US administrations have always articulated their interventions abroad within ethical principles. They invoked internal values to sell the American adventures overseas to the American public. That is to say, morality is invoked to gain approval for the American involvements back home.
Indeed, the United States, historically, has always stressed idealistic objectives to mobilize and maintain public support for military intervention overseas (e.g. World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama). The strategy contains two main elements: An exaggeration of the importance of the conflict, and an emphasis on the moral imperative of US reaction. Frequently, those justifications bear little resemblance to the more plausible political and economic motives for intervention. This approach was apparent as early as World War I. President Woodrow Wilson repeatedly insisted that the conflict is a struggle to “make the world safer for democracy”.
A similar discourse was used to justify militarily interventions during the Cold War era. The intervention in Korea and Vietnam were reduced to a simplistic conflict between the forces of freedom and democracy in the south and a monolithic communist aggressor threatening the security of the entire free world.
In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower justified sending US Marines to Lebanon in similar language. He stressed the danger of a communist takeover of Lebanon. Similarly, in the invasion of Grenada in 1983, US officials emphasized the alleged communist threat to the Caribbean region. They insisted that the invasion was essential to prevent the creation of a new Soviet puppet in the Western Hemisphere.
In the invasion of Panama in 1986, the first Bush administration evoked two moral motives for the invasion: Bringing democracy to Panama and striking a blow against the post-Cold War bogeyman, the international drug menace.
It is hardly surprising that the same moral principles were invoked during the Gulf War and the early phases of the War on Terrorism. The war was presented as a war between two forces, “good” versus “evil” ; them on the side of “evil” and “us” on the side of “good”. This process served an important function for America. It induced the public to rally behind the war against the “Other”.
The problem is that it also helped to sustain the generalized image of the Arabs regardless of the change in the political scene represented by differences within Arab politics in the Gulf War and regardless of the fact that the Arabs are now victims of terrorism and an ally on the war on terrorism. The passivity, to say the least, of the US government could imply that it was more concerned about selling the war at home than at initiating a new way of perceiving the Arabs.
Our critique of the US government’s role in perpetuating the crude generalizations about the Arabs stems from the presumed strong impact of the policy makers on the media’s agenda. Government has proven, since Vietnam, its ability to shape the media’s agenda. Such an impact is magnified in times of national crisis not only because journalists take sides when his/her own country is going to war but also because of their reliance on official sources.
Our criticism does not just apply to the US government but also to the media. The latter missed an opportunity to exercise its own social responsibility theory and to set out a new way of dealing with the Arabs. In other words, rather than providing a new view, the press followed the government line. This tendency is closely related to some of the conditions that structured the coverage of the Gulf War and the first phases of the War on Terrorism. These conditions were used in the news production process, media coverage of foreign policy, and coverage of national crisis.
To sum up, the relationship between American politics, in time of national crisis, and the generalized image of Arabs is not a good one. That is to say moral principles and the monolithic image of the Arabs are invoked to sell foreign policy at home.
— Dr. Khalid Alrowaitea is assistant professor of political communication at the Institute of Diplomatic Studies, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
