Journal of International Development
J. Int. Dev. 18, 87–104 (2006)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.1264

POLICY ARENA

WAR WITHOUT END? MAGIC,

PROPAGANDA AND THE HIDDEN

FUNCTIONS OF COUNTER-TERROR

DAVID KEEN*

Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School of Economics and Political Science,

London, UK

Abstract:

This paper suggests that current tactics in the ‘war on terror’ are predictably

counterproductive, and that these ‘failing’ tactics actually serve a range of political, economic
and psychological functions for diverse actors who make up the ‘war on terror’ coalition. It
compares the ‘war on terror’ to civil wars, especially in Africa, where experience shows that
predictably counterproductive tactics are common and the aim is not necessarily to win.
Current violent responses to terror—which represent ‘magical thinking’ in important ways—
are based on the fallacy of a finite group of evil people who can be physically eliminated;
more productive would be a genuine attempt to understand the processes that lead people to
embrace violence and an attempt to engage with processes of exclusion, humiliation and
discrimination. This is something that needs to be built into any developmental initiative;
otherwise, we are left with a vast pool of anger and a counter-terror reflex that only
exacerbates the problem. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords:

Terror; terrorism; state; civil wars; rebels; functions; Arendt; psychology;

propaganda

1

INTRODUCTION

In terms of current public understanding of the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq war in
particular, many people now understand that they were sold the war on false pretences and
that turning ‘victory’ in Iraq into peace and democracy is a long way off. Rather less well
understood is the way contemporary terrorism (and the growing importance of ‘bottom up’
violence more generally) renders attacks on states redundant and counterproductive. This

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence to: David Keen, Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School of Economics and
Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A2AE. E-mail: [e-mail]

paper tries to examine some of the assumptions and belief-systems behind the ‘war on
terror’, suggesting that predictably counterproductive tactics—as in the realm of civil war—
have hidden economic, political and (not least) psychological functions. (Keen, 2005).

2

THE WAR ON TERROR AS PREDICTABLY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

The war in Iraq was sold as a war that would make the world safer in the wake of 9/11. Iraq
was supporting terrorism and Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were a threat. Yet
the logic here was profoundly illogical. Recent military interventions are predictably
counterproductive in terms of the expressed objective of ending terror.

First, despite some scraps of evidence hyped up by the Bush administration, no

substantial connection between Saddam and al-qa’ida (let alone 9/11) has ever been
proven: indeed, al-qa’ida seems to have strongly opposed the largely secular regime of
Saddam, and Osama bin Laden denounced Saddam as an ‘infidel’. Second, no weapons of
mass destruction have been found. Third, the attack on Iraq is likely to be profoundly
counterproductive in combatting terrorism. It has significantly deepened the anger that is
fuelling terrorism among Islamist militants in particular. Iraq has become to some extent a
magnet and a cause celebre for these militants—much in the same way that Afghanistan
did during the struggle against the occupying Soviet forces. Anger and fear have also been
stoked by more general proclamations from the US government of a right to unilateral
military action and ‘preventive self-defence’. Fourth, the attack obviously produced
significant violence inside Iraq, including attacks on and by coalition troops attempting
to occupy and govern the country. Fifth, as Chomsky has stressed, the original 2003 attack
on Iraq was itself a source of terror; so too is violence associated with the continuing
occupation. Terror to end terror makes no sense.

Similar problems surrounded the earlier attack on Afghanistan, in the immediate

aftermath of 9/11. First, the connection with terrorism was dubious: some al-qa’ida
camps attacked by the US were reported to be empty (Woodward, 2002); and the 9/11
attackers were mostly Saudis, not Afghans. The attack on Afghanistan tended to disperse
rather than eliminate al-qa’ida. Insofar as key leaders have been killed or put out of action,
this seems to have contributed to a decentralization of command within al-qa’ida and its
(loosely) affiliated networks (Burke, 2003; Taylor, 2005). The attack fuelled anger among
many Muslims, and prompted significant and continuing resistance inside Afghanistan.
Finally, the attack itself was again a source of terror, something that was hardly concealed
when the coalition tried to use humanitarian aid to sugar the kill —or, as Bush put it in a
memorable phrase, ‘Can we have the first bombs we drop be food?’

