The Buck Stops in Baghdad

Let’s start our rhetorical tinkering by putting President Bush’s address to the nation last month up on the rack and take a look at what makes it tick (or not).

I thought one approach that might be interesting is to do an analysis based on the actual word used in the speech. Word counting by itself is only marginally helpful when evaluating a text, but we’ve got some help in the form of a computer program called “Diction” created by rhetorical scholar Roderick Hart.

I won’t go into a long explanation of how the program works, but in essence, it counts up and categorizes words in a text, then compares the number of words in each category with averages based on typical texts of the genre.

For example, one of the categories the program uses is “self-reference.” Any words that would refer to the speaker/writer of the text fall into this category (e.g., “I,” “me,” “myself,” etc.).

After counting up these words, Diction tells you whether the text you’re analyzing uses a typical number of “self-reference” words when compared to similar texts, or if it uses a statistically significant larger or smaller number.

By itself, this might seem like a bit of linguistic trivia, but what Diction does is point to fruitful places to do more in-depth qualitative analysis. In this case, if the text uses a lot more I’s and me’s than is typical, you might want to take a closer look at how the speaker is positioning himself/herself (rhetorically speaking) in the text and think about what the significance of this might be.

Okay, so on with our analysis. I ran the text of Bush’s speech of January 2007 announcing the troop “surge” in Iraq through Diction. To add some perspective, I also had the program analyze a parallel address to the nation Bush gave just over a year earlier (December 12, 2005), soon after elections were held in Iraq. The speeches were given on parallel occasions (i.e., an apparent turning point in the U.S. occupation of Iraq) to the same audience (the American people) in the same venue (a televised primetime speech from the White House) and for the same basic purpose (to shore up support for the president’s policy). On top of that, Bush specifically refers to the 2005 speech in the first lines of his 2007 address.

The idea here was that by comparing Bush’s 2007 speech against a similar speech he had given, we’d get a bit more insight than we would if we just compared the speech against generic “norms.” I wasn’t disappointed.

Diction offers us dozens of variables, but I’d like to focus on just a few that stood out, and then offer a brief analysis of why these numbers are meaningful.

You don’t need a computer program to notice one word that’s used far less frequently in 2007 than it was in 2005: war. In his 2005 address, Bush used “war” 15 times. In 2007, he used it three times (this despite the fact that the violence in Iraq, by his own admission, had grown since his first speech).

Tuck that factoid away for a moment. Diction also points out that, compared to the 2005 speech, Bush’s 2007 address scored far lower in “self-reference.” As I noted above, that means Bush referred specifically to himself less often in his most recent speech than he did in 2005. How dramatic was this falloff? In 2005, Bush referred to himself nearly five times more often than he did in 2007.

Another variable that stands out for the breathtaking nosedive it took is the group of terms Diction refers to as “blame” words: terms that deride or assess responsibility (in a negative way) to someone or something. The 2005 address is statistically above the norms for a policy speech. In 2007, it’s fallen way off.

Going along with this is similar drop in words that express satisfaction. In 2005, Bush was again above average in this category. In 2007, this had dropped by almost a factor of three.

With all these downturns, what went up, if anything? One variable measured by Diction that took a major up-tick was “cooperation.” Just as the name suggests, these are terms implying collaboration, camaraderie, working together, etc. These words increased nearly three fold.

A variable with an inverse relationship is “denial.” These are words such as can’t, don’t, won’t, etc. that imply unwillingness, refusal, forbidding, or interdiction. These drop by a factor of five in the 2007 address.

Interestingly, words that express certainty and optimism remain virtually unchanged in 2007.

So what? Well, here’s my take.

The numbers are interesting because they suggest that in his most recent 2007 speech, Bush is not facing reality any more than he did in 2005. Had the speech been a true indicator of a major policy change that was aimed at actually changing the reality on the ground, we’d likely see a decrease in “rosy-colored” rhetoric from the 2005 self-congratulation in the wake of Iraqi elections, reflecting the tough challenges ahead. We’d also not expect to see any lessening of self-reference. On the contrary, a truly decisive speech changing course would likely be full of phrases like “I have decided . . .” and “My plan for action is . . .”

Rather than a speech focusing on a change in “strategery” in Iraq, what we have, I’d argue, is a speech aimed at preemptive blame-placing. We have a president who senses failure and is interested primarily on shifting responsibility.

Not that the president is placing blame . . . yet. In fact, as we noted, the speech is largely devoid of words that connote blame for what is going on in Iraq. To raise the topic of who is to blame at this date would be an invitation for his audience to mull that issue over and conclude that it’s Bush himself that’s to blame. Better to avoid any overt talk of who’s responsible in favor of sly suggestions at who *will* be responsible when things go to hell in a handbasket.

Obviously, the drop in self reference is a clear indicator of this. Bush puts himself in the wings rather than at center stage in the speech. In a speech in which he is talking about the disappointments of the last year in Iraq, he wants to put as much rhetorical distance as he can between the situation he describes and himself.

So who does get put on center stage? The Iraqis! Despite the fact that the 2005 speech was an homage to the growing sense of national identity in Iraq, “Iraq” and “Iraqis” only show up half as much in that speech as they did in 2007.

And if you glance at the speech itself, you’ll see that this word-counting is indicative of a substantive difference in the speeches. In 2005, there was a lot of talk about what we, the U.S., were doing to “win” in Iraq. Last month, however, Bush bent over backwards to emphasize the supporting role of the U.S. It would be the Iraqis who would crack down on the insurgents—we’d be there to help as needed.

In 2005, “our forces [were] on the road to victory—and that is the road that will take them home” according to the president. In 2007, however, “America’s commitment is not open ended” and “if the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people.” What about “victory”? Well, Bush tells us that if it indeed comes, it “will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved” and “there will be no surrender ceremony on a deck of a battleship.”

Great. No wonder the term “war” vanished in the 2007 speech.

In the end, what we have is a president who pays lip service (literally) to an optimistic view of Iraq, all the while providing himself with rhetorical rat holes to escape down when the need arises. Failure in Iraq won’t be our fault (let alone his); it’ll be those spineless Iraqis.

Just to emphasize the extent to which the 2007 speech is meant to give a vague sense of a “buck-stops-here” president while actually doing the opposite, take a look at the most telling line from the whole speech: “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

Note the passive construction. The president didn’t make mistakes. Mistakes were made by unnamed persons or entities, on whose behalf the president graciously accepts the responsibility. The phrase is actually doubly passive. Not only have mistakes “been made,” but “the responsibility rests with me” (as opposed to the more active and straightforward “I take responsibility.”

Word counting is rhetorical analysis at its most mechanical, but it can be a good avenue to seeing deeper patterns. In this case, I’d suggest that the changes in the president’s word usage in these two speeches reveal that the Commander-in-Chief, rather than offering a clear and forceful vision for a new direction in Iraq, is a tour-de-force example of pre-emptive blame placing.