The Metaphorical Logic of (Political)
Rape:
The New Wor(l)d Order
A revised version of this article appears in Metaphor and Symbolic
Activity, v. 10, no. 2, Spring 1995.
ABSTRACT
The 1991 Persian Gulf War dramatically punctuated the importance of metaphor to
our everyday life and our reasoning about politics. Did the Gulf situation more closely
resemble Vietnam or World War II? One's choice of metaphor yielded different practical
inferences about what the United States and the world community ought to do in response
to the Iraqi invasion. Using the Public Papers of the President series I investigate
the metaphors used by former U.S. President George Bush to conceptualize the political
situation in the Persian Gulf during the pre-war period of August 1990 through January
1991. I argue the analogical reasoning behind the "new world order" rests on a complex
system of metaphors and on Bush's assertion that the expression "the rape of
Kuwait" is literal (non-metaphorical) language. The practical outcome of accepting
Bush's metaphors and his metaphorically projected inferences was the 1991 war in the
Persian Gulf.
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(c) 1994 Tim Rohrer,
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon,
Eugene, Oregon 97402
rohrer@darkwing.uoregon.edu