From
guest contributor
Karen Dodwell,
Assistant Professor
at Utah Valley State College


From the Center: The Cowboy Myth, George W. Bush,
and the War with Iraq

In an address to the nation, on March 17, 2003, George W. Bush declared, “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.” The ultimatum aroused a multitude of commentary in editorials and news articles that depicted George W. Bush as a cowboy sheriff who told outlaws to get out of town or face the consequences. On March 19, for instance, Reuters ran a story titled “High Noon for Cowboy Era” in which the lead sentence declared that, for Arabs, Bush's ultimatum was a throwback to the Wild West. The commentary prompted by the forty-eight hours ultimatum was not the first time Bush's actions had been referred to as cowboy-esque. After September 11, 2001, as editorial writers and public figures discussed terrorism more vigorously, they frequently described Bush in terms of a variety of cowboy images that went well beyond the cowhand who works cattle and drives them to market miles away. In the months leading up to the war with Iraq, commentators began to portray Bush as a sheriff in the Old West who would go it alone without a posse if need be in order to defeat what he saw as lawlessness and evil. Europeans, who would not join the posse to defeat the outlaw, were compared to timid saloonkeepers and shopkeepers, afraid to confront evil and afraid of the sheriff who might shoot up the town while getting his man. Eventually, the sheriff realized he had to ride out without a big posse. Tony Blair became Tonto to Bush's Lone Ranger and rode along to cover his boss's back.

As the image of the cowboy dominated debates over the war with Iraq, it became obvious that the term “cowboy” was lodged securely in the national and international consciousness as a means of delineating positions. I examined editorials and news articles published in newspapers and magazines both in print and on the Internet, beginning September 11, 2001, and continuing through April 2003 in order to explore the ubiquitous representations of George W. Bush as a cowboy. I read these editorials and news articles to answer one primary question: How and why has the myth of the cowboy been used in shaping public opinion about the war with Iraq ? Answering the question was a challenge because I immediately confronted the slipperiness of the signifier “cowboy” and the generative quality of the story of the American cowboy, now widely called the cowboy myth. As I will discuss in more detail below, numerous writers have traced the evolution of the myth from the original era of the trail-riding cowboy in the late 1800s through contemporary images that are a mixture of the historical and the fictional. In understanding the news commentary, then, I was first caught up in the structuralist endeavor of investigating the myth as a pattern for understanding a certain type of persona. I then recognized that the cowboy myth appeared in so many editorials and news articles, building and growing from writer to writer, that it formed a multi-faceted story.

I also wondered why the cowboy myth was still being used in political rhetoric early in the twenty-first century. In 1955, Franz and Choate asked the following question in their work, The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality : “Why this everlasting preoccupation with the cowboy in a country that is supposed to be crassly treadmilling its way to an ever increasing urbanization and ulcerated pursuit of happiness through money?” The question seemed even more puzzling in the context of urbanization and consumerism that have proliferated beyond what most individuals in the mid-1950s could have imagined. Most editorialists and politicians who exploited the cowboy myth most likely lived in urban areas and were far removed from the austerities of life on the cattle trail and the frontier. Obviously, the myth of the cowboy persists not because many people live like cowboys but because it defines something significant about the character of the U.S broadly and the character of George W. Bush specifically. What the cowboy myth means, however, is complicated because, as Frantz and Choate have explained, the cowboy represents both a desire for violence and recklessness and also the pursuit of heroism and integrity. Furthermore, as recent theorists have also explained, the line between the good and the bad cowboy is ambiguous because some people view the cowboy's will to act, even violently, as an honorable trait while others are repelled by the aggressive, eager-to-shoot image. Given the blurry line between the bad cowboy and the good cowboy, I was surprised that editorialists and politicians had adopted the cowboy myth in conveying their views of an international conflict.

I will argue that in spite of the slipperiness of the term cowboy, the complex evolution of the cowboy myth, the anachronistic aspects of the historical cowboy, and the blurry line between the good and bad cowboy, both those who supported and those who opposed the war with Iraq used the cowboy myth successfully to influence public opinion. Many columnists and public figures outside and within the U.S. used the cowboy myth to create a very negative image of George W. Bush as a blood-thirsty, trigger-happy loner. The love of the cowboy in the U.S., however, became a potent means of coalescing support for George W. Bush as a fast-acting, straight-shooting, brave president. The cowboy myth produced positive associations for segments of the U.S. public that held conservative views while the myth produced negative associations for segments of the public with more liberal views. As I will explain, this dichotomy aligned with a view of the frontier promoted by Frederick Jackson Turner and the opposing view promoted by New Western Historians and those who have called for the abandonment of the cowboy myth. My reading of editorials that analyze the presence of the myth in the discussions about the war with Iraq (the meta-commentary) leads me to believe that Bush's image as a cowboy president was more positive than negative in the U.S.; in Europe, however, a negative image of the cowboy reinforced a disgust with Bush's handling of the war with Iraq.