing role. As Rice continued, she shifted away from answering why the Iranians rejected the EU-3’s offer and focused on illustrating the shared understanding between the United States and Europe with regard to Iran: “So the Iranians are facing a common front. Everybody told President Bush when he was in Europe—President Chirac, Chancellor Schroeder, Prime Minister Blair, President Putin—Iran must not get a nuclear weapon” (2005d). By acknowledging Russia’s commitment, Secretary Rice put a positive spin on the behavior of one of the most difficult obstacles the United States has faced in its efforts to end Iran’s nuclear (weapons) program in an attempt, confirmed by McManus and Schieffer’s silence, to show the American people that it was not just close

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allies that were aligned with the Bush administration’s perspective on Iran, but our former Cold War foe. This tactic was even more evident in Secretary Rice’s list of “everybody” who told the president that Iran must not acquire a nuclear weapon: “President Chirac, Chancellor Schroeder, Prime Minister Blair, President Putin” (2005d). Rice’s list began with one of the staunchest opponents to Operation Iraqi Freedom, thus sandwiching Prime Minister Blair within leaders who were not the most eager to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq. By connecting American interests with that of former presidents Chirac and Putin, Rice sustained her positioning of the United States as a multilateralist stabilizer and Iran as an intransigent force for instability.

Control of the Discourse and Its Consequences As Secretary Rice reached out to the American people during 2005, she was doing more than speaking on behalf of the president; she was aiming to shape the knowledge citizens could use to deliberate over the friction between the United States and Iran in a context favorable to President Bush’s stance toward the Islamic Republic. If presidential rhetoric, as Zarefsky contends, “defines political reality” (2004, p. 611), this cannot happen without forces, without voices, that buttress the president’s ability to do so. While the president is indeed empowered by “his prominent political position and his access to the means of communication” (Zarefsky 2004, p. 611), scholars must also consider, as rhetoricians have shown, the other powerful voices that provide support for, challenges against, or distractions from the president’s messages. Nor can rhetoricians and discourse analysts forget that though the Oval Office bestows upon its occupant a substantial boost in ethos, the person who sits behind the Resolute desk can subsequently squander that power, as President Bush seemed to have done according to his job approval ratings throughout the year. Secretary Rice, through her own position as an important political figure with far-reaching media access, sought to arrange the informational landscape in which the president’s rhetoric could more smoothly operate. By emphasizing those aspects of Iranian policy with which the Bush administration took issue, while at once providing no details of the nature of Iran’s “international obligations” or of the evidence in support of perceiving Iran as a nuclear proliferator, Rice used her media platform to render audiences more susceptible to the president’s uncorroborated charges against Iran which he had made in all of his post-9/11 State of the Union addresses and elsewhere.


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The secretary of state, however, was not alone in constructing the knowledge made available to audiences, as the interviewers consciously or unconsciously cooperated in the process. Granted an interview, like conversation, requires cooperation among its participants in order for talk to even transpire, the issue is not that the interviewers cooperated with Secretary Rice to enable an actual interview to take place, but rather how that cooperation unfolded on Secretary Rice’s terms. The failure to ask the secretary of state to provide support for many of her claims regarding Iran’s nuclear program completely disregarded lessons that should have been learned after the invasion of Iraq. ABC, CNN, CBS, USA Today, and other news outlets should provide communicative environments in which statespersons justify their positions, not serve as quasi-epideictic spaces in which political leaders can present debatable assumptions as truth and repeatedly reinforce that “truth” with the help of their interviewers. To be fair, there are some unwritten constraints that influence the questions that can be asked during an interview such as the fear of “appearing to be crusading for a cause” (Bennett et al. 2007, p. 7). But there are ways of asking challenging questions that divorce an interviewer from what is asked. In the Andrea Mitchell interview, for instance, Mitchell sought a response to a recorded comment an Iranian official made about Secretary Rice. The same could have been done by asking Rice to respond to the IAEA’s uncertainty, a move that could have possibly pushed the secretary to address this disagreement between the United States and those who have overseen the inspections of Iran’s nuclear program. Unfortunately, Rice’s repetition of the international community’s unity apparently sufficed. Even more troubling than Secretary Rice’s assertion of unsupported arguments was her lack of reflection on American actions. Though some of the interviewers, such as Jonathan Karl and Barbara Slavin, tried to lead the secretary of state down this path, there was no looking back for Secretary Rice, since to do so could have potentially limited the expansive executive power Bush had enjoyed since September 11, 2001. If Americans were encouraged to consider the White House’s (potential) actions in the context of past mistakes, they may be less inclined to look kindly upon the idea of the president’s keeping all options on the table. However, the interviews, often with the interviewers’ complicity, worked to keep America’s eyes on an ominous future in which an irrational, incorrigible Iran possesses a nuclear weapon, which necessitated that Americans remain occupied with what the president could do to prevent that future from happening. When the places the public turns to for information construct knowledge without reconsideration or rethinking the past and present, they have failed in

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educating the public in a way that enables Americans to realize their potential to check the power of their leaders. When the press works to provide audiences with alternative ideas that may or may not cohere with the White House’s positions, news organizations help audience’s deliberate on grounds that are not necessarily shaped by the president and his political surrogates. Although this did not happen in the interviews with Secretary Rice, journalists are willing to make exceptions, as the analysis of an interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shows in the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Verbal Tug-of-War: An Interview with the Enemy

Though the interviewers in the previous chapter failed to challenge Secretary Rice, their unwillingness to do so with an American political leader does not necessarily translate to interviews with foreign officials—particularly those who have been deemed enemies. Tamar Liebes, Zohar Kampf, and Shoshana Blum-Kulka (2008) aptly refer to such communicative interactions as “interviewing the enemy,” a genre of news interview, the scholars argue, that is characterized by an overly deferential interviewer who allows the interviewee to dominate the floor or an extremely antagonistic interviewer who pushes the interview to a communication breakdown (p. 326). Although their observations are sound, the characteristics Liebes and her colleagues ascribe to the “interviewing the enemy” genre are not applicable to all cases. In 2006, Mike Wallace interviewed Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes and used an interview style that fell between the extreme deference and hostility poles that Liebes, Kampf, and BlumKulka attribute to interviews with the enemy. This middle road enabled the interview to move forward despite the occasional communicative impasses that emerged during the discourse and gave salience to the debatable quality of Ahmadinejad’s positions—an element of the interview that was missing from the interviews with Secretary Rice. While Wallace’s language and actions mediated his interviewee’s language, Ahmadinejad worked to project an appealing ethos, partially indebted to Wallace’s behavior, and offered perspectives on Iran’s nuclear program such as the United States’ earlier support of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the question of American attempts to monopolize nuclear energy—perspectives that were absent in the Rice interviews. Perhaps most interesting in this exchange is Ahmadinejad’s seemingly unconscious treatment of Iran’s nuclear program and his bellicose language toward Israel as separate issues. This rhetorical move indirectly countered claims that his alleged aspiration to “wipe Israel off the map” is evidence of Iran’s seeking a nuclear weapon.

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In addition to my analysis of the Ahmadinejad interview, I also examine a public’s response to the interview in a way that speaks to Ron Scollon’s caveat concerning mediated discourse: news media communicates information to audiences, but audiences take up that information in different ways and in different spaces (1998, p. 5). The Internet offers myriad spaces where everyday people can blog, vlog, comment on message boards, and interact with each other in a variety of ways. If the public sphere, as Peter Dahlgren (2005) writes, “is understood as a constellation of communicative spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates— ideally in an unfettered manner—and also the formation of political will (i.e., public opinion)” (p. 148), then Dahlgren and many other scholars’ turn to the Internet to understand publics within a larger public sphere is necessary since it provides a number of digital spaces where people can gather to discuss civic issues. Four days before the airing of the interview, CBS posted a transcript of the interview on its website and opened up a message board for its audience to voice their opinions. Using stasis theory, I categorize many of the arguments communicated on the message board and determine the major points of contention expressed in the posted comments. Members of the 60 Minutes audience who shared their thoughts showed that there was no clear consensus over how they defined Iran’s nuclear program. The participants were also concerned with politics of space, as many criticized CBS for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak in such a forum, while others chided Wallace for his interview style. Furthermore, the posts illustrated how misleading opinion polls and surveys can be when findings are used to exaggerate Americans’ perceptions of Iran as a nuclear threat by flattening out the nuances of a public’s opinions.

Methodology: Gathering Public Opinion Through a Public’s Discourse To conjoin analyses of the 60 Minutes interview with Ahmadinejad and the discourse on CBS’s message board helps to prevent overstating the effects of mediated discourse on both the CBS audience and the larger conglomeration of publics Americans constitute. Considering the communication on the message board also provides an alternative to public opinion polls on Iran and its nuclear program that are far from infallible. Scholars from a number of disciplines have long criticized public opinion polls and surveys, citing problems to which the polls on Iran have not been immune. J. Michael Hogan (1997) contends that opinion polls are ensconced in a

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rhetoric of science that has and continues to shield polls from criticism of their failures and allows them to “increasingly shape both the agenda and the outcomes of public debate” (pp. 161–62). According to Douglas Walton (2007), language choices such as the definition of terms and the wording of questions influence participants’ responses in a manner that decreases the accuracy of polling results (pp. 229–49). With regard to surveys, Herbert Clark and Michael Schober (1992) argue that it is not just the wording of a question that affects responses, but “how the question is introduced, what questions come before and after, what answers are allowed, and much, much more” (p. 15). Even the layout of a survey, as Maria Sanchez (1992) points out, has significant effects on the choices respondents make (p. 216). While no form of public opinion gathering is perfect, various public sphere theories provide grounds for articulating alternative ways for doing so. In January 2006, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that “[seven] in 10 Americans favor international economic sanctions aimed at dissuading Iran from enriching uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons” (Cohen 2006). The following month, a USA Today/CNN Gallup poll showed 41 percent of those polled were “somewhat concerned” that the United States would not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and 50 percent thought it “very likely” that Iran would supply a terrorist organization with a nuclear weapon to be used against the United States if the Islamic Republic were able to produce one (2006). Another Gallup poll of the same month indicated that Iran had taken up the mantle of “America’s greatest enemy” as 31 percent of those polled placed the threat of the Islamic Republic above that of Iraq and North Korea (Saad 2007). Though the polls communicated some Americans’ anxiety about Iran and its nuclear program, the results reflected more of the rhetoric the pollsters made available to the participants than the linguistic choices of the participants themselves. Sensational language such as “America’s greatest enemy” is a superlative supplied by the pollsters, not the people polled. The polls cited above also asked questions that presumed Iran was developing nuclear weapons or conflated a weapons program with one for civilian energy. With an implied definition of Iran’s nuclear program, pollsters were able to ask questions that focused Americans’ attention on what should be done to disrupt Iran’s nuclear efforts—moves that paralleled Rice’s rhetoric in the interviews discussed in the previous chapter. For example, the ABC News/Washington Post poll asked participants: “To prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology, would you support or oppose” sanctions from the international community or an American bombing campaign (Cohen 2006)? The question not only encouraged participants to see Iran’s

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nuclear program as a problem that must be dealt with, but it also suggested that any type of Iranian nuclear program is a threat. Because the polls were fixated on what to do about Iran’s nuclear development, the question of how to define Iran’s nuclear program was never raised. One could argue that previous polls would have asked people to consider the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, but the earliest poll to address the nuclear debate during the Bush years failed to do so as well. With the International Atomic Energy Agency in the middle of inspecting Iran’s nuclear facilities, a 2003 Los Angeles Times poll asked participants what should be done about Iran’s nuclear research and development rather than inquiring about whether Americans perceived Iran’s nuclear program as a civilian or weapons program or both. The results, like those from 2006, were action-oriented as “[exactly] half said the United States should take military action against Iran if it continues to move toward nuclear weapon development; 36% disagreed” (Brownstein, 2003). What may have been part of the reason for a lack of questions that asked participants how to define Iran’s nuclear program was that Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not presented to the American people as a major priority until President Bush aligned Iran with the “axis of evil” in 2002. When Bush did so, he defined Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program and pollsters apparently accepted that definition as demonstrated by their decision to avoid questions that asked individuals to define the nature of Iran’s nuclear efforts. There are other approaches, however, to public opinion gathering that embrace a public’s own discourse instead of limiting a public to the discursive parameters set by an opinion poll. Although Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991) is taken to task for a number of reasons, he nevertheless highlights some important ideas for thinking about publics and their opinions. In his historical account of a bourgeois public sphere, Habermas roots this public in the connection between private enterprise and the emerging publicized communication, or news, on commodity exchanges (p. 16). Gathering in seventeenth-century coffeehouses, private citizens (which at the time meant property-holding, affluent, white males) would bring their individual perspectives and their common knowledge grounded in the publications of the nascent news industry to engage in rational debate about matters of public concern. For Habermas, a public is given life through spatial and informational common ground. For this study, the Ahmadinejad interview provides the informational common ground that people could take up in a variety of ways; the CBS message board is the common space that, though not physically shared in the sense of a coffeehouse, enabled individuals to communicate with each other. Writing of blogs in a way that

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is equally applicable to online message boards, David Perlmutter (2008) describes them as “voluntary associations of individuals who could previously have associated so intimately only in the union hall, at the town meeting, or among the mob on the street” (p. 10). By providing an interview with Ahmadinejad and a space for audience members to voice their perspectives, CBS laid the common ground needed for a public to grow and discursively express itself. What Habermas saw in the development of the bourgeois public sphere would later inform his work in The Theory of Communicative Action (1984) which relies on normative, truth, and intentional values that serve as grounds for communicative interactions that are geared toward reaching a consensus among two or more people (p. 86). Though Habermas’s theoretical contributions have influenced a number of works such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s Why Deliberative Democracy? (2004) which makes similar claims for publics to be geared toward consensus (pp. 4–7), ideal models of public communicative exchanges, as Nancy Fraser (1999) posits, are incapable of accounting for the “limits of actually existing democracy” (p. 111). As Diana Carlin and her colleagues’ study (2005) of discussion groups and online discussion boards during the 2004 Presidential election demonstrates, the communication that transpired in those various spaces did not fully meet normative criteria of healthy public deliberation. While I applaud efforts such as Carlin and her collaborators’ work to better understand the “health” of American public deliberation, my analysis of the CBS message board is to better understand the opinions circulating in the discourse, not to measure how well the audience’s rhetoric adheres to externally imposed criteria. In Vernacular Voices (1999), Gerard Hauser attempts to move away from imposing the parameters of an ideal public on existing ones in order to understand publics through their discursive practices. Like Habermas, Hauser grounds publics in their communication and contends that to rhetorically understand publics is to consider “not only formal statements of officials, leaders, and spokespersons or of institutional voices, such as the press, but vernacular exchanges among the actively engaged segment of society” (1999, p. 276). Hauser’s call for more scholarly attention to be paid to the discourse of different publics, however, is not without its problems, as others have pointed out the very little attention that Hauser himself actually devotes to voices aside from those of political elites in his work. Dana Cloud (1999) also criticizes Vernacular Voices for its “tendency to attribute outcomes of public contestation to rhetorical choices rather than other, material factors” (p. 212). Furthermore, Hauser, despite claims of

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not imposing ideal characteristics on publics, does so as he outlines their “rhetorical criteria”: open access, discursively engaged individuals, the discussion of contextualized issues, people who believe they can discursively effect change, and a space in which other views are tolerated (1999, pp. 77–80). In addition to Cloud’s critique of the study’s rhetorical determinism, spaces which seem to have open access are still governed by sociocultural factors that exclude certain people or discourage their wanting to enter a particular space; there are countless people, for instance, who could not voice their opinion on the CBS message board simply because they did not have a computer. Also, the idea that other views must be tolerated rules out people who engage with other social actors whose views the former finds completely unacceptable, yet they nevertheless discursively interact. Moreover, tolerance itself is problematic because, as Wendy Brown (2006) argues, it serves a disciplinary function in liberal democratic societies in order to control worldviews that challenge prevailing ones that keep a society whole (p. 71). Though Hauser’s project has its pitfalls, the key point that he makes—the need to analyze a public’s own discourse rather than just that of elites—is significant and can be achieved if one rearticulates how to approach such language. If we draw selectively from Habermas and view a public as people sharing a common space in which they discuss issues on some form of common ground, then our eyes will be directed primarily toward a public’s discourse without overstating rhetoric’s power (per Cloud’s criticism), bowing to tolerance, or ignoring the invisible boundaries that limit access. The question, then, is how to approach this language in order to extract the different opinions expressed within a public; I emphasize the multiplicity of opinions a given public may have to acknowledge the diversity of perspectives the individuals who constitute a public likely hold, rather than attributing one of many positions to a public at the exclusion of other ideas expressed. In his discussion of Vernacular Voices’ lack of vernacular discourse, Kendall Phillips (2001) attributes this absence to a more systemic problem in rhetorical studies: “Despite recent interests in vernacular discourse, the methodological tools and inclinations of rhetoric are still largely geared towards the analysis of ‘official,’ dare I say ‘public,’ texts” (p. 58). Analyses of official discourse indeed constitute recurrent objects of analysis in rhetorical studies, though many rhetoricians have studied unofficial sites of language such as the rhetoric of social movements. Despite the field’s proclivity to study the rhetoric of the powerful, there are rhetorical tools available for examining the diversity of arguments produced within a public, namely stasis theory. Stasis theory, as discussed in

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Chapter 2, provides a way of classifying arguments according to separate, yet connected, stases or points of disagreement. Unlike other rhetoricians who recognize only three stases, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor (1983) identify four: fact/definition, cause/effect, quality, and action. Fact/definition arguments include claims that address ontological questions, which at once entail a definition of whatever it is whose existence is being debated (p. 140). Cause/effect arguments have to do with what led to the existence of something and the results of that existence; quality arguments concern value judgments attributed to the issue under scrutiny; and action arguments encompass perspectives on what to do, if anything, about the issue being debated. With the stases, the arguments members of a public communicate to each other can be identified in a structured way that is flexible enough to capture the variety of ideas conveyed without limiting people’s voices to predetermined responses that one would see in an opinion poll. Through a count of the different arguments that may occur in each stasis, we can also get an understanding of the major points of disagreement within a public to open up the discourse to analysis that extends beyond the analytical limits of stasis theory. Put differently, stasis theory can help map out the contours of a public’s discourse so that we can begin to dig deeper into a public’s claims, the implications of the circulating points of disagreements, and other elements of the disourse. But before using stasis theory to analyze the 60 Minutes audience’s posts on the message board, I examine the arguments President Ahmadinejad made in the interview and compare Mike Wallace’s interview style with those used in the interviews with Secretary Rice. Turning a rhetorical and discourse analytic eye to the interview also enables me to juxtapose an academic reading of the interview with the various perspectives on the message board to avoid amplifying the effects of the interview’s discourse on the audience.

