Rhetorical Devices In The Last Letter

“The Last Letter” In Tomas Young’s letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney entitled “The Last Letter” (March 2013), Young justifies that the Iraq War was a thoughtless act that caused more harm to those involved than good to the nation. Young develops his claim using a description of how the war affected him and others fighting, rhetorical questions, description of what the war was like, anaphora, and an appeal to pathos. Young’s purpose is to tell the intended audience about his view of the war in order to “make it clear” that millions of people “know fully who [Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney] are” and what they have done regarding the war. Based upon addressing Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney directly multiple times, the audience Young was writing to

The anger is to be directed toward Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who themselves in some way escaped from serving their time. Young states that Mr. Cheney “dodged the draft in Vietnam” and that Mr. Bush “went AWOL from [his] National Guard unit.” He uses these examples to create anger because most people would be angered by the fact that they are sending all these militia personnel into something they were “not willing to risk” themselves for decades ago. If that did not already create some anger in the readers, Young follows with his opinion that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney “sent… young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more than a thought than it takes to put out the garbage” which is sure to create a good amount of anger. Later in the letter, Young tries to invoke pity upon Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney when he mentions “I would not have to lie in my bed,… body filled with painkillers, … life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, … were sacrificed… for little more than the greed for oil companies…” Young is stating this as a way to make Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney feel bad for what they have done and makes them think of the what has

Bush and Mr. Cheney, Young describes what the war was like over in Iraq and what was happening. Young uses his descriptions to make civilians reading this aware of what actually happened from the viewpoint of an Iraq soldier himself; he mentions that they helped to “rebuild Iraq” and were told that it “could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion.” Helping to rebuild Iraq is meant to be seen as a positive thing, but when told that it cost the United States trillions of dollars it makes us clear that it was something negative. While describing the war and “the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children,... were sacrificed… for… the greed of oil companies”, Young inserts his opinion that the Iraq war was the “largest strategic blunder in American history” because he wants to make it know that it was something that wasn't worth fighting for that only caused more damage to the people