Securitisation and repetition

Repetition is by definition a temporal activity; it takes place over time. Yet, as we noted earlier, the most striking feature of Wæver's formulation of ‘securitisation’, indeed the most striking feature of any successful illocutionary act, is its instantaneity: saying ‘security’ performs securitisation at the very moment of the utterance in much the same way that saying ‘I promise to do X’ instantly performs a promise. The key to reconciling the apparent tension between the instantaneity of illocution and the temporality of repetition lies in recognising, following Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, that not only is illocutionary speech necessarily characterised by conformance to repeatable formulas, repeatability is in fact a condition that makes possible (if not necessarily guarantees) the success of illocutionary speech.

John Austin acknowledged that the working of speech acts involves correspondence to repeatable formulas. In an oft-cited passage he explained that ‘infelicity’, that is, the failure of performative speech to do something, ‘is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts’.Footnote ³⁴ Austin, in other words, subsumed speech acts within a larger category of performative acts (including, for example, nonverbal gestures like bowing), and he implied that the ability of these acts to transform reality was a function of their ritualised quality and/or their conformance to conventions.Footnote ³⁵ Austin, then, clearly recognised that the success of words in doing something at the very moment of their utterance depended in part on circumstances that preceded (and likely will succeed) that moment. For example, ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’ successfully performs a marriage to the extent that this act corresponds to a convention that, having been followed time and time again, has become sedimented; had this pronouncement not conformed to a ritualised formula, the utterance would have ‘misfired’.Footnote ³⁶

As Derrida complained, however, Austin's understanding of the conventional character of performatives was unduly narrow: ‘Austin … appears to consider solely the conventionality constituting the circumstances of the utterance (énoncé), its contextual surroundings, and not a certain conventionality intrinsic to what constitutes the speech act (locution) itself’.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, virtually all the illustrations of conventionality supplied by Austin involve extra-linguistic conventions – for example, the statement ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’ is successful if it is uttered by an appropriate person (say, a priest) in an appropriate context (say, a wedding ceremony).

Contra Austin, Derrida argued that the conventionality of speech inheres in speech itself. Referring to Austin's claim that speech acts have ‘the general character of ritual’, Derrida wrote that ‘“Ritual” is not a possible occurrence (éventualité) but rather, as iterability, a structural characteristic of every [linguistic] mark.’Footnote ³⁸ In other words, for Derrida, linguistic signs derive their performative force from their own inherently repeated quality – their ‘general iterability’ – as much as from conformance to nonlinguistic conventions.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Could a performative utterance succeed’, Derrida asked rhetorically, ‘if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable utterance or, in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a “citation?”’Footnote ⁴⁰ Derrida went on to discuss how signatures epitomise his claim. The conformance of a signature to a ritualised, repeatable model is the very condition that facilitates its validity: ‘In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, by corrupting its identity and singularity, divides its seal.’Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, as Culler pointed out, the essential iterability of signatures is brought into sharp relief by observing that signatures are valid even when they are (or precisely because they can be) produced by a machine.Footnote ⁴² In sum, for Derrida a performative utterance is not a ‘singular’ event; its working is not strictly confined to a single, isolated moment.Footnote ⁴³ The past and future repetition of the very same utterance is what makes its performativity possible. This argument was furthered by Judith Butler. Illocutionary utterances, she wrote, are not only

Butler thus clarified a point that was implicit in Derrida's formulation: characterising illocutionary acts as rituals is tantamount to conceptually stretching the moment of the act along the axis of time. Past, present, and (potential) future invocations of the utterance blur into each other, forming, to repeat Butler's elegant formulation, a ‘condensed historicity’.

This theoretical insight – the idea that the ‘moment’ of an utterance should not be understood literally, that the past and future repetitions of an utterance are condensed into the present instance of its invocation – is readily applicable to securitisation campaigns. Drawing upon Derrida and Butler, we can interpret the repetitive uttering of ‘security’ – utterances that, when successful, create the danger they ostensibly refer to – as forming an extended ritualised moment, a single linguistic ‘event’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Understanding securitising acts in this fashion allows us to think of them as occurring continually in time without our having to jettison or weaken Wæver's insight that ‘the utterance itself is the act’. In other words, theorising the moment of the securitising act as ‘condensed historicity’ makes it possible to preserve an understanding of the act as illocutionary even as, or indeed precisely because, we incorporate temporality into our theoretical account.

