Note to the Reader

The articles cited represent a sampling of the articles analyzed in the construction of Chapter 2 of this book entitled “Fin de Siècle: The Beginnings of American Empire.” These articles were selected because of their presence within authoritative or otherwise mainstream news sources covering events connected to the Spanish-American War during the latter years of the nineteenth and the earliest years of the twenty-first centuries. These news products were selected using archive and database searches that selected keywords connected to the war such as “Manila + Soldiers” or “Cuba + Fighting,” applied in a series of distinct but related searches performed over the course of research conducted for this project. Many thousands of articles were hit during the aforementioned keyword searches, and as such they are not all represented in the list to follow here. Instead, what is presented within this Appendix and throughout the Appendices of this book are those articles that are representative examples of the kind of articles uncovered during this research process and then subsequently analyzed for the critical, discursive perspective contained therein. Major publications reaching a total audience of millions were included in this sampling, though, to include news articles from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post among other authoritative news sources.

A final note regarding the sample to follow here: it was common practice during the period of the Spanish-American War for news articles to be identified using an extended article title (sometimes dozens of words long) and a publication name, date, and location. But specific journalists, editors, or authors were rarely identified in the archival examples of the original publications reviewed for the creation of this chapter. As such, the citations to follow below do not typically identify the author but rather point only to the often extended title of the news item and its publication information only.

Print News Articles

“Action Close At Hand: Land and Naval Forces of the United States Engaged in Important Movements. Cube to Be Invaded Early Next Week. Report of a Battle at Manila between Dewey's Fleet and the Spanish Forces Hourly Expected. A Portion of the Cape Verde Fleet Sails and May Be on the Way to This Country.” (1898, April 30). New York Times, 1.

The Great American Lie

America is a nation at war. Between 1776 and the most recently completed year at the time of this writing, the United States has been involved in either open or clandestine warfare for 225 out of the 243 years of its existence. Said another way, America can then be considered a nation of war, not just a nation at war, wherein a foundational part of the fabric of American society, American policy, and even American identity itself is inextricably bound up in warfare. Further, and as the full scope of this study intends to show, America might be more accurately described as a nation of war given the numerous, avoidable, and unnecessary wars of choice that this country has undertaken during its 243 years of existence. In spite of the fact that the United States consistently presents itself as a reluctant combatant both at home and on the global stage, this record of bellicosity indicates that war, and the myriad forms of death and destruction that come with it, is a deeply seeded aspect of America's political identity.

Indeed, it is plain to see that American foreign policy and its attendant military-industrial complex have been dependent upon and bound up within campaigns of warfare for the majority of the country's history. And over the course of the last 125 years, the majority of that warfare has been exported to distant points on the globe, ensuring that the American landscape and both its urban and rural infrastructure have stayed all but completely intact while foisting devastation upon the citizenry of other nations from Southwest Asia, East Asia, Latin America, and many points in between. Through this period of history, the United States has seen war as a preferable policy choice even when other, far less destructive avenues of conduct on the international stage have been readily available. In the words of a former participant in some of the most brutal aspects of this macabre historical period: “If the American military-industrial complex believes anything, it's that for any problem there exists a military remedy.”

War Making in America

The enormity of World War II is difficult to overstate. Beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1937 and lasting roughly until the destruction of two Japanese cities by American nuclear bombs in August of 1945, the conflict embroiled dozens of nations and tens of millions of people and spread previously unimaginable horror throughout the globe. As many as 70 or 80 million people died in this war, the vast majority of them civilians who were starved, shot, stabbed, or burned to death in fires that consumed entire cities or in the barbaric ovens of Nazi death camps. Perhaps up to 20 or 25 million were soldiers who died in the fighting itself, making what many consider to be the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of intangible, even ephemeral political ideals such as fascism, communism, or democracy. Countless others were wounded physically or psychologically or were otherwise permanently affected as a result of the war by the loss of a loved one or the loss of livelihood. The war was widespread and all-encompassing; it was the defining political, cultural, economic, and martial event of the first half of the twentieth century. The consequences of World War II, however, would extend much farther into the future.

