Rhetorical Analysis of President’s Address To The Nation Post 9/11

Rhetorical analysis assignment: President’s Address to the Nation

Since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has been calling every citizens and every nations to support his Middle East policy. Nonetheless, the U.S. has been involved in the middle-east struggle for more than half of the century, wars were waged and citizens were killed. Yet, political struggles and ideological conflicts are now worse than they were under Clinton’s presidency. As “President’s Address to the Nation” is a speech asking everybody to support the troops to keep fighting in Iraq, I, as an audience, am not persuaded at all because of his illogical fallacy in the arguments. In this essay, I will analyze how and what are the illogical fallacies he uses in the speech.

The “President’s address to the Nation” is a claim of policy. President Bush is asking people to support his policy that “we” have to keep fighting the war “until either we or the extremists emerge victorious.” To hold up his claim of such a policy, he uses three supports during the speech.

The first support is that “if we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” To back up such an idea, he uses two backings. The first backing is “if we pulled out… they (the terrorists) will not leave us alone. They will follow us… they

will gain a new safe haven; they will use Iraq’s resources to fuel their extremist movement” while the second backing is that the terrorists hate “us”. To come up with these backings, he assumes that terrorists will use nuclear weapons to attack us as soon as they can obtain nuclear weapons. The illogical fallacy of this assumption is cause an...

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...ng logic, it is hard to distinguish the logic from the issue because they are closely related. Nevertheless, I found out that the issue is that because of his personal values, assumption, and illogical reasoning, he deceives American citizens to push a Middle East strategy we otherwise would not have. Six years after the 9/11 attacks, Americans are still looking for reasons to keep the troops in Iraq. Besides real reasons, President Bush still needs to provide real

evidence to support his claims. I, as an audience, am not persuaded at all.

Bibliography

Bush, George. “President’s Address to Nation/” The Fifth Anniversary of Septemer 11,

2001. 11Sept 2006. (http://whiteshouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060911-3.html).

Reporters Without Borders. Press release: Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007. Paris:

Reporters Without Borders, 2007.