To recapitulate, we propose that the speech of securitising actors may be fruitfully analysed as consisting not in offering arguments so much as in reiterating simplified phrases (‘rogue/failed state’; ‘border/homeland security’; ‘ethnic cleansing’; ‘regime change’). Following Derrida and Butler we argue that the repetitive uttering of these phrases is a condition of their performativity. The more constantly and frequently a securitising phrase is being repeated, that is, the more condensed the ‘historicity’ of the phrase becomes, the more likely is the phrase to acquire an illocutionary force, to construct the security threat it ostensibly describes.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such actions are part of an assemblage of linguistic-material processes in which the audience facilitates the securitising efforts of speakers through the ritualistic ‘chanting’ of the phrase. This entire ritual of iteration, repetition, and material practice, we argue, should be understood as the securitising process.

Conceptualising audience acceptance

While the ritualised spouting of speech acts by securitising actors enables the success of these acts, it does not guarantee this success. As Buzan and Wæver correctly recognised, for illocutionary acts to succeed in creating reality, they must in some sense be accepted by an audience: ‘A discourse that takes the form of presenting something as an existential threat to a referent object does not by itself create securitization – this is a securitizing move but the issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts this as such.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Alas, the Copenhagen School's theorisation of audience acceptance was somewhat fuzzy. Even as Buzan and Wæver held fast to the view that securitisation was a linguistic event, they appeared at least occasionally (and possibly unintentionally) to portray securitisation as an intellectual process. Thus, they repeatedly characterised the securitising move as the making of an ‘argument’ or ‘argue[ing]’, which the Oxford Dictionary Online defines as ‘give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one's view’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Buzan and Wæver, moreover, alluded to ‘processes’ whereby securitising actors and audiences construct a ‘shared understanding’ of the threat and they associated the acceptance of a securitising argument by an audience with its becoming ‘convinced’ by the argument.Footnote ⁴⁹ These formulations evoke an image of an auditorium in which the securitising actors lecture from the podium while the audience listens passively in its seats. Furthermore, the use of terms like ‘argument’, ‘understanding’, and ‘convince’ implies that the interaction between the actors and their audience operates on an intellectual level more than a linguistic-material one.

We have argued earlier that the securitising move involves the spouting forth of ambiguous, simplified phrases more than the communication of arguments. Here, we want to propose that, just as the securitising move should not be solely understood in terms of arguing – ‘give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea …’ – so should audience acceptance not be conceptualised in terms of intellectual persuasion or understanding.Footnote ⁵⁰ Audience acceptance, we contend, is better understood in terms of belief: ‘an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof’ or ‘trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something’.Footnote ⁵¹ Belief or believing is at the core of the religious experience and practice. It is a concept typically associated with faith and practice as much as with facts or reason.

Our claim that audience acceptance often includes more than intellectual persuasion is partly informed by the recent ‘practice turn’ in IR. This work was largely initiated by Iver B. Neumann's contention that discursive approaches put too much emphasis on language at the expense of incorporating other kinds of social actions and lived experiences of agents.Footnote ⁵² Perhaps the major claim of the practice literature is that ‘it is not only who we are that drives what we do; it is also what we do that determines who we are’.Footnote ⁵³ As Neumann argues, practice theory focuses on ‘material patterns of action that are organized around the common implicit understandings’ and as such entails the background knowledge that actors habitually rely upon in their actions.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this sense, there are few aspects of practices that we build upon here. First, a practice is ‘a performance – that is, a process of doing something’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Processes of 'doing something’ here are viewed as socially significant and meaningful performances that can both uphold and subtly redefine socially constructed understandings. Second, practices bring together both the discursive and the material aspects of interaction. Practices require language to articulate social meaning, and they entail material enactments that manipulate and change the physical world and collective understandings about the world.Footnote ⁵⁶

