Metaphors, 2004/2007

Furthermore, there are metaphors we live by: some people see life as a journey (progressing on a path to a goal), others see life as a jungle (beset by dangers), others, that life is a dance. Usually, we are not conscious of such metaphoric thinking, but these unconscious assumptions surface in the everyday language we use..

Recently, cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff (University of California, Berkeley), have emphasized that metaphors are also the way that people think about abstract concepts in terms of concrete. In Moral Politics, a scholarly academic book, Lakoff makes the case that people unconsciously, metaphorically, usually think about government in terms of parent and child, that is "Society-as-Family."

Furthermore, he claimed that there are two basic ways to think about parent/child relationships: conservatives emphasize the common patriarchal model of of the family; the "Strict Father" mode; whereas, the liberal political model of the family is that which emphasizes the "Nurturing Parent."

Subsequently, Lakoff's brief book Don't Think of an Elephant was a national best-seller, popular especially among Democratic liberals and progressives, as he pointed out that liberals also have "family values" which can be described in terms of a "Nurturing Parent" model, emphasizing caring, compassion, and caretaking.

Conservative Republican political persuaders, well-funded and well-organized, Lakoff argued, distracted middle-class voters away from their own economic interests, and to "family values" appeals, such as respect, discipline, responsibility. Being tough and manly, as the protective "head of the family," was the ideal male image emphasized. Conservatives appealed especially to what they called the "NASCAR Dads" which metaphorically refers to the machismo of Southern white men -- a patriarchical model earlier described as the "Bubba vote" or "the good old boys" or "Joe Six Pack" voters.

In the 2000 campaign, seeking the moderate vote, George Bush's political persuaders effectively described him as a "compassionate conservative"; later, liberals would point this out as the prime example of an oxymoron.

Currently, for example, politicians also talk about targeting an audience of "Soccer Moms" as a metaphoric shorthand suggesting the nurturing care of suburban women.

Government regulations (anti-smoking, seat belts, food labeling) are often attacked by conservative critics as "nanny politics ... with Big Nanny Government defending the 'masses, the children (that's us)' against the big bad entrepreneurs.... and treating us like children." Consumer protection laws (OSHA, EPA) are often mocked by conservatives as "... mommy politics to outlaw anything that could possibly be dangerous to anyone anywhere."

An election campaign is so commonly discussed in terms of a war or a race that we don't even notice that these are metaphors: candidates do not actually shoot each other, or really run in a footrace. Many other metaphors are used in elections, changing with times and location, by which people commonly "understand" abstractions by means of concrete metaphors.

In 2006, conservative columnist David Brooks revived attention to a political metaphor used 30 years earlier by journalist/novelist Tom Wolfe: "when it comes to politics, high school explains most everything you need to know. In 1976, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Commentary in which he noted that our political affiliations are shaped subrationally. He went on to observe that especially when we are young and forming our identities, we make sense of our lives by running little morality plays in our heads in which the main characters are Myself, the hero, and My Adolescent Opposite, the enemy."

The term "war hawk" was first used in 1798 by Thomas Jefferson to describe his Federalist opponents who urged a war on France, Since then, variations have remained in our political language, according to Safire's Political Dictionary, and the most famous was during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which popularized the dichotomy of "hawks and doves" -- the arguments about military force vs. diplomacy.

In 2002, before the Iraq war, The New Hampshire Gazette in reporting about the military force Vs diplomacy arguments between the Defense Department and the State Department humorously used the term "chicken hawks" to describe the Bush administration's "hawks" (including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz) who in their youth had managed to avoid service in the Vietnam war. The New Hampshire Gazette defined as "chicken hawks": "public persons – generally male – who (1) tend to advocate military solutions to political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime."

As Jim Lobe reported (September 9, 2002): "There's more combat experience on the 7th floor of the State Department than in the entire Office of the Secretary of Defense," quipped the high-ranking State Department official to a room filled with senior military officers last month. The statement "generated riotous applause," according to an eyewitness quoted in the Nelson Report, a private newsletter subscribed to by foreign-policy heavyweights and embassies in Washington. The incident revealed the growing importance of the "Chicken Hawk" factor in the increasingly rancorous debate over the Bush administration's push toward war on Iraq and beyond.

At the moment, the military brass is leading the opposition. It includes both the folks who will have to fight this war and those who have retired from the service. The list of former generals includes Secretary of State and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and his deputy, U.S. Naval Academy grad and Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage; as well as veterans of the Gulf War, including most famously Bush Sr.'s national security adviser, ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft; the Gulf War commander, ret. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf; and his logistics chief and later successor at Central Command, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni.

"It is interesting to me that many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), one of the most outspoken skeptics of the war with Baghdad. "They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off," the Vietnam veteran added. Hagel is not alone. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a highly decorated fellow Vietnam veteran who turned against the war, is also openly skeptical."

Veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, detailing the 16 month period between Sept 11, 2001 and the March 2003 start of the Iraq war, is rich with the informal metaphoric language used so naturally by the White House war planners. CIA Director George Tenet, for example, using a sports metaphor, assured the President that the WMD case against Saddam Hussein was a "slam dunk." (p.249, 438) President Bush, speaking to British journalists, praised Prime Minister Tony Blair's resolve by saying (p.178) that "he had cojones" (that's macho Texas talk for balls). And, as the AP reported (April 17,2004), "Over a period that began in early 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell is depicted as having cautioned Mr. Bush and other advisers repeatedly about the potential drawbacks of military action in Iraq. The 'you break it, you buy it'' principle he cited in delivering those warnings was privately known to Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, as the 'Pottery Barn rule,' the book says."

But, perhaps the most important metaphor was the smoking gun ... mushroom cloud phrasing, attributed first to Condoleezza Rice on September 8, 2002 (p.179), then repeated a month later, October 7, by President Bush: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." (p.202)

William Safire (p.661) gave us the definition of the metaphor "smoking gun" (as "incontrovertible evidence the proof of guilt that precipitates resignations") and its political history, especially related to the discovery of the secret tape-recording by President Nixon, the smoking gun which prompted his resignation a few days later. Since the 1945 photos of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom cloud imagery has been an intense nonverbal icon suggesting the catastrophe of a nuclear war.