The United States entered the war on the side of the Allies via declarations of war against both Japan and Germany in December of 1941, just after the Japanese destruction of the American Naval Station at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. By the end of the war, more than 16 million Americans had been active in the military during the conflict, meaning that more than 10 percent of the overall population of the country had direct involvement in the war. The American war effort incorporated unprecedented industrial production, innovating new avenues for transportation and distribution among civilian and military personnel alike. Beyond logistics and production, capacities creating the nuts and bolts of warfare though, the culture of the United States was indelibly altered by the war.

Note to the Reader

Included in this final Appendix within this study is a sampling of authoritative print news media articles reviewed and examined in connection with the discourse analysis performed in Chapter 7 of this book entitled “Iraq Part II: Invasion, Occupation, and Imperial Overreach.” As with appendices connected to the preceding case study chapters within this work, what follows is a small subset of the many hundreds of articles reviewed for frames of representation in the presentation of an authoritative discourse on the American war of choice in Iraq spanning from the spring of 2003 through until the substantial drawdown of military personnel in 2011. As with the examinations performed for long durée wars in the recent American past, the sample presented below in no way represents a complete collection of news materials that were produced and disseminated during that period of time. Instead, what is offered below constitutes some of the text documents that were reviewed and critiqued in the chapter within this work connected to this appendix as a point of reference for those readers interested in the guiding methodology that sustained this media study. In most cases, the articles mentioned here were deconstructed within the aforementioned chapter as examples of authoritative news media texts presenting both overt and subtle meaning through print language in the conveyance of presumption, narrative framing, and/or ideological positioning in discussions of individual and collective actors connected with America's second Iraq war. And, as with previous article samples, some of the media texts presented here were applied in the associated case study chapter for multiple occurrences of a given discursive frame, while others were examined for one prevalent intellectual position emphasized within their text.

Print News Articles

Abram, Ruth J. (2004, May 30). “Save Abu Ghraib; Iraq Needs the Prison to Recall Its Past.” The Washington Post, B02.

Allen, Mike, and Michael D. Shear. (2004, June 1). “Bush, Kerry Pay Tribute to Veterans at Events in Virginia: Saluting U.S. Veterans.” The Washington Post, A1.

“Beyond Those Sick Images.” (2004, May 4). Los Angeles Times, B12.

Destination Imperium: Iraq 2003

By any standard of military measure, the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein after his ill-fated invasion of Kuwait was a massive success. The U.S. military, along with their coalition partners, acting at the behest of international opinion as rendered by the United Nations, destroyed a substantial amount of the dictator's military capability and forced his hasty retreat to Baghdad. There, though still in power, Saddam became increasingly isolated as he and his regime were the targets of a series of UN sanctions intended to further restrict his martial reach while also potentially fomenting domestic rebellion against his autocratic regime. This rebellion was meant to explode from the heartland of Kurdistan, an ethnically distinct region of northern Iraq frequently mentioned by U.S. president George H. W. Bush throughout the Gulf War period as being prepared for and worthy of independence. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1991 war, the Kurds were encouraged by Bush and other U.S. officials to rise up against Saddam and wrest control of the northern Kurdish regions of Iraq away from Baghdad. Commitments of funding and general support were offered by American officials to political and military leadership in Kurdistan, encouraging this action. Kurdish leadership kept their part of the bargain and, in the aftermath of the U.S. military defeat of Iraq, took up arms against the central government of Iraq in an attempt to create an independent Kurdistan in its region of ethnic dominance within Iraq. But the H. W. Bush administration reneged on their promise. The resulting fight between lightly armed Kurdish nationalists and heavily equipped Iraqi Army regulars was a slaughter:

Note to the Reader

The sample of articles here represents a subset of hundreds of articles reviewed for lexical choice and discursive positioning in the construction of the media analysis section of a chapter of this book entitled “Iraq Part I: Sanitized War, Ubiquitous Patriotism.” Certainly, as compared with previous case study chapters examining wars of long durée like World War II and Vietnam, the print news media sample for this particular inves-tigation was smaller and much more focused given the relatively quick buildup and prosecution of this specific American war. Still, like with all other case studies in this work, the sample size was still fairly large, numbering well into the hundreds, given the attention paid to the American military and its prosecution of the Gulf War in late 1990 and early 1991. Likewise, and as with previous case study chapters and those to come, news articles analyzed were sourced from Main or World sections of nationally distributed newspapers published in large American cities and published contemporary to the events that occurred during the First Gulf War. Editorials or other opinion articles were not considered for this specific study, given that they may not constitute a standard, institutional, or otherwise authoritative news perspective. What is given here, though, is a small sampling of all of those articles reviewed and assessed for discourse construction in the form of print media framing, story selection, emotive narration, and other forms of discernible print news discourse in news coverage of the First Gulf War. As discussed in some detail in the pages of this chapter itself, these discursive strategies are considered to be foundational in the creation of public knowledge and collective information regarding the U.S. military, its actions through the course of the war, and its place within the American state and society in the early part of the 1990s.

