Para Bellum, or, the U.S. Department of State (DoS) ‘Pre-emptive Narrative’ in the 1997-2001 Daily Press Briefings: a Multidisciplinary Corpus Approach.

In Conoscenti (2004) I discussed the rise and development of language engineering techniques, combined with media management strategies, as an important element for consensus generation in crisis communication, especially in the aftermath of epochal events or during wars. In that study I also addressed the case of 9/11 and the communicative steps that the Bush Administration took to establish a narrative of terror (Woodward, 2002; Westen, 2007: 349-376; Lakoff, 2008: 125-132) that since then has generated plenty of literature. At the time of that research I was surprised by how quickly – 24 hours – the US were able to design and deliver such a compelling emotional narrative (Monahan, 2010: 95-116), coherent with the US country’s foreign policy agenda. At the same time I was also interested to understand why public opinion so easily “bought” these self-explanatory, but also contradicting, “stories” that implied the necessity for a “global war”. In this way, rationality and a critical approach to the linguistic categories used to describe those and the following events, i.e. the Afghan war in 2001 and the Second Gulf War in 2003 (Høyer, 2008), were suspended. This study is an attempt to establish the connections, from a linguistic and cognitive point of view, between the pre and post 9/11 narratives to understand the conditions that made the latter a pre-emptive one.