President Bush frequently used the term "weapons of mass destruction" (a general term, covering chemical, biological, and radiological weapons), emphasizing the accepted facts that Hussein had already used WMD (i.e. gas against the Kurds at Halabja); but , with the mushroom cloud image, the President uses specific nonverbal imagery of another, different, and unsubstantiated WMD. Asserted ("clear evidence"), but not substantiated, not even to the inner circle, but a useful way to persuade the general public by associating these two metaphors.

Not-So-Great Expectations (elsewhere on this site) includes the general advice:

Expect persuasive messages which start with a problem (a threat, a fear) will end offering a solution ("Do this... vote for..") Expect the urgency and dangers to be intensified during campaigns: The greater the problem, the greater the need for the solution.

"The Fog of War" received the Academy Award (March, 2004) as the winning documentary movie about Robert McNamara (the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war) relating his decision-making role then, and now admitting he made some errors, but attributed them, metaphorically, to "the fog of war."

Richard Falk (The Great Terror War, 2003) in his review of this documentary wrote: "The title The Fog of War is a phrase taken from Karl von Clausewitz, the early-19th-century German war theorist, and is used to explain the inability of a military commander to grasp the full realities of a battlefield given its complexity. It bears so centrally on the McNamara enigma because it is exculpatory in effect, suggesting that the mistakes of war are due to its complexity -- rather than the incompetence or depravity of the leaders who impart it. What is misleading here is that Clausewitz used the phrase to explain why tactical errors are made in war, while McNamara is indirectly excusing moral shortcomings, including those that have criminalized by international law."

The "War" on Terror

-----See also: Law Not War | Bush Revises Stance || A war that can never be won | Playing into Their Hands | War or Shabby PR Ploy? | War Rhetoric's Toll on Democracy | Sell it Softly | Violence & Terror

President George W. Bush, in a formal speech (March 19, 2004) on the first anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, called attention to the underlying metaphoric language of war, but emphatically asserted that it was not a simple metaphor: "The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation."

President Bush, who by his own admission doesn't read newspapers or poetry, isn't likely to be aware of Lakoff nor of metaphor theory. (Below) However, Bush's speechwriter, Mike Gerson, who puts the elegant words into the president's mouth, is one of the most skillful writers ever to work in the White House, and is sure to be aware of the arguments about framing the issue of terrorism in terms of war metaphors -- instead of crime metaphors.

Five days after September 11, 2001, George Lakoff (in his article "Metaphors of Terror"), quick to understand the implications of framing the issue, wrote:

"The administration's framings and reframings and its search for metaphors should be noted. The initial framing was as a "crime" with "victims" and "perpetrators" to be "brought to justice" and "punished." The crime frame entails law, courts, lawyers, trials, sentencing, appeals, and so on. It was hours before "crime" changed to "war" with "casualties," "enemies," "military action," "war powers," and so on.

Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials have pointed out that this situation does not fit our understanding of a "war." There are "enemies" and "casualties" all right, but no enemy army, no regiments, no tanks, no ships, no air force, no battlefields, no strategic targets, and no clear "victory." The war frame just doesn't fit. Colin Powell had always argued that no troops should be committed without specific objectives, a clear and achievable definition of victory, a clear exit strategy—and no open-ended commitments. But he has pointed out that none of these is present in this "war."

Because the concept of "war "doesn't fit, there is a frantic search for metaphors. First, Bush called the terrorists "cowards"—but this didn't seem to work too well for martyrs who willing sacrificed their lives for their moral and religious ideals. More recently he has spoken of "smoking them out of their holes" as if they were rodents, and Rumsfeld has spoken of "drying up the swamp they live in" as if they were snakes or lowly swamp creatures. The conceptual metaphors here are Moral Is Up; Immoral Is Down (they are lowly) and Immoral People Are Animals (that live close to the ground)....

With no definition of victory and no exit strategy, we may be entering a state of perpetual war. This would be very convenient for the conservative domestic agenda: The war machine will determine the domestic agenda, which will allow conservatives to do whatever they want in the name of national security...."

James Carroll's column in the Boston Globe (Sept. 15, 2001) clearly presented the moral case against using war metaphors -- instead of crime metaphors. "In the Arab world --indeed, throughout the whole House of Islam -- bin Laden's stature was in the process of being transformed from a marginal miscreant to a modern-day Saladin, the hero who vanquished crusaders. Bush's war on terrorism, by defining bin Laden as a martial adversary instead of a sadistic criminal, had elevated him to a mythic status. The "war" on terrorism, in that sense, was lost the day Bush declared it."

Yet, four years later (in 2005), the war metaphor is still the most common one used by the administration and by the mass media, perhaps because it makes for good soundbites, shorthand, slogans, and sarcasm.

Such metaphors imply the way people think. Headlines, for example: "Rove Draws a Hard Line Between Conservatives, Liberals Over 9/11." (Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2005): "A partisan furor erupted Thursday as Democrats assailed President Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, for criticizing liberals over what he described as a tepid response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said Wednesday night at a Manhattan gathering of the Conservative Party of New York state."

While "preparing indictments" might legitimately be called a reference to the use of law, here linking the added sarcasm of "therapy and understanding" misrepresents the Liberal position. Carroll, for example, in that essay immediately after 9/11, affimed the need for a forceful response: "Before going any further, let me state the obvious. The nearly worldwide consensus that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington must be met with force is entirely correct. The network of suicidal mass murderers, however large and wherever hidden, must be eliminated. But force can be exercised decisively and overwhelmingly in another context than that of 'war.'"

Early in the Iraq war, very few politicians challenged this use of the war metaphor, but there were some signs of awareness of its implications. On April 18, 2004, CNN reported that Democratic candidate John Kerry said: "It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish credibility with the rest of the world, so that we can have a believable administration as to how we proceed." Kerry also said he didn't consider the war on terrorism primarily a military effort. "I will use our military when necessary, but it is not primarily a military operation," he said. "It's an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort."

