He instead rhetorically transformed US soldiers from fratricidal killers into liberators of their ancient fatherland.
POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY
Only when foreign enemies looked different from what Americans conceived themselves to be could presidents wage war against a people as a whole. Thus, former US president Franklin Roosevelt could simultaneously urge Americans to keep the world from being “dominated by Hitler and [Benito] Mussolini,” even as he told them that “we are now in the midst of a war against Japan.” The war in Europe was a war to liberate oppressed peoples from tyrants. The war in the Pacific was a race war.
Such politically expedient language has a strategic downside. First, once you pin blame for a conflict on a single individual, a Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-il, it is difficult to see a solution to international conflict that does not result from the tyrant’s downfall. Imagine Bush parlaying with Saddam in 2005 or 2006, if war had never come again to Iraq, after having called him this generation’s Hitler.
More troubling is the identification of conflict with a single human source, which obscures the more systemic and insidious nature of international conflict. Again, imagine if recent history had gone differently, and Saddam had in fact taken the Bush administration’s 11th-hour offer of exile rather than war. Or if the initial attempt made on Saddam’s life in the war’s first hours had been successful.
If Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction, as Bush believed, Hussein’s departure would have left such weapons in the hands of … whom exactly? Equating war with a solitary tyrant thus imposes strategic limitations for policymakers. It also leads, paradoxically, to a greater number of civilian deaths.
Bombs aimed at dictators or their security apparatus almost invariably kill individuals far from the corridors of power. Their deaths are easier to stomach, and to justify, so long as airmen and soldiers, and the public watching at home, believe the violence was at least directed against evil incarnate.
Such rhetoric clearly works. It is global in nature. But it also helps make the world a more dangerous place by obscuring the real reasons for war, and by allowing peoples around the world to justify violence and conflict not as a means to an end, but rather as a holy mission of liberation, freedom and the eradication of tyranny. Until political leaders reject the rhetoric of evil as a justification for war, war itself is unlikely to disappear.
Jeffrey Engel is director of programming at the Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs, Texas A&M University.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE/INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN SCIENCES
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