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| Fahad Alqurashi is a graduate student and writes 'A Message From The East' for the Daily News. His views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. |
To justify his huge campaign against Iraq, President Bush tried his best to make the people believe in the myth of the Iraqi threat. The president's efforts were in vain because he lacks the basics of the art of persuasion.
According to Aristotle, there are three methods with which you can persuade the audience: logos, ethos and pathos. Logos has to do with the logic and reasoning of an argument. It is about the facts that you use to persuade the audience.
President Bush and his team have spread false information about the Iraqi armament program. Up until now there is no solid evidence to prove that the Iraqis have nuclear weapons. The argument that Iraq represents a threat to the United States is baseless.
Ethos is related to the ethical aspect of the character of the speaker. Aristotle believes that good morals provide you with strong credibility, which provides you with a powerful persuasive influence. Ethos questions your motives and whether you put the best interests of your society at heart.
Evidently, the credibility of President Bush is questionable because the motives behind the war are questionable. War is not for the benefit of the American people. War will not solve any problem for the people who already are suffering the increase in oil prices.
Pathos is the appeal to the emotions of the people. Pathos is concerned with techniques for deriving the desired emotional response from the people by addressing their matters.
Again, President Bush has not been successful in eliciting the kind of emotions he wanted from the people. His repetitive statements about the risk that Iraq represents to human civilization failed to make people "feel" that risk.
It seems that the insistence on using the same repetitive statements gave the opposite result. The millions of people who participated in anti-war marches around the globe didn't seem to be moved by the words of President Bush. They were moved by another concern: Iraqi innocent people shouldn't be targeted.
In his effort to provide information about the Iraqi threat, the Secretary of State used plagiarized materials that were 12 years out-of-date. When Colin Powell addressed the Security Council, he used information copied from three different published articles, including one written by a graduate student.
The secretary of defense kept talking about the brutality of Saddam, and how he used chemical weapons against his own people. When he met Saddam in 1983, Donald Rumsfeld didn't raise the issue of human rights in Iraq.
Basically, he gave a signal to Saddam that the United States would close its eyes to Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians, providing an early boost to Iraq's plans to develop weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush and his team are in a difficult situation because they failed to persuade the American people, as well as other countries, of the legitimacy of the war against Iraq.
This failure is a direct result of the lack of persuasion Aristotle talked about 25 centuries ago.
Write to Fahad at fahad765@yahoo.com
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