ABSTRACT
Speaking to airline workers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in late September 2001, American President George W. Bush assured his audience, ten days before the start of the war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that their nation was already ‘adjusting to a new type of war’. In the weeks following the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Bush had been at pains to evoke this notion of a different type of battlefield, a different type of war and a new type of struggle, in speeches and photo opportunities with foreign leaders, forecasting an ambiguously ‘long campaign’ to be carried out, in military and intelligence operations as well as in finance and law enforcement, against an enemy, terrorism, which ‘knows no borders’ and ‘has no capital’ (Ó Tuathail, 2003). At O’Hare, a busy hub airport on the newly recognized front lines of a war, Bush continued:
“This isn’t a conventional war that we’re waging. Ours is a campaignthat will have to reflect the new enemy. There’s no longer islands to conquer or beachheads to storm. … These are people who strike and hide, people who know no borders . . .”
