Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [194]
In the real world, as in the game, another approach might prove more productive. It involves making unpalatable but necessary assumptions. For example: recognize rather that these evildoers (to use President George W. Bush’s term) could be supple, resourceful, creative; assume they may be endlessly adaptive in their remorseless challenge; accept that in pursuit of their fell cause, they might possess both the intellect and confidence that make them strong where the Western world is weak. And finally, be certain that they will readily use the instruments of modernity when they choose, for they disseminate their ideological product by “viral marketing.” This viral analogy is relevant to the spread of terrorism, for infective viruses cannot be controlled by traditional antibiotic methods.87
The measures adopted by the president and most of his main advisers against the “evil enemy” have attacked only the symptoms and not the underlying condition. The Bush administration, viscerally predisposed toward a war on evil, has looked only to destroying the bodies that house the infection. But they are blind to the true nature of their opponents. The ancient language and ideology of evil has predisposed the U.S. government to see their enemy only as some crude, inflexible, quasi-medieval relic to be extirpated with fire or the sword. In their minds, he is a savage wearing a turban. Osama bin Laden aptly fulfills that stereotype, as did Saddam Hussein, in all his many costumes. Try as they might, the administration cannot escape from a gut reaction, for “turban” symbolizes all those primitive impulses described earlier in this book.88
Nevertheless, the U.S. government has always been adamant that there is no question of a religiously inspired Western attack upon the Islamic world. This is plainly right. There is no “war of the cross” with President George W. Bush caucusing like a twenty-first-century Urban II. But crusading is not so much a technical definition as an attitude of mind, and it is easy to find many examples of that way of thinking in Western nations. I shall deal with the outspoken General Boykin, who knows his own mind, in the next chapter, but he is probably not the only U.S. official who thinks the same way yet sustains the political vow of silence as necessary for the national strategy. To the degree that this kind of doublethink is widespread, it will impede any attempt to find an appropriate and effective response to an elusive enemy.
The United States confronts a remorseless opponent, like a virus endlessly changing its shape and mutating to counter the strengths and qualities of the most powerful nation on earth. But are there alternatives to attacking it in the political language of evil? Experience suggests that current quick-fix strategies will never remove this subtle and resourceful enemy. Nevertheless, the West can respond effectively, by developing a slow-acting antiviral. This would first require a shift in both attitudes and language. A starting point might be found in Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the section of the United States Declaration of Independence which contains the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” His original draft was more comprehensive, but the phrase “pursuit of happiness” survived editing and redrafting, rather as “axis of evil” survived into President Bush’s State of the Union address. The language of happiness was a common political discourse at the time that the declaration was compiled. It has been considered so inclusive as to defy precise definition.89 Such objectives were not unique to the United States but no other nation made it a founding