Bush's 2003 Address to the Nation

In an effort to better understand the American people during that time, I decided to read the polls first rather than our former president George W. Bush’s 2003 speech when American first began a war against Iraq, more specifically Saddam Hussein. The polls showed that the American people do not usually agree with going into war, and although Colin Powell’s speech helped the American people support a war more than before, it still did not impact Americans in the long run because there was this public opinion that American should have not interfered in Iraq as the losses were not being properly justified by the gains of sending our troops to war in Iraq.

After reading President Bush’s address to the nation, I concluded that President Bush wanted the American people to feel as if the problem in Iraq was affecting us in such an imminent way that the only solution, was that our troops were to interfere before the problem escalated into our land. I believe that one of the most powerful sentences in his speech was when he mentioned that we would send our troops in order to “not have to meet [the war] later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.” I believe that the speech before hand had the innocent citizens on Iraq in mind and how we were entering the war, not to conquer the land, but to restore peace, and the sentence above changed the initiative of the speech and made it relevant to the safety of the American people. Former president Bush framed the upcoming war in a manner that made it important to every single person and mentioned that it was not just the US helping, instead the US alone was just one out of more than thirty-five countries helping Iraq in their time of need.