Through studies of individuals and of countries, we now understand quite a lot about the

processes by which a terrorist is radicalised and the role of world events in this process.
Everything we know suggests that a perceived abuse of American power (including
attacks on Iraq) has fuelled this process of radicalisation.

There are important lessons to be learned from attempts to combat the use of terror within

a range of civil wars, drawing on the author’s experience in researching and documenting
these (notably in Africa). One crucial lesson has been that proliferating weapons and deep-
seated anger at political and economic exclusion have fuelled conflicts that cannot be
adequately understood, or addressed, as the struggle between two teams, let alone between
good and evil. Another is that the nature of counter-insurgency profoundly shapes patterns
of violence and terror, often by attracting new recruits to an otherwise-weak rebellion.

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While some US administration officials have optimistically compared al-qa’ida to a

snake which will die when the head is cut off, other analysts argue more plausibly that the
network resembles a mould: you have to tackle the environment in which it grows. Rather
than imagining that terrorists are a discrete group of evil individuals, we need to look at
processes of becoming. This demands a sense of history. It also demands a willingness to
face up to the damaging effects of one’s own nation—in particular, the role of military
interventions over a long period (and of largely unconditional support for Israel) in
fuelling anger. Yet history, for Bush and to a large extent for Blair, has been ‘narcissised’
and projected into the future: when they speak of history, it is usually in terms of how
history will judge their interventions.

The atrocities of 9/11 produced a need to hit back, and this is natural enough. Yet it is

precisely this impulse to retaliate which should show us why a ‘war on terror’ cannot be
won. Why would other people not feel similar emotions and impulses when they are
attacked, when their innocent people are bombed or shot in the name of somebody else’s
‘justice’? Are they not human too? 9/11 and the overthrow of Saddam are not moral
equivalents. But stating repeatedly and publicly that you expect your ‘war on terror’ to
make the world a safer place in effect sends a message that you do not believe the victims of
your violence—and there are always innocent victims—are the same as you with the same
emotions (including the same all-too-human desire to retaliate). To your victims, your very
confidence in your own tactics may proclaim your racism and your failure to recognise their
humanity. Indeed, like Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, they may demand revenge in
part to remind you that they are human (‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? . . . And if you
wrong us, shall we not revenge?’) To the extent that an entire group (Arabs? Muslims?) is
stigmatized and even dehumanized, this impulse is redoubled. Significantly, whilst Shylock
presents his violent revenge as a manifestation of his humanity, he is also ready to adopt the
inhuman persona he has been saddled with: ‘Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a
cause; But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.’

The American sense of near-invulnerability has been dramatically undermined by

September 11th. The resulting feeling of powerlessness seems to have been addressed by
the clumsy but spectacular assertion of US military power. This dangerous and damaging
process in effect offloads (or exports) these feelings of powerlessness onto other countries,
notably in the Middle- and Near-East. Of course, many people there may be similarly
tempted to remedy powerlessness with a feeling of power-through-violence.

If the ‘war on terror’ is so counterproductive, how then are we to explain the persistence

and appeal of such counter-productive tactics?

3

THE WAR SYSTEM: POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS

It is important to examine the hidden political and economic functions of the war on terror
and to realise that its beneficiaries are located not only in the US and the UK but also in a
variety of dubious regimes whose co-operation is required. Given these benefits, the desire to
defeat terror cannot necessarily be taken for granted—whether at a micro-level (for example,
the often-collusive behaviour of Russian troops in Chechnya where Russian generals have
made a lot of money) or at a macro-level. Crucially, as in civil wars, demonisation of a
particular enemy creates space for abuses by those who claim to be fighting this demon.

After the end of the Cold War, new enemies have been repeatedly identified—not least

to justify the very high levels of spending on the military. The current Pentagon budget

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represents nearly twice the defence spending of the rest of the world’s military powers
combined. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the enemy has been variously identified as:
rogue states (the vilification of which long preceded 9/11), drugs (and ‘narco-guerillas’),
and most recently terrorism. With any of these enemies, the point may not be so much to
win as to fight: preserving or fomenting the conflict has hidden benefits. Nor can oil be
discounted as incentive for picking sides —in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

While the idea of a ‘war on terror’ legitimises violence with the label of war, the status of

‘prisoners of war’ has been denied to ‘the other side’. Thus, we are invited to believe that this
is simultaneously a war and not a war. This mirrors the schizophrenic official discourse in
many civil wars where the state habitually delegitimises rebel violence as ‘criminal’ (see,
notably, Mark Duffield’s (2001) ‘Global Governance and the New Wars’) while legitimising
its own violence as ‘war’ (and usually favouring a military rather than a policing response).

