Paper short abstract:

How was the Bush Administration’s War on Terror formed? I shed a light on the reflexivity between the legal arguments in the UNSC and the strategic arguments in the USNSC. I clarify how UNSC’s legal argument for the Afghanistan War rewrote NSC’s threat formulation and posited the target.

Paper long abstract:

How was the Bush Administration's War on Terror, the doctrine proclaiming preventive military action against even the slightest possibility of terrorist attack, formed after 9/11? While scholars in STS and the critical terrorism studies have pointed out numerous precedent ideas in the security expertise characterizing international terrorist networks as the most potent threat to the United States, they have failed to answer the question of how such prior characterizations were configured to justify the use of military force against the state sponsors, rather than the law enforcement against the terrorist organization immediately responsible for the atrocity, as the only reasonable and legitimate reaction. To answer this question, invoking the theoretical works of a Sociologist Harold Garfinkel and an International Lawyer Martti Koskenniemi, I shed light on the reflexivity between the legal discourse in the UN Security Council and the strategic arguments in the US National Security Council. The concept of reflexivity is invoked here to remind the fact that formulation of the threat and justification of the reaction to it proceeds not linearly, but go hand in hand in the formation of security policy. I clarify how UNSC's legal discourse for the Afghanistan War rewrote National Security Council's threat formulation, and how NSC proceeded to posit the possible link between rogue states and terrorist networks as the "undeterrable but attackable" target of the War on Terror. I argue such reflexive formation of security policy paved the way for the Iraq War in 2003.