Print News Articles

Armstrong, Jenice. (1990, September 11). “Neighbors Remember Their Soldier in Mideast; Yellow Ribbons Bedeck Swann Street NW.” The Washington Post, (D04).

Bailey, Eric. (1991, May 19). “200,000 Cheer Troops in O.C. Victory Parade Celebration: Gulf Veterans Get a Warm Welcome Home. Spectators View Military Might on Land and in Air.” Los Angeles Times, 1.

Note to the Reader

As with other case study chapters in this work, the articles cited here represent a sample set of news articles examined in this work's Chapter 4, entitled “World War II: The Good War.” The articles mentioned below were examined for the presence of discursive frames to do with the American military during World War II, along with those cited in the main text of the chapter itself. Whenever possible, the full citation is provided along with the author's first and last name. For a number of news pieces reviewed for this study, however, articles were provided only with titles and publication information but were appended with no byline crediting a specific author with the work. In those cases below, all available publication data is provided beginning with the article title first. The news items listed here and those used in the text of this case study chapter, represent publications sampled from across the country and taken from reputable and otherwise authoritative voices in the distribution of printed news in the United States. The overall assessment in this chapter as in other case study chapters in this work, then, is of a given discourse formed by a series of narrative frames, which then contributed to the structuring of public knowledge about the role of the U.S. military in World War II and about the centrality of the U.S. military in the structuring of conceptions of the American self during the time period reviewed and into future decades.

Print News Articles

“5 Million Casualties Listed By Japanese.” (1945, September 7). New York Times, 3.

“25 Ships Sunk or Set Afire off Luzon; Carriers Strike Formosa and Okinawa: MacArthur's Fliers Cause Much Luzon Damage—New Landings Made on Mindoro—Leyte Casualties Go Up to 121,064 25 Ships Are Sunk Or Fired Off Luzon. Japanese Report on Luzon.” (1945, January 4). New York Times, 1.

“46 Jap Ships Smashed Off San Fernando: Port Is Shelled; Yanks 12 Miles Inland on Luzon; Drive Unchecked.” (1945, January 13). The Washington Post, 1.

“Americans 4 Miles Into Luzon on Solid Front; Win 4 Towns, Airfield; Japanese Moving Up; Nazis Quitting Western Tip of Belgian Bulge: MacArthur's Troops Reach Central Plain 100,000 Start Drive on Manila, 100 Miles Off; Meet Little Resistance Foe Rushes Tanks To Agno River Line.” (1945, January 11). New York Herald Tribune, 1.

A House Divided: America in World War I

World War I, or the Great War as it was then known, was a slaughter of epic proportions. Devastating new military technologies merged with age-old continental rivalries and imperialist ambition in an exhaustive war of attrition, one that bled armies on both sides of the gore-soaked trenches of energy, equipment, and, most tragically, the soldiers themselves. And though this conflagration would rend the world for four long years, from the summer of 1914 through to November of 1918,2 the United States of America, led by effete, southern-born Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, was a latecomer to these horrific events. Sustained by the majority of public opinion in the United States at the time, isolationism was the buzzword that encapsulated U.S. foreign policy of the era: leave European problems to Europe while America tackles its own. When the American Expeditionary Force finally did enter the war in April of 1917, compelled most forcefully by the business elites who stood to profit from the bloodshed, the entire, brutal episode was just 18 months from its conclusion. After armistice, state and society in the United States embraced a new model of foreign policy, one that would guide them substantially throughout the twentieth century. In this new ethos, isolationism was abandoned as folly as the United States donned the garb of increasing militancy and nearly endless warfare for the remainder of the era. The characteristics of the society that launched us into perpetual conflict, militarizing our sidewalks, streets, and schools along the way, therefore bear closer examination here.