A key contribution of IR practice research is precisely in its drawing together of the material and the ideational in a framework that allows for nuanced analyses of meaning-making. Yet, practice theory's downplaying of the temporal dimension in the functioning of speech acts is precisely how we supplement practice approaches here. The notion of ‘condensed historicity’ discussed above helpfully draws out the theoretical significance of the temporality of the illocutionary act, thereby conceptualising the act more in terms of a process in time. We argue that the ritualised uttering of phrases such as ‘WMD’ is a condition of their performativity. The more frequently a securitising phrase (with ultimately contestable meaning) is repeated – the more condensed its ‘historicity’ becomes – the more likely is the phrase to acquire a processual illocutionary force and cohere into a securitised threat. The political aspects of the materiality of practices can be helpfully analysed through the repetitive elements of ritual. We argue that securitisation succeeds to the extent that the audience itself comes to participate in the performance in a ritualised chanting and repetition of the securitising discourse. In this sense, we argue that securitisation efforts and audience beliefs about threats can be more effectively analysed by conceptualising the interplay between the temporality of illocutionary acts, practices as performances, and the materiality of the body. The ‘condensed historicity’ of the securitising effort is materially inscribed in the performances of speakers and audiences. Consequently, the particular temporality of the speech act is the condition of possibility of meaningful material performances of speakers and audiences.

Let us return now to our argument that audience acceptance is best understood in terms of belief. A standard way of thinking about beliefs is to view them as attributes of human subjects, attributes that precede and guide the subject's practical actions: I believe that the existing political order is good, hence I regularly cast votes, dutifully pay taxes, sing the national anthem, and so on. Or, I believe that country X is a ‘rogue state’ and I thus voice my support for military intervention. But a more compelling (to us at least) way of conceptualising beliefs is to invert the above formula: I practice, thus I believe. This inversion is a central theme of Louis Althusser's theory of ideology. Challenging extant conceptions of ideology – conceptions that characterised ideas, distorted though they might be, as prior to human action – Althusser argued that in fact ‘the “ideas” of a human subject exist in his actions’, and that these actions are ‘inserted into practices’, which, in turn, are ‘governed by’ and ‘inscribed’ in ‘rituals’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Butler pointed out, ‘Althusser's insistence that ideology has a “ritual” form’ is a ‘counterpart’ of ‘Austin's view that the illocutionary speech act is conditioned by its conventional, that is, “ritual” or “ceremonial” dimension.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Althusser acknowledged a debt to Pascal for his ‘wonderful’ formulation of the inverted relationship between belief and practice. Pascal, according to Althusser, ‘says more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”’. For Pascal (and Althusser), then, belief is not an intellectual choice that precedes the practicing of religious rituals. Belief is rather inscribed in and enacted by these rituals – it is in the repeated performance of verbal and nonverbal practices that one becomes a believer. This formulation may have ‘scandal[ised]’ the Catholic Church during Pascal's lifetime and it may remain anathema to the Church today, but believers/practitioners of other faiths would not necessarily find Pascal's position offensive.Footnote ⁵⁹ Judaism, for example, ‘has historically been a religion of law and hence practice’.Footnote ⁶⁰ As University of Chicago divinity professor Michael Fishbane explained, ‘In traditional Judaism all aspects of life are ritualized through halakhic [Jewish law] regulations – from the first thought and prayer in the morning through the final prayers upon one's bed at night.’ These daily rituals

The similarity between this account of the performativity of Judaism and Pascal's (and Althusser's) formula – pray and you will believe – is striking indeed.

While many Jewish rituals are nonverbal, the recitation of liturgical texts is an integral part of Jewish practice. An observant Jew does not only repeat – indeed chant – the same prayers day in and day out, he chants certain phrases multiple times within each individual prayer. Of course, neither the repetitiveness of the liturgy nor the incorporation of musical forms into prayer services is unique to Judaism. Linguist Julia Bamford noted that the liturgies of most religions ‘rely on repetition to create incantatory rhythms’.Footnote ⁶² And anthropologist Robin Sylvan observed that ‘music and religion are intimately linked in almost every culture and in almost every historical period’.Footnote ⁶³ To cite a few examples, rhythmic chanting accompanied by drums is an integral aspect of shamanist traditions. The chanting of mantras is a central practice in all forms of Buddhism as is the chanting of Qur'anic verses in Islam's daily prayers. And hymns are incorporated into ‘Christian liturgy in a myriad of forms, from the solemn tones of Gregorian chant to … the African American styling of gospel choirs.’Footnote ⁶⁴