A Discursively Agonistic 60 Minutes Interview Elected during the summer of 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never shied away from opportunities to engage with the American president, press, and people. On May 9, 2006, Ahmadinejad (2006a) sent an 18-page letter to President Bush that pointed out what he believed to be Bush’s hypocrisy with regard to his Christian values and his foreign policy, critiqued the invasion of Iraq, and lamented the US government’s treatment of detainees, among a number of other issues. Ahmadinejad also inquired, “Why is it that any technological and scientific

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achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime?” (2006a). Through this question, Ahmadinejad indirectly addressed the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program by identifying the roots of the ongoing tension between the United States and Iran with Israeli influence on American policy. The president concluded the letter with a call for President Bush to join the world’s people in their struggles against governmental corruption, disparities in wealth, and other global problems. When Bush publicly commented on the letter, he said, “It looks like it did not answer the main question that the world is asking and that is, ‘When will you get rid of your nuclear program?’ ” (quoted in Adair 2006). At least in the public eye, this was where the White House’s recognition of the letter ended. Later in November 2006, Ahmadinejad sent a letter to the American people via the press, in which he explained that his disdain for the White House’s policies did not detract from his positive feelings toward the American people who are “Godfearing, truth-loving, and justice-seeking” people (2006b). In an attempt to promote friendship between Iranian and American citizens and to counter portrayals of him as anti-American, rather than anti-American government, Ahmadinejad identified what he saw as the many good qualities of American and Iranian peoples, while at once criticizing the Bush administration for its actions. How Americans and the press responded to his letters are the makings of another project, but what is important for the present purposes is that Ahmadinejad has not been afraid to communicate his ideas to American leaders, news media, or people since becoming president of the Islamic Republic. When doing so, he, being the politician that he is, demonstrates an awareness of the need to construct an ethos that counters the one that saturates the American media—a warmongering, anti-American Iranian leader. Throughout 2006, Ahmadinejad also partook in interviews with USA Today, Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Brian Williams on NBC’s Nightly News, and Anderson Cooper on CNN. Of these four, I chose to focus on the 60 Minutes interview because CBS provided an online space for its audience members to respond to the interview, which enabled me to discuss both the discourse in Wallace and Ahmadinejad’s interaction and the language on the message board to better understand a public’s opinion that shared the interview as a source of information. Ahmadinejad’s interviews with Wallace and other members of the American press are part of a larger genre of news interviews that Tamar Liebes, Zohar Kampf, and Shoshana BlumKulka (2008) refer to as “interviewing the enemy” (p. 311). According to the scholars, what gave rise to this genre of news interview are the prevalence

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of interviews in news media and the expansion of available news outlets to audiences on a global scale that have encouraged journalists to increase the range of official sources to whom they turn for information. Liebes and her colleagues posit that these interviews are “bound to fail at two ends of the same continuum of control—with an overzealous interviewer taking over the interview, putting the interviewee totally on the defensive, or with an over-deferent interviewer fully abandoning the floor to the interviewee” (2008, p. 326). Though the US and Iran’s mutual antagonism precedes both Bush and Ahmadinejad, to categorize interviews with the Iranian president as an “interview with the enemy” is appropriate given the circumstances: the White House’s charges of Iranian nuclear weapons development, of Iran as a destabilizing force in the Middle East, of aiding terrorists, and other allegations all help to constitute Ahmadinejad as an enemy of the United States, even if the criteria for enemy status was determined by political leaders, not the American people. Though the Wallace interview fits the enemy interview genre, it does not share the discursive characteristics that Liebes, Kampf, and Blum-Kulka attribute to the genre. Rather than being “overdeferential” or overzealous, Wallace’s interview style can be located somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, as he aggressively asked questions, pursued answers with follow-up questions, and repeatedly interrupted Ahmadinejad, all while ceding the floor to the Iranian president. On the specific topic of Iran’s nuclear program, Wallace took a similar middleground approach, as he did not outright call Iran’s nuclear efforts a weapons program, but certainly implied it with his questioning. The 60 Minutes interview with Ahmadinejad includes the communicative exchanges between Wallace and Ahmadinejad and Wallace’s narration of the interview, through which he worked to frame the communicative event. As Steven Clayman (1991) explains, the opening sequence of interviews helps to establish an interviewee’s ethos (pp. 61–63), though that ethos can change throughout the course of an interview. Helping to establish Ahmadinejad as “the enemy,” Wallace’s opening narrative draws on the same themes that typically accompany the Iranian president’s name in American news media: When Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks out candidly— and he does it a lot—he scares a lot of people. He’s said more than once that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust is an overblown fairytale. Interviewing him in Tehran this past week, it became apparent that he sees the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah—that militia Iran has long supported—as part of a larger battle between the

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U.S. and a militant Islam for control of the Middle East. (Ahmadinejad, 2006c) To censure Wallace’s initial construction of Ahmadinejad’s ethos is difficult, given that he is citing Ahmadinejad’s own (questionably translated) words. Despite the potential incommensurability in translating the president’s comments, it is likely that Ahmadinejad’s fiery public persona would have been present in the minds of American viewers even if Wallace had not regurgitated the president’s perspectives on Israel and the Holocaust. Wallace, however, did refrain from referring to Hezbollah as a terrorist group—as the Bush administration often called the organization—thus introducing his interviewee in a way that did not necessarily reinforce the notion of Ahmadinejad as a terrorist-supporting political leader. Though the opening narrative paints an inauspicious portrait of the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad managed to present himself as an even-keeled political leader, an image in stark contrast to portrayals of him elsewhere as a madman. Because the interview took place during the Israel-Hezbollah War in the summer of 2006, the interview with Ahmadinejad addressed this conflict. For the first speaker heard in the actual interview to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer, it would seem that the person in control of this interview was Ahmadinejad, because he was presented as simply talking, though not necessarily in response to a question Wallace asked. The first comment audiences heard was Ahmadinejad criticizing the United States and Britain. After a brief interruption on Wallace’s part, the dialogue continued: Ahmadinejad: They’re providing state of the art military hardware to the Zionists and they are throwing their full support behind Israel. We believe that this threatens the future of all peoples including the American and European peoples. So, we are asking why the American government is blindly supporting this murderous regime . . . Wallace: Wait, wait, wait, wait. (2006c) Here, Wallace interrupted Ahmadinejad for a second time, and the interview had barely gotten started. On multiple occasions throughout the exchange, Wallace interrupted the Iranian president, often waving his hands to hush Ahmadinejad so that he could present an alternative perspective. In this particular case, Wallace cut Ahmadinejad short to ask a series of questions about Iran and Hezbollah:

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Wallace: Who supports Hezbollah? Who has given Hezbollah hundreds of millions of dollars for years? Who has given Hezbollah Iranian-made missiles and rockets that is making, that are making all kinds . . . Ahmadinejad: (speech not translated) Wallace: May I ask my question please, sir? Ahmadinejad: Are you the representative of the Zionist regime or a journalist? (2006c) Wallace’s willingness to ask his questions in such an aggressive way contradicts what Liebes, Kampf, and Blum-Kulka associate with enemy-interviews performed in the interviewee’s home country: that an interviewer will not be tough on a foreign leader when the interview is on that leader’s turf (2008, p. 319). Interviewing Ahmadinejad in Tehran, Wallace appeared perfectly fine with challenging the Iranian president and bringing in perspectives that contradicted those of his interviewee. The problem is that the viewpoint Wallace inserted into the discourse reinforced a binary—Iran versus Israel (or the United States)—that Ahmadinejad immediately challenged when he asked Wallace if he was a Zionist or a journalist. If Wallace had framed his questions in a way that highlighted a third point of view that emphasized the destructive influence of both the United States and Iran on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, Ahmadinejad’s rejoinder may have been different and Wallace could have shown himself as taking the high road rather than appearing to side with the American or Israeli governments. Wallace’s interruptions, nevertheless, were refreshing, though some may argue that such an interview style does not show the proper respect due a head of state. The interruptions were particularly significant, because Wallace made salient to audiences that Ahmadinejad’s arguments were debatable; this was a sharp change of pace from the exchanges with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her interviewers, who allowed her to say what she wanted without question. What likely enabled Wallace to have more freedom in his interview approach to Ahmadinejad as opposed to the journalists who interviewed Rice is that American journalists and their employers must maintain an ongoing relationship with American government officials in order secure future interviews. Wallace’s interview with the Iranian president, on the other hand, would likely be his last. As the interview proceeded, Ahmadinejad elaborated on what he observed as Hezbollah’s right to protect itself on its homeland and Israel’s violation of Lebanese territory, while Wallace interjected to point out that Hezbollah was committing violent acts as well. The president then began to explain how the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) was not fulfilling

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its duty to bring peace and justice to the world. Rather, the UNSC, according to Ahmadinejad, “is there to safeguard the interests of the British and the Americans” (2006c). From this point, the interview segued into talk about the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program: Wallace Narrating: And he [Ahmadinejad] told us the Security Council is also doing America’s bidding by trying to prevent Iran from developing nuclear energy. The Security Council is demanding that Iran stop all uranium enrichment by the end of this month which Iran is refusing to do. (Ahmadinejad 2006c) Wallace’s transition into the nuclear question did not set up the program as one geared towards nuclear weapons development, but instead laid out the current situation in a fairly neutral manner. By doing so, Wallace moved into discussion about the nuclear issue on grounds that did not reinforce a weapons definition of the program as many of Rice’s interviewers did. When the interview resumed, Ahmadinejad was in the middle of saying that Bush would not stop Iran’s progress toward nuclear energy. Wallace then asked Ahmadinejad to say more: Ahmadinejad: We want to have access to nuclear technology. We want to produce fuel. Do you not think that the most important issue of the world of tomorrow that is will be energy? Wallace: Emhem. Ahmadinejad: We think that Mr. Bush’s team and the parties that support him want to monopolize energy resources in the world because once they have that they can impose their opinions, points of view, policies on other nations. And of course line their own pockets. (2006c) Ahmadinejad’s argument comprised two claims that Wallace could have asked him to further substantiate: Iran’s need for fuel and the United States’ alleged attempt to monopolize nuclear power. First, the position that Iran needed nuclear energy for fuel was a claim that Rice challenged during one of her interviews, as she contended that Iran did not need nuclear technology, given its vast oil reserves. If asked to say more about Iran’s energy needs, Ahmadinejad would have likely stressed Iran’s energy dependence since 40 percent of the country’s energy is imported, as reported by Reuters (Webb 2006). And if Ahmadinejad were especially rhetorically savvy, he would have directed his rhetoric toward Americans who were likely experiencing the problems that arise when energy is controlled by other states, as

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gas prices climbed during the summer of 2006 (Mufson 2006). Second, the position that the Bush administration wanted to monopolize nuclear energy was defensible, since Bush, in 2004, proposed that non-nuclear states be denied autonomous nuclear facilities and instead “the world’s leading nuclear exporters should ensure that [non-nuclear] states have reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors” (2004b). Wallace, however, redirected the topic of the discourse to a simplified version of the nuclear issue, much like the news stories in Chapter 2: Wallace: President Bush has said, vowed, he will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Do you believe him? Ahmadinejad: Basically, we are not looking for, working for, the bomb. The problem that President Bush has in his mind is he wants to solve everything with bombs. The time of the bomb is in the past. It’s behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue, and cultural exchanges. (2006c) Wallace’s simplification of the matter did nothing to better inform the 60 Minutes audience, because all Ahmadinejad really had to say in response to Bush’s vow was that Iran was not seeking a weapon. Having an interviewee respond to another person’s comments is often used in interviews, but this moment would have been more informative for the 60 Minutes audience if Wallace had asked Ahmadinejad to consider more specific issues rather than broad, unsubstantial statements; the Rice interviewers also failed to capitalize on this discursive element of news interviews. What if, for example, Wallace asked Ahmadinejad to respond to specific evidence the Bush administration cited to support its charge of Iran’s developing a nuclear weapon? The response audience’s would have received could have been more fruitful than Ahmadinejad’s mere disavowal of nuclear proliferation. To ask such a question, though, would require that actual evidence about Iran’s alleged development of nuclear weapons be made available in the first place, which was, and still remains, not the case. Following Ahmadinejad’s response, Wallace narrated, “But dialogue and cultural exchanges do not sound like his policy toward Israel” (2006c). As Wallace turned the topic toward Iran-Israel relations, he implied a weapons definition of Iran’s nuclear program despite his earlier efforts to divorce himself from the issue: “Israel, you have said time and again, must be wiped off the map. Please explain why. And what is it that Iran’s doing about that?” (Ahmadinejad 2006c). Though Wallace did not say so explicitly, his question was phrased in a way that allowed audiences to infer a connection between Iran’s nuclear program and Ahmadinejad’s wanting to wipe Israel

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off of the map as the topic of Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel immediately followed talk of the nuclear program. And if Ahmadinejad were developing a more reasonable persona for an American audience during the course of the interview, Wallace’s asking Ahmadinejad to address these comments was an effective way to remind the audience of what may have weighed heavily in their minds about Ahmadinejad before hearing him speak. To Wallace’s dismay, Ahmadinejad wanted to continue with his talk on Iran’s nuclear program: Ahmadinejad: Will you allow me to finish with the nuclear dossier first. Wallace: You’ve finished with that. Ahmadinejad: (speech not translated) Wallace: You’ve finished with that, please. Ahmadinejad: No it’s not finished, sir. Wallace: Okay. Ahmadinejad: We are just beginning. Wallace: Hoho. Well I’m, that’s what I was afraid of. (2006c) What is interesting, aside from the numerous interruptions, is that Wallace wanted Ahmadinejad to answer a question that was phrased as an implication of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons to bring to fruition Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel, yet Wallace did not want Ahmadinejad to continue with the nuclear dossier. If the nuclear program and the fiery language about Israel were somehow related, as Wallace insinuated, then it would seem that Ahmadinejad would need to continue what he was saying about Iran’s nuclear program. But Ahmadinejad resisted the conflation of the issues, which could lead one to infer that Iran’s nuclear program might actually have nothing to do with the president’s hatred of Israel. After Wallace reluctantly ceded the floor to Ahmadinejad, the president contended that the United States was against Iran’s progress. When Wallace disagreed, Ahmadinejad further explicated his perspective: Ahmadinejad: Well, I’m going to explain. Before the [Islamic] Revolution, the Germans, French, American governments, and the Canadian government had signed contracts with us to produce nuclear fuel inside Iran. But immediately after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, their opposition started. Right now, they are opposed to our nuclear technology. Now why is that? (2006c) When the president finished, Wallace narrated: “Because the US is convinced that nuclear energy is just a smoke screen. That what Iran really

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wants is the bomb. Then I tried to get the president back to his most inflammatory statement” (Ahmadinejad 2006c). Though the narration offered an answer to Ahmadinejad’s question, it lacked the historical depth in which Ahmadinejad’s comment was grounded. What Ahmadinejad implied is that once Iran asserted its independence from foreign influence, including America’s, its nuclear program, which European and North American states once supported, was and still is portrayed as a threat. For Wallace to acknowledge this point in some way would have helped legitimize Ahmadinejad’s earlier claim about the United States wanting to control Iran—and other nations—since American-Iranian relations were severed after the November 1979 American Embassy hostage crisis in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. In the end, Wallace stuck to his position as interviewer—as he should have—and pressed Ahmadinejad to answer for the Israel comments. However, the shift to Ahmadinejad’s controversial views of Israel redirected the audience’s attention away from what one would assume to be the more pressing issue of Iran’s nuclear program that the UNSC was threatening with sanctions nearly two weeks before the interview (United Nations Security Council 2006). Rather than focusing on the nuclear program that the White House could use to justify American military mobilization like it did earlier with spurious WMD charges against Iraq, Wallace chose to stay on the topic of what could likely be nothing more than an empty threat in spite of the very real consequences that could result from the tension between Washington, DC and Tehran over the latter’s nuclear research and development. As Wallace and Ahmadinejad’s adversarial interview proceeded, Ahmadinejad managed to keep his cool. Later in the interview, Wallace told the president to provide brief answers, but Ahmadinejad replied by pointing out that Wallace’s long questions required equally long answers. The president even suggested that the interview be brought to an end if Wallace did not have the patience to hear what he had to say; his suggestion, however, was not offered in a manner indicative of someone who had lost his temper, but reflected the constant tug-of-war for discursive control of an interview that could not continue unless both parties were on board. Wallace sarcastically humbled himself to help the interview stay afloat, and they eventually moved on to the question of Iranian involvement in the violence against US soldiers in Iraq. Ultimately, what the interview displayed to the audience was a linguistic exchange replete with challenges issued from both interview participants, an Ahmadinejad who appeared more reasonable than how he was typically portrayed in light of his provocative comments about Israel (whether the translation is correct or not), and a discussion of the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program that

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Wallace managed to reduce from a complex issue to an unsubstantiated nuclear weapons/nuclear energy binary. Though the interview did not share the discursive characteristics of the enemy interview genre (e.g., having an overly deferent or overly hostile interviewer) as Liebes, Kampf, and Blum-Kulka explain, Wallace’s interview style and Ahmadinejad’s ability to deal with Wallace’s approach with an even temper demonstrates the diversity of discursive possibilities in this genre of news interview. These conclusions, however, are from a rhetorical and discursive analytic perspective. To further complicate this study and to better understand a public’s opinions in response to this interview, the next section takes an in-depth look at the rhetoric circulating on the CBS online message board.