Bush Revises Stance on War on Terrorism
'We will win,' he tells veterans as Democrats
continue to criticize his previous comment.
By Edwin Chen Los Angeles Times September 1, 2004

NASHVILLE — President Bush forcefully and repeatedly declared Tuesday that the war on terrorism was winnable, a day after he touched off a partisan tempest by saying on national television, "I don't think you can win it."

In a speech to the national convention of the American Legion, Bush told cheering veterans: "We meet today at a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win. If America shows weakness or uncertainty in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch."

His comments came a day after Democrats sharply criticized the president for remarks he made to interviewer Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" show that were aired Monday. "I don't think you can win it," Bush said of the fight against terrorism, "but I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

The campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, pounced on Bush's latest comments.

"What today showed is that George Bush might be able to read a speech saying we can win the war on terror. But as we saw yesterday, he's clearly got real doubts about his ability to do so, and with good reason," spokesman Phil Singer said.

Kerry addressed Bush's remarks for the first time Tuesday night during a rally on the airport tarmac here; he is scheduled to address the American Legion today.

"All they're talking about is the war on terror, which the president yesterday said he doesn't think we can win," Kerry told hundreds of whooping supporters. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you something: We can, we must and we will win the war on terror. And the way to win … is fight a smarter, more effective war on terror."

Bush administration and campaign officials sought Tuesday to explain the president's comments to NBC. Vice President Dick Cheney, First Lady Laura Bush and campaign and administration staff said the president believed that the fight against terror would end in victory but that the long-term nature of the war meant that it would not end unequivocally, with a treaty-signing ceremony.

Bush, as a call-in guest on the Rush Limbaugh show Tuesday, said, "Really what I was saying to Lauer was, is that this is not the kind of war where you sit down and sign a peace treaty. It's a totally different kind of war. But we will win it.

"I probably needed to be a little more articulate," he said.

Bush told the American Legion convention, "Make no mistake about it, we are winning, and we will win. We will win by staying on the offensive. We will win by spreading liberty."

Calling in to the Sean Hannity talk show on Fox Radio on Tuesday afternoon, Cheney said that "the president never intended to convey the notion that we can't win. We clearly can, and we will."

Mrs. Bush commented during three interviews on the morning news shows, and campaign advisor Karen Hughes spoke later in the day on television.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., speaking on CNN, said, "I don't think we're ever going to find a situation where every individual terrorist is eliminated. I do think that we will win the war on terror, and I think that we will prevail."

The about-face pointed up Bush's reliance on his credentials as a "wartime president" in his bid for a second term.

Singer, the Kerry campaign spokesman, sought to cast doubt on those credentials. "This president has gone from mission accomplished to mission miscalculated to mission impossible on the war on terror," he said. "We need a leader who knows we can win the war on terror and has a plan to do it. America can do better than a go-it-alone foreign policy that has alienated key allies, leaving U.S. troops bearing the overwhelming burden in Iraq and U.S. taxpayers shouldering the bulk of the cost."

Also Tuesday, Bush campaigned in Iowa and dropped by an evening picnic and softball game in central Pennsylvania between Pennsylvania Young Republicans and Pennsylvania College Republicans. He also addressed the Republican National Convention in New York, using videoconferencing equipment.

Today the president is scheduled to campaign in Ohio before traveling to New York for the GOP nominating convention.
In his remarks in Nashville, Bush talked about his support for veterans' benefits as well as a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. He was accompanied by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam War veteran and rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

Law Not War
by James Carroll

Written just days after 9/11, James Carroll's timely column in the Boston Globe (Sept.15, 2001), which has been reprinted in his book: Crusade (2004), presents the moral case against using the metaphor of war

How we love our country! For days now, we Americans, while mourning and shuddering, have felt the accumulating weight of our patriotic devotion. We are joined in the shocking recognition of what a rare and precious treasure is the United States of America. Our nation's sudden vulnerability makes us shrug off, just as suddenly, the habit of taking for granted its nobility. We see it in the throat-choking empty place of the New York skyline, and in the gaping wound of the building beside Arlington Cemetery. We see it in the grimy faces of the resolute rescue workers, and in the implication that doomed airline passengers fought back against hijackers. We see it in the splendid diversity of our features, our accents, our beliefs, our responses even. Never has the national motto seemed more true: out of many, one.

But so far our main expression of this intense patriotism has been oddly in tension with its inner meaning, for the thing we treasure above all about America at this moment is the way it measures its hope by principles of democracy, tolerance, law, respect for the other, and even social compassion. Our supreme patriotic gesture in this crisis has been a nearly universal call for war, and indeed the growing sentiment for war, fueled by the rhetoric of our highest leaders, may soon be embodied in a formal congressional declaration of war. Before we go much farther, we should think carefully about why we are heading down this path, and where it is likely to lead. Do the rhetoric of war, and the actions it already sets in motion, really serve the urgent purpose of stopping terrorism? And is the launching of war really the only way to demonstrate our love for America?

Before going any farther, let me state the obvious. The nearly worldwide consensus that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington must be met with force is entirely correct. The network of suicidal mass murderers, however large and wherever hidden, must be eliminated. But force can be exercised decisively and overwhelmingly in another context than that of "war." One of the great advances in civilization occurred when human beings found a way to channel necessary violence away from "war" and toward a new, counterbalancing context embodied in the idea of "law." The distinction may seem too fine to be relevant in the aftermath of this catastrophe, but it is after catastrophe that the distinction matters most. The difference between "war" and "law" is not the use of force. The United States of America, with its world allies, should be embarked not on a war but on an unprecedented, swift, sure, and massive campaign of law enforcement. As the term law enforcement implies, the proper use of force would be of the essence of this campaign.

