ALTHOUGH President Obama appears to favour a cautious approach toward Islamic State (IS), he may find himself escalating the fight with this organisation due to rhetorical factors.
When Mr Obama said recently: "We don't have a strategy yet" for confronting IS, he was trying to slow down the momentum toward military escalation.
Yet this phrase provided Mr Obama's domestic critics with ammunition pointing to his purported indecisiveness on foreign policy. These political attacks on the President may compel him to take a more aggressive stance toward IS than his basic instincts would dictate. Even as the US - and the UK appears poised to follow - has begun bombing IS in Iraq and Syria, Mr Obama remains resistant to further escalation with ground troops.
An even more important rhetorical factor that might overwhelm Mr Obama's cautious instincts is the power of the very word IS, or ISIS as it's better known in the US.
A short time ago the catchy acronym ISIS was nowhere to be found in international discourse. Now, however, it's on everybody's lips, incessantly. Although Mr Obama himself actually prefers ISIL, his close aides often say ISIS.
The media have amplified the chant. A quick search for ISIS on the websites of the Washington Post and New York Times over the past week returns hundreds of mentions of this (although the UK media including The Herald refer to IS). Political pundits of all stripes in the US continuously repeat the name ISIS on TV, radio, and social media.
In turn, this acronym creeps into everyday conversations at the water cooler, coffee shops, in homes, and has quite clearly become the icon symbolizing this new threat for most Western ears.
Although there has been some debate on which abbreviation should be used to depict the Islamic State organisation, ISIS has drowned out others in the public arena for a quite prosaic reason: ISIS is catchy and easy to memorise and repeat. ISIS is symmetrical and thus easier on the ear. As Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri noted, ISIS already has a presence in oral culture as the name of, among other things, a major Washington foreign policy think tank, an ancient Egyptian Goddess and a contestant on America's Next Top Model.
Being symmetric and vaguely familiar, ISIS can easily become an "earworm" - a tune that involuntarily burrows into our brain, replaying ceaselessly even as we might try hard to extinguish it.
As anthropological and sociological analyses show, the power of repetition has long been central to rituals. Repeated chanting is key to religious practices - an effect or feeling of "oneness" is achieved through the reiteration of chants. During religious services, collective ritual chanting has the effect of creating a sense of cohesion even as individual minds may wander in different directions.
There is a recent historical precedent for such a phenomenon: the rhetoric of "WMD" in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the autumn of 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration's prime justification for war was Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction". Senior Bush administration officials constantly repeated this phrase in their media appearances. This repetitive chanting in turn helped to foster a generalised atmosphere of threat and fear within the UK and US.
President Obama's instincts are probably correct regarding IS. To successfully advance a cautious politico-military strategy toward this organisation, Mr Obama should adopt, and enforce upon his administration, a cautious rhetorical strategy. He should stick to the awkward-sounding Isil rather than succumb to the smoother, more contagious sound of ISIS.
In doing so, the administration may be able to blunt the steady drumbeat sounded by the media that fosters a sense of fear and danger as much as it merely refers to a specific danger.
The administration will thus make the rhetorical environment more congruous with the deliberative approach toward the Islamic State that the president prefers.
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