Note to the Reader

The articles cited here represent a substantial sample of all news articles examined in the aforementioned chapter (in addition to those cited in the main text of the chapter itself). These articles dealt with a variety of topics related to the American presence in and action during the broader conflict that came to be known as World War I. When possible, the full citation of all articles examined for this section of the larger work, including the attributed author, is provided. Where an attributed author is not provided, readers may assume the article in question was contributed by a staff writer or supervising editor. Articles published in the Los Angeles Times during this period were very typically published unattributed. Articles presented by Special Cable to the New York Times were contributed by Edwin L. James or G. H. Perris, embedded journalists with the American military in France during this period, unless otherwise specified. Article headlines in the cited list below are occasionally abbreviated for the purposes of editorial brevity and contemporary citation practices as compared with those of a century ago.

Print News Articles

“11th Engineers Are Cited: Rendered Fine Service at St. Mihiel and in Meuse-Argonne.” (1918, December 24). New York Times (1857-1922), 7.

“89th Division's Record Distinguished Itself in St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Drives.” (1918, December 21). New York Times (1857-1922), 11.

“120,000 Americans Killed or Wounded at Meuse-Argonne: War Department Statistics Show Tenth of U. S. Force Was Disabled; Total Dead of War 2 Per Cent.” (1919, June 27). New-York Tribune, 9.

“Admit Our Argonne Gaines. Germans Report that Americans Advanced a Kilometer at Exermont.” (1918, October 6). New York Times, 6.

“Advance of 77th Division in Argonne-Meuse Battle.” (1919, May 4). New York Times, 80.

“Allied Attack Failed, Germans Are Told: But It Was Delivered ‘In Front of Our News Positions’ Behind Cambrai.” (1918, October 11). New York Times, 1.

“Allies Attack at Many Points While Warships Extend their Operations Along the Belgian Coast Along Ostend.” (1914, December 22). New York Times, 2.

“America Pays Honor to Valor at Verdun: Herrick Bestows the Only Medal This Country Has Given to Any Community. Poincare Defense France, Denies Imperialism and Says Germany Has Been Treated With Moderation.” (1922, June 5). New York Times, 1.

Colonialism and Nationalism in Vietnam: 1858–1954

By the middle of the nineteenth century, European colonial powers had long cultivated an avaricious interest in Southeast Asia. In 1858, a joint Franco-Spanish military expedition arrived there using the suppression of the Catholic Vietnamese minority to justify a full-scale military invasion: “When the Vietnamese emperors persecuted the missionaries and their converts as a subversive foreign sect, France used the pretext of ‘freedom of religion’ to justify military intervention.” In September of that year, European navies besieged the Vietnamese city of Da Nang (called “Tourane” by the French), engaging in a punitive war against Emperor Tu Duc. The Franco-Spanish effort sought to lay European claim to the rich ports and productive hinterland of Southeast Asia and to extract those resources (particularly rubber) for European gain with or without the consent of the majority Buddhist population. The Siege of Tourane, as the French destruction of Da Nang came to be known, resulted in a bloody, 22-month occupation of the port city. Vietnamese nationalists counterattacked and besieged the city, resulting in hundreds of European casualties from attrition and disease, particularly cholera. The European army decamped in March of 1860, but by 1862, France and its allies had regained the upper hand. In suing for peace, Emperor Tu Duc was forced to relinquish three of his southern provinces, Bien Hoa, Gia Dinh, and Dinh Tuong. With their capital at Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the French established the state of Cochinchina, beginning a repressive colonial rule in Vietnam that would last for a century.

The French governance of Vietnam was cruel and detached. Successive French Governors General lived in a luxurious palace in Hanoi, the largest city in the northern provinces, and maintained their rule by virtue of a sprawling administration within Vietnamese cities. Most French officials spoke no Tieng Viet, ruling instead through a series of French-speaking Vietnamese bureaucrats who were willing to carry out the will of the French overseers in exchange for a position of privilege within colonial society.

Spanish Conquest of Cuba

The Spanish acquisition of Cuba as a colonial possession is generally dated to that seminal year in the Age of Exploration, 1492, when Christopher Columbus2 himself is credited with landing on the island in fulfillment of his commitments to the centralized Spanish monarchy under King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castille. Having brutally ended nearly 800 years of Muslim governance in Spain in the consolidation of their own political power on the Iberian Peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella famously dispatched Columbus as the commander of three vessels intending to gain land, gold, and converts to the Spanish kingdom. No less bloodthirsty than his employers, Columbus and his men (mariners, seamen, and soldiers reputedly much more able and seaworthy than Columbus himself) landed in the fabled New World and quickly began torturing and murdering its indigenous inhabitants in pursuit of wealth, fame, and Christian glory for their own sake, and on behalf of the Spanish royals.