My research on contemporary civil wars focuses on the idea that these wars can be

better understood as systems than as contests: In other words, the aim in a war is not
simply ‘to win’ (a position that assumes that there are ‘two sides’ with aims are essentially
political or military and set ‘at the top’); rather the aims in a war are manifold, with many
of the most important actors more interested in manipulating (and perhaps prolonging) a
declared ‘war’ for local and immediate benefits (often economic or psychological) than
they are in ‘winning’. In contemporary civil wars in Africa and elsewhere, both
government and rebel forces have repeatedly engaged in attacks on civilian populations
which have predictably radicalised these populations and attracted support for the enemy.
We have also seen many instances of soldiers selling arms to ‘the other side’. Within a
framework focussed on ‘winning’, these actions can be seen as irrational (or perhaps as
‘mistakes’). However, aims other than winning have often been important and they
include: carrying out abuses under the cover of war, making money, and even perpetuating
a war because of the political and economic benefits of such a ‘state of emergency’. In
these circumstances, even predictably counterproductive tactics may have a good deal of
‘rationality’ —at least for many of the key actors producing the war.

Significantly, the global war on terror and contemporary civil wars share many of the

same dynamics, and both may usefully be considered as systems rather than simply as
contests. Some of these similarities seem to reflect the nature of war itself, and the
opportunities it naturally and perhaps inevitably creates. Other similarities reflect the fact
that similar global forces (like weapons proliferation and expanding illegal international
trading) have impacted on both types of war.

Let me look first at some shared dynamics within the insurgency/terror network. First,

the proliferation of weapons makes it very difficult to isolate a fixed and finite group of
rebels or terrorists whose elimination would not be followed by the emergence of more
armed rebels or terrorists. Second (and related to this proliferation), the access which
terror/rebel organisations enjoy to lucrative global markets again makes these movements
very difficult to destroy whilst simultaneously encouraging relatively decentralised
patterns of command since it further assists ‘followers’ and not just ‘leaders’ in getting
access to weapons and building organisational capability. Al-qa’ida, incidentally, has been
tied into some networks sustaining civil wars, notably the diamond-trading networks in
West Africa. Third, the violence is driven primarily by anger, anger which is only
exacerbated by particular (abusive) kinds of counterinsurgency.

Within the counter-insurgency/counter-terror networks, there are two main shared

dynamics. The first is the prevalence of tactics that are counter-productive in the sense
that they induce additional military and political opposition. Of central significance here is

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the phenomenon of abusive and at least partially indiscriminate violence that creates the
enemies it claims to be interested in defeating.

1

Abusive counter-insurgency and counter-

terror tend to knit together the diverse grievances of those whose targets might otherwise
be resolutely local. Hugh Roberts, for example, has stressed that anti-American feelings
are neither natural nor or long-standing in countries such as Algeria and Egypt, but that
aggressive US actions tend to superimpose an American enemy on top of local
grievances.

2

In Sudan, we have often seen the radicalisation of populations through

attacks on areas not sympathetic to the SPLA, frequently attacks with an economic
rationale. Also significant in many countries has been a persistent tendency for key rebels/
terrorists to escape capture—despite the very significant inequality of resources between
the demonised rebels/terrorists and the forces ranged against them. We can see this in
Sierra Leone, Guatemala and Uganda, for example. Finally, there has often been some
kind of business relationship (perhaps including arms trading) between ostensible
enemies, either before or during a given conflict.

The second shared dynamic in the counter-insurgency/counter-terror networks is that

these networks’ violence (and notably the ‘counterproductive’ violence which induces
additional political and military opposition) actually has functions for the diverse coalition
creating the violence. These functions are economic, political and psychological. In both
civil wars and the current global ‘war on terror’, we can see an abundance of opportunities
for political, economic and psychological ‘pay-offs’ among actors collaborating—or
claiming to collaborate —with a particular war effort but not necessarily sharing the aim of
eliminating the named terror.

