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Alberto Arenas
Professor Bevill
ENGL 1302-06
7 September, 2015
The Stairway to War
On 20 September, 2001, the speech, Address to Join Session of Congress on the 9/11
Attacks, was presented by President George W. Bush to address the American people, the
United States Congress, and to its allies around the world nine days after the historic attack, by a
terrorist group called Al Qaeda, to several American facilities around the country. The speech
was intended for the president to answer the questions people had about the recent events that
happen and to give his points of views on what to do about it. President Bush used numerous
amounts of fallacies to persuade the people, but he also used sympathy to let everyone know that
he also felt the effects of all the lost lives in the attack. By doing so, President Bush was able to
use those emotions and fallacies to get his ideas out, and by knowing that he will get the support
of the American people, he simply transformed himself into a superhero like figure to get
everyone with him and to let the people feel safe again, which will make his speech a success.
A huge part of President Bushs speech was the use of emotion fallacies due to the affects
that could do to the audience. By looking for fallacies using emotions, the article starts by
presenting an introduction with a deep sad tone, then it turns into anger of vengeance. By using
the anger of the events that occur, President Bush was smart enough to turn it into fuel to
motivate the audience to look for a bright side and to find the solution of the problem with the
following quote, our grief has turned into anger, and anger to resolution (1). By using the
quote, President Bush made himself a foundation for his argument since this caused many people

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to pay attention to him and to consider everything he has to say. Another point of view of using
fallacy was when President Bush used the either or choice fallacy with the quote, Either you are
with us, or you are with the terrorist (4). With this quote, President Bush is addressing to the
world, no matter who the country is if they support the terrorist group, known as Al Qaeda, the
United States of America will consider them as enemies. With this idea, not only did President
Bush can get all the support that he needs from the American people and its allies, but it also
unified everyone in the nation that was pro war to stand by him and go into war.
Not only did President George W. Bush use emotion fallacies in his speech, he also used
logical appeals as well. President Bush used ideas which he considered as facts to back up his
thoughts in a clever way, even though the identity of where the information came from is
unknown. For example, the facts that he used in this speech were affective to make people get
behind him for the common goal on stopping terrorism. President Bush used these facts to his
advantage to emphasize his points by saying, cabinet-level position reporting directly to me-the
Office of Homeland Security (4). The president used this quote to emphasize the idea to
promote security to the people of the United States with the idea of another organization to
protect them from invaders. The audience grew quicker towards the ideas that President Bush
was proposing and saying got more heads up and more support. With the support already there
and still growing, President Bush was able to build up his tower of ideas and proposals on top of
the foundation he already made and stable it with the help of emotions. President Bush scattered
fallacies and logical appeals using facts and logic throughout the article strategically. With this in
mind, President Bush used the number of people and their race, who tragically were killed in the
terrorist attack as a fact to emphasize that not only the terrorist killed Americans, but they also
killed other people from other places there as he uses in this quote , the citizens of 80 other

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nations who died with our own: dozens of Pakistanis, more than 130 Israelis, and more than 250
citizens of India; men and woman from el Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan; and hundreds of
British citizens(2). This quote used by President Bush in the speech shows that he also takes in
consideration that it wasnt just Americans who were killed and that it will not be tolerated.
Fallacies were a huge part of President Bushs overall speech. It made the audience
believe that he also felt the same way as they are in order to give out his ideas on what to do. Not
only did he used fallacies, he over used them in order to build his speech. The kind of fallacies
that were used the most were emotion fallacies; and the problem with using emotion fallacies too
much, it made the speech weaker by causing multiple feelings. An example of this will be when
the president said, they will hand over the terrorist, or they will share in their fate (3). When
President Bush said this, it might have caused mixed emotions with some friendly citizens in the
Middle East since they might feel that the president will do anything in order to stop the terrorist
and they dont want to be in the middle of the fight.
President George W. Bushs speech was overall a well written which emphasizes on
emotions and facts supporting the emotion made. With the emotions high in that present time, the
environment was perfect for this article to be presented to the public. Not many people knew
about what was going on, honestly most people were confused, but for the people who knew
what was going on and after hearing President Bushs speech, many were in favor with the ideas.
Besides the fact of over using emotion fallacies, the speech was well organized and the timing
for it was perfect that many people actually agreed with the ideas he said, which made his speech
effective in that setting.

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Work Cited
Bush, George W. Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the 9/11 Attacks.
AmericanRhetoric.com. Ed. Michael Eidenmuller. 2006. PDF file