Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [191]
Incredible, perhaps, but Bush had been hugely impressed by Black’s go-getting attitude. In the president’s inner circle the CIA man was known as “the flies on the eyes guy,” from his earlier comment “When we’re through with them [Al Qaeda], they will have flies walking on their eyeballs.” Woodward concluded, after his lengthy interviews with Bush, that the commander in chief was “tired of rhetoric. The president wanted to kill somebody.”72
This dialogue seems more suitable to a sixteenth-century Ottoman sultan and a pasha eager to please than to a twenty-first-century United States administration. The reader’s mind races. What did Gary intend to do with the pike? Decapitate bin Laden with a government-issue machete, then parade it still dripping blood through the cheering ranks of U.S. troops, rather like the head of the Ottoman admiral at the battle of Lepanto? What this little episode suggests is that once you have entered the world of maledicta, with its accursed enemies, it is near impossible not to fall from a modern world respecting progress into the dark domain of raw faith. But just imagine if Black’s plan had been fulfilled, and he had carried the head of America’s evil enemy, in its dry ice, triumphantly into the Oval Office. How would the president have responded to this culmination of his crusade?
The exercise of realpolitik generates so many similar examples of casual but necessary brutality that this minute picking over of a few words might seem a ridiculous scholastic exercise of the “how many angels can dance on the point of a needle” variety. But watching history in the making, without the benefit of hindsight and an archive, demands that we consider these tiny physical traces like those that archaeologists use to reconstruct an image of lost worlds. The argument of this book is that words and images matter, because it is often in these casual, ephemeral productions that the uncensored truth resides. Censorship can be of two types. We all self-censor, and the presentation President Bush makes of himself after preparation is very different from the man speaking off-the-cuff or under pressure. Then there is the censorship or artful rhetoric produced by professional speechwriting. In the hundred days after the murderous attacks on New York, it was the unguarded moments that provided the greatest insights and revelations.
THERE IS NO PROBLEM IN REVERTING TO THE APOCALYPTIC REGISTER, to maledicta—if you are willing to accept the consequences. The columnist Arianna Huffington expressed the issue succinctly:
I was always troubled by the President’s repeated references to “the evil ones”—from his first press conference after the attack, when he mentioned “the evil one” and “evildoers” five times, to his recent vow that “across the world and across the years, we will fight the evil ones, and we will win.” I objected not because the terrorists aren’t evil but because, as much as we would love it to be true, such a simple demarcation of good and evil flies in the face of history, religion and human nature.
The lure of this kind of reductionist thinking is not a new one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself a victim of some of the most horrific evil of the 20th century, warned against it in “The Gulag Archipelago”: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”73
It is enormously difficult to keep the language of maledicta under control, to hold it within bounds. It touches too many deep and visceral feelings, dramatizing the conflict between a good and an imperfect world.
If the “evildoers” do pose an omnipresent or mortal threat, then perhaps the only alternative is to pursue them to the last extremity. So let us consider the operational realities, as Cofer Black might