3WarSpeeches
March 17, 2006
St Patrick's Day, with its green beer and predictable spike in America's blood alcohol levels, fell on a Monday three years ago. Speaking from the White House in the primest of the evening's prime time, President Bush interrupted the festivities with a brief live address to the nation (and the world). He announced, save in the unlikely event that Saddam Hussein and his two spawn were to flee their country, the impending invasion of Iraq.
Less than seven weeks later from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln the President would tell the carrier's crew and prime time TV America that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." That evening's most memorable words were not spoken but read by all who watched: Mission Accomplished.
Now three years later the war in Iraq continues into the foreseeable future. As the illusion of progress faded like a mirage, a blur of corners turned, the rationale, purpose, and goals of our violent incursion into the Mideast morphed and changed. The mission to secure Iraq's weapons of mass destruction turned out to be unnecessary, the regime apparently had no caches of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons nor the means to produce these weapons. What should have been good news was greeted by disbelief, unease instead of relief. America's highest ranking political figures had repeated the dangers of Saddam's arsenal with enough frequency and certainty that Americans were (and are) slow to accept the new truths.
(Our rationale for being in Iraq is a long steady creep of mission redefinition. Our goals have become abstractions like freedom and democracy, worthy but hard to measure. The cost in dollars and in lives has gone steadily up. No one has a clear notion of what victory looks like for us or where to find one. The president is clear, leaving is losing.)
(starting Year Four with no clear way to win perhaps it would help to look again at our goal when we first started. this mission was best articulated in speech given by the President on St Patrick's Day from the White House three days before the invasion. because of confusions, some from the distortions of electoral politics, some from the passage of time and a slow creep of mission redefinition, ... use the text of the President's speech to just before the then-likely war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. A close reading, aided by the number-crunching powers of the web browser, will guide us as we rediscover our Mission.)
Numerical Speech Analysis, version 0.0
The first pass, born of a nerdy faith in numbers, involved treating the words of the speech as things to be counted. As a plan is was simply this: create a list of the words used in the speech and chart the frequency of their use — instant insight. Hypothetically, displaying the words used most along side the entire text of the speech will reveal meaning and purpose of the speech in obvious clarity and beyond the haze of political intrigues. Nerdy super bonus, this is a stunningly simple programming exercise, nearly a one liner. A little JavaScript juke and ju-ju, presto! In something like Expected Time, Programming Mission Accomplished.
Well, sort of. As a Scottish poet once observed of mice and men, these things gang aft agley. The "stunningly simple" programming exercise turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than anticipated. The real Programming Mission Accomplished moment arrived unbidden, as an unexpected byproduct of code debugging. The revealed answer was not so good, more of an Oh Shit than a Eureka Moment. Turned out this exercise is asking a much larger question. A rather difficult question.
(For the actual details, wherefore and how counting words is a futile exercise,
we've prepared a technical note. It opens in a separate window.)
Fortunately this project didn't have to be solved down to the last nit before yielding meaningful results. Unfortunately the Counting Listing Discovering idea wasn't going anywhere. Words' failure, in retrospect, is obvious. A single word, taken alone, means little. The word's contribution to meaning of a larger text depends on the words around it, on the context, the source, even how the word is voiced.
The failed experiment left us staring at a nifty little quandry — single words mean little but lots of single words strung together add up to an announcement of war. The Meaning we were searching is still in the speech but it is not in the list of the speech's individual words. As an answer this raises a new question: is it possible to identify underlying concepts of the speech, united strands of words like threads in a woven fabric, small meanings contributing to the larger meaning of the speech?
threads
Yes, the concept of individual threads supporting the larger speech works well. The St Patrick's Day speech breaks down gracefully into a number of coherent themes with a surprising amount of interdependence. Isolating and illustrating these thread-themes is something web display allows without obscuring the text of the speech. It is easy to view the speech with and without commentary.
To further test the idea of thread themes we applied the same type of reading and display to two speeches from World War Two; Winston Churchill's address to Parliament following the declaration of war with Germany and Franklin Roosevelt's speech to Congress following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
war speech one: george w bush, 2003
from Cross Hall in the White House the President addressed the nation on live TV.
link to Iraq: Denial and Deception(From the White House web site. Includes full text of the speech, thread analysis, and a link to further commentary.)
war speech two: churchill, 1939
Two days after Germany's attack on Poland Prime Minister Chamberlain told his nation that Britain was at war. Following his radio address the Prime Minister traveled to the House of Commons, in session to start prosecuting war against Germany. Amoung the speakers at the session was Winston Churchill, then Member of Parliament. Churchill would later that day join the War Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty.
link to War Speech(From the Churchill Centre web site. Includes full text of the speech, thread analysis, and a link to further commentary.)
war speech three: fdr, 1941
The day after Pearl Harbor FDR addressed a joint session of Congress delivering one of the most famous phrases delivered from that podium.
link to Speech for Declaration of War(From web archives maintained by the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Includes full text of the speech, thread analysis, and a link to further commentary.)