Part of this is because both counter-insurgency and global counter-terror operate

through a kind of licensing of violence by diverse groups. The limits to US power on a
global stage tend to create collaborative strategies that mimic the strategies of govern-
ments pursuing counter-insurgency within weak states. This means that the aims of the
‘counter-insurgency’ or ‘counter-terror’ are very diverse (although certain parties, for
example the US in the case of the ‘war on terror’, have clearly had a disproportionate
influence in shaping these aims). In civil wars, counter-insurgency has often taken the
form of encouraging violence between ethnic groups. The licensing of violence (whether
by governments who encourage ‘tribal violence’ as part of a counter-insurgency, or by
Washington allowing allied governments to present their own struggles as counter-terror,
or by coalition partners involving private firms in the running of Iraq and its jails), has the
advantage that it enlists support and creates many opportunities for ‘deniability’ when
abuses are revealed. It may also minimise the exposure to violence of a government’s own
forces (whether draftes on voluntarily enlisted).

The political functions of even militarily-counterproductive violence include the political

pay-off from uniting a country around a common and clearly identified enemy. There may
also be political advantages in intimidating a wider group of potential victims.

British playwright David Hare is among those who have stressed the function of the

2003 Iraq attack as a demonstration of US power:

The intention to destroy the credibility of the United Nations and its right to try and
defuse situations of danger to life, is not a byproduct of recent American policy. It is

1

Insurgents/terrorists have also frequently carried out abuses that predictably create opposition, though having the

‘advantage’ of advertising their own power and their ability to stand up to a greater power (compare Eric
Hobsbawm, 1972 [1969]).

2

See also, Michael Mann, 2003.

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its very purpose. Bush chose Iraq not because it would make sense but because it
wouldn’t . . . The thinness of the justification for this war is, in fact, it very point.
As is the arbitrariness of the target’ (Hare, 2003).

Saddam Hussein himself understood that the very arbitrariness of official retaliation could

usefully reinforce feelings of terror among those he wished to intimidate (Makiya, 1998).

Insofar as picking an arbitrary target does have a logic, it is partly this logic of

generating fear. After 9/11, Bush told Rumsfeld: ‘Tell the Afghans to go round up
al Qaeda. Let’s see them, or we’ll hit them hard. We’re going to hurt them so bad so that
everyone in the world sees, do not deal with bin Laden.’(Woodward, 2002).

One analyst of the US-backed counter-insurgency in Guatemala in the 1980s

commented:

Most observers are in agreement that the purpose of the Guatemalan army’s counter-
insurgency campaign was as much to teach the Indian population a psychological
lesson as to wipe out a guerrilla movement that, at its height, had probably no more
than 3,500 trained people in arms. In essence, the purpose of the campaign was to
generate an attitude of terror and fear—what we might term a ‘culture of fear’—in
the Indian population, to ensure that never again would it support or ally itself with a
Marxist guerrilla movement (Davis, p. 21).

The Guatemalan rebel movement got new recruits as a result of this tactic. But

democratic forces were suppressed, the war system was maintained, and the US continued
to bask in its self-image as the defender of freedom against (tenacious) Communist rebels.

Revealingly, the idea that bad things are the responsibility of a few ‘evil individuals’ has

informed both the tactics in the ‘war on terror’ and the official US response to revealed
abuses like those at Abu Ghraib, which were dismissed as the work of a few ‘bad apples’.
The use of torture in third-party countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia

3

has also helped to preserve the idea that bad things are the responsibility of ‘them’ and not
‘us’. These denials of responsibility are closely linked to a persistent tendency to
exaggerate the decentralization of violence in relation to one’s ‘friends’. Alongside this
has been an enduring habit of underplaying the decentralization of violence among one’s
‘enemies’ (the terrorists). Thus, abuses in the ‘counterterror’ system (if admitted) are said
to reflect a ‘breakdown’ in the chain of command, while the enemy’s abuses are held to
reflect a ruthless imposition of command. This neatly sidesteps responsibility in the West
as well as the widespread anger that informs terrorism (and the West part in fuelling this
anger). Meanwhile, the attribution of strong chains of command to the enemy underpins
the unrealistic assumption that eliminating leaders and ringleaders will solve the problem.

