TOW #7: Barack Obama Speech- Against Going to War With Iraq

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After analyzing JFK's inaugural address, I decided to analyze one of Barack Obama's many speeches, mainly because I know Obama was inspired by JFK in terms of his delivery. This particular speech is called "Against Going to War With Iraq". Barack Obama had some pretty big decisions to make at this time. In his speech, he starts off by telling his audience that he is not a person who opposes all wars, and then uses the example of the Civil War, which drove out slavery. He repeats the sentence, "I don't oppose all wars" three more times. Right off the bat, he establishes a persona. He makes a huge deal out of saying that he is NOT against war. He then goes on to declare which kinds of war he is opposed to. He says he is opposed to dumb wars. I think that within the first half of his speech, he is basically explaining his take on war itself, and then the people that are involved in the current situation with Iraq (Sadam Hussein and others). In this speech, I found the most interesting part was when Obama directly addresses the previous president, George W Bush. Bush wanted this war to happen. Obama uses anaphora when he asks, "You want a war, President Bush?" as the first line in 4 paragraphs. He then goes on to say what America should really be fighting for. He says that we should fight for the freedom of people in other countries who don't have it. This definitely appealed to pathos in the sense that it allowed the American people to want to reach out to the other countries that don't have the freedom that we do in this country. Overall, I think the speech is effective. He basically compares the idea of going to war with Iraq to the ideas of using the United States' Army to fight for more important causes. In that way, he also uses juxtaposition. All of these rhetorical devices combine to get across the message that going into Iraq and fighting this war is not only stupid, but worthless as well. When examining his delivery, he does use similar tactics, He makes lines their own paragraphs, and separates ideas with commas and new paragraphs. In this way, his syntax and diction were very similar to JFK's. This speech was successful because he does get straight to the point, and because the speech is short and sweet, it leaves the audience (the US, George Bush, other countries) with something to think about.