Cicero and the Rhetoric of War
Dr. Ken Zagacki

Marcus Tullius Cicero, who lived from 106 BCE - 43 BCE, not only involved himself in the domestic and foreign affairs of the Roman empire, but he also taught Roman citizens, as he would instruct us, to commit themselves to public service.  His main means of engagement was through rhetoric, by which Cicero meant the ability to speak wisely and eloquently about public affairs.  To do so, Cicero urged his students to think critically about the topics they would discuss, to consider the implications of the things they said and the lines of reasoning they followed.  More specifically, he wanted them to see that every issue contains a "turning point" or the issue upon which a debate may hinge.  The state of any case, he argued, could be determined by asking certain questions: Whether a thing is, what it is, of what kind it is, and how to proceed.  In other words, did a case turn on a question of fact, definition, quality, or procedure?

Although today we might find much of Cicero's world alien and exotic, I would suggest that a great deal of his thinking about rhetoric remains valuable.  This is especially true as we struggle to understand the discourse surrounding the events of the last several weeks, events with which Cicero himself would have been profoundly concerned since his own faltering Roman Republic was almost perpetually embroiled in conflict at home and abroad.

So how can we apply Cicero to the public messages about "war" and "terrorism" we have heard in the last several weeks?  To begin, we must ask: What are the facts?  In what manner are they presented?  For most of us who saw those horrifying events on September 11, the facts seemed clear: Terrorists hijacked airliners and crashed them into the WTC and the Pentagon.  Many observers believed that Osama bin Laden sponsored the attacks.  However, Cicero would caution us to first inquire about how we could know this.  What, exactly, are the facts and what logical inferences can we draw from them?  Who gets to collect and observe the facts?  Do the facts actually constitute guilt on bin Laden's part?  And, importantly, do the facts as we are coming to understand them meet the standards of evidence that many Islamic countries are calling for - what they refer to as "clear and compelling proof?"

Assuming we know the facts, the next query Cicero would raise is: What do the facts mean?  How can we define them?  Here we get into trickier matters of interpretation and audience response.  If we consider bin Laden's "fatwahs" or "edicts" as argumentative tracts, which I think they are, we find unsettling attempts to define terrorism as "Jihad" or "holy war" against the West.  The traditional and rather nuanced meanings of these terms in Islam notwithstanding, many of bin Laden's followers interpret them in a particular way.  Jihad allows bin Laden's soldiers to identify themselves with their comrades at arms and other downtrodden Muslims; it connects them to what they understand to be a deep religious tradition and a righteous cause.  It creates a sense of martyrdom that also blinds them to the brutality and perhaps the self-defeating nature of their acts.  In a somewhat similar manner, President Bush's comprehension of the facts led him to label the bombings an "act of war" that requires our "defense of freedom."  Here, the war metaphor and the references to freedom are especially provocative because they seem to entail that Americans must commit themselves, both in thought and in deed, to a certain war-like stance.  Yet, as in the "war on drugs" - and unlike, say, the Cold War - the enemy remains shadowy, not part of any nation-state or organized entity that we traditionally take to be an object of war.  Equally important, the emotionalism of the terms and the expectations or conclusions we are encouraged to see may obscure larger questions of national identity addressed recently by the U.S. Supreme Court itself.  How much freedom, the Court has asked, must we give up in the defense of freedom?  We might wonder, also, about how the speech act of declaring "war" facilitates the goal of fighting regimes that "harbor terrorists" while protecting the innocent Muslim civilians that live in countries ruled by these regimes.  More pointedly, how does the discourse divide the "US" from the "Them" - Americans from those nations automatically labeled enemies because they "harbor terrorists" and from moderate Arabs who have legitimate or illegitimate grievances against the U.S. but who also happen to live in those terrorist-infested places?

The third inquiry concerns quality, by which Cicero meant something like the value of the act, whether it was good or bad, just or unjust.  Thus, when bin Laden calls Americans "crusaders," a term which President Bush mistakenly employed himself early on - or when bin Laden refers to the U.S. as "the great Satan" - he implies value: That Americans are the villains, championing Christianity while destroying Islam.  This is an uneven and emotionally heightened characterization of America that allows bin Laden to create his own version of the "Us" and the "Them."  Such stark rhetoric, moreover, can easily persuade those who live in his world that retaliatory acts, internationally sanctioned legal proceedings, or even humanitarian relief efforts led by the U.S. are "evil," "against Islam," or a "war against the Muslim world."  Thus, if the call for an even more harsh level of holy war goes out, which it apparently has, the cycle of violence continues.  Of course, President Bush has been blunt as well: For him, the bombings were acts of "terrorism," "evil" acts perpetrated by "cowards" bent on destroying the American "way of life."  These labels also carry enormous emotional if not practical weight.  For one thing, Americans during moments of extreme foreign policy crisis have come to expect that there are clear protagonists and antagonists - that God is, in fact, on their side and not the other.  Hence, national leaders depict villains who defy civil modes of conduct and whose obvious lack of moral character explains, in a simplistic manner, what appears to be the utter inexplicability and horror of their acts.  Relatedly, even or perhaps especially when the battle lines are in practice difficult to draw, or when the government cannot launch an immediate military counterstrike, as was true in the present situation, presidents assume that Americans require targets upon which they can vent their wraths.  In these cases, when other forms of retaliation are restricted, rhetoric does the fighting, symbolically.  Although President Bush has toned his rhetoric down somewhat in recent days, it is useful to keep in mind that the potential problems with imbuing certain acts with value are numerous.  First, expressions like "eradicating evil" and "infinite justice," or bin Laden's "Zionist-Crusader Alliance," confuse divine and human capacities.  Second, when the President in particular calls the American mission a "crusade" he unwittingly played right into the hands of people like bin Laden who have talked of "expelling crusaders and Jews."  Ironically, President Bush's language bolstered American audiences but it may also have strengthened America's opponents.

Third, no clear, internationally-agreed-upon definition of "terrorism" has been developed, making the use of the term in political and other public forms of discourse problematic, especially when attempting to build coalitions with Arab nations who view certain allies of the U.S. as "terrorists."

The final point concerns procedure, which asks: Assuming we know the facts and that at least some agreement exists on the meaning and the quality of the facts, how do we proceed and how do we publicly justify the procedure?  What is it possible to do, given the current situation?  Will the action taken change the current state of affairs for better or worse?  What are the merits of the competing proposals?  In addition, at what point is it valid to discuss the causes of the problem in order to prevent the problem from arising in the future?  So far, three topics have been raised in the public sphere regarding procedure: military operations, diplomatic initiatives, and legal proceedings.  Of these, legal proceedings have received the least amount of attention in the public dialogue and yet the issue is of great international importance.  Cicero would point out, for instance, that if bin Laden or some other figure can be termed an international "terrorist" who deserves punishment, a jurisdictional argument can arise over whether the problem belongs to individual cities, to the U.S. federal government, or to international tribunals such as the World Court or the United Nations.

No stranger to hyperbole or deception - or to promoting ruthless policies as well as military intervention - Cicero nevertheless teaches us many valuable things about rhetoric and citizenship.  He teaches us that rhetoric - questions about fact, definition, quality, and procedure - was and remains an important means of "winning hearts and minds," of framing controversies and shaping people's opinions about vital domestic and foreign policy events.  However, he also demonstrated by his own rhetorical efforts the devastating impact of certain kinds of argument while warning about language outpacing our ability either to contain its effects or to realize the expectations it engenders.  This is why we must use public discourse to instruct and to inspire, but we should also think about public discourse, critically and with some trepidation.