Textual fingerprints of risk of war

We compute the rate of textual signals of risk of war recognizable in series of consecutive political speeches about a disputed issue serious enough to entail an international conflict. The speeches concern Iran’s nuclear program. We trace textual signals forewarning of risks of war that reactions to this affair lead to. The thrust of the textual analysis rests on the interplay of affiliation and power words in continuous texts, following D. C. McClelland’s model for anticipating wars. The speeches are those of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, US Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prefiguring a military confrontation before it occurs involves structuring information from unstructured data. Despite such imperfect knowledge, by the end of January 2012, our results show a receding risk of war on the Iranian side, but an increasing risk on the American one, while remaining ambiguous on the Israeli one. ................................................................................................................................................................................. Wars are like the uncontrollably complex soliton waves. Solitons result from normal after-waves that superpose one onto another to multiplicative effect (Herman, 1992). Our matter concerns one of these waves, the latent threats buried in speeches by political elites about a disputed issue serious enough to entail a risk of war. Our purpose is to recognise textual signals prefiguring these threats in transnational databases of texts. We centred on the speeches of four political figures in Iran, Israel, and the USA about Iran’s nuclear affair. For Iran, the figures are the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s is a hybrid secular-clerical government (Hashemi and Postel, 2011), a reason for analysing not one governmental source of data, but two, Ayatollah Khamenei on the clerical side and President Ahmadinejad on the secular one. For now, clerical dominance remains the rule (Dalton, 2010). The other figures are Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, US Department of State, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the State of Israel. The stakes justify the present study. It is not our job to like or dislike the Iranian issue, which is our object, not our cause. In truth, it is the words about the affair that are our object, not the affair itself. Our job is (i) to concentrate on political speeches related to the issue, (ii) use empirical methods to sift and order the information received and processed, and (iii) winnow from these speeches recognizable signals about the risk of war. At day’s end, our job is to reduce uncertainty by foreshadowing what might happen before it happens, that is, by building up an index of risk of war that changes before war breaks out. The future may not be predictable. Some may not even wish it to be predictable. ‘The idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting Correspondence: Robert L. Hogenraad,