Why does this distinction matter? Four reasons:

War, by definition, is an activity undertaken against a political or social entity, while the terrorist network responsible for this catastrophe, from all reports, is a coalition of individuals, perhaps a large one. Law enforcement, by definition, is an activity undertaken against just such individuals or networks. By clothing our response to the terrorist acts in the rhetoric of war, we make it far more likely that members of groups associated by extrinsic factors with the perpetrators (Arabs, Muslims, Afghans, Pakistanis, etc.) will suffer terrible consequences, from being bombed in Kabul to being discriminated against in Boston. Furthermore, the rhetoric of war, as it falls on the ears of such people (a billion Muslims), makes it all the more likely that they will only see America as their enemy.

War, by definition, is relatively imprecise. Steps can be taken to limit "collateral damage," but the method of war, in fact, is to bring pressure to bear against a hostile power structure by inflicting suffering on the society of which it is part. History shows that once wars begin, violence becomes general. As President Bush threatened, no distinctions are made. In law enforcement, by contrast, distinctions remain of the essence. Law enforcement submits to disciplines that are jettisoned in war. Do we really have the right to jettison such disciplines now?

War, similarly, is less concerned with procedure than with result; or, more plainly, in war the ends justify the means. In law enforcement, the end remains embodied in the means, which is why procedures are so scrupulously observed in criminal justice activity. To respond to a terrorist's grievous violation of the social order with further violations of that order means the terrorist has won.

War inevitably generates its own momentum, which has a way of inhumanely overwhelming the humane purposes for which the war is begun in the first place. In the death-ground of combat violence, self-criticism can seem like fatal self-doubt, and so the savage momentum of war is rarely recognized as such until too late. The rule of unintended consequences universally applies in war. Law enforcement, on the other hand, with its system of checks and balances between police and courts, is inevitably self-critical. The moral link between act and consequence is far more likely to be protected.

What does "winning" a war against terrorism mean? How has hatred of America become a source of meaning for vast numbers whose poverty already amounts to a state of war? Must a massive campaign of unleashed violence become America's new source of meaning, too? The World Trade Center was a symbol of the social, economic, and political hope Americans treasure, a hope embodied above all in law. To win the struggle against terrorism means inspiring that same hope in the hearts of all who do not have it. How we respond to this catastrophe will define our patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize our beloved dead.

"In the Arab world --indeed, throughout the whole House of Islam -- bin Laden's stature was in the process of being transformed from a marginal miscreant to a modern-day Saladin, the hero who vanquished crusaders. Bush's war on terrorism, by defining bin Laden as a martial adversary instead of a sadistic criminal, had elevated him to a mythic status. The "war" on terrorism, in that sense, was lost the day Bush declared it." -- James Carroll, Crusade (p.208)

In addition to his book (Crusade), James Carroll is the bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning memoir An American Requiem; Constantine's Sword, a history of Christian anti-Semitism; and ten novels. He lectures widely on war and peace and on Jewish-Christian-Muslim reconciliation. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit www.americanempireproject.com | Copyright © 2004 James Carroll

A war that can never be won
Terrorism is a technique, not an enemy state that can be defeated
Jonathan Steele Saturday November 22, 2003 The Guardian

The bombast has increased with the bombs. We saw two disturbing escalations this week. The explosions that devastated the British consulate and the HSBC bank in Istanbul mark a significant widening in the choice of targets by those Islamist radicals who use terror to express their hatred of British and US policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The Blair/Bush response reached an equally alarming new level of ferocity.

At their swaggering joint press conference on Thursday, the two men repeatedly made the risible claim that they could win their war on terror. The prime minister was the worse. While Bush gave himself a global carte blanche to intervene anywhere, by speaking of his "determination to fight and defeat this evil, wherever it is found", Blair put the issue in terms of a finite goal. He talked of defeating terrorism "utterly" and "ridding our world of this evil once and for all".

The hyperbole of the religious pulpit allows for all-embracing and eschatological language, but these men are meant to be practical political leaders. When Blair, in his opposition days, invented the phrase "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", he knew that crime could never be totally eliminated. The task is to reduce and restrain it by a variety of methods. Violence and terrorism are no different. Like poverty, they will always be with us. At best they can only be diminished and contained. Yet now, with the arrogance of power, we have the Bush/Blair roadshow promising in sub-Churchillian tones to vanquish terrorism as though it were a clearly defined enemy like Nazi Germany.

Terrorism is a technique. It is not an ideology or a political philosophy, let alone an enemy state. Our leaders' failure to understand that point emerged immediately after September 11 2001 when they reacted to the attacks in New York and Washington by confusing the hunt for the perpetrators with the Afghan "state" that allegedly "harboured" them. The Taliban ran avicious regime, but Afghanistan was a disastrously failed state and its nominal leader, Mullah Omar, had no control over al-Qaida.

By the same token the "war" on terror should have remained what it initially was, a metaphor like the "war" on drugs. But instead of being harmless linguistic exaggeration to describe a broad campaign encompassing a range of political, economic and police counter-measures, it was narrowed down to real war and nothing else. The slippery slope that began with Afghanistan quickly led to the invasion of Iraq, a symbolic and political enormity whose psychological impact Bush and Blair have not yet grasped.

When Ariel Sharon, then a middle-aged general, wanted to send Israeli tanks into Cairo in October 1973, it was the arch-realist Henry Kissinger who realised how devastating the emotional effect would be in the Arab world, and stopped him. For a new generation of Arabs, the sight of American tanks in Baghdad is just as humiliating. Osama bin Laden's claim that having US forces at airbases close to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia is a desecration appealed only to a few Muslims, but the daily television pictures of US troops in the heart of an Arab capital, and not just patrolling but using lethal force to back up an administration of occupiers, inflames a much larger audience.

Jack Straw argues that terrorism preceded the war on Iraq and it is therefore wrong to blame the US and Britain for increasing the danger. This is a non-sequitur, which also flies in the face of the evidence, admitted by US officials themselves, that non-Iraqi Arabs have been infiltrating Iraq to commit acts of terror because of the US presence.

