The global war on terror memorial and the rhetoric of commemoration.

This paper will discuss the rhetoric surrounding the plan to construct a national memorial for the Global War on Terror. It looks at three distinct areas of discourse relating to the project: the congressional debates over the memorial, the principles the memorial foundations declared that they hoped the final project would represent and arguments forwarded by supporters of the foundation regarding the imminent need to honor American veterans. In each chapter I outline the narratives and memory of the conflict being promoted by supporters and argue that these narratives uphold the United States depiction of the war as a instance in which heroic Americans sacrificed themselves in the name of freedom. I also focus on the implications that building a memorial for a war that has not ended has in terms of how practices of commemoration are understood in the post 9/11 era.