Using Stasis Theory to Map Out a Public’s Opinions Several days before the airing of Mike Wallace’s interview with President Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes, CBS provided a transcript of the interview and allowed the general public to post comments. Because there are over 3,000 posts, I examined the first 400 comments from when the interview transcript was initially publicized on August 9, 2006, and the first 400 comments that followed the August 13, 2006, airing of the interview on 60 Minutes. By examining posts from the two dates, one can observe the public’s reaction to both CBS’s textual representation of the interview and the televised version. To capture some of the ideas communicated in this space, I understood the concept of argument in a broad sense so as to avoid overlooking unsupported claims. From the adjectives used to describe President Ahmadinejad to more fully developed perspectives, I categorized the arguments that emerged on the message board, counted them as they occurred in different posts, and used the stases to categorize them in a way that illuminates the primary disagreements (See Tables 4.1 and 4.2). The numbers that identify the frequency with which certain arguments occurred are based on the posts, not the individuals who made the comments. For instance, Table 4.1 shows that eighteen posts identified Israel as the cause of the United States’ tension with Iran and other states in the Middle East. However, this claim was argued in different ways by one screen name. At the same time, that one screen name quite possibly could have been used by several different users who perhaps did not feel the need to create their own screen names so they used their friend’s account instead. Nevertheless, the same argument repeated verbatim by the same screen name multiple times is only counted once. In short, this study accounts for the arguments

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conveyed, not who said what, because there are a number of uncontrollable factors for which I cannot fully account. Furthermore, the tallies are intended to concretize my observations, not to attribute one particular view to the people who took the time to share their thoughts on the message board. Although the CBS transcript accurately reproduced the actual interview for the most part, there were some discrepancies that I noticed along with some of the individuals who expressed themselves on the message board. And though the language in the transcript and the video are not drastically

Table 4.1: Arguments from the first 400 posts at CBSnews.com in response to the 60 Minutes interview prior to airing Fact/Definition Arguments In Reference to President Ahmadinejad 31 identify Ahmadinejad as a terrorist or supporter of terrorism 27 associate Ahmadinejad with Hitler 25 voice concern with Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel 25 refer to Ahmadinejad as a madman 24 identify Ahmadinejad and Iranian leadership with Democrats and leftists 14 refer to Ahmadinejad as a hypocrite in regards to foreign policy 12 identify Ahmadinejad as a tyrant 11 see both American and Iranian leadership as troubling 10 call Ahmadinejad a liar 6 refer to Iran as primitive, archaic, or savage In Reference to Iran’s nuclear program 22 call Iran’s nuclear program a nuclear weapons program Fact/Definition, Cause/Effect, and Quality Arguments 74 Identify Mike Wallace and CBS as puppets for Ahmadinejad with potential negative effects on audiences Cause/Effect Arguments 21 identify Islam as the cause of ongoing conflict in the Middle East 18 identify Israel as the cause of American involvement in the Middle East 7 identify religion in general as the cause of ongoing conflict in the Middle East Quality Arguments 11 praise US foreign policy in general 9 find the interview praiseworthy 5 see positive value in Ahmadinejad’s positions Action Arguments 32 question US foreign policy 11 propose war or a nuclear attack on Iran 7 propose assassinating Ahmadinejad

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dissimilar, the first 400 responses that followed the transcript and the first 400 after the broadcast were significantly different. The transcript opens the same way the aired interview does—with Wallace’s narration of Ahmadinejad’s notorious comments about Israel and the Holocaust—but omits a brief editorial comment that Wallace made in the later broadcast. There are other, more substantial omissions, such as one that someone by the name of “christinek6” identified on the message board—“the comment that Mike Wallace made that Bush was the ‘commander in chief of the free world’ ” (“christinek6” 2006). These omissions worked to present Wallace as an unbiased interviewer, which the actual footage of the interview undermines. After quoting Ahmadinejad’s criticism of the United States and Britain’s support of Israel, the narration positions Wallace as the loser in a verbal tug-of-war between him and the president: “Wallace tried to ask him about Hezbollah’s use of missiles, rockets furnished by Iran, but [Ahmadinejad] wanted to talk about Israel’s attacks with American bombs” (“Iranian Leader” 2006). After another Ahmadinejad quote, Wallace, according to the transcript, again attempted to ask a question about Hezbollah, but, according to CBS, “he was interrupted” (“Iranian Leader” 2006). Ahmadinejad was next described as challenging Wallace’s journalistic credentials, and he then moved into a monologue in which Wallace, in spite of his efforts to stay on the topic of Hezbollah, seemed to temporarily disappear. Though the transcript began in a way that, at first glance, made Wallace appear as if he could not hold his own ground with Ahmadinejad, the intransigence of both parties became more pronounced as CBS’s transcript of the interview moved forward, revealing Wallace’s interruptions, albeit not labeled as such, and his sarcasm. CBS’s portrayal of Ahmadinejad having the upper hand in the interview apparently influenced the way many of the respondents saw the interaction between Wallace and the president, though not necessarily with the results the network may have wanted. If CBS hoped readers would empathize with Wallace, they were wrong. Seventy-four of the 400 posts criticized CBS and its journalist for the interview with Ahmadinejad. One reader, “obelisk07” wrote: Once again, CBS becomes a paid lackey of terrorists and nuclear madmen. You’ve just provided a forum for this murderer and terrorists to speak on US TV. Absolutely no negative questions were asked (nor would they have been allowed) so your integrity and journalist impartiality was non-existent. (“obelisk07” 2006)

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Another reader, “siempreko”, added: Why would you give a terrorist the venue to share his “thoughts, dialogue, and cultural exchanges”? This man has the goal, desire, vision to destroy us. He has no desire to have true diplomacy. I guess he is speaking to the crowd that continues to blame America for what happened on 9/11. And they are listening to him! (“siempreko” 2006) In Table 4.1, I categorized these arguments within the fact/definition, cause/effect, and quality stases because they, as is often the case with arguments, do not fit neatly into a single stasis. The gist of the 74 posts that took issue with the interview is that giving an enemy of the United States a space to talk is troubling because it legitimizes that person’s ideas and, as “siempreko” exclaimed, gives that enemy the opportunity to influence people who may be susceptible to such thoughts, particularly Democrats and leftists, as posited in 24 of the 400 posts. Initially, the 74 posts that lambasted CBS and Wallace seemed primarily concerned with Wallace’s apparent inability to ask tough questions or his ceding too much power to Ahmadinejad, as CBS’s framing of the interview implied. Frustrated with earlier comments, “Johnedit,” one of the nine posts to praise the interview, wrote, Those who criticize the brief story CBS ran have no idea of the full interview and how often Mike Wallace challenged Iranian President Ahmadinejad. To say CBS is just giving airtime to the enemy, without seeing the entire “60 Minutes” interview, is like calling a man a killer because his left thumb twitches. (“Johnedit” 2006) “Johnedit” ’s criticism of readers’ judging before seeing the interview in its entirety stands out not only because it is the only post out of 400 to make such an observation, but because it draws attention to the possibility that readers who excoriated Wallace for a supposedly weak interview with Ahmadinejad may not have read more than the first two pages of the transcript CBS provided—a transcript that does not downplay the tension between Wallace and the president. If people were making up their minds about the interview before reading, seeing, and/or hearing it from beginning to end, the problem at hand, then, was something other than how Wallace interacted with Ahmadinejad. The issue embedded in the 74 posts had to do with a tacit understanding of the rules of rhetorical space and

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the speakers allowed to occupy such spaces. As Roxanne Mountford (2001) explains, “Rhetorical space is the geography of a communicative event, and, like all landscapes, may include both the cultural and material arrangement, whether intended or fortuitous, of space” (p. 42). The cultural and material arrangements thus influence perspectives on who is allowed to speak, what is open for discussion, and how one is to speak in a given rhetorical space. For a major American news source to grant an interview to someone perceived as a maniacal, Hitleresque, terrorism-supporting, antiAmerican tyrant was disturbing to those who composed the 74 posts, because allowing Ahmadinejad to speak about anything in this arena went against the unspoken rules of the news interview qua rhetorical space that they apparently did not share with CBS. Adherence to these unwritten rules precludes such audience members from having to listen to what Ahmadinejad had to say, because no matter how reasonable the Iranian president presented his positions in the interview, his very presence on 60 Minutes was a violation of their expectations. Further, these audience members likely felt the need to deter those who they perceived as gullible Americans from viewing this interview before it aired. The overwhelming concern with the interview as a violated rhetorical space prevailed throughout the posts, which entailed negative characterizations of President Ahmadinejad as a terrorist/terrorism-supporter (31), Hitler-like (27), a madman (25), and several other demeaning labels to justify this criticism (Table 4.1). The need to define Ahmadinejad’s character in the posts also appeared to serve as indirect evidence for claims of Iran’s having a nuclear weapons program. Throughout the 400 posts, there was little debate over the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, but respondents nevertheless presumed or implied what Iran’s nuclear intentions were. Twenty-two posts explicitly identified Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program, while virtually none of the posts spoke of the program in terms of civilian energy. Additionally, 25 comments raised the subject of Ahmadinejad’s remark about Israel’s needing to be “wiped” off of the map, a statement that enabled Ahmadinejad’s critics to associate him with Hitler and to suggest that what was needed to wipe away Israel was a nuclear weapon. But as “andy_f90” asked, “If Bush is certain Iran is producing nuclear bombs, why doesn’t he prove it?” (“andy_f90” 2006). This reader’s call for empirical evidence of Iran’s nuclear ambitions rested partially on the unsupported WMD charges that helped justify Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet, as Gordon Chang and Hugh Mehan (2008) contend, the Bush administration, like many of the respondents in this study, downplayed reasoning that required empirical evidence and emphasized claims

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that did not require such support in justifying the White House’s actions during the war on terror, specifically in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq: “Faced with an amount of WMD that was ‘unaccounted for’—perhaps hidden by Iraq, perhaps already used, perhaps destroyed without evidence, and perhaps never existed—the Bush administration argued that such empirical ambiguity was the result of Hussein’s deception” (p. 473). One could also add that the empirical ambiguity was the result of Hussein’s perceived homicidal madness that has also been used to characterize President Ahmadinejad in the posts and elsewhere. If Americans focused primarily on Ahmadinejad’s character and less on the details of what he and the Bush administration had to say about Iran’s nuclear program, there was no need to produce evidence of Iran’s seeking nuclear weapons, because an evil person would not do anything to the contrary. While many of the first 400 hundred posts responded negatively to the interview for providing Ahmadinejad a platform to spew his supposed anti-American rhetoric, the first 400 comments after 8 p.m. EST on the day the interview was aired (Table 4.2) were also predominantly critical of the interview. The difference, however, was that 145 posts in the second group disliked Mike Wallace’s approach to the interview and felt that it would only further increase the tension between the United States and Iran and/or reinforce the stereotype of the loud, obnoxious, impolite American. As “jeaniej2” pointed out, Mike Wallace is an embarrassment to CBS and to the U.S. as a whole. He demonstrated that there is an element of truth to the stereotype that Americans are a rude, demanding, impatient people who will use bullying tactics to get our way. CBS provided the rare opportunity to interview the president of Iran. They should have given the assignment to a journalist who has the ability and professionalism to conduct a neutral, informative interview. (“jeaniej2” 2006) Though there are many on the message board who shared “jeaniej2” ’s position, some in that category indicated that they disapproved of Wallace’s interview approach, primarily because he would not have done the same thing to President Bush or any other head of state. Four of the 29 viewers who found the interview praiseworthy made similar comments. The vast majority of the 145 comments that disapproved of the interview, however, emphasized that heads of state should simply not be treated the way Wallace did President Ahmadinejad. The difficulty for journalists, apparently, is finding the middle ground between being overly deferential and too aggressive,

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Table 4.2: Arguments from the first 400 posts on CBSnews.com after the August 13, 2006, airing of 60 Minutes Fact/Definition Arguments: In Reference to President Ahmadinejad 20 identify Ahmadinejad as a terrorist or supporter of terrorism 15 voice concern with Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel 11 refer to Ahmadinejad as a madman 8 identify Ahmadinejad as a tyrant 6 call Ahmadinejad a murderer 5 refer to Ahmadinejad as a hypocrite in regard to foreign policy 4 associate Ahmadinejad with Hitler 4 call Ahmadinejad a liar In Reference to Iran’s Nuclear Program 8 say the program is for weapons development 6 say the program is for nuclear energy Fact/Definition, Cause/Effect, and Quality Arguments: 145 identify Mike Wallace’s interview style as problematic with a potential negative influence on American-Iranian relations and/or Americans being informed about these relations. 38 identify Mike Wallace and CBS as puppets for Ahmadinejad with potential negative effects on audiences Cause/Effect Arguments: 16 identify Islam as the cause of ongoing conflict in the Middle East 15 cite Israel as the cause of Middle East conflict and/or American involvement in the region Quality Arguments: 61 see Ahmadinejad’s language and demeanor in the interview as credible and praiseworthy 29 find the interview praiseworthy Action Arguments: 33 question US foreign policy

holding a president’s feet to the fire without being overly antagonistic. To do so would have required Wallace to do a better job of distancing himself from the questions he asked—which could have mitigated his sarcasm—his incredulous facial expressions, and the other body language that many on the message board thought inappropriate. As for reactions to Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President demonstrated that even if audiences attend a communicative event with preconceived notions of a speaker, ethos, as Jim Corder (1994) argues, is nonetheless emergent in discourse (p. 108). There were certainly a number of posts in the 400 that followed the broadcast that called President Ahmadinejad a terrorist (20), voiced concern for his alleged comments about wiping Israel off the map

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(15), and labeled him a madman (11) (Table 4.2), but such posts were less prevalent than they were in the first 400 responses to the transcript. More striking were the 61 comments that found Ahmadinejad’s language and behavior during the interview praiseworthy. “credulous” wrote, Congratulations and thanks to CBS and 60 Minutes for giving us this close-up view of the president of Iran, so often represented in the American media as an anti-Semitic and bellicose buffoon. While Mike Wallace came across unfortunately as the All-American A-etc., an arrogant, bullying, patronizing know-it-all, the president appeared to be knowledgeable, reasonable, good-natured, penetrating, and for the most part justly provocative. (“credulous” 2006) Though I cannot be certain that “credulous” and other posters came to the understanding of Ahmadinejad’s ethos as reasonable, good-natured, and so forth, primarily through the discourse of the interview itself, he or she and others alike still showed their awareness of how Ahmadinejad had been portrayed elsewhere and how Ahmadinejad’s participation in the interview encouraged them to rethink those earlier portrayals. Some posts contended that Wallace’s behavior, more than Ahmadinejad’s language and conduct, strengthened the Iranian president’s credibility, thus reaffirming my claim that the interaction, not just the language of the interviewee, serves a rhetorical function in influencing how audiences understand what is communicated in an interview. While arguments asserting that Wallace’s conduct boosted Ahmadinejad’s ethos would seem to counter my own—that Wallace’s style demonstrated the debatable quality of Ahmadinejad’s responses—such posts cited Wallace’s behavior, not his willingness to push Ahmadinejad to answer questions, as the problem; criticizing Wallace’s body language is not the same as taking issue with his questions. In addition to the shift in perceptions of Ahmadinejad on the message board, there were fewer posts that spoke of Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program as only eight, as opposed to 22, posts discussed the program in terms of weapons and six in terms of nuclear energy (Table 4.2). Because there was very little talk about Iran’s nuclear program in both sets of comments, it is hard to determine whether the lack of discussion on the matter had to do with the respective audience members being uncertain about how to define the program, being unconcerned with the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, seeing Iran as developing nuclear weapons as common sense, or a number of other possibilities. And because the interview covered a wide range of issues from Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel,

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the battle that was being fought between Israel and Hezbollah, to Iraq, it would be easy for the nuclear issue to be subsumed by other matters. Nevertheless, there was one post in the second 400 posts that echoed a similar comment by “andy_f90” in the first group. “mk_harvey” observed, Perhaps Iran is scaling up WoMD—perhaps it’s obvious that Iran is scaling up WoMD but one thing is clear to me, as an American: D.C has a lousy batting average at making that call. (“mk_harvey” 2006) “mk_harvey” ’s post possessed a skepticism that many of the posts lacked when Iran’s nuclear program was broached. Talk of Iran’s nuclear ambitions on the message board reflected Wallace, other journalists, and the US government’s treatment of the subject: the program is either for weapons or for energy; there is no room for uncertainty. Uncertainty, however, is what journalists need for more probing questions on critical issues such as Iran’s nuclear program to avoid strengthening perspectives that may have violent results as was the case with Iraq.

Interviews with the Enemy and Public Opinions Though the prevalence of the Bush administration’s views on Iran and its nuclear program could not be offset by a handful of interviews with Iran’s President, CBS and the other news outlets that decided to print or broadcast interviews with President Ahmadinejad performed a necessary service for the American people by providing audiences with an alternative to the Bush administration’s position in the nuclear debate. While opening a prominent rhetorical space to a foreign political leader perceived as an enemy risked what some audience members understood as legitimizing Ahmadinejad’s propagandistic, anti-American speech, such criticism overlooked the fact that Ahmadinejad’s language was, nevertheless, mediated in the 60 Minutes interview and elsewhere. Ahmadinejad was not given a platform from which he could say whatever he wanted, because Wallace did not simply cede the floor to Iran’s president; he constantly contested Ahmadinejad throughout the interview—challenges that were lacking in the nine interviews with Secretary Rice examined in the previous chapter. Though some of the posts were right in that a journalist should treat a foreign leader with respect, regardless of how one perceives that person, the line between respecting and contesting what an interviewee has to say is a difficult one to walk.

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Leaving the question of respect aside, Wallace’s willingness to challenge President Ahmadinejad calls attention to the contexts in which journalists are willing to push the envelope with some political leaders and avoid doing so with others. Wallace, though not overly aggressive, demonstrated a readiness to dispute Ahmadinejad. As discussed in Liebes and her colleagues’ study of the “interview with the enemy” genre, a correspondent for Israel Public Channel, Oded Granot, very aggressively challenged Yasser Arafat in a December 2001 interview (2008, p. 321). While both interviews share a common factor—that both journalists interviewed the enemy— there are other cases in which journalists have boldly challenged prominent political leaders who were not enemies of the journalists’ home countries. In 2004, Carole Coleman took the initiative to question President Bush’s policies in an interview for Ireland’s RTÉ. The interview not only ruffled Bush’s feathers (Coleman 2005, p. 14), but also led to her being reassigned to another position because she could no longer serve as RTÉ’s White House correspondent. Though Bush was not the enemy, what he shares with Ahmadinejad and Ariel Sharon is that he was a foreign leader. As I mentioned earlier, journalists who are open to confronting foreign political leaders likely do so because they do not have to sustain relationships with those interviewees as they do with their own government officials. As Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston (2007) argue, it is the relationships (sometimes business and sometimes personal) with domestic government officials that discourage journalists from “crusading,” or using their positions as journalists to offer alternatives to the White House’s claims (p. 35). What is interesting, though, is that RTÉ still has a White House correspondent and Ahmadinejad still partook in interviews with American journalists after the Wallace interview because political leaders, foreign and domestic, need the press just as much as the press needs them. If the American mainstream press underwent an institutional shift in which journalists were more willing to confront American governmental officials’ questionable claims, presidents and their political surrogates would not stop giving interviews; they would adapt. Alongside the implications of Wallace’s interview style, the opinions circulating on the message board show a range of ideas that public opinion polls on American-Iranian tension have failed to illuminate and serve as a sharp reminder that the cooperation of government and media discourses, understood here as governmentality, is not wholly effective in encouraging members of society to see the world in particular ways. Although there are people who expressed themselves on the message board who echoed much of what the Bush administration had to say about Iran and its nuclear

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program, there were some audience members who demonstrated an openness to Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric in order to have a different perspective on the tension between Washington, DC and Tehran—even if they listened to Ahmadinejad with the same skepticism that they have when listening to an American politician. While the message board does little to clarify how members of this particular public defined Iran’s nuclear program, it nonetheless demonstrates that people understand the discourse of the nuclear debate between the United States and Iran in different ways and that it would be problematic to assume that Americans in general blindly adhere to what they are reading, hearing, and seeing with regard to Iran’s nuclear program. The range of ideas discussed on the message board also reveals the nuanced and agentive character of public opinions that polls and surveys rarely capture. Approaching public opinion from the actual discourse of a public encourages us to map out the diversity of perspectives expressed rather than to impose predetermined responses on people and allow the discursive option with the largest percentage to serve as “public opinion.” Furthermore, the discourse is agentive, not passive, in that the participants discursively work to shape public opinions—even if only among the other readers of and writers on the CBS message board—instead of allowing an outside organization to shape their discourse and thus their opinions for other American publics to consume in news media. The discursive texture and agency of publics and their opinions are nevertheless situated within governing forces such as the state and the press that can work to smooth out the nuances of public opinion to increase the agency of the state. However, it is not always public opinion that must cohere with the White House’s perspectives, but other members of the state such as the United States’ own Intelligence Community.