Sharon, similarly, says suicide bombings in Israel started before he took office. Does that mean he shares no blame? That is not the view of four former Israeli intelligence chiefs, who argued last week that Sharon's exclusive reliance on hardline responses has weakened Israel's security and increased the number of attacks on Israelis.

Before the war on Iraq several of Britain's intelligence experts, including senior officials, warned that it would increase the risk of terrorism and make British interests potential targets - a view shared by most critics of the war. To suggest they were wrong runs against common sense.

Coming after the war on Afghanistan, the war on Iraq has made al-Qaida's grisly work easier. Dispersed by American bombing from their remote mountain lairs, they have shifted to the much easier terrain of an urban Arab environment where they can be more readily hidden and helped. Resistance to US forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan as well as terrorist attacks on aid workers and other western soft targets are on the increase, but they appear to come from Afghan supporters of the former Taliban as well as other Pashtun radicals from Pakistan. Most Arabs who were in Afghanistan have moved to Iraq. There they have been joined by new Arab recruits, eager to add their energy to Iraq's local resistance.

In the long history of terrorism, al-Qaida has provided two novelties. One is its global reach, marked by willingness to strike targets in many countries. The other is its use of suicide attacks as a weapon of first, rather than last, resort. Under the broad heading of terrorism as a political and military instrument, suicide bombing is a sub-category, a technique within a technique.

In the post-colonial world its first proponents had nothing to do with the anti-Islamic myth that martyrs are motivated by the hope of being greeted by dozens of virgins waiting in heaven. It began with Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, an act of martial self-sacrifice by angry women as well as men. When it spread to Palestine over the past decade, it was an act of last-resort desperation by frustrated people who saw no other way to counter Israel's disparity of power, as Cherie Blair once publicly pointed out. Al-Qaida has merely taken an old technique and made it the weapon of choice.

The shock this week is that Bush and Blair not only still believe that war is the way to deal with terrorists but that even when faced by the escalation of Istanbul they think victory is possible. The real issue is how to control risk. Anti-western extremism will never be eradicated, but it can be reduced by a combination of measures, primarily political.

The first is an early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and the withdrawal of foreign forces. An arrangement whereby the new Iraqi government "requests" US troops to stay on will convince few in the Middle East. Second is firm and sustained pressure on Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians, presumably on the lines of the recent accord worked out in Geneva by Israeli and Palestinian dissidents.

There is no guaranteed defence against a suicide attack on a soft target. "Hardening" targets by turning every US or British building, at home or abroad, into a fortress makes little sense. It is better to try to reduce the motivations (hatred, revenge, or an overwhelming sense of injustice) that make people turn themselves into bombs. That endeavour will also never produce complete success. In Blair's misguided words, it cannot be done "utterly" or "once and for all". But it is the more productive way to go.

Playing Into Their Hands
Our "war" on terror breeds terrorists, and a vicious cycle of violence
By George Soros
(George Soros heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. His most recent book is "The Bubble of American Supremacy.")

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.
If the administration cannot recognize and admit its mistakes, it cannot correct its policies.

War is a false and misleading metaphor in the context of combating terrorism. The metaphor suited the purposes of the administration because it invoked our military might. But military actions require an identifiable target, preferably a state. As a result, the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states like Afghanistan that are harboring terrorists, not at pursuing the terrorists themselves.

Imagine for a moment that Sept. 11 had been treated as a crime against humanity. We would have pursued Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (hopefully with more success), but we would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would we today have our military struggling to perform police work in full combat gear, getting soldiers killed in the process.

This does not mean that we should not use military means to capture and bring terrorists to justice when appropriate. But to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering — all of which ultimately depend on the support of the populations among which terrorists operate.

Declaring war on the very people we need to enlist against terrorism is a huge mistake. We are bound to create some innocent victims, and the more of them there are, the greater the resentment and the better the chances that some victims will turn into the next perpetrators.

On Sept. 11, the United States was the victim of a heinous crime, and the whole world expressed spontaneous and genuine sympathy. Since then, though we Americans are loath to admit it, the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than were lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The comparison is rarely made in the U.S.: American lives are valued differently from the lives of foreigners, but the distinction is less obvious to people abroad.

The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush administration is more likely to bring about a permanent state of war than an end to terrorism. Terrorists are invisible; therefore, they will never disappear. They will continue to provide a convenient pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy by military means. That, in turn, will continue to generate resistance, setting up a vicious circle of escalating violence.

The important thing to remember about terrorism is that it is a reflexive phenomenon. Its impact and development depend on the actions and reactions of the victims. If the victims react by turning into perpetrators, terrorism triumphs in the sense of engendering more and more violence. That is what the fanatically militant Islamists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks must have hoped to achieve. By allowing a "war" on terrorism to become our principal preoccupation, we are playing straight into the terrorists' hands: They — not we — are setting our priorities.

The United States is the most powerful country on Earth. While it cannot impose its will on the world, nothing much can be done in the way of international cooperation without its leadership or at least active participation.
The United States has a greater degree of discretion in deciding the shape of the world than anybody else. Other countries don't have a choice: They must respond to U.S. policy. This imposes a unique responsibility on the United States: Our nation must concern itself with the well-being of the world.

The United States is the only country that can take the lead in addressing problems that require collective action: preserving peace, assuring economic progress, protecting the environment and so on. Fighting terrorism and controlling weapons of mass destruction also fall into this category.

By using the war on terror as a pretext for asserting our military supremacy, we are embarking on an escalating spiral of terrorist/ counterterrorist violence. If instead we were to set an example of cooperative behavior, we could not only alleviate poverty, misery and injustice in the world, but also gain support for defending ourselves against terrorism. We will be the greatest beneficiaries if we do so.

Los Angeles Times (M1, April 4, 2004
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Sell It Softly
Persuasively promoting American values and culture
will work better than either carrots or threats to influence the Middle East
By Joseph S. Nye Jr. (in Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2004)
Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Power, simply put, is the ability to influence others to get what you want. Nations need power because without it they have a difficult time advancing their goals. But there are ultimately three main ways for a nation to achieve power: by using or threatening force; by inducing compliance with rewards; or by using "soft power" — attracting followers through the strength of a country's values and culture. When a country can induce others to follow by employing soft power, it saves a lot of carrots and sticks. This is a lesson the United States needs to keep in mind.