As anthropologist Richard Jones explained, chanting is a ‘linguistic act’ that functions both to foster group solidarity (more on which later) and to affect individual minds. At the individual level, ‘Anyone who has ever repeated the same word over and over again has noticed that any repeated word, or string of words, eventually seems to become strange and meaningless.’ Chanting thus has the capacity ‘to put the mind beyond words and into an altered state of consciousness in order to, for example, achieve enlightenment, to personally experience God, or to enter into the spirit world’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Through chanting – whether it takes place in a house of worship or in secular venues such as music clubs or football stadiums – individual minds may possibly come to transcend reality, ‘experiencing a powerful form of virtual reality’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Furthermore, chanting, like all music, affects the human body as well as the mind. The truth of Nietzsche's saying that ‘we listen to music with our muscles’ is readily evident when music moves us to sway our bodies, ‘tap our feet,… “keep time”, hum, sing along or “conduct”’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Chanting even affects our brains in involuntary ways. The words of simple, endlessly repeated popular songs/chants become lodged in our memory even if we did not care to remember them.Footnote ⁶⁸ And ‘all of us have experienced the involuntary, helpless mental replaying of songs or tunes’, sometimes called ‘“earworms”, for they may burrow into us, entrench themselves and then perseverate internally hundreds of times a day’.Footnote ⁶⁹

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We now return to securitisation theory and draw upon the above theoretical ideas to elucidate ‘audience acceptance’. The audience is not akin to students in an academic lecture hall or to theatergoers who are mostly performed to. Instead, securitisation succeeds to the extent that the audience comes to participate in the performance in a manner more characteristic of music club goers or worshippers in sanctuaries where chanting and music play a central role. Securitisation succeeds when the ‘mantras’ repeated by securitising actors in speeches and news releases jump to the pages of the print media, skip into the wording of frequently-asked and widely-reported opinion poll questions, reverberate through talk shows, news broadcasts, and other electronic media programming, echo throughout the blogosphere, and, increasingly in recent years, flood the social media. Mediated by these media forms, the securitising phrase infiltrates and even infects everyday talk, including, for example, dinner party conversations, chatter around office water coolers, and discussions in school and college classrooms. The utterances of the securitising actors and the audience thus combine into a chorus, a collective chant that, though it is performed in time, constitutes a single linguistic event.

The audience, moreover, should not solely be understood as a passive receiver of securitising arguments who then decides whether these arguments are logically or factually valid. Audience members cannot quite check the accuracy of the securitising phrases they hear because, as we will discuss further below, these phrases are typically ambiguous (what exactly is a ‘rogue state’? a ‘weapon of mass destruction’?) and new to most people (how many people were familiar with ‘ethnic cleansing’ before it became a stock phrase in the 1990s?). We propose that many, if not all, members of the audience rather come to believe in the alleged security threat in the manner theorised by Althusser: the threat comes into existence in one's chanting of the phrase that ostensibly describes this threat. The phrase becomes itself the threat.

As the securitising phrase echoes in people's ears, and as they themselves join in repeating it, the phrase becomes materially ‘inscribed’ in people's bodies.Footnote ⁷⁰ The phrase ‘burrows into’ audience members by becoming stuck in their memory like a refrain of a popular song, or even by becoming ‘entrenched’ in the brain in the form of an ‘earworm’.Footnote ⁷¹ As to people's minds, we do not argue that one's participation in the society-wide chanting of securitising phrases literally alters his/her consciousness in the way in which it may be altered in the course of a trance party or a Sufi ceremony. Still, we propose that ‘trance-formation’ – the capacity of the rhythmic incantation of words to take the chanter's consciousness ‘beyond words’, creating a virtually-real consciousness of vague yet palpable danger – is a powerful metaphor that elucidates the audience's acceptance of securitising phrases.Footnote ⁷² This metaphor is a useful aide to understanding securitisation in the same way that ‘drumbeat’ remains a rightly-popular conceptualisation of war mobilisation even as in contemporary society we no longer literally beat war drums.