Cuba managed to escape permanent Spanish settlement until the year 1511 when Diego Velazquez de Cuellar landed on the island not as an explorer but as a conqueror with an army and new orders from Ferdinand and Isabella to take the island for Spain. The Taino, Ciboney, and Guanajatabey people resisted de Cuellar's army and engaged in a three-year guerilla campaign against the conquering Spaniards that exacted a hefty toll upon the militant conquistadors, very nearly undoing Spanish designs there before they had begun.

Over time, though, new diseases and new technologies4 began to overwhelm indigenous resistance, and with the capture, torture, and murder of Taino leadership in 1514, de Cuellar took complete control of the island, laid the foundations for the port city of Havana, and instituted the nearly four-century Spanish rule over Cuba and its indigenous populations that lasted into the twentieth century.

The Media and the Military: Sustaining American Empire

Each of the preceding case study chapters has sought to produce two distinct but complementary and mutually reinforcing intellectual outcomes. In the first place, each of the preceding chapters suggested a historical narrative of an American war conducted over the course of the last 125 years that is definitively outside the mode of the mainstream, broadly accepted, conspicuous public histories that are produced within standard institutions of the American state, society, and culture today. These histories proffered alternative views of the American state and the American military in either their ideological positioning, conduct, motives, and/or affected outcomes in the context of the political world in which a given war—of which there have, of course, been many—was conducted. The second element of these case study chapters contained an analysis of print news language as it was constructed and disseminated to American audiences in order to convey information about the military and the wars that were conducted in a given social context during the time period of the war itself. This investigative element, as it was framed and predicated by the theoretical discussion in the introductory chapter to this work, situates itself firmly in the academic history of CDA, which begins with the premise that language encodes meaning both beyond and within the superficial or the semiotic. CDA also asserts that large, public, or state-sustaining institutions like the authoritative print news media wield power in the construction of language and assert substantial influence in their ability to access huge audiences in order to disseminate that language and power. As indicated, then, and as has been referenced frequently throughout this work thus far, this study engages language and discourse, which are in turn crucial intellectual components in the construction of knowledge and information about the observable world. Also, and perhaps in a more immediate sense, this study argues that language, discourse, and the associated knowledge that comes with these intellectual components are disseminated in a given culture and inform considerably about the political and social worlds beyond the immediately accessible or verifiable.

Saddam Hussein: American Client

By the 1950s, the masters of the American regime and its exploding military-industrial complex were growing in their interest in Southwest Asia alongside their increasing interventionist stance in the Southeastern corridor of that continent. In Iraq, the U.S. intelligence community bullied its way into a direct role in the internal politics of the state. There, in the summer of 1958, a military dictatorship arose under the leadership of ‘Abd al-Kareem Qassim, an army general who assumed power by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, one of the few remaining regional governments established by British colonial policies during the interwar years. Assuming control in what came to be called the July Revolution, in one grisly stroke at the Royal Palace in Baghdad on July 14, 1958, Qassim loyalist Abdul Sattar Sabaa Al-Ibousi murdered King Faisal II, Crown Price ‘Abd al-Ilah (the king's first cousin once removed), several members of the Crown Prince's family, and the king's prime minister, Nuri as-Said. A number of valets and servants attendant to the royal family were killed too, serving notice to those in the country who still maintained loyalty to the Hashemite monarchy or to the old order of the Iraqi state. By the end of the month, Qassim assumed the position of prime minister, claiming publicly that he had been elected to the post. In order to maintain strict control over the military, the very institution that promoted him to political power, he also assumed the post of Iraqi defense minister. Promised constitutional and social welfare reforms were few and far between, though, as Qassim's government quickly descended into autocracy.

In fulfillment of his nationalist promises, Qassim quickly moved to seize control over Iraqi oil revenues, which had been consigned primarily to American and British interests vis-à-vis the foreign-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Qassim's Public Law 80 immediately limited the operational purview of the IPC while at the same time restoring a number of previously shared oil fields to exclusive state control.