Of course, the history of every part of the world is connected to its past, but in some places it seems to be possible to begin again at times, to have a fresh beginning. This never seems to be the case in the Middle East, where the past can act like quicksand, sucking down into the past every attempt to right past injustices and to create a brighter future for the young people of the region (Bergen 27)
I think that it is fair to do so -- to include both implicit as well as explicit references to key terms. But I think that it is in this case more useful in terms of analyzing this speech to consider the broader historical references that Bush is making (Burke 45)
While Hussein killed far fewer people than did Hitler, obviously, he still engaged in genocide against the Kurds. So why did Bush not refer to genocide explicitly? Why not bring in the parallels to World War II? (Hatfield 119)
Also, for most of Bush's audience, both in the United States and abroad, World War II is seen as a just war. Connecting the invasion of Ira to World War II would have provided another way to justify the invasion in moral as well as historical terms (Hyams 81)
But I think that it is in this case more useful in terms of analyzing this speech to consider the broader historical references that Bush is making (Burke 45). By citing Paine, Bush is asking Americans to categorize the invasion of Iraq as morally equivalent to the American Revolution (Johnstone 64)
Probably the most compelling reason for the invasion was that Iraq was badly in need of money after the costs of the Iran-Iraq war and Iraq had its eyes on Kuwaiti oil revenue. There were also accusations by the Iraqi government that the Kuwaitis were drilling under the Iraqi-Kuwaiti international border and using pipelines to suck Iraqi oil back into Kuwait to sell (Leckie 31-3)
" Bush is making the same claim against Hussein. Although it seems that nearly every speech by an American president ends with asking for divine protection, it remains the case that the end of the speech and the end of the Declaration have similar pleas (Powell 64)
By calling to mind -- through explicit reference and parallel phrasing and imagery -- the American Revolution, Bush is reaching back past the war in Vietnam, past the Korean War -- even back beyond "his" war -- to the war that all Americans are at least supposed to be in support of. The Declaration of Independence, like Bush's speech, also references the importance of repeated diplomatic attempts (Rhodehamel 10)
An international coalition of military forces would eventually invade, although most of the troops would be American. The United States would be given economic aid to fund its military action, with the majority of the money coming from Saudi Arabia, with Great Britain and Egypt also making economic contributions (Simpson 41)
Because I myself believe that it is important to build alliances in foreign relations, I may be more amenable to believing that this is the strongest argument in this speech. But I do believe that it is in fact the strongest argument in the speech because of the way in which Bush repeatedly used all of the terms in this thematic cluster and the ways in which he connects the different related terms here in sophisticated ways (Vilaros 740)
" 1776, not 1942 Bush asks his listeners to imagine themselves on Bunker Hill rather than on the beaches of Normandy. Indeed, it is striking that Bush does not cite World War II as a parallel to the invasion of Iraq (Widmer 132)
Anne bore twelve children in their sixteen-year marriage, five of whom died in infancy, before dying of puerperal fever at the birth of her twelfth, stillborn, child, at the age of thirty-three in 1617. The marriage appears to have been a love-match, and was certainly an important stabilizing factor for Donne during the difficult years that followed (Bald, 326)
Perhaps before her death he would have exercised this rationalization in abstract and found it satisfactory, but now that death and loss is such a reality to him he is unable to do this: 'why should I begg more Love, when as thou / Dost wooe my soule for hers; offring all thine' is his bitter rejoinder, and he goes on in an extraordinary final passage, effectively, to rebuke God for small-minded jealousy, in finding it necessary to take away his wife in order to be sure of all his love: And dost not only feare least I allow My Love to Saints and Angels things divine, But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt Least the World, Fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out. If the Holy Sonnets are to be read, as one scholar has argued, as evidence not of God as an active presence but rather 'of the presence of God not as an active participant in the dramatized moment but as a silent presence beyond human words and human reason' (Beaston 107), this direct addressing of the deity appears somewhat paradoxical - unless it is seen in the context of a grieving man seeking an orthodox Christian channel of expression for the powerful feelings of anger, powerlessness, guilt and sorrow that grief contains
Walton had his own reasons for emphasizing those aspects of Donne's character and life that best fitted in with the view he was putting forward in his biography of Donne the devout Anglican clergyman and writer of sacred verse. For this reason Walton was chiefly concerned with what he called Donne's 'last, best Dayes' (Bottrall 31)
John Donne There can be no question that one of the central themes of John Donne's work, in poetry and prose, is death. Not for nothing did a recent academic biographer of Donne devote an entire chapter to his subject's attitude towards, uses of, and presentation of, the theme of death (Carey 229ff)
Yet despite this conventional theology, the dread brought into Donne's life by his recent very personal experience of death is clear. As one scholar has pointed out, the many evidences of the fear of death in the Holy Sonnets represent a conventional view of the necessity for death and rebirth that underlies the notion of Christian salvation: 'Donne's contemporaries typically invoke "death" and "resurrection" to describe regeneration and the death of the old man and resurrection of the new' (Cefalu 78), and this is certainly present in Donne, but the reading of the sonnet that addresses Donne's loss of wife explicitly, Sonnet XVII, above, suggests that this is insufficient to account for the vivid presence of death and the fear of death in these sonnets
The epitaph that John Donne wrote to his wife itself lays out the religious trajectory which he is clearly already following in dealing with his loss in spiritual terms. This epitaph, written in Latin, is the one work which can be identified specifically as having been written by Donne in direct response to his wife's death (Hester 513-4)
The marriage appears to have been a love-match, and was certainly an important stabilizing factor for Donne during the difficult years that followed (Bald, 326). Donne's friend Izaak Walton commented in his life of Donne, published 1670, that the death of Donne's wife in 1617 had 'crucified him to the world' (Parfitt 103)
It is not necessary, however, to accept uncritically Walton's view of Donne to accept that his wife's death did affect him severely, and that its consequences can be seen in his work. As a man of his time, Donne reflected the contemporary attitude that 'death [was] and important event in one's religious life' and 'the very fact of death was more generally accepted than it now is' (Roberts 960-1), but even given the high visibility and even celebration of death around him, Donne's concern with mortality is particularly strong, from his earliest poems to his final meditations
As a writer concerned with both the intensely spiritual and the intensely physical, death was a natural focus of Donne's thought and work throughout his life; as a Christian, convinced of the reality of resurrection and salvation, death was in a sense the fixed point around which his world-view revolved. Donne's fixation with the body, with its physical substance, its relationship to the outside world and its role as an expression of the divine, relates powerfully and inevitably to his conception of the significance of the body's physical dissolution in death and the consequences of this for the soul (Selleck 150-1)