Political ritual and social solidarity

Chanting is typically performed in group settings. In addition to putting individual minds beyond words ‘the ultimate purpose of chanting is to express group solidarity and cohesiveness’.Footnote ⁷³ As Emile Durkheim wrote in 1915, ‘It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that [people] become and feel themselves to be in unison.’ For Durkheim and subsequent generations of anthropologists, communal ritual activity is ‘necessary’ for creating social solidarity.Footnote ⁷⁴

In his seminal study of political rituals, anthropologist David Kertzer stressed that solidarity should not be equated with social harmony or political consensus. On the contrary, anthropologists have learned that ‘the greater the divisiveness in society, the greater the need for compensatory ritual to hold the society together’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The genius of ritual lies precisely in fostering a sense of unity in the absence of political or social consensus. Ritual ‘can promote social solidarity without implying that people share the same values, or even the same interpretation of the ritual’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Take, for example, the US Constitution, which Max Lerner once called the ‘American totem’. The invocation of the Constitution in public life serves as a ‘unifying national force’ even as many Americans are at best dimly familiar with the content of the document and even as deep political divisions surround the interpretation of key parts of the Constitution.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, when a crowd in a sports arena rises to chant the national anthem, the communal singing fosters a feeling of oneness even as the partisan preferences and inner attitudes of individual spectators may be significantly divergent, with some chanters expressing deep-seated patriotic values, others singing mechanically as their thoughts wander in various directions, and yet others who might inwardly scorn the ritual but take part in it to avoid disapproving stares. By the same token, when a securitising phrase ‘catches fire’, echoing throughout the media and skipping into everyday talk, the emergent chorus produces a general ‘atmosphere of strangeness, danger, and fear’ even as the chanters may not share the same political values and even as some of them may oppose the policies promoted by the securitising actors.Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, when opponents of securitisation incorporate the securitising phrase into their speech – stating, for example, that ‘our country has no business intervening in “failed states”’ – they participate in the choral chanting of the phrase all the same; they thus contribute to the consolidation of a generalised atmosphere of threat in the same manner that absent-minded or reluctant chanters of the anthem still contribute to the crowd's sense of cohesion.Footnote ⁷⁹

Kertzer explained that the capacity of political rituals to build solidarity in the absence of consensus is rooted in the ambiguity of the symbols whose repetition makes up these rituals. ‘WMD’, as illustrated below, is an example of an ambiguous symbol. As we have detailed elsewhere,Footnote ⁸⁰ the meaning of ‘WMD’ has shifted over time, and this unfixed meaning has opened the phrase up as a site of political contestation, allowing for its repetition across diverse audiences. Kertzer's emphasis on ambiguity in ritual closely parallels the concept of the ‘empty signifier’ from a discourse-theoretical perspective. Empty signifiers are terms that have no ‘intrinsic’ meaning and thus their meaning is unable to be fully pinned down, yet it is this ambiguity that opens them up as sites of contestations. This unfixity is in fact necessary for their contestability in the first place and their historicity.Footnote ⁸¹

The ambiguity of symbols such as ‘WMD’ derives, according to Kertzer, from two common properties of ritual symbolism: condensation of meaning and multivocality. Condensation denotes the way in which symbols bring together a rich diversity of ideas.Footnote ⁸² Consider, for example, the term ‘axis of evil’, which the George W. Bush administration coined in 2002 in reference to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Not only did this symbol lump together three countries that differ from each other in many ways, it also packed into three short words two loaded concepts, one fraught with religious significance, the other evocative of the heroic struggle against Fascism.

Partly because of their condensation, ritual symbols tend to be multivocal. Multiple meanings become attached to the same symbol so that ‘the same symbol may be understood by different people in different ways’.Footnote ⁸³ For example, attentive news consumers may have understood that the ‘axis of evil’, as invoked by the Bush administration, referred to the three above-mentioned countries but many Americans may not have acquired a clear idea of who exactly the phrase referred to, while yet other Americans may have associated the term with other regimes. Furthermore, while for many Americans, especially Republicans, the phrase came to represent the vigour and resoluteness of the administration's foreign policy, for other Americans it may have represented unnecessary swagger and immoderation.

The complexity and uncertainty of securitising phrases thus make it possible for them to be adopted and chanted by people who do not share political values and who do not see eye to eye on the securitisation of the issue at stake. Notwithstanding the lack of political consensus, as long as these people are, in Durkheim's words, ‘uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word … in regard to some object’ they partake in fostering a shared sense of danger surrounding this object, thus securitising the object.