The advantages of bringing in an understanding of civil wars are further underlined by

the fact that the global war on terror is itself made up of civil wars to quite a large extent—
for example, in Colombia, the Philippines, Chechnya, Afghanistan and, increasingly, Iraq.
Aggressive approaches to the problem of ‘terror’ in these civil wars tend to create
opportunities for lucrative abuse (for example, by paramilitaries in Colombia or Russian
generals in Chechnya), as well as perpetuating the conflict that legitimises these abuses.
Presenting civil wars within the framework of a global war on terror has often encouraged
additional demonisation of rebels and additional resources for counter-insurgency, making
a resolution more difficult.

3

For example, Mayer, 2005.

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Of course, one should not fall into the trap of insisting that dynamics in the war on terror

are exactly the same as those in civil wars (just as the characteristics of civil wars
themselves will naturally vary from country to country). For one thing, the fact
that counter-terror is being waged by large and well-resourced democracies produces a
significant difference from a counter-insurgency waged by an under-resourced auto-
cracy—not least perhaps the increased importance attached to carrying public opinion.

4

THE NEW WITCH-HUNT

It is important to try to examine the psychological functions of the war on terror, including
the role of what I call magical thinking in the way that enemies have been defined and re-
defined. Renowned child psychologist Jean Piaget refers to a notion of causality called
‘magical-phenomenalist’; this is adhered to by infants who attribute events to their own
thoughts and actions, rather than to relationships between external objects or people.
Assimilation of new data on relationships in the external world depends on the existing
mental structures, which in turn are modified and enriched when the subject’s behaviour
accommodates the demands of reality (Piaget and Inhelder, 1969).

In the understandable panic after the September 11th, magical thinking has

produced plausible (but spurious) answers to the problem of explaining—and
preventing—suffering. It also seems to have provided a sense of psychological security
and certainty which has repeatedly ‘trumped’ a more rational or realistic sense of what is
likely to promote lasting physical security.

Highly mobile, un-uniformed and often drawing sustenance from a criminal under-

world, the terrorist is elusive even in death: on the whole, the perpetrators of the worst
atrocities can neither be interrogated nor punished because they have committed suicide in
the course of their crime. One timeless rule of war is this: when the enemy is elusive, more
accessible enemies must be found. Retribution will find its victims (and explanation for
suffering will find its object).

Just after 9/11, Bush declared: ‘Somebody is going to pay’. He told King Abdullah of

Jordan: ‘There’s a certain amount of blood-lust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction . . .
We’re steady, clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.’
As Rene Girard has noted: ‘When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate
victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only
because it is vulnerable and close at hand’. Osama bin Laden, almost certainly the
architect of 9/11, could not be found and probably remained somewhere in the mountains
between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well then, the Taliban or Saddam would have to do.
Vice-President Dick Cheney came close to admitting this ‘logic’ when he said: ‘To the
extent we define our task broadly, including those who support terrorism, then we get at
states. And it’s easier to find them than it is to find bin Laden.’ Lt. William Calley
remembered when he had faced an elusive enemy in Vietnam: ‘At last it dawned on me—
these people, they’re all the VC . . . I realise there are Americans who say, ‘How do you
really know it?’ Well, I was there. I made decisions. I needed answers, and I didn’t have a
more logical one.’ Calley played a key role in the My Lai massacre.

4

Feeding into the felt need for radical action has been a sense that the tools of the Cold

War are increasingly redundant. These tools centred on deterrence: the strangely

4

On Vietnam, see Susan Faludi (1999).

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comforting ability to threaten death and destruction to any state that might be considering
an attack. As Bush himself stated in the new National Security Strategy of the United
States:

Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose
avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so-called
soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness.

5

For a country where many still place particular emphasis on deterrence—not only in

foreign policy but also in the use of the death sentence for criminals —a suicide bomber is
all the more disorienting and alarming. Apparently, he wants to die.

In response to disaster, political leaders have followed the time-honoured path of finding

someone to blame, someone whose removal—it is claimed—will produce a safer world.
This process is reminiscent of nothing so much as a witch-hunt—a collective hysteria of
which 17th century Salem in North America is perhaps the most famous example. Keith
Thomas noted in his classic study ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic’ that when suffering
is not explicable within existing frameworks, human beings have tended to resort to
magical thinking.

