Taken by Storm: The Exploitation of Metaphor in the Persian Gulf War

Abstract

On January 16, 1991, the Allied Troops in Saudi Arabia moved from a metaphorically titled defensive posture—Desert Shield—into an offensive named Storm. An examination of WAR IS A STORM and four other structural metaphors the media used to report the Persian Gulf War, which takes into consideration the power of metaphor to shape consciousness, may lead us to conclude that the American people's acceptance of and support for the war was determined in part by the metaphors in which they read about it. As the United Nations Security Council's January 15, 1991 deadline for Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait drew near, I speculated about what transformation the Bush Administration's Operation Desert Shield would take when the allied forces attacked Iraq. I imagined that perhaps it would be a spear, in keeping with the archaic imagery of the shield, or an arrow. Or, perhaps, the administration would not change its metaphor at all, playing out before the whole world the irony of launching an offen...