Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Mechanisms Of Moral Disengagement In George W. Bush’S “War On Terror” Rhetoric, Stefan Cartledge, Lorraine Bowman-Grieve, Marek Palasinski

The Qualitative Report

Despite considerable literature on the Bush administration’s war on terrorism rhetoric, little attention has been paid to its discourse of moral disengagement, leaving an important and still relevant gap that this paper aims to address. Rather than approaching this gap in terms of an archival historical analysis that is disconnected from the present, it proposes an exploratory revisit of the rhetoric that the benefits of hindsight might enrich and, we argue, aid in understanding connections to the current post-invasion turmoil and the gradual ISIS takeover. Having subjected nineteen presidential speeches to qualitative content analysis, we identified a number of moral …