6

The limits of medical knowledge in the 16th and 17th centuries, for

example, created a powerful impulse to explain illness through ‘witchcraft’. In the face of
the ‘disease’ of contemporary terrorism, the evident shortcomings in academic frame-
works—a militaristic ‘war studies’, a state-centric international relations, and a
statistically-obsessed political science—have helped to create political and intellectual
space for explanations that are once more leading us into the realms of the superstitious
and the persecutory. The focus, as so often in a witch-hunt, is on evil intentions more than
past actions. Rumsfeld says the US must ‘anticipate threats before they appear’. Three
variations of magical thinking have been invoked. First, an evil intention has been seen as
harmful in itself. Second, there has been a failure to discern—or even interest oneself in—
causal relationships lying beyond an egocentric universe: thus, Iraq and al-qa’ida can be
assumed to be in league because of a shared hostility to the US; the need for evidence on
causal relationships in the external world is denigrated; and egocentrism may even create a
presumption that anti-Americanism is a natural state of affairs (‘they hate us and envy us’),
marginalising the possibility that many people’s main grievance (before the violent
counter-terror) has been with their own government. Third, eliminating the evil individual
or individuals has been seen as magically solving the problem; the causal process by which
terrorists are made and replaced has not been taken seriously.

Our self-appointed witch-finder generals—usually besuited rather than in uniform—

presume to judge who is harbouring evil intentions and set out to provide the world with
‘proof’. Just as a woman accused of witchcraft could often save herself only by ‘admitting’
she was a witch, so too Bush made clear that Saddam’s only way to avoid war was to give a
‘full and complete’ declaration of the illicit weapons-of-mass-destruction which, it now
seems clear, he did not possess. There was also much talk of Saddam concealing,
destroying or shipping abroad his ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Historian Keith Thomas
said of suspected witches in pre-modern Europe: ‘If she were searched for the Devil’s
mark, her body was certain to offer some suitable mole or excrescence; if not, then she
must have cut it off, or perhaps concealed it by magic; it was known that these marks could
mysteriously come and go . . . If the witch confessed, that settled the issue; if she refused

5

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html

6

Thomas, 1978.

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to do so, she was adding perjury to her other sins.’ (Thomas, 1978). Does that ring any
bells in Downing Street or the White House?

Evidence from witch-hunts past and present suggests that they operate within closed

systems of thought that make them difficult to challenge. When the killing or banishment
of a witch does not eliminate a particular problem, the conclusion is usually not that the
witch-hunt was ill-conceived but that more witches must be found. (Similar dynamics can
be found among persecutory Communist regimes, including Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s.)
Terrorist acts in the wake of violent counter-terror have similarly been cited as evidence of
the need to reinforce the existing strategy and widen the pursuit of culprits. This impulse
needs questioning or we are heading down a path to escalating violence.

In many ways, we are back in the world of Orwell’s 1984 and the regime’s prohibition of

‘thought-crimes’. Today you can be punished for what you thought or intended rather than
for what you have done. This of course raises the question of who gives themselves the
right to presume to know these thoughts and intentions. When violence is justified in terms
of what someone is about to do, a profoundly dangerous step has been taken. Indeed,
propaganda about ‘What they are about to do to us’ is a hallmark of regimes preparing for
genocide: the destruction of a social group (the Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied
Europe, the Tutsis in Rwanda) can only be achieved if large numbers of people can be
convinced that this group is about to destroy them.

We are now in the murky world of Stephen Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report’ and its ‘pre-

crimes’ division. The idea is to stop crimes before they happen rather than the present,
‘too-late-by-half’ tactic of trying to punish perpetrators once a crime has taken place
(also known as the law).

The human tendency to look for magical solutions to suffering was perceptively

discussed by Hannah Arendt in relation to the rise of the Nazis (Arendt, 1951): indeed,
the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews can itself be seen as a 20th century witch-hunt, whose
‘magical’ solution for Germany’s ills proved deeply alluring despite lacking any basis in
reality. Crucially, identifying an enemy offers the cognitive satisfaction of certainty in
uncertain times. The fact that the proposed solution has no basis in reality does not
necessarily make it any less seductive. In his book ‘Mirrors of Destruction’, Omer Bartov
drew attention to the propensity to blame military catastrophe in World War One on those
(notably ‘The Jews’) who had allegedly undermined the war effort and betrayed German
soldiers: the need to explain and glorify suffering led to the mutation of enemies from
soldiers ‘over there’ to civilians ‘over here’ (Bartov, 2000). This reminds us of the
possibility that the witch-hunt will be extended internally. Those who initiate external
witch-hunts may find it hard to counter the arguments of those—like the British National
Party—who favour an internal one.