Chapter 5

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate : A Visual Analysis of News Coverage

In December 2007, the United States Intelligence Community (IC), which comprises sixteen intelligence agencies including the CIA and NSA, released its National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that put forth a position on Iran’s nuclear program that shocked the Bush administration and anyone else who had been paying attention to the tense relations between Washington, DC and Tehran over the latter’s nuclear research and development for the past five years. As the IC stated unequivocally, “We judge with high confidence that in Fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” (National Intelligence Estimate 2007). This judgment blatantly contradicted the grounds on which the Bush administration had been legitimizing its frame of Iran’s nuclear program since it first aligned the Islamic Republic with the “axis of evil” back in 2002. Roughly two months before the NIE was released to the public, President Bush warned, “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” (quoted in Stolberg 2007). Though Bush claimed that he had not yet seen the intelligence estimate in its entirety before it reached the eyes of the public, Bush expressed what he understood to be at stake over Iran’s nuclear aspirations—violence on a global scale. With the White House’s war rhetoric beginning to more fully flower and years of the press’s stenographic reporting of the Bush administration’s positions, the 2007 NIE served as a potential roadblock to Bush’s aggressive stance toward the Islamic Republic and the power the White House exercised over the rhetorical construction of Iran as a nuclear threat. To more fully demonstrate how the 2007 NIE indeed constituted a moment of resistance, I situate the prelude to the 2003 war in Iraq within Foucault’s theory of governmentality and juxtapose it with the AmericanIranian ordeal. If, as Foucault contends, a multitude of governing forces are needed to mobilize populations toward particular actions or subjectivities,

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part of that amalgam of governing entities (e.g., the White House and the press) can be strengthened or weakened when other sources of government do not fall in line. Whether or not an act of opposition is effective, however, depends on how other actors and institutions take up the acts and discourse that constitute a challenge to the status quo. Thus, a visual analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the NIE follows a comparison of Iraq and Iran. While the majority of this project has dealt primarily with the linguistic elements of communication, the visual rhetoric of newspapers also plays a significant role in conveying ideas to audiences. As Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone (2001) explain in The Form of News, newspapers exercise power “on a metadiscursive level—not through what a story said but through how it was framed [. . .] and where designers positioned it in a flow of reading” (p. 211). Though newspaper sales have gone down because audiences are more often turning to the Internet for news, people still read them, and the Times and Post continue to be considered papers of record for the political elite. Nevertheless, to avoid limiting the media uptake of the IC’s shift in understanding of Iran’s nuclear program to the Times and the Post, I consider the ways participants—mediators and debaters—handled the topic during the Republican and Democratic primaries and the presidential debates. Ultimately, I argue that despite a brief shift in the coverage of two prominent newspapers and a marked difference in President Bush’s rhetoric that demonstrated that he likely knew more about the estimate than he claimed he had known before its release, the NIE was an unsuccessful act of resistance as made clear by the continued importance given to the notion of Iran as a nuclear threat in the press and among our political leaders.

Governmentality, Iraq, and Iran: A Confluence and Divergence of Governing Forces As explicated in Chapter 1, Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality has to do with the congealing of governing forces in society “to manage and no longer to control through rules and regulations” the conduct of populations (2007a, p. 353). Though the different governing apparatuses that exist in a society can be directly influenced by another, an institution’s own practices can also unwittingly result in lending support to a governing force’s agenda. In the case of Iraq, the White House, as studies have shown, managed to influence the press and the IC and benefited from the practices of these two entities that helped lead to the production of knowledge

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate

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that convinced an American citizenry, certainly not all, of the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein for the safety of the American people and, as the strategic title “Operation Iraqi Freedom” indicates, the spread of democracy to those oppressed in foreign lands. Through a brief comparison of the Iraq debacle and the Iran dilemma, we can more clearly see the 2007 NIE as an act of resistance on the part of the Intelligence Community that worked against the prevailing notion that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Criticism of President Bush and his cabinet abounds, as scholars from a number of disciplines have explored the language of their warmongering. Gordon Chang and Hugh Mehan (2008) contend that part of what enabled the Bush administration to make the case for invading Iraq was the characterization of Saddam Hussein as evil, an attribute that allowed the White House to connect the possession of WMD and al-Qaeda to the former Iraqi dictator despite the absence of supporting evidence (p. 473). The White House, as discussed in the previous chapter, applied the same rhetorical moves to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to portray Iran’s nuclear program as a weapons program. Bush’s World War III remarks also revealed his efforts to hijack the future in order to persuade others that action needed to be taken in the present to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Similarly, Patricia Dunmire (2005) explains that the Bush administration’s language about Iraq—that immediate action was needed to forestall a horrible future—was his effort “to interfere with our ability—even desire—to imagine, articulate, and realize futures that challenge those prescribed by dominant discourses” (p. 483). In addition to such rhetorical moves, the Bush administration capitalized on 9/11 to extend America’s military might to Iraq (John et al. 2007) and relied on a rhetoric of evil to debilitate a more robust public debate that could have preceded the war (Ivie 2005). Though the Iranian government and people did not experience the same violence their neighbors have experienced since 2003, Bush never excluded the Islamic Republic from the rhetoric he directed toward Iraq. Even with all of the charges leveled at the Bush administration, they were not alone in preparing the way for military mobilization against Saddam Hussein. The press also played a significant role in “willing to truth” certain perspectives that helped legitimize the White House’s plans. On May 26, 2004, the New York Times admitted its complicity in paving the road to the second war with Iraq, as the newspaper criticized its own editors for not encouraging skepticism among its staff, failing to consider the underlying motives of Iraqi defectors when relying on them as sources, and downplaying or ignoring follow-up stories that could have challenged earlier news

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reports (“The Times and Iraq,” 2004). On August 12, 2004, the Washington Post apologized for its coverage as well, pointing out that they deemphasized news that contradicted the White House. According to the Post, the results of a self-study of their prewar coverage and interviews with those who partook in its production showed “that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page” (Kurtz 2004). In addition to these self-critiques, the press was overly reliant on the Bush administration because it sat atop the governmental power hierarchy and appearing to crusade against the White House would have led to the loss of prominent official sources (Bennett et al. 2007). Though the apologies of two news media giants were welcome, many of the problems the Times and the Post identified in their coverage of Iraq have reemerged in the coverage of Iran’s nuclear program in the news critiqued in this project: little has been said about the National Council of Resistance, a branch of the Mujahideen-e Khalq that the State Department designates as a terrorist organization, and its role in intelligence gathering on Iran’s nuclear program; the Bush administration’s perspective on Iran, as interviews with Condoleezza Rice confirm, was never really challenged by the press in a way that revealed alternative points of view; and the IAEA’s indefinite findings have typically been reported as damning investigations rather than cautiously worded documents that note when Iran has been both cooperative and uncooperative. Hindsight may be 20/20, but retrospective critiques mean nothing when the lessons that should have been learned are not applied to happenings with similar circumstances. Alongside the press’s failure to provide alternative perspectives to the Bush administration’s rhetoric about Iraq were those of the Intelligence Community. As Political Scientist Richard Betts, who has advised both the National Intelligence Council and CIA, observes, “the mistaken estimate that Iraq maintained stocks of chemical and biological weapons and an active program to acquire nuclear weapons was the worst intelligence failure since the founding of the modern intelligence community” (2007, p. 596). Among his list of the IC’s mistakes during the prelude to war was the Intelligence Community’s unwillingness to emphasize its lack of concrete evidence when it presented analyses to policy-makers. According to Betts, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspected Iraqi facilities in the wake of the first Persian Gulf War and exposed Iraq’s clandestine efforts to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. After booting UNSCOM out of the state in 1998, Iraq claimed that it no longer possessed such weapons, but the IC saw Saddam Hussein as feigning compliance to the international community’s demands since inspectors


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were not present to verify the removal of said weapons. Since 1998, the Intelligence Community had worked under the assumption that nothing much had changed in Iraq’s weapons stockpiles and nuclear ambitions, though they lacked updated intelligence analyses to justify those beliefs. Instead, these views, Betts explains, were validated by Iraq’s secrecy and lack of cooperation with UNSCOM. Thus, the IC’s perspective on Iraq’s alleged WMD “was deduced from Iraqi behavior and the motives assumed to be consistent with that behavior” (Betts 2007, p. 598). In the 2005 NIE, the IC could have applied the same reasoning to lead them to judge with “high confidence” that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons (National Intelligence Estimate 2007, p. 9). Iran, for whatever reason, had not been fully cooperative with IAEA inspectors, a lack of cooperation that could have been perceived as covering up an illicit operation, as the Bush administration argued. However, the IC may have sought to rectify past mistakes when they stated in the 2007 NIE that Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in fall 2003, the same time period (November 10) IAEA inspectors reported that there was “no evidence” of an Iranian nuclear weapons program (ElBaradei 2003c, p. 10). Though the IC certainly made its own mistakes, some were the results of external influence. As Robert Jervis (2006) notes in his review of three official investigations of the intelligence gathering and assessment on Iraq, the IC’s findings could have potentially been politicized or “illegitimately influenced by the IC’s knowledge of the answers the policy-makers wanted to hear” (p. 6). The reports, however, rejected this possibility, and Jervis does so as well, while at once noting that the committees that conducted the investigations relied on a narrow understanding of “politicization” that excluded such acts as policy-makers’ “cherry-picking” information that best supported their policies (2006, p. 33). By emphasizing the White House’s selectivity when it came to the intelligence analyses they were presented, defenders of the IC could redirect charges of ineptitude away from the IC and toward the White House. Paul Pillar, for one, roots the Intelligence Community’s failure not in the analyses they produced, but in the Bush administration’s refusal to allow the IC’s complete findings to be a major influence on their decision-making. “What is most remarkable about prewar US intelligence on Iraq,” Pillar asserts, “is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important US policy decisions in recent decades” (2006, p. 15). For Pillar, the ideal relationship between the IC and the White House is one in which the former collects and sorts through raw intelligence data in search of possible threats in as an objective manner as possible, while the

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latter takes into consideration the entirety of the IC’s analyses to inform policy decisions. The problem Pillar sees in the Bush administration’s relationship with the IC prior to the Iraq invasion is that the White House had made its decision to invade Iraq without considering the Intelligence Community’s prescient admonition to avoid waging a war that could lead to prolonged violence, destabilize the Middle East, and necessitate a continued American presence in Iraq. With all of the finger-pointing, whether aimed at the Bush administration, the press, the IC, or even the American people, the question of who was guilty is more than a matter of individuals and groups refusing to accept responsibility for the lives lost in Iraq. The causes of the current, violent state of affairs in Iraq are multifaceted, and many different governing forces coalesced to form a milieu in which the Bush administration could extend its power to act against another sovereign state. The White House managed to influence some of the factors, and others may have just so happened to work in Bush’s favor. Ironically, the prelude to Operation Iraqi Freedom seemed to be replaying itself with regard to Iran. The Bush administration declared Iran’s nuclear program as military in nature. The press fell in line with the president’s certainty that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons, though the supporting evidence was speculative at best. And in 2005, the IC provided an estimate that expressed with high confidence that Iran was running a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The 2007 NIE, then, marked a potential roadblock for the Bush administration’s aggressive stance toward Iran, as it emphasized its findings in a way that did not allow the White House to cherry-pick information so easily. However, the control the IC has on how it presents information does not account for how effective that intelligence will be in altering a dominant discourse as the Bush administration’s rhetoric was not beholden to the IC and newspaper editors exercised their prerogative in the selection of news content and visual form.

Methodology: Guiding Readers with Newspaper Form In their history of American newspaper form, Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone (2001) explain that form “includes the things that are traditionally labeled layout and design and typography; but it also includes habits of illustration, genres of reportage, and schemes of departmentalization” (p. 3). Early on, the form of the American newspaper took on what the authors call a vernacular form as the various news reported was presented without headlines, varying typography, or any other features printers could


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use to differentiate one news item from another and thus direct readers’ attentions. “Everything about its appearance,” Barnhurst and Nerone observe, “announced that it was the reader’s job, not the newspaper’s, to make sense of the world” (2001, p. 39). But by the twentieth century, newspapers abandoned efforts to represent the chaos of world events in a manner that treated all news equally, a shift, the scholars explain, that reflected a change from a Victorian to a modern ideology, from complexity to orderly: “Modern design, by definition rational, functional, and premeditated, instead tamed the mess through artifice” (Barnhurst and Nerone 2001, p. 251). Newspaper editors no longer assumed that readers possessed the capacity to make sense of the goings on around them and consequently tried to assume the role of sense-maker for their audiences through the manipulation of form. If Barnhurst and Nerone are right, then newspapers’ visual presentation of their 2007 NIE coverage demands further consideration to better understand the extent to which the press encouraged readers to see the nuclear debate in a particular way. Though the visual presentation of news has the power to guide readers through language and influence how meaning is produced during a reading experience, newspaper form is neither superior nor subordinate to the verbalization of information. Rather, the visual and verbal elements of texts, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen posit, are complementary and interact with each other in semiotic processes (2006, p. 177). This balancing act has and continues to be of primary concern to newspaper editors worldwide because the information they provide is not all that influences audiences’ perceptions of a news organization and what it reports. In News Production, David Machin and Sarah Niblock (2006) examine the Liverpool Daily Post’s efforts to attract a different kind of audience without losing its current readership through changes to the newspaper’s appearance. After editors altered the form of the Daily Post, the newspaper experienced a jump in readership the following year. However, Karin Raeymaecker’s study (2004) of 1,200 Belgian teens’ perspectives on newspaper reading shows that newspaper form alone is not effective in attracting these readers, as the students called for changes in content and a more accessible register. Moving away from the commercial implications of form, Susan Middlestadt and Kevin Barnhurst researched the potential effects horizontal layout has on readers’ perceived tone of an article. What they found was that the study’s participants viewed what they read as “more tranquil (comforting, gentle, light, pleasant, sweet, beautiful, and so on) than did those who read the same articles in vertical layout” (1999, p. 272). Thus, form plays significant rhetorical roles in the construction of a newspaper’s self-image and of

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the information it provides, and this interplay of appearance and content was certainly at work when the New York Times and Washington Post reported on the events and language surrounding the NIE. But rather than considering the commercial or tonal implications of form, I am concerned with how form works to emphasize and deemphasize positions on the nature of Iran’s nuclear program. If, as Kenneth Burke once put it, “a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (1984, p. 49), then there are particular visual elements of newspaper layout that attract or distract attention and communicate how readers should make sense of the information they are presented. To discuss these features, I turn to Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s approach to analyzing newspaper layout. For Kress and van Leeuwen, a visual space’s zones, the degrees of salience given to news stories, and the placement of a news item in relation to others play significant roles in communicating the value of the information a newspaper provides. The zones of which Kress and van Leeuwen write are left/right, top/bottom, and center/margin spatial arrangements with each communicating different levels of informational value. Left and right placements correspond to the values of Given and New respectively. While Given news items on the left-hand side of a page provide information assumed to be commonsensical, New information on the right-hand side is “presented as problematic, contestable” (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p. 189). I would also add that those voices placed in the space as Given are those understood to be the most authoritative as they serve as potential lenses through which the New information can be understood. Top/bottom positioning express Ideal/Real perspectives. “For something to be Ideal,” Kress and van Leeuwen explain, “means that it is presented as the idealized or generalized essence of the information” (1998, p. 193). On the other hand, the Real information along the bottom of a page offers more specific, detail-oriented news. Center/margin layout is more straightforward as the central element is usually the most significant in relation to the items at the margins. Though the visual zones of a newspaper convey different news values, the degrees of significance arrangement confers onto news items are can deviate. Addressing the mutability of news value in newspaper layout, Kress and van Leeuwen add, “Regardless of where they are placed, salience can create a hierarchy of importance among the elements, selecting some as more important and more worthy of (immediate) attention than others” (1998, p. 200). Through font size, bold letters, color, and other typographic features, editors can give some news items more visual weight than others thus increasing their ability to influence what captures a reader’s eye first.


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Moreover, “the elements of a layout may either be disconnected, marked off from each other, or connected, joined together” (Kress and van Leeuwen 1998, p. 203). Through such framing, news items can be presented as a whole or as discrete units depending on the extent to which the items on the page are set apart from each other with thick lines, empty space, and other dividing/aligning techniques. Spatial organization in the newspaper, then, interacts with unequal distributions of salience and framing strategies that function to produce guided patterns of reading for news audiences. Though we must keep in mind that individual readers may not follow the same reading paths (e.g., some people start from the back of the newspaper and work their way to the front), newspaper layout is still the product of conscious efforts on the parts of editors to guide readers in certain directions and has significant implications for the quality of news that audiences are given. In the analysis that follows, I use Given/New, Ideal/Real, Center/Margin, salience and frames to offer a perspective on how the visual rhetoric of news layout interacted with the news content on the 2007 NIE to determine the degree to which the Times and the Post presented multiple perspectives in a visually balanced way that did not accentuate one viewpoint at the expense of others. I have chosen these two newspapers, once again, because they are very influential and their journalists have access to high-ranking government officials that many other news organizations do not: the New York Times is one of the largest, well-respected newspapers in the United States, and the Washington Post is the most widely read in the metro DC area. The first 48 hours of coverage on the NIE (December 4–5, 2007) is the time frame, so that what follows is not simply a comparison of the Times to the Post. The second day, when the newspapers published editorials that expressed their respective positions on the NIE, is compared to the first day to note any shifts in coverage and to determine if the editorials hint at why the two papers presented their news coverage in the manner that they did. Images that replicate the actual Times and Post pages have been provided to help you visualize the layout and other elements of the newspapers’ design choices.

A Visual Analysis of the New York Times and the Washington Post In the largest font size and located at the top of the New York Times front page on December 4, 2007, reads, “U.S. Finding Says Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Effort In 2003” (Fig. 5.1). Though the headline shares the top of the

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Figure 5.1



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front page with two others, its greater salience clearly indicates that the National Intelligence Estimate is what the Times understood to be the most important news of the day. Directly underneath the headline is an image of the NIE at the center of the IC’s polarized findings from 2005 and 2007, thus visually communicating the Intelligence Community’s shift from one position—high confidence of Iran’s determination to develop nuclear arms—to its opposite. Additionally, a news analysis of how the National Intelligence Estimate might influence the debate on Iran’s nuclear program and a news story on the potential impact the estimate could have on Bush’s policy are presented with space between them rather than a dividing line, a move that belies the notion of the article on the left being more important than the one positioned to the right as they are coupled within the same frame. As Kress and van Leeuwen point out, news items may “be strongly or weakly connected, and the stronger the connection, the more they are presented as one unit of information, as belonging together” (1998, p. 203). Thus, for the first time in their coverage of the nuclear debate, the Times did not make the same mistake as they did previously with Iraq and gave salience to news that challenged the Bush administration rather than relegating the information to the back pages. As readers make their way to section A14 (Fig. 5.2), where the news from the front page is resumed, the Times presents at the top of the page a chart of key statements and findings arranged vertically in the following order: the IC, the Bush administration, the IAEA, and the Iranian government. The newness of the intelligence estimate perhaps explains why the IC is situated above the White House, and the placement of Iran at the bottom of the list is evidence of its position in what the Times perceives to be the informational hierarchy. Located in the middle of the page is the continuation of one of the front page news stories that explores the implications the estimate may have for the Bush administration’s policy toward Iran, the story with the highest value, as its centeredness and bold headline are the most eye-catching elements on the page. Exemplifying what Herbert Gans (2003) calls “multiperspectival news,” or news that draws on a variety of perspectives (p. 103), the article aligns the IC’s findings with that of the IAEA, quotes Democratic senator Harry Reid as saying that there needs to be a change in DC’s stance toward Tehran, highlights the administration’s skepticism toward the IC’s findings, and other viewpoints that emerged with the publicizing of the NIE. In short, the Times did what one would hope a newspaper would do on a regular basis—present well-balanced news. At the bottom of the page, reflecting what Kress and van Leeuwen see as the shift from Ideal (generalized information) to Real (specific information),