We won the Cold War in part by deterring Soviet aggression with our hard military power. But the Soviet Union's final dissolution came only after we also began to effectively employ soft power. Ultimately, people in Eastern Europe and Russia were attracted to Western values through exchange programs, better diplomatic relations and broadcasts that penetrated the Iron Curtain.

Since Sept. 11, it has become commonplace to say that the United States is engaged in a war of ideas for the hearts and minds of moderate Arabs. To win that war, we will have to become more adept at wielding soft power in the region.

The greatest challenge to the United States today comes from radical Islamist ideology, in particular from the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, which originated in 18th century Saudi Arabia and has grown more powerful in recent decades. Radical Islamists are expert in the use of soft power, attracting people to their ranks through charities that address basic needs and through religious institutions that form the backbones of communities.

Support for radical Islam has been consistently provided by Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family agreed to propagate Wahhabism as a means of placating clerics. The royal family's support of Wahhabism was itself an exercise in soft power. Because Saudi funding came from both government ministries and private charities, it is practically impossible to estimate the total amount of payments. One expert testified to Congress that the Saudis had spent roughly $70 billion on aid projects after the oil boom of the 1970s, much of it funneled through radical Islamic groups, and others report that the Saudis sponsored 1,500 mosques and 2,000 schools worldwide, from Indonesia to France. These institutions often displaced more-moderate and less-well-funded interpretations of Islam. Even if the numbers are heavily inflated, they dwarf the $150 million that the U.S. spends annually on public diplomacy in the Islamic world.

Soft power is not a panacea, of course. It is difficult to control — as the Saudi royal family has discovered — and can have unintended consequences. Organized religious movements of all stripes, including Christian, Buddhist and Muslim, have used soft power for centuries to attract millions of people to their teachings. But soft power can also attract people to malevolent religious organizations and networks.

Ultimately, the soft power of Wahhabism has not proved to be a resource that the Saudi government can control or use to obtain favorable outcomes. It has become a Frankenstein's monster, returning to haunt its creator. The radicals regard the royal family as corrupt and in league with Western infidels. They aim to overthrow or disrupt the government, as demonstrated by the 2003 terrorist attacks on residential compounds and the bombing that ripped apart a police headquarters in Riyadh last week. The royal family's bargain with the Wahhabist clerics backfired because the soft power of Islamic radicalism has flowed in the direction of Osama bin Laden and his goal of overthrowing the Saudi government.

A snapshot of this situation was captured by polls taken shortly after the Iraq war. Pluralities in Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco and the Palestinian Territories said they had a lot or some confidence in Bin Laden to do the right thing regarding world affairs. In those same countries, more people had more confidence in Bin Laden than in George W. Bush or Tony Blair. The fact that Bin Laden inspires confidence sends a clear message to Americans about the soft power of our sworn enemy.

Hard military power is not a sufficient response. Soft power must also be fought with soft power. Americans and others must find better ways of projecting our soft power to attract moderate Muslims.

Effective public diplomacy requires three strategies. First, we need to respond much more quickly with American interpretations of events. The establishment of Arabic language broadcasting units like Radio Sawa and satellite television channel Al Hurra, both of which intersperse news with popular programming, was a good first step for the U.S. Now we must learn to work more effectively with Arab news media such as Al Jazeera, which is a trusted news source for many Arabic speakers.

Second, like any entity trying to get a message out, we have to decide which key strategic themes to emphasize. One real need is to better articulate American policies and to explain how they relate to the values of moderate Muslims. For example, the charge that U.S. policies are indifferent to the killings of Muslims can be addressed by pointing to American interventions that saved Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as assistance to Islamic countries to foster development and combat AIDS. As Assistant Secretary of State William Burns pointed out last year, public diplomacy must be accompanied by "a wider positive agenda for the region, alongside rebuilding Iraq; achieving the president's two-state vision for Israelis and Palestinians; and modernizing Arab economies."

Finally, and most important, we must develop a long-term strategy of cultural and educational exchanges aimed at creating a richer and more open civil society in Middle Eastern countries. The most effective spokespersons for the United States are not Americans but indigenous surrogates who understand America's virtues as well as its faults. Visa policies that have cut back on the number of Muslim students in the United States do us more harm than good.

Much of the work of developing an open civil society can be promoted by corporations, foundations, universities and other nonprofit organizations, as well as by governments. Companies and foundations can offer technology to help modernize Arab education. American universities can establish more exchange programs for students and faculty. Foundations can support the development of American studies in Muslim countries, or programs that enhance the professionalism of journalists. Governments can support the teaching of English and finance student exchanges.

Only when we learn to combine this type of soft power with our hard power will we succeed in meeting the challenge of Islamist terrorism.

Since it's difficult to communicate to a mass audience the inevitably complex and usually debatable reasons for one nation's use of force against another, the leader of the enemy state must be used to stand for the entire nation and then demonized. Lasswell meant the term quite literally: The enemy leader must be portrayed as the incarnation of evil, the devil himself. Sound familiar? Just as Saddam Hussein became the personification of both Iraq and evil, so too was Kaiser Wilhelm used by Allied propagandists in World War I.

While the strategy of demonization is familiar to us, so too are the problems it creates once the war ends. If the cause of war is an evil leader, then his elimination should be the solution. Once that leader is dead or captured, problems faced by the victors as they attempt to reconstruct a shattered society are no easier to explain to Americans today than they were to the Allied populations in the wake of World War I.

Lasswell argued that to gain popular support for a war, it must always be portrayed as defensive. Claims about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction or about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden became the linchpins of our Iraq mobilization because they were central to portraying the U.S. invasion, without U.N. backing, not as an unprovoked attack, but as a defensive action necessitated by an evil enemy preparing to strike us.