The implication of this insight for empirical analyses of securitisation is that, in gauging the audience's acceptance of the securitising message, we should not necessarily expect to find evidence that the public has come to be of one mind with regard to the policies favoured by the securitising actors. Observing that a significant number of people express doubts or even oppose these policies is perfectly compatible with securitisation so long as the doubters/opponents join in the ritualistic uttering of the securitising phrase. Securitisation ‘is produced by people acting [chanting] together, not by people thinking together’.Footnote ⁸⁴

An illustration: WMD and the securitisation of Iraq

During 2002 and early 2003, Iraq had become securitised in the United States, that is, the Iraqi regime has been designated by the Bush administration and a ‘significant audience’ as ‘an existential threat requiring emergency action or special measures’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In March 2003, the Bush administration took the special measure of invading Iraq.

The central theme of the administration's securitisation campaign was the danger of Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Beginning with the January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush and senior administration officials uttered this phrase multiple times in most of their public appearances.Footnote ⁸⁶ For example, on 24 March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on three major television programs to express deep concerns about, as he told CNN, ‘the development of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein, his refusal to comply with the UN Security Council Resolution 687, … which said he would get rid of all his weapons of mass destruction’.Footnote ⁸⁷

In August 2002, the White House was put on the defensive by a growing opposition galvanised by an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal. Titled ‘Don't Bomb Saddam’, the article was authored by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, a confidante of the president's father.Footnote ⁸⁸ To regain momentum, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card convened a high-level group whose ‘mission was to market a war in Iraq’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Although the formation of this group – the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) – was not made public, Card hinted at its task on 6 September 2002, when he told the New York Times that ‘[f]rom a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.’Footnote ⁹⁰

Among the members of the WHIG were several specialists in strategic communication, including the president's senior political advisor, Karl Rove. In a remarkably candid comment he made to journalist Ron Suskind, Rove

It is unclear whether he ever studied the philosophy of language, but Rove's comment surely evinced a solid grasp of the concepts of social construction and speech acts.

The WHIG coordinated ‘a dramatic public relations offensive to sell the American public on the war’.Footnote ⁹² With the launching of this campaign, the use of the catchphrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by administration officials increased markedly. In an appearance on CNN on the campaign's first day – Sunday, 8 September 2002 – National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice uttered the phrase 13 times.Footnote ⁹³ In a televised prime time speech he gave in Cincinnati on 7 October 2002, President Bush alluded to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ eight times in 26 minutes.Footnote ⁹⁴ A shorter speech Bush delivered in Fort Hood, Texas, on 3 January 2003, contained as many utterances of this expression, packing five of them into a short paragraph:

A month later, Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated the term 17 times in his widely-watched address to the UN Security Council.Footnote ⁹⁶

In sum, the incessant repetition of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was a central aspect of the Bush administration's campaign to securitise Iraq. Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the only Republican senator who opposed the war, was hardly exaggerating when he later complained that the administration's case for invading Iraq consisted in a ‘steady drumbeat of weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction’.Footnote ⁹⁷

It did not take long for Congressional leaders to amplify the administration's drumbeat. On 4 September 2002, Dick Gephardt, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House of Representatives, advised President Bush to dramatise the Iraqi threat to the American people. ‘It's about weapons of mass destruction getting in the wrong hands’, Gephardt said; the American people ‘don't see it. We have to do everything in our power to keep WMD from going off. We need to make it graphic.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Shortly thereafter the phrase began reverberating through Congress as its members were debating a resolution authorising the war. For example, on 8 October 2002 John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, declared on the Senate floor that he would support the resolution because ‘a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in [Saddam Hussein's] hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security’.Footnote ⁹⁹

The insertion of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ into opinion poll questions was another avenue through which this phrase spread from official to public discourse. For example, beginning in February 2002 the Gallup organisation regularly included in its surveys the question: ‘Do you think Iraq currently has weapons of mass destruction, is trying to develop these weapons but does not currently have them, or is not trying to develop weapons of mass destruction?’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As much as such questions registered preexisting opinion, their very inclusion in widely-reported polls shaped public opinion by naturalising the notion that Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were an urgent security problem.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Soon enough, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ became a daily staple of the US press. As Figure 1 illustrates, the frequency with which the Wall Street Journal printed this phrase was virtually zero in the 1980s and moderate in the 1990s before spiking dramatically in 2002 and 2003.Footnote ¹⁰² A similar pattern was characteristic of other leading newspapers. In the New York Times, for example, the frequency of articles in which this phrase appeared took off from 60 in 2000 to 524 in 2002 and 853 in 2003 (in many of these articles the phrase appeared more than once). Figure 2, moreover, demonstrates that during the twelve months preceding the invasion of Iraq the incidence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in leading US press publications has increased almost tenfold. Much of this increase coincided with the launching of the government's marketing campaign in early September 2002. In the seven-month period bracketed by this event and the outbreak of the war, the phrase appeared on average in 100 articles per month in the New York Times, compared with an average of 27 articles per month during the preceding seven months.