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the Times reprints the key findings of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. The rest of the day’s Times presented the news in this multifaceted way as articles on another page, arranged in the same Ideal/Real order, explored the nuclear debate in general and the specific reactions of European diplomats and those seeking the Democratic presidential candidacy. If December 4 marked the potential for change in the Times’ coverage, December 5 marked a return to business as usual. Contrary to the day before, the second day’s front page headline gives primacy to Bush’s position on Iran: “Bush Insists Iran Remains a Threat Despite Arms Data” (Fig. 5.3). Though the article’s placement on the right side of the page suggests the contentious quality of the president’s insistence, what is visually presented as Bush’s “questionable” perspective on page A1 becomes a reinforced idea as we move deeper into the day’s news. When the NIE coverage continues on A12 (Fig. 5.4), the first page story resumes on the left-hand side, signaling its Given status, while the information occupying the New position is directly quoted commentary provided by President Bush, Senator Joseph Biden, and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. While the president and the Israeli defense minister assert that Iran still intends to develop a nuclear weapon, Biden links the Iran dilemma to the Iraq war and emphasizes Bush’s misuse of intelligence. Though the commentary is arranged from left to right—Bush, Biden, Barak—the centrality of Biden’s voice does not highlight its importance nor does Barak’s right-side position present his commentary as least important. Rather, the insistence that Iran remains a threat is given priority as Biden’s perspective, which itself doesn’t explicitly state that Iran is not what the White House has portrayed it to be, is sandwiched between Bush’s and Barak’s remarks, which are different, yet claim the same thing. The visual emphasis on the Iranian threat in the upper half of the page could be counterbalanced as we move down A12, but the potential for the lower half to do so is undermined by what editors selected to occupy this space. Dealing more with the Real, the article immediately to the left is headlined, “Israel Insists That Iran Still Seeks A Bomb,” a headline that parallels the title “Bush Says Iran Remains A Threat Despite Report,” the headline at the top of A12 that is a continuation of the front page news story. Along with the visually aligned, denotation allied headlines, the content of the news item, which presents the Israeli response to the NIE, reinforces the idea of Iran as a nuclear threat. The story to the right of the Israeli response, “New Data, New Methods, New Conclusion,” does not lessen the salience of the Iranian nuclear threat because of the ambiguity of the headline and the inconclusiveness of the article. If, for instance, the headline read “New Data,

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New Methods, New Conclusion: Weapons Program Halted,” mentioning the NIE’s conclusion in large, bold font could have given the IC’s findings, like that of Bush and Israel’s positions, some visual weight on the page. And even as one reads the article, there is more a sense of uncertainty, as the reporter writes about the 2007 NIE’s contradiction of the 2005 estimate and the Intelligence Community’s reactions to both estimates in light of the newest one. The journalist adds, “Current and former intelligence officials insist that much of the 2005 Iran report still holds up to scrutiny” (Mazzetti 2007, p. A12). It is not until the end of the article that an explanation for why key intelligence figures see the 2007 estimate as the stronger of the two: the interception of communication between Iranian officials and the use of “red teams” to play the role of devil’s advocate. Nevertheless, the article remains secondary to the prominence given to the account of Iran as a threat. Though the Times may intend to provide readers with balanced coverage, the official Iranian response, a voice that could have potentially offset the imbalance of perspectives in the chart on A12, is positioned on a separate page altogether (Fig. 5.5). Even if the segregation of the Iranian reaction from the comments of two American officials and the Israeli Defense Minister was due to something as benign as a lack of space, the division nonetheless communicates the little importance the Islamic Republic’s perspective holds in the Times as it occupies the page opposite A12—the right, questionable side of the newspaper when a reader holds it completely open. At once, the article, “Iran Hails U.S. Report That It Ended Bid for Nuclear Arms,” is placed slightly off-center with two related articles at its margins, thus allowing the Iranian voice to have some salience on A13. However, this visually small news report in comparison to the two that surround it further diminish the import of what is presented in the article. At the top of A13, the headline reads, “Monitoring Agency Praises U.S. Report, but Keeps Wary Eye on Iran” and at the bottom another says, “The Thin Line Between Civilian and Military Nuclear Programs.” As the former headline clearly announces the IAEA’s reported suspicion of Iran’s nuclear program, the latter hangs onto the coattails of the Bush administration, as the writer insinuates that the move from a civilian to a military nuclear program is pretty much inevitable despite the IC’s claim that Iran stopped its weapons program: “The history of the atomic age, however, suggests that for a country with an advanced civil nuclear program, crossing the line into bomb work is easy” (Broad 2007, p. A13). But as Jacques Hymans (2006) argues in The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation, the psychological pressures surrounding the decision to develop nuclear weapons are more complicated than simply pushing a button to start the WMD assembly line. Moreover, if the


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decision were not a difficult one, the number of non-nuclear weapons states with the technological capacity to develop them would not be four times the number of states who chose to harness nuclear power for military purposes (Hymans 2006, p. 4). Such a perspective, however, does not make it into the story. Surrounded by two articles that continue to play up the notion of an Iranian nuclear threat, the news item in which the Iranian voice is presented is ultimately negated by the news stories in which it is ensconced by virtue of its being outweighed in terms of visual presence and content on pages A13 and A12. With the unidirectional coverage in the body of the paper, it is not surprising that the Times weighed in on the NIE the way it did in the editorial “Good and Bad News about Iran.” Though the Times criticized Bush for his hyperbolic World War III remarks, the editors at once buttressed Bush’s position that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons despite the findings of the IC: “Anyone who wants to give the Iranians the full benefit of the doubt should read the last four years of reports from United Nation’s nuclear inspectors about Iran’s 18-year history of hiding and dissembling” (“Intelligence on Iran” 2007, p. A30). The irony is that the Times’ emphasis on what they perceive to be Iran’s covering up its alleged illicit activity is the same rationale that, according to Betts, got the Intelligence Community in trouble with Iraq: viewing Iraq’s lack of cooperation with UN inspectors as evidence of its guilt. Moreover, the op-ed columns on the ensuing page offered little in the way of alternative perspectives. Maureen Dowd provides her usual, witty critique of the White House and concludes, “When W.’s history is written, he will be seen as the rebellious teenager crashing the family station wagon into his father’s three most cherished spots—diplomacy, intelligence, and the Gulf” (2007, p. A31). Rather than commenting on the NIE situation, Thomas Friedman writes an imaginary Iranian intelligence estimate of the United States in which he pushes for energy independence, censures the White House for exploiting the fear of 9/11 and neglecting America’s failing infrastructure, and other tangentially related points (2007, p. A31). The other two columns are completely unrelated to the NIE. While the Times editorial is situated on the left as it always is—thus communicating its greater significance than the op-ed columns to the right—what is truly disconcerting is that the editorial appears to be a rationale for the visual organization and content of the day’s coverage of the NIE. Instead of presenting readers with an array of viewpoints in a visual form that spreads salience as evenly as possible within the current constraints of newspaper form, the Times used visual elements to emphasize its own agenda and downplay those


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that did not follow suit. Fortunately for the Bush administration, the Times’ point of view just so happened to be in line with the White House’s—that Iran is still dangerous. Following the release of the NIE, the Washington Post took a different approach to its visual layout and content than their New York counterpart. Unlike the Times, NIE coverage took priority on the December 4 front page of the Post (Fig. 5.6). At the top, editors placed a news analysis, “A Blow to Bush’s Tehran Policy,” in the Given position and situated the more general news story, “U.S. Finds That Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Bid in 2003,” on the New, right-hand side. Although the news analysis occupies the left, more authoritative side of the front page, the typical values left/right placements lend to news items are undermined as the New information is more attention-grabbing with its much larger, longer headline, and the story itself takes up a little more space than the news analysis to its left. At the same time, the positioning of the news analysis to the left-hand side of the page demonstrates that the Post was indeed applying lessons learned from their reporting prior to the invasion of Iraq. Rather than downplaying the implications of the NIE’s findings, the Post emphasized the IC’s challenge to the Bush administration—the “blow” to Bush’s policy toward Iran—without letting it overshadow coverage of the intelligence estimate itself. When the reporting on the NIE continues on A12 (Fig. 5.7), the potential obstacle the IC put before the Bush administration is given precedence with the headline “Report May Hinder Efforts by U.S. for Sanctions Against Iran” taking up the upper left side of the page and opposite a large photo of President Bush. As the analysis unfolds vertically in two columns along the left side of the page, the information embodies the Ideal—generalized coverage of news—as it reports the reactions from Democratic presidential candidates, intelligence officials, the Bush administration, conservative and nonpartisan think tanks, and the IAEA to present an overview of the general political climate in the wake of the estimate. To the right of the analysis and under the photo of Bush are quotes from the Bush administration from 2003 to 2007 to help readers get the gist of the White House’s rhetoric over the course of four years and to more fully demonstrate the NIE’s departure from the prevailing discourse. Underneath it all in the Real (detail-oriented) position, the news story on the NIE from A1 resumes, going into specific detail about the estimate and providing, like the Times, a small chart that visually displays the differences between the 2005 and 2007 reports. The Post, however, does not go so far as the Times in actually reprinting the key judgments of the 2007 estimate for readers to potentially

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Figure 5.6



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judge the report themselves. Instead, the Post embeds the chart with direct quotes from the two NIE reports into the news story and intertwines summary with quotes from intelligence officials identifying the factors that led to the different conclusions. While the Times’ second day coverage gave overwhelming salience to Iran’s continued efforts to pursue nuclear weapons—an emphasis that worked to the Bush administration’s advantage—the Post highlighted neither the White House’s position nor the IC’s on the December 5 front page (Fig. 5.8). Instead, the headline at the top right of the page reads, “Lessons of Iraq Guided Intelligence On Iran,” a title that strengthens the IC’s position, but at the same time doesn’t emphasize the findings of the NIE. Beneath the short column in a significantly smaller, yet bold font is “Bush: Iran Still Dangerous,” a move that acknowledges the former president’s position without lending it as much prominence as the Times did. In what appears to be the Post’s continued effort to present perspectives in a balanced way, the less salient story on A1 occupies the top half of page A23 and is partially wrapped around a large photo of President Bush at a podium (Fig. 5.9). Above it all reads, “U.S. Renews Efforts to Keep Coalition Against Tehran,” a headline that spans the entire width of the page. In line with its placement in the Ideal zone, the story does more than document Bush’s reaction to the NIE, but rather, presents local and global responses as the journalists cite the reactions of the Democratic presidential candidates, Iranian officials, European leaders, a Chinese envoy, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and members of the Bush administration. Though a truly equal balance of the voices is impossible, as some must inevitably appear before others, Iranian officials were not removed from the conversation as they were in the Times’ second-day coverage. Rather than segregating positions, the story strikes a perspectival balance, as the journalists placed the different voices in a cacophonous conversation with each other. At the bottom, Real section of the page, the Post returns to the “Lessons Learned” article from A1 and exclusively addresses the changes in intelligence gathering and assessment on Iran that led to the IC’s new conclusion. Because the lower half of the page focuses on the process that led to the production of the 2007 NIE, the news item is neither presented nor written in a manner that gives more weight to the IC’s judgments than the rest of the positions on the page. Upon turning to the editorial section, the Post’s response to the NIE on the left side of the page provides the same perspective as the Times’ editors: a sustained skepticism of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. While such a position is advantageous for the Bush administration, the difference between the Post and the Times is that the former did not allow their editorial position to


Figure 5.8


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dictate the visual presentation of the second day’s coverage of the NIE, nor did the content of the news items reflect the news organization’s perspective on the matter. Though the information that precedes the editorial section provides a variety of perspectives, the Post does not carry this into the op-ed pages. Unlike the news stories, the visual arrangement of the op-eds does reflect the position the Post emphasizes most in its editorial, that Iran “is responsive to the sort of international pressure applied by the United States and other Western governments” (“Intelligence on Iran” 2007, p. A28); in other words, the leadership in the Islamic Republic comprises rational actors, not the Orientalist, crazed stereotypes of the Middle Eastern Other. Giving this perspective salience on the opposite page, the editors run “The Myth of the Mad Mullahs” horizontally across the top of the op-ed section starting from the left side of A29 (Fig. 5.10). The privileging of the Post’s position continues as all four op-eds that address the NIE speak of Iran in terms of being rational and emphasize diplomacy rather than military strikes. Because more than one person saying the same thing is not the equivalent of presenting multiple perspectives, the Post can be faulted for what editors selected to go into the op-ed section. But more important is that the news organization’s point of view did not manifest itself so blatantly in the news stories that most readers expect to be objective. Further, the op-eds repetition of Iran as a rational actor contradicts the rhetoric that the White House aimed at Iran over the years, a discourse grounded in centuries of Orientalist stereotypes in literature, film, art, and so forth. By emphasizing Iran’s rationality, the Post undercut arguments for military strikes as the result of America’s not being able to negotiate with irrational Iranian leaders and instead calls for diplomacy. Despite the shortcomings of the Times’ second-day coverage and the homogeneity of the Post’s op-ed page, the NIE indeed shook up the internal debate, or lack thereof, that two of the United States’ most influential newspapers had been covering since 2002. If the press, in an effort to avoid crusading for a cause, reports only the perceived agreement/disagreement among political leaders (Bennett et al. 2007, p. 49), the Intelligence Community’s departure from the White House’s understanding of Iran’s nuclear program was the first public, high-level challenge to the Bush administration with regard to Iran policy. This helped enable the press to provide an alternative to the dominant discourse on Iran and thus move away from quoting American officials, as seen in Chapter 2, ceaselessly reiterating what came to be a sort of mantra, “Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.” If the buildup to Iraq was characterized by a White House determined to overthrow Hussein, weak (or cherry-picked) intelligence, a complicit

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press, and an American people still in the grips of fear from 9/11, the extension of this governmentality, or the alignment of governing forces encouraging Americans to accept particular ways of thinking about and acting toward Iran was temporarily upended as the Intelligence Community opened the doors for an actual debate among America’s political elites during a time when trust in the Bush administration and attitudes toward the war in Iraq were abysmal.

Responses by Bush and His Aspiring Replacements While the NIE brought about various degrees of change in the Post’s and Times’ coverage, there were also subtle shifts in President Bush’s rhetoric. One would have expected him not to have uttered the World War III remark in October 2007 after having learned of the NIE before it was released to the public in December, but Bush explained that he was not apprised of the full details of the estimate when he was told about it in August 2007. Nevertheless, Bush, according to the Post, “made clear [the NIE] did not change his view and would not have changed his rhetoric, including his October warning about the possibility of World War III if Iran builds nuclear weapons” (Baker and Wright 2007, p. A23). Though the president claimed there would not be any change in his rhetoric, there was definitely a marked difference in the way he spoke of Iran’s nuclear program before and after the NIE was made public. The following are the comments Bush made about Iran and its nuclear goals in State of the Unions from 2002 to 2007: Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. (2002a) In Iran, we continue to see a government that represses its people, pursues weapons of mass destruction, and supports terror. (2003a) America and the international community are demanding that Iran meet its commitments and not develop nuclear weapons. (2004a) Today, Iran remains the world’s primary state sponsor of terror— pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. (2005) The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. (2006)

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The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Iran, and made it clear that the world will not allow the regime in Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. (2007) What each statement shares is Bush’s categorical certainty that Iran is pursuing, developing, and/or acquiring nuclear weapons. There is nothing in his words suggesting that Iran might be doing anything to the contrary with its nuclear program. However, Bush appeared to not be so sure of Iran’s intentions in his State of the Union following the December 2007 NIE: “Tehran is also developing ballistic missiles of increasing range and continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon” (2008). Now, Iran “could be” working on a nuclear weapon, a hedging move that somewhat mitigated the imminent danger he portrayed Iran as being in the previous addresses and used to justify the preemptive/preventive attack on Iraq five years earlier. There was also a subtle difference in the World War III remark from Bush’s past rhetoric. What would push the world into another conflict on a massive scale was not a nuclear-armed Iran, but an Islamic Republic that has “the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” (quoted in Stolberg, 2007). Prior to this moment, it was never a matter of Iran simply having the knowledge to make a weapon, because Iran, according to the Bush administration, was never planning to stop short of a nuclear weapon. To have emphasized Iran’s pursuit of the knowledge of nuclear weapons development for half a decade could have potentially led people to believe that Iran was a rational actor and quite possibly having other reasons for its nuclear program than to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to destabilize the Middle East. After all, there are nearly fifty states that are technologically capable of developing nuclear weapons, but do not have a nuclear arsenal (Hymans 2006, p. 4). If Iran were perceived as a rational actor, the fear factor that accompanies the portrayal of Iranian leadership as monomaniacs bent on mass murder would also have been upended and the president’s ability to keep everything on the table with regard to American policy toward Iran would have been hindered. The idea entertaining all options was definitely challenged by the Times and the Post, as both called for diplomacy, not military strikes. Given this rhetorical shift in Bush’s October comments, despite the hyperbole, it seems that the president indeed knew what trouble the NIE would bring to his policy and had plenty of time to adjust his arguments before the IC’s findings were made public during the first week of December.


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The revisions in Bush’s rhetoric would not have been possible if it were not for the flexibility of the circumstances. Despite the parallels in the Iraq and Iran situations, the details of the former do not completely map onto the latter. With Iraq, President Bush set a physically measurable bar for himself, as he declared that the United States was attacking Iraq because Hussein was in possession of WMD. When those alleged weapons were not found, the grounds on which Bush rested the American invasion of Iraq fell apart under the weight of absent evidence. On the other hand, Bush, as discussed in Chapter 3, did not have to provide concrete proof of Iran being in possession of a nuclear weapon, because it had always been an issue of intent, which exists before nuclear weapons are actually produced. Since the NIE said that Iran stopped its alleged weapons program in 2003, the White House could argue, and it did, that they were never wrong about Iran’s intentions in the first place and that the Islamic Republic’s having the knowledge to develop a weapon is still dangerous, since their supposed weapons aspirations could return at any given moment. In other words, the NIE provided both a challenge to the Bush administration and an opportunity for the White House to absorb the IC’s findings into its own discourse and reduce the estimate’s significance by claiming that the report said what Bush and his team had been saying all along—that Iran has had, even if not at this particular moment, intentions to develop nuclear weapons. Despite the slight modification to Bush’s rhetoric, the United States continued to support UN sanctions in spring 2008 as the Security Council expanded its efforts to curtail the development of Iran’s nuclear program by calling on the international community to inspect import/export cargoes for nuclear sensitive material, to keep banks from helping Iran secure funds for its nuclear activities, and a number of other preventive measures (United Nations Security Council 2008, pp. 4–5). These sanctions would not be removed until Iran verifiably suspended all enrichment activities so that the nature of Iran’s nuclear program could be understood in its entirety. Iran, however, was anything but silent as the United Nations increased the sanctions on what the NPT declared to be a state’s legal right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. In a letter submitted to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki outlined a list of injustices he believed Iran was facing with yet another round of sanctions: denial of the right to a peaceful nuclear program, American manipulation of the IAEA and UN to pursue its own agenda, and the failure of the IAEA to adhere to its own statutes, just to name a few (2008, p. 3). Nevertheless, the sanctions leveled against Iran were not done

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because there was evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, but because of the Islamic Republic’s continued failure to cooperate fully with inspectors. The 2007 NIE, however, could still be used to justify Americanbacked sanctions against Iran because the IC argued that what prevented Iran from moving forward with a weapons program “was probably halted primarily in response to international pressure” (National Intelligence Estimate 2007). The initial round of sanctions against Iran, though, were not implemented until three years after the IC claimed Iran shut down its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. So the NIE may have offered an alternative perspective on when Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons, but it was not an internal roadblock to the White House’s calls for increased sanctions, as it credited the halt in Iran’s alleged weapons development to foreign influence. By the summer of 2008, little had changed in the rhetoric of Bush’s potential replacements as the top political parties held debates among their respective presidential candidates. On June 3, 2008, the Democratic presidential hopefuls gathered in New Hampshire to debate America’s most pressing issues. Though everyday people posed the questions for the debate, the inquiries were undoubtedly filtered to ensure that they addressed particular concerns. Turning the debate to Iran, “Polly,” one of the “ordinary voters” given the opportunity to pose a question, asked, “How would you approach solving the problem we have in Iran today?” (“New Hampshire” 2008). She was also concerned with whether the candidates would take military or diplomatic measures. The ambiguity of Polly’s question left the responsibility of defining the problem to the candidates themselves, and most of them perpetuated the notion that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. And when mediator Wolf Blitzer rephrased Polly’s question for Senator John Edwards, the problem became more clearly defined: “Senator Edwards, how far would you go, if necessary, to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb?” (“New Hampshire” 2008). Blitzer even went on to offer a hypothetical intelligence estimate when seeking Senator Joseph Biden’s response: “If you got word from the US intelligence community that Ahmadinejad and his government were on the verge of having a nuclear bomb capable of hitting targets in the region on missiles, what would you do?” (“New Hampshire” 2008). Biden, however, took a different path than his colleagues as he actually downplayed the Iranian nuclear threat: “They are not a year away or two years away. They are a decade away from being able to weaponize [. . .]” (“New Hampshire” 2008). Moreover, Biden pointed out that Iran imports the majority of its refined oil for energy purposes, thus offering a rationale for why Iran would need a nuclear program in the first place; Biden did not make this connection explicit, though. Instead, he


