Friend and Enemy

The humility that Sara Ruddick describes as essential for a critique of militarism is missing from the rhetoric in the war against terror. Such humility, she argues, would produce a politics that is decentred, open and non-doctrinal, instead we have what is best described as a clash of fundamentalisms (Ali, 2002) between two opponents eager to represent the other as the epitome of evil. Where the gesture of humility does appear in this rhetoric it is simply a veil for a politics of certainty and righteousness. George W. Bush is no doubt humbled by the fact that he is the chosen instrument of God, delivering His gift of freedom to the world, but this humility is anything but pacific, used as it is to support a massive military budget, pre-emptive strikes and the moulding of the world in accordance with US economic interests. While the identification of a new enemy is undoubtedly the cover for the expansion of these interests, something I will address in the final chapter, the naming of this new enemy has a number of other functions, not least the continuation of the existential struggle against the forces of darkness. These forces may be couched, as we shall see, in theological garb in which the enemy is quite literally Satan, or in more secular terms as the atrophe of the human spirit in the absence of a struggle.¹