ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the elements of identity-making and the logics of gendered, racial, and orientalist discourses to identify how these logics and the identity categories they create have functioned to make possible the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. It focuses largely on events and texts produced within the 11 September 2001–31 December 2002 timeframe, interrogating the earliest attempts to discursively define a particular view of the 11 September attacks and the key actors related to these, in terms of developing a discourse that called for military intervention in response to these attacks. Contextualising the lead-up to military intervention into Afghanistan and the conflict's ongoing impact, the chapter discusses texts produced by key members of the Bush administration. It builds on the discussion of the division of the 'War on Terror' world in to an 'us' and a 'them', and delineate the roles, actions, feelings, and desires pre/proscribed to 'them' in official US 'War on Terror' discourse.
