He reminds us in, Bush's Global War On Radicals, that we aren't really fighting foreign terrorists anymore. We never really were.
In other words, the war against “terrorist groups of global reach,” which became the “global war on terrorism,” now has morphed into what might be called the “global war on radicals and extremists,” a dramatic escalation of the war’s ambitions with nary a comment from the U.S. news media.
So, under Bush’s new war framework, the enemy doesn’t necessarily have to commit or plot acts of international terrorism or even local acts of terrorism. It only matters that Bush judges the person to be a “radical” or an “extremist.”
While the word “terrorism” is open to abuse – under the old adage “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” – the definition of “radical” or “extremist” is even looser. It all depends on your point of view.
Needless to say, an interchangeable foe is an elemental totalitarian mechanism for control of the patriotic passions of the population. Eastasia and Eurasia were frequently substituted one for the other and Winston Smith--even after he figured out it was simply a doublethink exercise, allowed himself to perform the necessary patriotic mental sommersaults in order to sustain the intensity of his hatred for the enemy of the moment.
Parry implies, too, that this expansion of the war is not intended to stop with foreign opponents, but to widen with Bush's self-described plenary executive power until the laws of the United States and our Constitution itself are superceded by the will of the President alone.
For this and other reasons, many view Bush himself as a radical extremist.
More than anything, though, I suppose he is a man of some talent and energy who has been put forward to lead the nation and the world. The direction is being set by conservative idealogues in banking, industry, and the military. They use Bush because he is able to put a warm and neighborly face on the neo-imperialism his backers have engineered.
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