Just as it was impossible for Allied governments to resist exaggerating claims of atrocities by German troops in neutral Belgium, a driving force behind claims of Iraqi WMD or connections to the terrorists of September 11, 2001, was their power to drum up public support. If we focus too closely on the accuracy of prewar intelligence estimates, we miss the more disturbing point that governments are simply unable to resist "cherry-picking" those estimates for use in propaganda.

Lasswell's analysis is even more prescient when it comes to the need for developing different propaganda appeals to different segments of the populace -- what we call segmenting, or "slicing and dicing," and wrongly take to be a new technique. Portrayal of an evil leader, guilty of unspeakable atrocities, possessing aggressive intent against one's country, works with the more jingoistic and aggressive segments of the population, Lasswell wrote, those who, he concluded, find "peace in war" and are labeled today as "Nascar dads" living in the "red" states.

Yet, he argued, there need to be as many different justifications for war as there are interests in the population. So, for example, more "sophisticated" middle-class intellectuals need appeals based on international law. In a discussion that anticipates the uses of the United Nations by the Bush administration, Lasswell argued that even if an international body (he had the League of Nations in mind) opposed your country's plans for war, that could be overcome by an argument that war was required by a "higher and truer" vision of international law, which international organizations failed to uphold.

But what of the long-run consequences when a government, once the war is over, is found to have manipulated the truth? Lasswell didn't think that was a problem, as long as your country won, since "victory required no explanation."

But victory is in the eye of the beholder. Can the continuing instability in Iraq, the violence, and the almost daily death and injuries inflicted on American troops be called victory? Whatever the long-term consequences, the Bush administration must feel an almost irresistible temptation to keep its time-table of turning authority over to an Iraqi government by June, declare victory, and hope that things don't fall apart until after the 2004 elections.

While the specific propaganda techniques developed in the early 20th century continue to be used, the context within which they are deployed has changed significantly. The rapid flow of information across borders makes it more difficult for governments to keep their populations long insulated from counterclaims and refutations.

Both the Blair and Bush administrations were quickly called to account over the basic premises they used to justify war. Unfortunately, that did not mean that the press provided an open and critical examination of the case for war before the conflict, when it would have done the most good.

While we pay much lip service to the idea of an aggressive press, in the run-up to war, journalists play a central role in propaganda campaigns by passing along the claims of their government with little criticism, or by acting as patriotic cheerleaders for war.

Depressingly, long-used propaganda techniques continue to be effective, but the price we pay is felt, in their wake, in the immediate backlash of cynicism and distrust of government. For example, one of the reasons (among many) that the Holocaust was not more widely covered in the American press, and used by the Roosevelt administration to buttress a case for war against Germany, was the suspicion that stories about the systematic extermination of Jews were just repeats of exaggerated World War I atrocity tales, and neither the press nor the public would allow themselves to be fooled again.

Similarly, I think it's unlikely that the Bush administration will launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran, Syria, or other members of the Axis of Evil (a phrase with deep roots in past propaganda campaigns). The greater problem may be that, even if Iran did pose a real and imminent nuclear threat, it would be exceedingly difficult to get a now-skeptical public to believe it.

We should question not the power of 80-year-old propaganda techniques -- their power seems indisputable -- but rather the need for them. Is the price they exact on public trust in government worth it? What sort of safeguards can be put in place against their use?

Those are some of the questions that need to be raised in the electoral-season debate over the war in Iraq. Clearly, fighting World War I or fascist aggression in the 1930s implied a total war and required total mobilization of the population. But invading a country like Iraq is hardly the same challenge as defeating a Nazi Germany that had conquered all of Western Europe.

When the United States is the world's pre-eminent military power, when wars are again fought by small professional volunteer armies, and domestic life is scarcely disrupted by conflict, the same blunt techniques used to mobilize for total war are simply not justifiable.

Strategically, because they portray conflict as a struggle for survival between good and evil, they make impossible any careful consideration of proportional military response in asymmetric conflicts. But more important, the toll they take on American democracy is too high.

Commonly, an analogy is defined as an "inference that if two or more things agree with one another in some respects they will prob. agree in others"; or " a resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike"; "a similarity; a comparison based on such resemblance."

Using terms from the Intensify/Downplay schema, an analogy would intensify similarities(e.g. long, draining, guerilla war), but downplay differences (e.g. wider effects on the Islamic world).

Logically, rationally, if metaphors are fully extended into an analogy, they're almost certain to be criticized, correctly, as being faulty analogies because no two things or situations are ever exactly alike.

Thus, the "war on terrorism"-- often used by administration -- if fully extended would be a logical faulty analogy. But also, the "Vietnam quagmire" analogy --often used by administration critics -- would also be a logical faulty analogy.

Emotionally, however, faulty analogies, non-rational as they may be, are often used by persuaders because the are effective. They transfer the emotional associations of one thing to another.

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"Bush with a Gerson text sounds a lot better than Bush on his own," says Theodore Sorensen, speechwriter for Jack Kennedy, and someone whose writing talents Gerson truly admires.
He puts words in Bush's mouth
Presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY April 10, 2001

WASHINGTON — The Sam Seaborn of the real West Wing is not, as creators of the popular NBC series would have it, as "equally skilled with the ladies" as he is with presidential prose. President Bush's speechwriter Michael Gerson, by contrast, married the girl he took piano lessons with back in junior high. Nor does the real-life White House wordsmith have the chiseled features, Ivy League pedigree and Armani polish of his TV counterpart. Gerson, 36, is a Brooks Brothers kind of guy, who studied theology in a small Midwestern college and is more reminiscent of Woody Allen than Rob Lowe in the glamour department.

He chews up uni-ball pens by the packet, scribbling out Bush's most acclaimed speeches in longhand on a yellow legal pad. He sometimes takes days to produce a first draft. And he does some of his best writing in the nearest Starbucks, where his muse is the largest latte on the menu and the ambient noise of an espresso machine. When he was crafting Bush's inaugural address, he waited in pre-dawn darkness for the coffee shop to open at 5:30 a.m. near his home in Alexandria, Va. (The real West Wing speechwriter's office is a windowless room in the basement.)

