Whenever the President has to address the nation after a natural disaster or terrorist attack, the message is always one of hope and encouragement. After reading the address and the Wikipedia page, I thought it was interesting that Bush didn't really talk about how long this fight was going to take in order to "disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger."
The main idea behind this message was to convince our nation that we had the upper hand in this war, and that the rest of the world was standing beside us and helping us in any way that they could. I believe the reason why Bush strayed away from talking about the details was because he (and his cabinet) had no idea what their next move was going to be. If the President were to have attempted to talk about the how, he might have come off as incompetent and ill-prepared for the fight ahead. This would have made his fellow citizens lose faith in him and he would have never been re-elected.
This is a tried and true method of every political leader when faced with giving a speech of similar nature. They never want to say how they're going to deal with something out of fear of causing controversy. Therefore, they stick to encouraging words and phrases that keep leading us to believe that we, America, are the "good guys" in this situation. Framing plays a huge part in this because everyone supported Bush after he declared war against Iraq. Fast forward to now, and this war has caused us major debt and has cost the lives of thousands of soldiers. Declaring war is never easy, but I feel like if politicians were a little more transparent with how they were going to fight, the nation's confidence in their leaders may be a little more resound.
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