The Construction of Reality about the War in Iraq: A Semiotic Analysis of Two Discourses (Bush‟s Speeches and Moore‟s Fahrenheit 9/11

Abstract

The core of the present thesis is the war on terror against Afghanistan and Iraq in particular that the USA launched as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th , 2001 in the US territory. The thesis attempts to explore the way the US president George W Bush and the American filmmaker Michael Moore tackled the war on terror in general and the war in Iraq in particular in their respective means of communication namely the political speeches and the documentary movie. The current work also endeavors to reinforce the fact that reality is socially constructed and shaped via different instruments and strategies. Accordingly, a semiotic perspective is adopted through using Peirce‘s triadic theory of sign, Kress and Leeuwen‘s multimodality, Leeuwen‘s perspective on the auditory level and Jonathan Charteris- Black‘s rhetorical means for persuasion in political communication to scrutinize the corpora in order to sort out the strategies and the rhetorical devices both actors resorted to in order to present thewar in Iraq. The findings of the analysis reveal that both actors made use of media devices at their possession which are the political speeches and the documentary movie to present their own positions towards the war in Iraq and persuade their audiences about the reliability of the reality they presented. The results show that the US president presented the war in Iraq as a noble cause and a necessity to get rid of the terrorists who represented a great danger on countries cherishing peace and liberty and as a guarantee to ensure peaceful and safe territories all around the world. While, the filmmaker argued that launching a war against Iraq did not intend to put an end to terrorism and free the oppressive countries but it aimed at distracting people from the real intentions which were to have access to the wide oil fields and make a lot of money. The interpretation ofthe obtained outcomes strengthens the fact that reality is socially constructed and shaped through different means of communication and media in a way to correspond to one‘s needs, objectives and desires. Some suggestions to account for the war in Iraq andthe social construction of reality are formulated to enrich the current work and attemptto enhance people‘s awareness about critically considering the world we live in.