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played the game and said, like his fellow debaters, that he would take out an Iranian nuclear weapon. Biden’s comments did not go without notice in the ensuing Republican debate, as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani brought up Iran in his response to the question of whether invading Iraq was a mistake. Arguing that taking down Iraq was part of a larger fight against terrorism, Giuliani added, “Iran is not 10 years away from nuclear weapons [. . .]. The danger to us is a state like Iran handing nuclear weapons over to terrorists” (“Republican” 2008). For Giuliani, Democrats were in denial that Iran was a nuclear threat, though the only one to deemphasize Iran’s nuclear program was Senator Biden. Less alarmist than the former mayor, Congressman Duncan Hunter, seeming to follow President Bush’s lead, hedged a little on his assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions: “They’ve got about 1,000 centrifuges now working, enriching the material that can make, at some point, a nuclear weapon” (“Republican” 2008). Initially, Hunter equivocated on if and when Iran would develop nuclear weapons, but clarified any ambiguity when he concluded that “the United States reserves the right to preempt, and we may have to preempt that nuclear weapons program” (“Republican” 2008). In the same vein as Giuliani, Governor Jim Gilmore of Virginia remarked that the American presence in Iraq was crucial to preventing Iran from expanding its power in the region, an expansion, the governor noted, that Iran sought to strengthen with nuclear weapons. Like both his Republican and Democratic counterparts, the gorvernor maintained that “all options are on the table by the United States” (“Republican” 2008). And like the Democratic debate two days before, no candidate mentioned the 2007 NIE. What soon became evident even before the nominees clamoring for top position dwindled to Senators John McCain and Barack Obama was that the issue was not one of how to define Iran’s nuclear program, though the 2007 NIE should have been the impetus for such a debate. Rather, both parties accepted Iran as pursuing a nuclear weapon, and the debates from the beginning were concerned with how to prevent Iran from achieving a goal that the IC said they had no interest in achieving as early as fall 2003. During the first presidential debate, Jim Lehrer, the mediator, asked the candidates to share their assessment of the Iranian threat to the United States, an open-ended question like that in the first Democratic presidential debate that left defining the problem to the debaters. McCain responded, My reading of the threat from Iran is that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the State of Israel and to other countries in the region because the other countries in the region will feel

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compelling requirement to acquire nuclear weapons as well. (“Transcript” 2008) Instead of providing his assessment of an actual threat, Senator McCain provided his reading of a hypothetical one. Obama was no different as he said that Iran had “gone from zero centrifuges to 4,000 centrifuges to develop a nuclear weapon” (“Transcript” 2008). Senator Obama also agreed that a nuclear-armed Iran would result in a domino effect throughout the rest of the region. “But we are also going to have to,” Obama pointed out, “engage in tough direct diplomacy with Iran and this is a major difference I have with Senator McCain” (“Transcript” 2008). For the Illinois Senator, America’s stance toward Iran needed to be less military driven, a point Obama used to separate himself from McCain and comically reinforced by quoting the Arizona Senator as singing, “Bomb, bomb Iran.” Though Obama separated himself from McCain on the grounds of diplomacy versus military strikes, he joined the chorus of political leaders who reinforced fear of an Iranian nuclear threat. At the same time, those candidates who supported diplomacy were using a discourse that was grounded in the notion that Iranian leadership is composed of rational actors, a presumption that the IC’s findings strengthened and the press supported. Though the IC’s findings undercut a pervasive Orientalist stereotype of the irrational Middle Eastern/Muslim Other in the case of Iran and its nuclear program, fear of a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Islamic Republic remained. If President Bush and his political surrogates “cherry-picked” intelligence prior to invading Iraq, the same thing seemed to happen with the 2007 NIE. While American leaders and the press highlighted the rationality of Iranian leadership, they at once downplayed the claim that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program, as this finding never saw the light of day during the intra-party and presidential debates. If it had, this would have been evidence of the IC’s ability to truly redirect the debate over Iran’s nuclear program. Thus, the IC’s success and failure in molding the discursive landscape with regard to Iran holds significant implications for studies of language and social change, an issue that will be explored in the next and final chapter.

Chapter 6

Before World War III: Discourse Studies and Social Change

Although I have primarily focused on the relatively recent past throughout the chapters that constitute this project, my overriding concern, much like that of the Bush administration, has been of the future—a hope of somehow effecting change through my academic work. As Bush augured several months before the public release of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” (quoted in Stolberg 2007). The former president’s prediction was not a singular occurrence, since it was only one among many that he, his political surrogates, and members of the press uttered from 2002 to 2008. Further, the Bush administration’s recurring articulations of an ominous tomorrow were not mere comments one should have taken with a grain of salt, but statements that the United States deployed in an effort to capitalize on the indeterminate space of the future. As Patricia Dunmire (2005) contends, “the future, as the site of the possible and potential, represents a contested rhetorical domain through which partisans attempt to wield ideological and political power” (p. 482). In the case of American-Iranian relations, if the Bush administration could successfully determine the future threat of Iran’s nuclear program for the American people (or at least appear to have done so), then the White House would have a greater chance of taking publicly sanctioned actions against Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions in the present (now the recent past). The Bush administration’s attempts to map out the future, however, included more than describing the imminent danger of a nuclear-armed Iran. To lend more credibility to their understanding of the events to come, the White House, with the help of the press, had to discursively configure present circumstances through rhetorical means, such as downplaying Iran’s energy needs, emphasizing President Ahmadinejad’s bellicose language toward

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Israel, claiming that the 2007 NIE did not contradict their stance on Iran, and so forth. This study, then, is an alternative arrangement of the same circumstances upon which the White House discursively relied to encourage readers to question positions such as Bush’s World War III comment. In doing so, I have not sought to absolve Iran from the suspicion American leaders have toward the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, but rather to examine the discursive construction and distribution of the certainty that characterizes the attitudes of those who have charged Iran with developing nuclear weapons. If unfounded certainty played a significant role in leading the United States to invade Iraq—a move that has resulted in a bloody, drawn-out conflict—then it only seems reasonable to provide a critical examination of what politicians, pundits, and others have said about Iran in American news media and elsewhere. To take a future-oriented approach differs from other scholarship that is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social change, because such work typically focuses on the actors who might effect change, leaving aside the unpredictability of the future. In the context of globalization, Norman Fairclough grounds his understanding of the relationship between language and social change in a bifurcation of the persons and organizations up high and their weaker counterparts down below. “Globalization,” Fairclough (2006) asserts, “is driven by the strategies of powerful agents and agencies” (p. 171). The world’s elites, despite Fairclough’s acknowledgment of the diverse discourses of the powerful, are construed as a homogeneous mass united in their efforts to sustain disparate power relations and/or the abuse of power. On the other hand, “Globalization from below is driven by the strategies of individuals or groups in specific places to adapt to and gain from change, or defend themselves against it” (Fairclough 2006, p. 171). Within this dichotomy of the powerful versus the unequally powerful masses, Fairclough grants agency to and strictly aligns social change with the latter. For Fairclough, the wellspring of resistance lies solely within the heterogeneous struggles of the disenfranchised who can strengthen their efforts beyond their respective locales by uniting with others on a global scale. Fairclough, however, leaves little room to consider members of the elite as possible sources of resistance. And if we extrapolate Fairclough’s perspective on social change to account for the discourse surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate would contradict his theory. No one could have, or likely would have, predicted that the American Intelligence Community would release a document that—contrary to the Bush administration’s rhetoric—worked against the White House’s position on Iran, precisely because the future is not set in

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stone. In other words, the powerful should not always be expected to act in unison, because people and organizations can and do change. While Fairclough’s position on resistance begins at the bottom, Teun van Dijk’s work in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) aspires to “develop strategies of discursive dissent and resistance” (2008, p. 23) in order to effect change from above. Outlining what he sees as the practical contributions CDA can make to help offset social inequality, van Dijk encourages critical linguists to advise media professionals and other gatekeepers of knowledge on how to recognize the problems their discursive choices may incur, to ally themselves with different movements and organizations so that the latter can make use of CDA scholarship, and to raise students’ awareness of malevolent discourses (2008, pp. 23–25). His recommendations are an attempt to put the knowledge/power relationship to work for the oppressed: critical linguists possess an expertise that, if shared with others in power, can assist in effecting change. “In order to be able to reach such goals,” van Dijk writes, “we need to investigate in detail which discourse properties, which discourse genres, and in what communicative contexts, are likely to have which sociocognitive consequences on the formation of knowledge, attitudes and ideologies” (2008, p. 24). In short, CDA scholars, in their collaborative efforts to combat disparate power relations, must amass enough evidence to predict what aspects of language use sustain or challenge the status quo despite an endless range of contextual factors and human attitudes. Such an approach is a huge burden on discourse scholars, because discourse analysts will never be clairvoyants, no matter how detailed and voluminous their CDA projects are. Further, one of the most difficult things to foretell in discourse studies is uptake. I would not have expected the audience of Ahmadinjad’s 60 Minutes interview to be as divided as they were, given the light in which the American press (and Ahmadinejad himself) has portrayed the Iranian president. By the same token, advising media professionals or instilling an awareness of disparate power relations in aspiring journalists are steps toward change, but are nonetheless subject to the whims of individuals themselves and the influence of news media’s institutional norms. That we cannot predict how media professionals will respond to scholarly advice, however, does not preclude van Dijk’s position that discourse scholars must align themselves with different organizations to help bring about social change, a claim that is very much in sync with Kenneth Rufo’s notion of “rhetorical power.” Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu, Rufo (2003) contends that a speaker’s ability to bring about social change through discourse is closely tied to one’s possession of symbolic capital or one’s ability to align

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oneself with those who possess a significant amount of symbolic capital; symbolic capital is whatever a society values such as masculinity, money, and other forms of capital that one can mobilize in an effort to achieve particular goals. “Ultimately,” Rufo explains, “rhetoric only functions epistemologically as a consequence of its distribution of power” (2003, p. 82). Although Rufo does not comment specifically on academic discourse, his perspective, which I find compelling, has major implications for scholarship that seeks to effect social change, particularly in global politics. When I began this study, I wanted to contribute both to discourse studies—specifically Rhetorical Studies and CDA—and the public concern over Iran’s nuclear program. While I believe my project adds to discourse studies as I fuse a variety of methodologies and theories that scholars might use in their own news media analyses, I am wary that the tiny academic audience my analysis reaches limits the capacity for this project to influence public discourse on the Iranian nuclear controversy in any significant way. This attitude was only reinforced when the Intelligence Community’s 2007 NIE hardly changed the rhetoric of the United States’ top political actors, as evidenced by the presidential and DNC/GOP debates of 2008. My study’s lack of rhetorical power, then, is its greatest weakness. Nevertheless, the uncertainty of the future pushed me to continue and finish a project that is only a single contribution to what can be said about the discourse surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, as tension between the United States and the Islamic Republic did not subside at the end of Bush’s presidency. While researching and writing this analysis of American public discourse on Iran’s nuclear program, I took heed of Dick Hebdige’s caveat concerning scholarship that provides perspectives on the future that do not necessarily reinforce a dominant discourse. “[I]n order to articulate social possibilities,” Hebdige (1993) observes, “you first have to take certain risks, to give up certain certainties” (p. 277). One of the certainties I abandoned is the claim—not the fact—that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. As I pointed out in the previous chapters, the number of powerful voices that have identified Iran’s nuclear ambitions as geared toward weapons development over the years has been overwhelming, but the same cannot be said of the evidence to support these accusations. Concrete proof, however, was never a priority for the Bush administration and those who followed suit. Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld put it best during a 2002 press conference in Belgium after an especially tongue-twisting observation of terrorism and WMD threat assessment: There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. [ . . . ]. Simply because you do not have


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evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist. (2002b) Though Rumsfeld’s remark is not completely unreasonable, there is a problematic assumption embedded in such a way of thinking: the investigative attitude that should accompany suspicion and could possibly lead to the unearthing of actual evidence is cast aside in a way that equates suspicion with proof. Rather than forsake inquiry to jump hastily to a conclusion about Iran’s nuclear endeavors, I embraced inquiry to consider many of the public arguments put forth to justify seeing Iran’s nuclear research and development as a weapons program. Neither American nor Iranian officials produced arguments that proved the latter’s guilt or innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. And just because a preponderance of American officials, Democrat and Republican, have repeatedly said that Iran wants to produce nuclear weapons does not mean that they were right, as the Iraq debacle has shown. Another certainty I discarded in this project is the idea that one analytical lens can provide a robust, multifaceted analysis that can aid in the articulation of different social possibilities (i.e., that Iran might not be developing nuclear weapons). My rhetorical analysis of the arguments Bush and his subordinates made during his two terms about Iran’s nuclear program demonstrated that their discourse lacked forensic rhetoric, occasionally relied on stereotypes of the Middle Eastern Other, conveniently omitted aspects of Iran’s international obligations and the United States’ past support of Iran’s nuclear goals, and other positions marshaled to convince Americans of Iran’s alleged nefarious plans. The Bush administration’s rhetoric, however, did not exist in a vacuum and was mediated by a news institution whose language also needed to be critically examined. Drawing from discourse analysis methodologies in Chapters 3 and 4, I highlighted the significant role interviewers play in shaping the discourse of foreign and domestic political leaders for audiences. As I observed in the Secretary Rice interviews, interviewers can help lend an epideictic air to what a political leader has to say when they refrain from asking tough questions and/or follow-up questions that seek clarification of vague responses. On the other hand, interviewers can draw an audience’s attention to the debatable character of an interviewee’s rhetoric, as was the case with President Ahmadinejad’s interview on 60 Minutes. Further, my use of visual grammar in the penultimate chapter helped illuminate the ways the New York Times and Washington Post attempted to guide readers through their respective coverage of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. By doing so, I tried to show that it is not only the newsmakers’ language that is important in

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communicating ideas to newspaper readers, but also a newspaper’s choices for visually presenting news stories. While the discourse in a news story or interview and how such language is mediated (e.g., layout or the interaction between interviewer and interviewee) are important for understanding the ideas newsmakers and news outlets try to communicate to audiences, this rhetoric is nonetheless subject to the unequal distribution of social power. Drawing from New Institutionalist scholarship, I emphasized what Timothy Cook calls the “negotiation for newsworthiness” as mutual dependence characterizes the relationship between newsmakers and journalists. Put differently, politicians and the other individuals who serve as newsmakers do not control news organizations, but they do control access to information journalists need to produce the news. In order to keep communication channels open, journalists tend to avoid “crusading,” to borrow Bennett and his colleague’s term, by refraining from challenging particular newsmakers with alternative points of view. When the state and the press are aligned, or seem to be in agreement, as was the case in much of what was examined in this study, these two entities can work to guide American citizens to take on particular worldviews, including the perspective that Iran is a nuclear threat. Turning to Foucault, I perceived this institutional alignment as a form of governmentality, or a confluence of governing forces that can mobilize populations toward particular ends. In the case of the supposed Iranian nuclear threat, the Bush administration, with the conscious or unconscious help of the press, worked to arouse fear in the American people of a dangerous future to increase the White House’s ability to prevent it from happening. Iran, then, was yet another rationale for former President Bush’s expansion of executive power that an interdisciplinary range of scholars have scrutinized, from theorists such as Agamben to historians such as Bacevich. No matter how much a president’s power increases during or before times of crisis, they can never truly control the future, partly because of the limited time a president can hold office. A president can certainly make a mark that lasts well beyond a maximum of eight years of work, but the actors that succeed an incumbent—even if they are members of the same party—are not guaranteed to continue efforts to bring a particular future into fruition. Take for example the Bush administration’s efforts, dating back to 2006, to establish a missile defense shield in central Europe that the White House argued would protect America’s European allies from a potential Iranian ballistic missile and/or nuclear attack (Gordon 2006). After a historic victory, President Obama proposed a change to his predecessor’s missile defense program, which was accompanied by a shift in rhetoric as well:


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This decision was guided by two principal factors. First, we have updated our intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile programs, which emphasizes the threat posed by Iran’s short- and medium-range missiles, which are capable of reaching Europe. There’s no substitute for Iran complying with its international obligations regarding its nuclear program, and we, along with our allies and partners, will continue to pursue strong diplomacy to ensure that Iran lives up to these international obligations. But this new ballistic missile defense program will best address the threat posed by Iran’s ongoing ballistic missile defense program. (2009b) In this statement, Obama implied that the Iranian nuclear threat was not as imminent as the Bush administration made it out to be. This implication, of course, did not suggest that the Obama administration opposed the previous White House’s suspicion of Iran’s nuclear program, but rather that suspicion itself would not guide Obama’s actions toward Iran more than the latest intelligence assessments. Further, the president showed that intelligence will be taken seriously, though the power to explain away intelligence findings, as the Bush administration did, still remains. Such a perspective was in stark contrast to that espoused by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, and Obama’s words were also evidence of how a change in political actors can alter the path to tomorrow that other elites tried to pave in the past. In addition to not treating suspicion as proof, the Obama administration may have also begun to change its rhetoric toward Israel. Unlike the Bush administration, the Obama White House capitulated to demands from Arab states, according to the New York Times¸ to encourage Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in a 40-page review of the treaty produced after a NPT meeting in May 2010 (Landler 2010). Though the United States signed the review, Obama’s national security advisor, General James Jones, is quoted as saying, “The United States deplores the decision to single out Israel in the Middle East section of the NPT document” (Landler 2010). General Jones’s comments and Israel’s disappointment notwithstanding, the decision to endorse the NPT document may serve as diplomatic leverage as Iranian President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the United States’ willingness to pursue sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program while Israel has refused to sign the NPT. If the Obama administration is genuinely willing to follow through with urging Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the White House might be able to stave off the hypocrisy that overshadows its efforts toward a nuclear-free Middle East. Though the United States’ top political actors have changed and their rhetoric toward Iran may have shifted—a claim that scholars can work to verify in future discourse studies—the same cannot be said of Iran. June 2009

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marked a potentially pivotal moment in American-Iranian relations, because President Ahmadinejad was up for reelection, but he ultimately defeated his opposition, most notably Mir Hossein Mousavi. After an election that many thought to be rigged, Iranian protesters took to the streets in numbers that have drawn comparisons to the Islamic Revolution, and it is still unclear how many demonstrators have died since Ahmadinejad (legitimately or illegitimately) regained office. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s reelection signaled another setback in easing the tension between the United States and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program, because there was virtually no chance that Obama would engage, even if he wanted to, in direct talks with Ahmadinejad, given Iran’s response to protesters after the 2009 election. This, however, is not to say that a Mousavi presidency would have attracted top-level exchanges. As Obama noted in a CNBC interview, “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised” (2009b). Nevertheless, a new Iranian president would have allowed the White House more communicative flexibility than the risk of engaging with Ahmadinejad. If many Americans reacted negatively to Ahmadinejad appearing on 60 Minutes, what degree of rage would ensue if Obama were to work directly with Ahmadinejad to resolve the nuclear controversy. In addition to the contested Iranian presidential election, Iran’s translucent relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency was once again the center of attention when President Obama, along with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister Gordon Brown, announced in September 2009 that “Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near [the city of] Qom for several years” (2009c). Shortly after the announcement, Iran sent a letter to the IAEA, which was quoted at length in the November 2009 inspection report, stating that the plant is a pilot facility and that it was built underground as a form of “passive defense” (quoted in ElBaradei 2009b). Despite Iran’s efforts to exculpate itself, the IAEA Board of Governors explained in a November 27, 2009, resolution that the Qom revelation reduced their confidence in the Islamic Republic because they could not be certain whether or not Iran had other hidden nuclear facilities. In the meantime, the United States and other European powers pushed for a fuel swap in which Iran would export its enriched uranium in exchange for energy that could fuel its nuclear reactors, a proposal that Iran ultimately rejected (“Iran Effectively Rejects” 2010). In short, the nuclear controversy has yet to be resolved, and language scholars have much to examine in the ongoing discourse surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.