There is now an assumption that terrorists are a discrete and finite group of ‘evil’

individuals who can be isolated and eliminated. However, as Soviet dissident Alexander
Solzhenitsyn wrote in ‘The Gulag Archipelago’:

If only it were all so simple! 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. (Solzhenitsyn, 1975).

The business of isolating the evil ones and eliminating them is precisely the project of

fascism —and of the paranoid Communism that Solzhenitsyn both suffered and wrote
about.

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The need to identify particular individuals who can be blamed for violence (whether or not

they are responsible) has extended to the use of torture in jails in occupied Iraq, often
carried out against individuals with no connection to the resistance. Part of the purpose of this
torture has been to get information. But any ‘advantage’ here would seem to be more than
outweighed by a predictable diminution in access to information from sympathetic Iraqis.
Commenting on 16th century witch-hunts in Europe, Ann Barstow draws on Susan
Brownmiller’s work on sexual violence and notes: ‘It appears that jailers, [witch] pickers,
executioners and judges, all could take their sadistic pleasure with female prisoners [accused
of witch-craft]. Men involved wanted more from witch-hunting than the conviction of
witches: namely, unchallegeable sexual power over women’ (Barstow, 1994). Barstow adds:
‘ . . . the basic fact of having total juridical power over women may have fanned the propensity
for violence’. The temptations of exerting extreme power in the form of torture would appear
to be particularly great in the context of, first, 9/11 and, second, the fear and sense of
powerlessness among occupying soldiers bunkered in among an increasingly hostile popu-
lation (and a population that the US leadership in particular had promised would be grateful).

The Bush/Cheney model of combatting terrorism competes with an alternative (and

more accurate) model that places terrorist thinking at the extreme end of a continuum.
According to this alternative model, terrorists are not an entirely discrete, isolated or finite
group but rather a group whose numbers can always be swelled (or diminished) —
depending crucially on the way the threat of terrorism is dealt with and the degree of
sympathy the group has with those who are not terrorists (or at least not yet). This
alternative model is in line with much current thinking on the disarmament of more
conventional military factions: we have learned that even disarming a particular group will
not be enough for peace if the conditions turning civilians into fighters persist.

The fixation with removing the evil ones has a history that includes Aideed in Somalia,

Milosevic in Serbia and more recently Charles Taylor in Liberia. It tends to creates great
naivety in relation to what happens next. The removal of Saddam Hussein has also left in
place a complex web of corruption and criminal gangs—a situation not entirely dissimilar
to that following the removal of Milosevic in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The
working assumption of the US in particular is that if you remove Saddam (the heart of the
problem), a democracy will naturally grow up in its place. But there are reasons why
democracy was absent in Iraq through the 20th century (not least the artificiality of
colonial borders and the artificially-bolstered power of Sunni allies), and many of these
reasons persist. Removing a totalitarian regime creates a vacuum, to be sure; but
democracy is not the only liquid which will move in to fill the vacuum.

A final word on witch-hunts may be appropriate. The elderly have commonly been a

focus of witch-hunts, and a notable feature of the ‘war on terror’—as in several previous
US-led wars —has been the weakness of those who are claimed to embody the greatest
threat. As Arundhati Roy was prompted to observe by the attack on Iraq, ‘We once again
witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate
almighty America. (Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries—earlier there was
Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Grenada, Panama).’ (Roy, 2004, p. 105). Weakness means you
cannot easily hit back. Anthropologist Tim Allen has suggested that witch-hunts may, in
some circumstances, serve some kind of positive function in focussing community
hostilities onto a single individual and escaping a cycle of revenge. Girard himself stated:

He who exacts his own vengeance is said to ‘take the law into his own hands’. There is
no difference of principle between private and public vengeance, but on the social level,

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the difference is enormous. Under the public system, an act of vengeance is no longer
avenged; the process is terminated, the danger of escalation averted. (Girard, p. 16).

It follows that, where there is some kind of generalized consent to a war (to some extent,

the Iraq war in 1991), the potential for fuelling future violence is far less than where the
war is seen as an act of private vengeance which may itself be revenged.

