Thursday, March 24, 2011

Obama's Message against Libya

          This past Saturday, as I was watching March Madness basketball, the game suddenly cut out for a special address from the president. At first I was angry, because my perfectly good afternoon of basketball was being interrupted, but then I realized that this was happening for a much more important cause. Due to the recent revolution in Libya, President Obama decided that the US would lead military action in Libya in order to protect its citizens and to root out the oppression of Muammar Ghadaffi.

          The address was extremely interesting from a rhetorical standpoint. It's main goal was to communicate that we would be bombing the nation of Libya, but it also strove to make a few points clear. First of all, Obama reiterated over and over that this would not be a huge scale military operation. He very carefully worded the situation in order to let the nation know that this would not be another Iraq or Afghanistan. Furthermore, he wanted to make it clear that even though the US was in charge of initial operations, it would not be long before we gave control to NATO, England, and France. Both of these messages were made very clear by Obama through his careful wording, and this helped accomplish the rhetorical strategy of not making this seem like another operation such as Iraq or Afghanistan. Furthermore, Obama appealed to pathos and logos throughout the speech, in order to make it seem as if it was the right thing to do to help the poor, innocent citizens of Libya. By doing all of these things, Obama effectively used his rhetorical strategies to communicate his message.

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