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Looking forward to the future, then, the final certainty that I have cast aside is that my colleagues and perhaps a larger reading public will take up my study’s claims in a meaningful way. The lack of scholarship on the discourse surrounding Iran’s nuclear program might be the result of only a few scholars having lent academic eyes to the matter, but the dearth of scholarly work might very well be indicative of scholars having already made up their minds about Iran’s working to develop nuclear weapons. If the latter is the case, it is nonetheless disconcerting that there has been no discussion in Rhetorical Studies or CDA on a foreign affairs issue with potentially far-reaching repercussions if certain decisions are made by either American or Iranian political actors. Must we wait for the success of diplomacy, the bloodshed borne of violence, or any other outcome to put our scholarly minds to use? If so, then our scholarship is nothing more than reactions to the judgments that governments and other powerful institutions and individuals use to help shape the future. By actively engaging with important policy questions, foreign and domestic, before major decisions have been made, we increase our chances of effecting change, even though most of us can do nothing more than hope that our analyses will be taken up by those powerful enough to lend our academic conversations rhetorical power that they otherwise would not have. In short, to ensure that we as scholars contribute to articulations of the future, we must work to produce scholarship that does not weigh in on a controversy after the fact. Iran’s nuclear goals have not been conclusively determined, and there is definitely a risk of speaking against the certainty that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons; after all, critics of Iran’s nuclear program might one day supply sufficient evidence to justify their suspicions. The possibility of my being wrong for critically engaging the circulating discourse on Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful or militaristic, however, is a risk that I—as a scholar and citizen—am willing to take to produce scholarship that encourages skepticism of the futures political elites hope to decide for the masses.

Appendix A

Excerpt from Interview on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos and Peter Jennings Washington, DC January 30, 2005

Stephanopoulos: Let me turn now to Iran. In your Senate testimony you called it an outpost of tyranny. Are you concerned now by the role that Iran is playing in Iraq? Rice: Well, we certainly are concerned by the role Iran has tried to play in Iraq. More importantly, the Iraqis are concerned about the role that Iran has been playing in Iraq. Iran is Iraq’s neighbor and it’s only natural that there will be links between Iran and Iraq. It’s only natural that there will be relations there. And as long as those relations are transparent with the new government, we should have no objection to that, just as we’ve had no objection to Iran having relations with its Afghan neighbor. But the Iranians need to understand that the Iraqis are going to build their own future, that is going to be a future that is very different than the Iranian regime. We’ve seen that from all Iraqi parties in the way that they’ve commented on the kind of regime that Iran has. That’s been our problem with Iran, that and some support for, perhaps for insurgents that is really not warranted. Stephanopoulos: And you think that’s still happening? Rice: Well, I do believe that the Iranian have not been particularly a force for stability and for good. Stephanopoulos: I know you are also, of course, concerned about the Iranian nuclear program. And it seems as if, in the last couple of weeks, there seems to be more of a split between the United States and Europe over how to handle that nuclear program, some rumblings of military action here in Washington.

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And your counterpart, Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, gave this interview to the BBC. Here’s what he had to say: ‘I don’t see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran.’ Do you agree with that? Rice: Well, I’ve just met with Jack Straw and with my counterpart from Germany, and I have to say Idon’t see a developing split here. What I see is that the world understands that there has to be unity in getting the Iranians to see that they cannot be part of the international system and pursue a nuclear weapon at the same time. The IAEA has been, I think very aggressive in dealing with the Iranians and telling them that they have to live up to their international obligations. In conversations with our European counterparts, we understand the EU-3 is pursuing this goal with the Iranians of stopping whatever the Iranians are doing. The good thing is, George, several years ago, I think nobody was really listening to us when we said that the Iranians were pursuing, probably pursuing, a nuclear weapon under cover of a civilian nuclear power program, which would, of course, be in complete contravention of their obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty. Now everybody is suspicious of that. Now people are telling the Iranians that you have to sign additional protocols. Now the Russians are telling the Iranians we can only finish your civilian power plant when you agree to additional protocols and to returning the fuel supply. So I see a unifying theme here to the Iranians and we’ve been in very close contacts with the Europeans about what they’re doing and hope that they succeed. Stephanopoulos: Do you support their efforts? Rice: Look, anybody who can succeed in getting the Iranians to live up to their international obligations, obviously, will have our support. Stephanopoulos: Vice President Cheney, of course, raised some eyebrows a couple weeks ago when he suggested that some were worried that Israel might take matters in its own hands and go and do a nuclear—a military strike against the Iranian nuclear program without asking anyone. Are you worried about that? Rice: Well, an Iran that is nuclear-armed, of course, is going to be a force for instability in that region and all kinds of things are possible if Iran gets to a nuclear device that is usable. That’s why we have focused so on the diplomacy, focused so on unifying the world around this theme, focused so on getting the Russians and others to recognize that even civilian nuclear engagement, civilian nuclear programs with the Iranians, have proliferation risks.

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Stephanopoulos: But if Israel came to the United States—and Dennis Ross has raised this possibility. If Prime Minister Sharon came to you, came to the President, and said, ‘I have to take action,’ would the United States try to dissuade him? Rice: George, you know I’m not going to speculate on such things. But the key is we have an obligation internationally to make sure that the Iranians live up their international obligations because an Iran that pursues nuclear weapons, an Iran that gets a nuclear device, would be very dangerous to the region, would set up all kinds of forces for instability. There is no disagreement anywhere in the international community that that is the case. Stephanopoulos: But then you can’t rule out military action. Rice: The President never takes any option off the table. But we believe, we believe fully, that this can be resolved by diplomatic means. All that we need is unity of purpose, unity of message to the Iranians, and the willingness to stay the course in terms of verification of anything that the Iranians are doing. And I think we’re getting that kind of unity of purpose.

Appendix B

Interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News Berlin, Germany February 4, 2005

Karl: Madam Secretary, you made some history just by getting sworn in. What was your feeling when you walked into that press conference with Chancellor Schroeder and saw all those cameras and that kind of a reception? Rice: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many cameras, so it was quite an experience. This has been a great opportunity, to be here in Germany, to earlier be in Great Britain. I wanted very much on my first trip as secretary to come to some of our great allies and friends to talk about the common heritage that we have, the common values that we have, the opportunities that we have before us, to spread freedom and democracy, and it’s just been a wonderful reception, it’s really be a great day. Karl: Now you’ve promised and the president has promised to support the Iranian people. How? Rice: Well, we are supporting the Iranian people. When you hear across these discussions that we’ve had today and in these press conferences that we’ve had, people saying the chancellor of Germany, the foreign secretary of Great Britain that the Iranian people deserve to have their aspirations met. Just telling the Iranian people, that they are not forgotten in the great reform movement that is going to sweep through the Middle East is important. The Iranian people are no different than the people of Iraq or the people of Afghanistan or the people of Ukraine or the people of Germany or the United States—they deserve the human dignity of being able to live in liberty. Karl: Well, words are one thing. Are you planning anything specific to help the Iranian opposition? Anything by way of programs, by way of, you know, radio broadcasts, what are you planning? What new? Rice: Well, in fact we do have broadcasts that are available in Iran. But let me just give you an example. We have something called the Forum for the

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Future, which is an outgrowth of the Broader Middle East initiative, and it is an effort to allow not just governance to talk, but also for civil society groups, for women’s groups, for business groups to talk. The Moroccans invited the Iranians to the Forum for the Future and obviously would have invited their civil society groups and the like. It would be a wonderful thing, if the civil society groups of Iran could participate in such an activity. So, there is much that can be done to sustain the hopes of the Iranian people. They are a sophisticated people who have demonstrated time and again that they want a democratic way and it is just extremely important that they not be forgotten as we talk about reforms in the rest of the Middle East. Karl: It is no secret that that’s an unpopular regime. If the Iranian people were to rise up against that regime, would the United States be there? Rice: Obviously, I’m not going to get into speculation about events that have not taken place. But the president of the United States, when he speaks of freedom on behalf of peoples around the world, is doing so because the United States has to stand for people who are not having their aspirations met. And the good thing is that I was listening earlier in my discussions with Foreign Minister Straw to what he said in the press conference, that of course, the discussions that they are having with the Iranians are not just about their nuclear weapons, not just about the support for terrorism, but also about their human rights records. There is a common purpose here to remind the Iranian regime that their efforts to be a member in full standing of the international community of states cannot be carried out if they are pursuing policies, internally and externally, that are policies that are out of step with the growing trends toward democracy and reform in the region. This is a long process of change in the Middle East, it is a generational commitment to change in the Middle East, but we have to have an agenda that says that it is a process of change from which no one can be omitted. Karl: So am I sensing a subtle change in our policy, where we are talking about the human rights and democracy issues regarding Iran now and not so much just focusing on the nuclear issue and terrorism issue? Rice: Oh, I think if you go back, the president has talked about the Iranian human rights issues for quite a long time. He’s issued statements that talk from time to time when the Iranians have done terrible things to their own people; he’s issued statements about that. It is important that this be a range of issues that, when we look at the kind of Middle East that we’re trying to build, it is a Middle East in which we are seeking for instance a peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. That is one of the most hopeful areas right now because with the election

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of a new Palestinian leader, with the Israeli plans for disengagement from the Gaza, we really have a new chance. What is one of the great frustrations? It is that there are rejectionist terrorist groups who at every turn try to frustrate the efforts of the Palestinians and the Israelis for peace. The Iranians are major supporters of those rejectionst groups and the Iranians of course have believed that Israel should not exist in the Middle East. They are out of step. They are out of step with where the Middle East is going. Karl: If you want to see the change out of this regime, why not have diplomatic relations with the Iranians. After all, our friends, the British do. I mean, if you really want to engage them, why not sit down and talk to them? Rice: The Iranians know what they need to do. We don’t need to talk about it. They know what they need to do. And we will work with our friends and allies. We have many means, diplomatic and political, at our disposal to continue to impress upon the Iranians that they are out of step with the trends that we hope to see develop in the Middle East. Karl: But isn’t it time to at least re-assess whether it makes sense because it has been twenty-five some years that we have not had any formal conversations with the Iranians? I mean, how do you encourage a country to change you’re not even sitting down and talking to? Rice: Well, it’s not hard to encourage change in a country when it should look around and see that the rest of the region is going to move on. If you think about the prospect or the perspective of those in Iran who have watched Afghans vote—in Iran—for a free Afghan government, who have watched Iraqis vote—in Iran—for a free Iraqi government, but are going to participate in effectively a sham election in a few months, if they participate at all. It says to the Iranian regime, to the unelected few, that this is not the future. And we have to say that. It doesn’t mean that the United States does not understand that this is a time for diplomacy. I’ve said that many, many times. This is the time for diplomacy. But it is also a time to be straightforward about what needs to be done. Karl: In the first term, the administration was perfectly clear that regime change is not the policy of the United States. Richard Armitage said it directly, just like that. You’ve been asked that question three, four, maybe five times on this trip, have not answered it directly, so let me try one more time: is regime change not the policy? Rice: Well, the policy of the United States is to deal with both the external and internal behavior of an Iranian regime that is out of step with where the Middle East is going. Karl: Do we think that it’s time for that regime to go?

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Rice: The Iranian people clearly deserve better. But the Iranian regime needs to be reminded that the entire world, the entire International Atomic Energy Agency, for instance, is united in its concerns and suspicions about what the Iranians are doing with their nuclear programs. That the world is not going to stand by, those of us who are interested in Israeli and Palestinian peace, and countenance the continued support for terrorism which will undo the very peace that we seek. That, as in my discussions here in Europe, as people have said, we have to stand for democracy in Iran. If we don’t stand for democracy in Iran, why are the Iranian people are any different than the others for whom we stand for democracy? So, our policies are pretty clear. The goal of this administration is to work with others to deal with Iranian behavior that is both internal and external, that is a problem for the kind of Middle East that we wish to build. Karl: But even your own spokesperson yesterday at the State Department, Adam Ereli, said “regime change is not the policy.” And I’m just wondering why you’ve passed up the opportunity to say that . . . Are we now saying that we want . . . ? Rice: Jonathan, we don’t need slogans; what we need is a policy that is clear about what it is we’re trying to achieve. And I don’t think sloganeering helps us here, and I’m not going to engage in it. What we have is a policy that says, and in which we have plenty of help, you’ve heard this question asked of Foreign Secretary Straw today, you’ve heard it asked of the German chancellor, should democracy in [Iran] be an issue? Yes, of course, because in an alliance based on values, it has to be an issue. Karl: You’ve also, you have a situation we have. Last question, we’re running out of time. You said, that the question of war with Iran is not on the table and not on the agenda and then you added “at this time.” What does that mean, does it mean it’s some other time? Rice: The American president is never going to take options off the table. My point was, I was asked a question and I think I said the question of an attack on Iran is not on the agenda at this time. And it’s not. Because we believe that we have many diplomatic means by which to deal with the challenge that Iran presents for an international community that is trying to diminish the threat of weapons of mass destruction—not create a new nuclear state. That is trying to move to peace in the Palestinian territories— not support terrorist rejectionists who frustrate that effort. That is trying to move toward reform and democracy in a region where people are crying out for reform and democracy. And so this I said in my confirmation hearings, that this is the time for diplomacy. We fully believe that we have diplomatic and political levers at

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our disposal, that we have commonality of purpose and unity of message to the Iranians about what is expected of them. And we will engage with our friends and allies to try and affect that behavior which, as I said, is very much out of step with where the rest of the region is going. Karl: You said: the time for diplomacy is now. You gave us all world atlases, pocket world atlases? Rice: Right. Karl: That means we’re going to be seeing you on the road a lot? Rice: That means that diplomacy requires a lot of travel. I’ll see you on the road. Karl: Madam Secretary, thank you very much. Rice: Thank you.

Appendix C

Excerpt from Interview with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News Rome, Italy February 8, 2005

Mitchell: There are still disagreements over China, over whether or not there should a continued arms embargo over China and over Iran principally. The Europeans believe that the president in his inaugural address was in fact promoting regime change in Iran. What can you say to them about what US policy is? Are we telling the Iranians that they should rise up and rebel against their government? Rice: We’re telling the Iranian people that they’ve not been forfotten in the efforts to spread freedom and democracy around the world. The Iranian people are a sophisticated people with a great culture and a great heritage and tradition. They are people that have demonstrated time and again that they want to live under democratic principles, and yet they live under an un-elected few who are frustrating those aspirations and this message to them—a message, by the way, that I think is being echoed in other places—is that the behavior of the Iranian regime internally is a concern for those of us in the trans-Atlantic Alliance, that we’re not going to forget that. Mitchell: You called the loathsome. Rice: Well, the human rights abuses in Iran are. You cannot summarily in effect execute young women for certain kinds of behavior and not consider that to be loathsome. You cannot throw the reformists in jail with really no process and not consider that to be loathsome. Mitchell: Some of our allies—Egypt, Saudi Arabia—do the same thing without that kind of harsh criticism from you and the president. Rice: Well, we’ve been very clear that we expect a lot from our friends as well. And we are seeing throughout the Middle East that the conversation is changing about what must be done. That even at the Arab League meetings

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last year, there was a conversation about reform. That is why when the American president puts something on the agenda of this sort, it begins to change the way that people talk and the way that people behave. But the Iranian regime is special in its internal behavior and in its external behavior, that seeks the nuclear weapon, that is engaged in supporting the very terrorists who are trying to destroy the peace process that we’ve just been talking about. Mitchell: One of the Iranian leaders was quoted in USA Today as saying that “the US would not dare to attack us. We have got used to this nonsense”— this is quoting Rafsanjani. “Miss Rice is a bit emotional. She talks tough, but she cannot be tough herself.” Rice: Well, we ought to be emotional about people who live essentially in bondage. We ought to be. Because those of us who are lucky enough to have been born on the right side of freedom’s divide have an obligation to those who are still caught on the other side of that divide to care about their progress. But the United States believes that our concerns about Iran can be resolved diplomatically as long as there is unity of purpose, as long as there is unity of message to the Iranians, we believe that we have diplomatic solutions here. Mitchell: Do you think that you as a woman secretary of state are treated differently? There is press coverage here in Europe. One headline called you “coquettish” with Chancellor Schroeder in Germany. Here you’ve got Rafsanjani in Iran saying that you are “emotional.” Is there an extra burden that a woman in your position carries where you are interpreted and viewed within a certain framework? Rice: Well, I don’t know, and I don’t think much about it. I will do what I do, I’m a package, I’m who I am and that includes being female. But I think as secretary of state I’ve got a job to do. I’m delighted that I have an opportunity at this historic time to try and help the president, to try and help our friends and allies move on this historic agenda. It’s a great time for those of us who believe in these values. It’s a challenging time. There are a lot of difficulties and a lot of hard times ahead, but if we put our best efforts to it, if we put our minds to it, I believe that we have a chance to leave a more permanent peace and, most importantly, a balance of power that favors freedom. Mitchell: Thank you very much Madam Secretary. Rice: Thank you.

Appendix D

Excerpt from Interview on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer and Doyle McManus Washington, DC March 13, 2005

McManus: Secretary Rice, let me switch to Iran for a moment. The administration has now given the Europeans an endorsement for offering the Iranians incentives to—positive incentives if they stop their nuclear program. But you haven’t put a timeline down. You’ve been very careful not to put a timeline down. They’re still working on nuclear weapons, so time is not on our side. Are you giving a signal that the Europeans have an indefinite amount of time to work on this? Rice: Well, I don’t think anyone wants an indefinite amount of time. This has been going on for some time. And the question is: What are the Iranians going to do? Are the Iranians going to finally demonstrate that they intend to live up to their international obligations? I would think they would want to do that sooner rather than later, given that everybody in the world appears suspicious now of Iranian activities. But we had said some time ago that we supported the diplomacy that the Europeans were involved in, that this needs to have a diplomatic solution. What the president did this week was to make that support more active by withdrawing our objection to a couple of things that the Europeans would like to offer in a package to the Iranians. So there’s no change here in terms of supporting diplomacy. We’ve been supportive of it all along. This just makes it more active. And I think, Doyle, it gives a more common approach, a more common front. The conversation had started to turn to what would the United States do. This puts the spotlight back on what will the Iranians do. McManus: I kind of noticed though that you didn’t get any closer to a timeline. How long should we wait to get a positive answer from Iran? Is a year too long?