Figure 1.

Frequency of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in the Wall Street Journal, 1980–2003

Figure 2.

Monthly frequencies of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in major US publications during the run-up to war

No sooner than it flooded the US media, the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ invaded the everyday talk of ordinary Americans. This linguistic invasion was powerfully if indirectly evidenced by the fact that the American Dialect Society (ADS) selected the phrase as its 2002 ‘Word of the Year’, that is, the year's most ‘newly prominent or notable’ vocabulary item.Footnote ¹⁰³ To put it in perspective, recent Word of the Year selections included ‘bailout’ (2008), ‘tweet’ (2009), ‘app’ (2010), and ‘occupy’ (2011). Wordsmith Ben Zimmer, who co-presided over the 2011 selection process, said that ‘The [Occupy] movement itself was powered by the word.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Likewise, the 2002 Word of the Year can be said to have powered, indeed embodied, the securitisation of Iraq.

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In commercial marketing, ‘the most unforgettable catchphrases’ are characterised by brevity; when such phrases ‘initially haven't been so simple, someone inevitably has stepped in to shorten them. Just ask the makers of the Macintosh (“Mac”) computer … Federal Express is now officially “FedEx”, Kentucky Fried Chicken is now “KFC”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, just as these corporations have profited from the abridgment of their brand names, so has the marketing of the Iraq war to the American people benefitted from the abbreviation of the flabby ‘weapons of mass destruction’ into a trim acronym. As Figure 3 indicates, whereas the acronym WMD almost never appeared in America's major newspapers in the 1990s, during the lead-up to the Iraq War the same publications printed this abbreviation hundreds of times. Furthermore, as the war approached, the acronym became so common that reporters and commentators no longer felt compelled to spell it out. The drumbeat became peppier: WMD, WMD, WMD.

Figure 3.

Frequency of the acronym WMD in major US publications

As Herbert Marcuse explained in a lucid ‘note on abridgment’, at the same time that abbreviations perform the ‘perfectly reasonable’ function of simplifying speech or prose, their use also performs an inconspicuous rhetorical function: ‘help[ing] to repress undesired questions’. For example, ‘NATO does not suggest what North Atlantic Treaty Organization says, namely a treaty among the nations on the North Atlantic – in which case one might ask questions about the membership of Greece and Turkey … DDR [elides] democratic. UN dispenses with undue emphasis on “united”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In keeping with Marcuse's analysis, we note that the popularisation of WMD helped ‘repress undesired questions’ surrounding administration statements such as (in President Bush's words) ‘They used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they have used weapons of mass destruction on their own people.’ Because WMD elides the words ‘mass destruction’, the growing prominence of the abbreviation in public discourse made it less likely that audience members would stop their chanting to ask questions like: can poison gas – the weapon that the above statement interchanged ‘weapons of mass destruction’ for – truly cause ‘mass destruction’ even as gas cannot destroy property? Did the gas the Iraqi regime use against ‘its own people’ actually cause ‘mass destruction’? Could the employment of chemical weapons by Iraq truly pose a grave danger to the security of the United States? To borrow Marcuse's words again, ‘Once [WMD] has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, “sanctioned” by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serve[d] merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

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While the bureaucrats and defense intellectuals who ‘constantly repeated’ this ‘official vocable’ may have shared a specific understanding of the meaning of WMD, this meaning was not necessarily shared by ordinary Americans. In fact, many Americans had barely heard the term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ before 2002. In November 1997, against the backdrop of growing tensions surrounding the weapons inspection regime in Iraq, Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter admitted that ‘until recently’ he ‘didn't know’ the meaning of WMD. He proceeded to explain that WMD was ‘bureaucratic shorthand widely known inside the government, but right now it's barely a blip in the public consciousness’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the same vein, Michael Kinsley pointed out in 2003 that ‘The term [weapons of mass destruction] is a new one to almost everybody, and the concern it officially embodies was on almost no one's radar screen until recently.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹

That many of Americans did not have an unambiguous picture of WMD in their head cannot entirely be attributed to intellectual laziness, for even if they were sufficiently curious to suspend the incantation of the phrase in order to search for its ‘true’, precise meaning, they would have had difficulty finding it. To summarise a detailed history of the phrase that we present elsewhere, when ‘weapons of mass destruction’ first appeared in diplomatic documents and the US press in November 1945, it had no clear definition.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In subsequent arms control negotiations diplomats and commentators have debated a wide range of definitions before the UN Commission on Conventional Armament resolved in 1948 that the WMD category included atomic, radiological, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as future weapons capable of comparable destruction. During the Cold War, however, the phrase gradually receded from public view and, to the extent that it has been mentioned in the US press, it was typically associated with nuclear weapons alone; for example, in contrast with president Bush's statement in 2003 that ‘[t]he Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction’, the US press did not employ this term in the 1980s in its reporting on Iraq's use of poison gas. In the 1990s, the phrase made a minor comeback into foreign policy discourse as a result of its incorporation into the 1991 Security Council resolution that imposed an arms inspection regime on Iraq. At the same time, however, the phrase jumped into the language of domestic US anti-crime legislation, where it was defined in far broader terms than those of the UN's 1948 definition (including, for example, any conventional ‘bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces’). Based on this law federal prosecutors have regularly pressed WMD charges not only against terrorism suspects such as ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid but also in cases involving petty domestic crime. For instance, a short time after the US invaded Iraq to remove the existential threat of WMD, a Pennsylvania man was sent to prison for mailing his former doctor a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ assembled from ‘black gunpowder, a carbon dioxide cartridge, a nine-volt battery, a model rocket igniter, and dental floss’.Footnote ¹¹¹

‘Weapons of mass destruction’, then, possesses the typical properties of political ritual symbols.Footnote ¹¹² First, it condenses into three words, or even three letters, multiple weapon systems that ‘are fundamentally different in terms of lethality’, as well as the iconic image of the atomic mushroom cloud.Footnote ¹¹³ Second, it is ambiguous. Throughout its history the meaning of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ has been contested, changeable, and, to most Americans, obscure. Finally, ‘weapon of mass destruction’ is multivocal. It has had multiple meanings and it has meant different things to different people.

As we discussed earlier, these properties allow the ritualised repetition of political symbols to foster a sense of social oneness in the absence of political consensus. The Iraq War was a divisive issue in American politics and a sizable minority of Americans adamantly opposed the invasion. Yet the chanting of WMD, WMD, WMD, transcended the political divide as opponents of the war embraced the term, repeating it reflexively and uncritically. For example, speaking on the same CNN news programme in which Condoleezza Rice kicked off the campaign to sell the Iraq war to the American people, Senator Bob Graham (Democrat, Florida), who would later vote against authorising the war, uttered ‘weapons of mass destruction’ seven times. Similarly, IR scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, both outspoken critics of the Iraq war, repeated the phrase six times in an op-ed article in the New York Times.Footnote ¹¹⁴

By joining the chorus chanting ‘WMD’, the opponents of the war helped consolidate a generalised atmosphere of danger, thus contributing to the securitisation of Iraq, even as, on the intellectual level, they were not persuaded by the Bush administration's case for war. With the caveat that, as we noted earlier, polls shape public opinion as much as they register it, it is nonetheless significant that, when Americans were asked by pollsters whether they supported or opposed the use of force against Iraq, ‘the results were exceptionally consistent’ over time.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In survey after survey conducted throughout 2002 and early 2003, just under 60 per cent of the respondents expressed support for an invasion while just over a third of them indicated opposition.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Remarkably, these levels of support/opposition were recorded by pollsters even before the focus of the administration's rhetoric shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. Equally remarkably, the launching of the administration's war marketing campaign in September 2002 made virtually no dent in this pattern. There is little evidence, then, that the administration's ‘argument’ for war ‘convinced’ the American people to change their minds about the Iraqi threat. The securitisation of Iraq was made successful not by ‘people thinking together’ so much as by people chanting together: WMD, WMD, WMD.Footnote ¹¹⁷

We conclude this section with a passage penned by columnist Michael Kinsley in June 2003.

Kinsley's observation, though it is not stated in theoretical language (or perhaps because it is not), forcefully captures the logic of our argument on WMD and the securitisation of Iraq.