Performing Victory: The Different Kind of War of Bush 43

Abstract

In the pieces to camera that George W. Bush has delivered since 9/11, the ideals of “victory” and “freedom” have driven the arguments for initiating, prolonging and sustaining belligerent action—bello jus—against a number of different targets. The arguments by which the “different kind of war” is conceptualised and justified have their basis upon the acts that are considered to have provoked the need for war, namely the acts of 9/11. This paper examines ways in which the performance of “presidency”—particularly as the “war president”—has generated and maintained the performative conditions of armed conflict, as well as ways in which those performative conditions have been interrupted and eroded over time.