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Rice: Well, this is a negotiated—a negotiating process. Look, the Iranians are in suspension at this point in time and that’s important. But everybody understands that there has to be a permanent arrangement in which the Iranians forego the means by which to develop nuclear weapons, and that needs to happen sooner rather than later. Schieffer: Madame Secretary, according to the Times of London this morning, Israel has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programs. Rice: Well, I’m not privy to Iranian—or to Israeli planning. But I will just say that we believe in the United States, the president believes, that there is an opportunity to resolve this diplomatically. And we have many other steps at our disposal—the UN Security Council, a number of other steps within the Security Council. The president, of course, doesn’t take any options off the table, but I think he’s made very clear that from our point of view this is a problem that can be resolved diplomatically. Schieffer: But so far Iran seems to dismiss the offers that we have made as “too insignificant” to talk about. Rice: Well, the Iranians, I am quite certain, are uncomfortable with the notion that they have failed to split the United States and Europe on this matter. They now have a united front. And by the way, the Russians, too, have, in the way that they’ve structured their Bushehr nuclear reactor deal with the Iranians, demonstrated, we believe, that they also do not believe that the Iranians should have this kind of activity. That’s why they would provide fuel and take back spent fuel rods. So the Iranians are facing a common front. Everybody told President Bush when he was in Europe—President Chirac, Chancellor Schroeder, Prime Minister Blair, President Putin—Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. And so the Iranians now have to demonstrate that they are not going to seek a nuclear weapon.

Appendix E

Excerpt from Remarks to the National Conference of Editorial Writers Washington, D.C. April 4, 2005

Question: Herb Field, Patriot News, Harrisburg. I wonder if you could speak a little about Iran and in the context of—well, if Pakistan has a nuclear program and India has a nuclear program and they’re not supposed to have nuclear programs, why can’t Iran, which is a proud nation—why can’t they have a nuclear program? And also, would you respond to the pressure that the United States and the European states are putting on Iran to deal with this nuclear issue and the threat of an oil crisis that an Iranian official made about a month ago that, if the United States takes this to the Security Council, there will be an oil crisis? Rice: Yeah, and I’d like to know what they’re going to do with their oil. Eat it? I mean, you know, we shouldn’t be put off by these sorts of threats. The price of oil is very high. I’m quite sure that the Iranians are in need of being able to sell their oil and, after all, oil is a commodity and . . . Question: So you don’t take it seriously? Rice: Well, I just think we will not be blackmailed by the Iranians on such—on anything of the sort. The Iranian nuclear program is a very serious matter. We would have preferred that the NPT had constrained other states as well, but because you weren’t able to constrain states in the past doesn’t mean that you have to stop trying to constrain states in the future, particularly one like Iran that has a very long history and rap sheet when it comes to terrorism. This is, after all, probably the most important supplier—important supporter of terrorist rejectionist organizations, for instance, in the Middle East. We were just talking about the possibilities for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Well, the Palestinian rejectionists, those who are trying

Appendix E

163

quite literally to blow up the prospects for peace, are getting an awful lot of their support from Iran. You can’t have it both ways. They cannot be—the rest of the world and we cannot favor a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and turn a blind eye to what the Iranians are doing in their support for terrorism. Secondly, this is a regime that is out of step in terms of its internal dynamics with the way that the rest of the region is going. Everybody else in the region is trying something on the reform side, as minimal as some of the reforms may be, whereas Iran is going the other direction with a population that is sophisticated, that has several times demonstrated its desire for a democratic development, and at every turn, the mullahs become more restrictive of the aspirations of the Iranian people. And so that can’t be—we can’t look aside at that. Now, the Iranians have—are trying to say that they have the “right” to civilian nuclear technology in support of their nuclear industry. Let’s leave aside the question of why Iran, sitting on all that oil with which they sometimes want to threaten, would need civilian nuclear technology. Let’s leave that question aside and let’s note that there is a presumption of access to civilian nuclear technology for states that are in compliance with their NonProliferation Treaty obligations. But what is at question is whether Iran is, indeed, in compliance with its international obligations in this regard. And we believe that there is sufficient evidence that they are not and others are sufficiently worried about it that the IAEA is continually investigating and asking Iranians for more cooperation. That the European-3 have entered into negotiations with the Iranians to try and deal with the technological issues associated with the ability of the Iranians to enrich and reprocess; that the Russians, when they sign their Bushehr civilian nuclear power deal, insisted on a fuel take-back provision, fuel provision and fuel take-back so that the Iranians could not reprocess. Now, that suggests to me that there are a number of people who are really worried about what the Iranians are doing. And so they have an opportunity to convince the international community that they don’t intend under cover of civilian nuclear power to try and build a nuclear weapon. They’ve not yet done that. And until they do, they’re going to continue to be under pressure from everybody to do so because a nuclear-armed Iran would be a seriously destabilizing factor in the international system and particularly in that region. Question: Kay, did you . . . Question: Yes, I did. My question—Kay Semion from the News-Journal in Daytona Beach. My question has to do with Iran, too. There have been

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reports in the international press that United States and Israel are planning a military action against Iran. Rice: Just not true. Question: Period? Rice: Period. Question: What’s Plan B, then, if the negotiations . . . Rice: Well, that’s a different question. (Laughter.) The president has said that believes very strongly that we can resolve this diplomatically. I think we made a good step forward when we and the Europeans came to a common position on how to deal with Iran when we removed our objection to WTO application for Iran and to some spare parts so that we could give the strongest possible hand to the Europeans in the negotiations that they are conducting. You don’t want the American president to ever take his options off the table, and he won’t. But the fact is that we believe this is something that can be resolved diplomatically.

Appendix F

Excerpt from Interview with Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News New York City September 14, 2005

O’Reilly: I hope so.All right. Iran. Now, this is America’s biggest enemy, next to North Korea, I think, in the world. Would I be wrong in saying that? Rice: Well, Iran is certainly a state, today . . . O’Reilly: They’re our enemies. Rice: Yeah, I would say this is a state that is 180 degrees from the interests of the United States. That’s right. O’Reilly: They’re helping the terrorists. They’re infiltrating them into Iraq. They’re harboring al-Qaeda. Rice: They do very little for their own people, in terms of human rights and democracy. O’Reilly: They’re developing nuclear activity where they could hand it off to al-Qaeda if they wanted or they could sell it to rogue states. And they’re basically saying to you, the secretary of state, to the sresident, to the world, “We don’t care.” They don’t believe you have the military capability to hurt them because you’re bogged down in Iraq. And it looks to me like this is just going to happen, that we’re going to have to deal with these people. Do you see it the same way? Rice: Iran is a state that is moving in the wrong direction, I would say 180 degrees in the wrong direction. But on one border they have now an Afghanistan that is a democratic state, an ally of the United States in the war on terror, a military ally of the United States. On the other hand, they have a not-yet-finished project in Iraq, but one that, when it is, will be a nontheocratic, Shia-majority state that is the center, now, of a non-theocratic Islamic-related democracy. O’Reilly: Are you positive that’s going to happen? Rice: I believe it’s going to happen—I do, Bill.

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O’Reilly: Really? Rice: Yes. I do. O’Reilly: Give me—90 percent, 80 percent? Rice: You know, they’re going to make it. They are going to make it. O’Reilly: I hope so. Rice: Because,if I look at . . . O’Reilly: With all, you know, the sacrifices that we’ve made. Rice: If I look at where they were and I look at where they are now, they are going to make it. And I’m also enough of a student of history to know that everything is—that’s a big historical change of any kind—is messy and violent and difficult. O’Reilly: Nothing’s easy. Rice: Nothing is easy. O’Reilly: Are we going to have to confront the Iranians militarily? Because Europe isn’t going to do it, you know. I don’t understand—let me get through this question, and then we’ll go back to the Iran question. Why doesn’t NATO help us in Iraq? O’Reilly: Let’s get back to Iran. The odds are we’re going to have to confront these people, either with sanctions from the United Nations, which I never think you’re going to get through. That’s a corrupt body. And more militarily. Aren’t the odds . . . Rice: Well, I still think there is a lot of room here to have the world pressure the Iranians into doing what the Iranians need to do. O’Reilly: Really? Rice: They’ve got to live up to their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And we’re working pretty well with the Europeans to try to make sure that if the Iranians do not do that, that they will eventually end up in the Security Council.

Appendix G

Excerpt from Interview with Andrea Koppel of CNN London, England October 15, 2005

Koppel: You’ve just come from meetings with President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov. When they came out and spoke to reporters, they indicated that they’re clearly in no hurry to refer Iran to the UN Security Council. How much does that undermine US efforts and EU efforts to turn up the heat on Iran? Rice: Well, the Iranians are under plenty of heat. They faced a resolution a couple of weeks ago in the Board of Governors that I think was a surprise to the Iranians because the only ones who voted against the noncompliance finding and the possibility of referral was Venezuela. The Russians abstained, and an abstention is a wait-and-see. And the wait-and-see is, can the Iranians use the next period of time to get back into negotiations with the international community that will come to a solution on Iran’s civil nuclear ambitions that will give confidence to the international community. Koppel: And you, in fact, had said that meeting, that next IAEA meeting on November 24th, is crucial to finding out whether or not the Iranians are serious about coming back into compliance. Do you still feel that way? Do you feel that that is the deadline to send it to the UN? Rice: I haven’t set deadlines. I do think that every meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, given the course of the Iranian events, is extremely important, indeed crucial. But we will, with our allies, and the EU-3 is still in the lead on this because they are the ones on whom the Iranians walked out, and so we will continue to work with them to determine the best course. As the French foreign minister said yesterday, the Security Council is a real possibility and we’re going to keep it as a real possibility, but at a time of our choosing.

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Koppel: Right. But the day after the last IAEA Board of Governors meeting, some of the senior officials in your department were briefing reporters, and I was among them, and they said effectively—come the next board meeting in November, the next stop if Iran hasn’t come into compliance and hasn’t agreed to come back to negotiations, is the UN Security Council. Rice: Well, certainly if there’s been no movement and the Iranians continue to say to the world they are going to threaten instead of coming back to negotiations, we may well be in the position where the Security Council is the appropriate step. Koppel: So what are the triggers? Rice: Well, you know, Andrea, that I don’t like to talk in terms of triggers and red lines and deadlines, because that’s not how diplomacy works. What we said to the Iranians and the international community has said to the Iranians in the strongest possible terms is get back into negotiations; that’s your course ahead. Now, in the first days after the vote, the Iranians threatened all kinds of things. They were going to pull out of the additional protocol, they were going to start enriching again, they were going to do all kinds of things. More recently, they’ve been saying, well, perhaps they’d rather negotiate. So let’s see where we are in a few weeks. Koppel: But Madame Secretary, you know very well from having watched this country for the last five years that they are very good at playing one side against the other. Aren’t you afraid that this is going to be drawn out and that they’re going to be playing for time? Rice: Well, at this point, the Iranians, of course, are not enriching and reprocessing, which is extremely important. I don’t want anyone to underestimate the pressure that the Iranians are under, not just from the vote, but from concerted and consistent efforts that we know are being carried on with the Iranians by a wide variety of parties to tell them that they have one course and one course only, and that’s to find a satisfactory solution to the negotiation. If not, I am quite confident they’re going to be referred to the Security Council. Koppel: What are the consequences if they don’t give—basically come back to negotiations by November 24th? Are there any? Rice: Well, I’m not going to set any deadlines, but it’s clear in what the foreign minister in France said yesterday and what the IAEA Board of Governors resolution says that the Iranians have got to come back to negotiations. They’ve not just got to come back to negotiations; they’ve got to come back seriously to negotiations.

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Koppel: And what is an indication—how can they show they’re serious? Rice: Well, it would help if they would come back to negotiations without continuing the kind of threats that their president levied against the international community when he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly. And indeed, they’ve backed off some of those threats. But the Iranians know what they need to do. They need to find a solution that if they’re going to pursue civil nuclear power, and we don’t believe they need to, but if they’re going to pursue civil nuclear power, that does it in a way that gives confidence to the international community that they’re not going to use that technology to build nuclear weapons. That means the fuel cycle. Koppel: So did you and the Russians discuss any ideas as to how if they’re going to continue—the Iranians—with that civil nuclear program, they might dispose of that fuel? Rice: Well, we are very aware of the fact that the Russians are having conversations. I’m not going to talk about the Russians’ conversations with the Iranians. That’s for the Russians to do. But we know how the Russians structured the Bushehr deal. The Bushehr civil nuclear plant that the Russians are under contract to build for the Iranians has what is called a fuel take-back provision, meaning that they will help the Iranians with the power generation that the fuel—that the generator would give, but that the fuel would be taken back to Russia. That would seriously reduce the proliferations risk of having a civil nuclear power plant in Iran. Koppel: And did the Russians raise that with you today or did you raise it with them? Rice: Well, we’ve talked about this on numerous occasions and we talked about it again today. But we have to remember that right now the problem for the Iranians is that they are not in compliance, they are not in good standing with the international community. There are multiple unanswered questions about why the Iranians were lying about their activities 18 years ago until the present of how certain things happened, of why the enrichment activities were discovered when they were unveiled by Iranian opposition, why none of that was reported to the IAEA. That’s the question that’s on the table. Koppel: Ambassador Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, today said that the United States was afraid that if Iran did have nuclear weapons it would give them to terrorists. Do you agree? Rice: Well, whenever you have nuclear weapons in the hands of a state that is irresponsible where it comes to terrorism, that is certainly a concern. The Iranians have plenty of terrorist friends: Hezbollah. They’ve supplied

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terrorist groups within the Palestinian territories. They are, to our classification, a state sponsor of terror. So as the President has said many times, our worst nightmare is nuclear weapons or nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists. The Iranians support terrorism. So it’s a natural concern that if the Iranians, if there’s proliferation in Iran, that some link with terrorism is entirely possible.

Appendix H

Excerpt from Interview with Barbara Slavin and Ray Locker of USA Today Washington, D.C. November 28, 2005

Slavin: You seem to have more leverage, though, on some issues. I don’t know this is just because it’s second term. Chuck Hagel said at the Council on Foreign Relations the other week that Colin Powell was succeeding in abstentia and he pointed to some of the changes he’d made on policy toward North Korea, Iran in particular. Rice: I think that the changes are overstated. The six-party talks come out of policies that the president and Colin Powell pursued, and that six-party framework was really solidified in that period. We’ve been able to press it forward and perhaps to do some things with it that were not done before, but that structure has been in place and was working well before—when I was National Security Advisor, well before I became secretary. Slavin: Right. But certainly if you look at positions on civilian nuclear power, there’s an acknowledgement that North Korea can have it at some point, and Iran there’s been quite a substantial shift. I recall talking to you just on the trip a month or so ago, where you were very leery of the notion that Iran could continue converting uranium into uranium hexafluoride. Now, my understanding is the US is supporting a Russian proposal that would allow Iran to contrinue to convert. Rice: I think, Barbara, on that trip I remember precisely what I said. I think I said that the fuel cycle, in total, is a difficult—is a problem, but that everybody recognizes that the real problem is uranium—enrichment and . . . Slavin: You talked about stockpiles of UF6. Rice: Yes. Well, I said that if there were a proposal that would allow the Iranians access to large stockpiles of UF6, that that would be a problem, on their territory, that that would be a problem. So we’ll see where the Russian proposal comes out. We’re prepared to see if the Russians can explore

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something that may bring the Iranians around to the recognition that they cannot enrich and reprocess on their territory, that they have a credibility problem with the international community as to the fuel cycle. We’ll see whether it works. But we do have the votes for a referral to the Security Council at a time of our choosing. Slavin: It wasn’t our choosing last week. Rice: No, we decided there was time for the—that there should be time for the Russians, who wanted the opportunity to explore this, to have a chance to explore it. So “at a time of our choosing” means at a time of our choosing. Slavin: On Iran, your old colleague, Abbas Milani, has suggested, others have suggested, that we should really change our whole policy toward that country if we want to promote democracy there, that we should have targeted sanctions instead of blanket sanctions. There have been suggestions, I believe, for opening a US visa office, putting Americans there, not making Iranians go all the way to Dubai; let Americans, Iranian Americans, send money, NGOs operate there. Are these some of the proposals that you’re considering and how far along are they? Rice: Well, obviously nobody has a desire to isolate the Iranian people. That’s not the point. The problem is that the Iranian government is one that pursues policies that are antithetical to the interests of the United States and interests of a stable Middle East. If you look at Iranian policies, you look at a country—we’ve just talked about the nuclear issue—where nobody trusts them in terms of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and therefore, people are trying to design a way that they cannot have a fuel cycle. You have a state that is supporting Palestinian rejectionists at time when the . . . Slavin: But . . . Rice: Well, now you’ll just have to let me finish. The Palestinian rejectionists at a time when they are—when Abu Mazen is trying to do quite the opposite, Hezbollah at a time when Lebanon is trying to emerge from Syrian occupation, not to mention an Iranian president that talks about wiping other countries off the map and an Iranian population that’s trapped in a political system that’s going backwards, not forwards. Slavin: So how do you help them going forward? Isn’t it through some kind of targeted engagement, the sort that we have not used with the Iranians? Rice: I find it hard to see what engagement at—broad engagement would accomplish with the Iranians, because it’s very clear that Iran is on a path that is different and contrary to the path that most people want to see the Middle East take at this point.

Appendix I

Excerpt from Interview on the Sean Hannity Show Washington, DC December 14, 2005

Hannity: Let me ask about Iran for just a minute here. I mean, first of all, this Iranian president saying that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map. Now, comments have been made dismissing the Holocaust as a myth, saying that the Jewish state should be moved as far away as Alaska. There is also talk about, well, we can engage in some type of nuclear strike against Israel and yet they will not survive, but we will. Rice: No. He’s—he obviously is saying things that are just completely outrageous. I think it’s having the effect though, Sean, of just further isolating the Iranian regime. Nobody thinks that a—the president of any civilized country should talk this way, and I can’t imagine that Iranians want to hear their president talk this way. He is sharpening the contradictions, if you will, between Iranian behavior and Iranian views and the civilized world. Hannity: You know, does it put Israel in the position that they now must think about a potential confrontation with Iran? I know that the prime minister, Sharon, he had some very tough words to say that Israel has this capability and if necessary would use it. Do you foresee the potential of this type of—these types of statements are made over and over again that Israel might find themselves in a position of striking some of the nuclear facilities in Iran like they did in Iraq in the early’80s? Rice: Well, I can’t speculate on how this might all play out. I think our goal has to be, as a civilized international community, to just condemn this and to take it as a warning about the Iranian regime and about its policies, and to make certain that they are not going to get a nuclear weapon. I remember what the Russian foreign minister said when one of the first of these came out. He said that this has given a lot of ammunition to people

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who want to take this issue to the Security Council. Well, absolutely. If Iran keeps behaving in this way, we’re not going to have any choice, and they aren’t demonstrating any willingness to actually negotiate. I think the fact is Iran is just getting more and more isolated, and we’re going to have to act on that sooner or later. Hannity: Well, we keep hearing reports. The International Atomic Energy—IAEA made the statement that they may be closer to nuclear weapons than anybody imagined. How dangerous would nuclear weapons in Iran be to the entire world? Rice: Oh, it would be enormously dangerous, in that region, with the volatility of the Middle East, and with an Iran that has the policies that Iran has. Of course, it would be extremely dangerous. And that’s why I think you’re going to find that there’s more and more understanding of that and more support for a policy that simply will not permit the Iranians to go down that road.

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