"I'm actually a terrible speller," Gerson says, further tacking from the TV image. His wife, Dawn, laughs at the Seaborn comparison. "I tease him," she says.

But heartthrob or not, Gerson has done more for Bush's ratings than an Oval Office full of Rob Lowes could do for The West Wing.
In Bush's arduous journey from earning credibility as a candidate to legitimacy as president, three speeches boosted him and won high marks from friend and foe. Each — his nomination acceptance speech in August, inaugural in January and address to Congress in February — was first drafted by Gerson, who later huddled with Bush and Karen Hughes, now counselor to the president, to revise and polish.

Suddenly, this evangelical Christian — with his owlish, horn-rimmed spectacles, and love of Monty Python humor and Chinese mysteries by Robert Hans Van Gulik — is the Mark McGwire of speechwriting.

"Remarkably deft, coherently organized, competently written and ingeniously crafted," The New Yorker magazine says of those major speeches. "Michael Gerson ... is three for three."

Newspaper opinion writers across America, and the political spectrum, describe the 15-minute inaugural as brilliant, impassioned, graceful and powerful. The New York Times calls it "the most eloquent speech of (Bush's) life." And Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. labels Gerson "his party's best wordsmith when it comes to describing the struggles of the poor and the obligations of citizens to share each other's burdens."

Bush's nickname for Gerson is The Scribe. Before writing a major speech, Gerson captures presidential thoughts on a small, handheld Sony tape recorder. In preparing for the inaugural, his questions to Bush about legacy produced that speech's four themes: courage, compassion, civility and character.

He paces in his office while reading first drafts out loud. To "feel the history," he pored through all 53 inaugural addresses. ("Some of them are eminently forgettable," Gerson says.)

He is a true adherent of Bush's compassionate conservatism, who finds his writing inspiration in the moral intensity of speeches by John and Bobby Kennedy, and the civil rights movement. "I'm an extraordinary fan of Martin Luther King," Gerson says. "He had that rare ability to take a moment and place it in the context of our whole history."

An inveterate reader, Gerson squirrels away quotes that might ornament a speech, gems both lyrical and obscure. One was by Declaration of Independence signer John Page to Thomas Jefferson during the American Revolution: "Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?"

Gerson wrote it into the ending of Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, but it got cut. He tried again in the inaugural. "I knew Mike really felt strongly about (it)," Hughes says. "I remember telling him, 'It's perfect for this speech.' "
It stayed, and Gerson echoed the phrase in crafting the speech's denouement. The inaugural, with its imagery of American democracy as a "seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations"; a shared concern "in the quiet of American conscience" for the poor; and a call for citizens "to seek a common good beyond your comfort," is the speechwriter's proudest effort.

"Gerson is very talented," says Michael Waldman, formerly Clinton's chief scribe, "and seems to have a core of decency that shines through in his speeches."

"Bush with a Gerson text sounds a lot better than Bush on his own," says Theodore Sorensen, speechwriter for Jack Kennedy, and someone whose writing talents Gerson truly admires.

There's a nervous energy about the Bush speechwriter. During an interview in a Starbucks near the White House, where he works part of each day, Gerson tortures a stirring stick, twisting it into a napkin while trying to characterize his job.

"Let me put it this way. On most days in most circumstances, you are writing for the next day's headlines. In a few moments, you are writing for American history. And that's a tremendous honor," Gerson says. "And then there may come a time, once or twice, when you are writing for the angels. For some great and decisive moment."

There was a time when presidential speechwriters were the redheaded stepchildren, kept in the closet lest they mar the charade that the president penned his own prose. That changed with the rising image of Reagan-Bush writer Peggy Noonan. Waldman sat for major profiles near the end of Clinton's tenure.

But Bush made Gerson available to the media right out of the box, uncommon candor particularly for a president whose tortured syntax is so often the stuff of late-night comedy. Karen Hughes explains the administration's straightforwardness about Gerson with: "We're from Texas." But she also quarrels with the notion that Bush isn't capable of his own eloquence.

"The president's natural style is what I call eloquent simplicity," Hughes says.

"Mike is able to challenge the president ... to more poetic heights," she says. "Mike deserves a great deal of credit."

Gerson once wrote a crucial address to the Christian Coalition for Steve Forbes that won the magazine publisher accolades and support. Receiving a first draft of a Gerson speech, Forbes says, is "delicious. You roll the phrases off your tongue."

"Mike gets these wonderful phrases. It's like music in his head," says Watergate figure Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, who hired Gerson as a staff writer in 1986.

Born in New Jersey, Gerson grew up in St. Louis, where he met his wife — a Korean native adopted by an American family — at the church they attended. The couple today have two boys, Bucky, 6 and Nicholas, 3. Gerson's father, who died in 1992, was a dairy scientist and maker of ice cream flavors. His mother, Betty, is an artist.

Gerson was studying theology at Wheaton College near Chicago when someone sent Colson a college newspaper column Gerson had written on Mother Teresa (a favorite Gerson icon, she surfaces again in Bush's inaugural) and Colson hired him right after graduation. Gerson later became policy director for then-U.S. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), taking time out to act as policy adviser to Jack Kemp and write speeches for Bob Dole.

"He has an almost uncanny quality," Coats says, "an ability to sit and talk and think aloud with you. And translate your thoughts and conclusions and recommendations into a document that seems to express it even better than you expressed it."
Gerson was working as a writer for U.S. News & World Report when Bush interviewed him for 45 minutes in 1999 and offered him a campaign job on the spot.

Bush is an active editor, says Gerson, who likes tight writing and shorter speeches. When he drafted a 1999 Bush speech critical of Republicans who see America as "slouching toward Gomorrah" on social issues, a conservative firestorm ensued. Many thought it a brazen attack on former jurist Robert Bork and his 1996 book on American moral decay: Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Editorial writers for The Wall Street Journal even suggested that Bush, not