Political Rhetoric of Leaders under Stress in the Gulf Crisis

The Gulf War and the crisis that led up to it provide an extremely useful laboratory for social scientists to test their hypotheses about crisis behavior. In this study the authors measure a structural attribute of leaders' utterances—their integrative complexity—before, during, and after the crisis and war to determine its association with behavior. They discovered that changes in integrative complexity provided a good early warning indicator of the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, and that later changes were closely associated with the fortunes of war for the Coalition and Iraqi forces. It was also found that “dovish” leaders showed higher levels of complexity than “hawkish” ones, that supreme commanders' utterances were less complex than those of their subordinates, and that complexity was not associated with region, language, or religion. Overall, the findings strongly confirm the general proposistion that reductions in the integrative complexity of leaders' communications provide a useful indicator of the presence of disruptive stress during a crisis.