5

SHAME AND COUNTERTERROR

Whether inside or outside Iraq, we cannot seem to let go of that tried and (strangely)
trusted solution: war. Enemies must still be found, labelled, isolated and eliminated.
Insecurity is remedied through violence, and this perpetually postpones any serious self-
analysis, any conciousness of our governments’ own role in fuelling cycles of violence.

The US’s dangerous project of serial persecution has been consistently backed by the

UK as well as getting sporadic support from others who have been flattered, bribed,
cajoled or coerced into compliance. Crucially, it is precisely the irrationality of this
apparently endless endeavour—somewhere between Bush magic and the Blair witch
project —that creates the necessity of orchestrating and bullying approval. Others must be
found to confirm you in your illusions.

9/11 brought with it a double threat of shame for the US. First, the attacks were

humiliating in themselves: caught by surprise, the world’s most powerful government —
already shaken by a fragile economic structure and heavy debt

7

—was conspicuously

unable to protect thousands of its own citizens; the hijacked planes brought down a
towering twin-symbol of US wealth before knocking a massive hole in the institution
charged with the country’s defence. Second, the attacks brought a more insidious threat of
shame —the threat arising from the suspicion, however dimly sensed, that 9/11 may have
occurred because of something that ‘we’ (meaning America) did. Terrorism purports to be
retribution, after all, and the question cannot entirely be expunged from consciousness:
retribution for what?

If Solzhenitsyn was right that ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of

every human being’, then trying to isolate the evil group and eliminate them makes no logical
sense but a great deal of psycho-logical sense: it helps in warding off the threat of shame.

The Afghan story is often forgotten—not least the way the US fuelled terrorism through

the manner of its intervention in (and withdrawal from) Afghanistan in the 1980s. The
intervention constituted an active nurturing of groups that later proved a significant source
of terrorists.

Separating the evil people in Iraq (terrorists, Saddam ‘remnants’) from ordinary

civilians protects the interveners from the shame of being an imperialist. As in the
Vietnam war, the habit of separating the evil people from ‘the rest of us’ seems to have
created a state of perpetual shock when those who are being saved from evil fail to show
the anticipated gratitude towards the self-declared ‘good guys’. There is also a state of
perpetual shock when the elimination of apparent leaders (for example, Saddam’s sons)
does not produce the abatement of violence predicted by US officials or generals. This also
reflects the tendency (mentioned above) to exaggerate the degree to which the enemy’s
violence is centralised.

7

See, for example, Todd, 2004; Putzel, 2005; Harvey, 2004. Compare Arendt (1958) on violence springing from

weakness rather than strength.

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Many catastrophes have brought forth a call for explanations and for associated

‘purifications’. Drawing on his fieldwork in northern Uganda, Tim Allen noted that elders
frequently sought to explain misfortune (for example, illness in a former soldier) with
reference to past antisocial behaviour—in other words, with reference to a morality they
sought to promote (Allen, 2000). In African civil wars, abstinence from sex and alcohol
has frequently been hailed as giving immunity to violence.

8

The Nazis threw invective at a

materialist Germany that had allegedly grown weak, feminine, soft and ‘bourgeois’,

9

and

writer Klaus Theweleit stressed that some of the origins of Nazism lay in a hostility among
German soldiers in particular to the forces and people—broadly, ‘women’, ‘revolution’,
‘Jews’, ‘corruption’—that were seen as undermining the strength, masculinity, pride and
purity of Germany and as paving the way for the humiliation of the 1919 Treaty of
Versailles.

A powerful strand of thought in the US suggested that 9/11 occurred, in part, because

America had become weak and pleasure-seeking. This has fed into two disturbing and
ultimately counterproductive reactions. The first has been aggression towards various
external enemies. The second has been a redoubling of the pursuit of ‘purity’ and ‘moral
regeneration’ at home—as if to reinvigorate a society grown soft and susceptible to attack.

The tendency to broaden the definition of the enemy is particularly troubling in view of

what we know about the ‘career trajectory’ of several notable terrorists and their feeling of
having been rejected by Western societies in which they live. To the extent that this
rejection is reinforced by ‘anti-terrorism’ measures, by anti-immigration rhetoric like that
of the UK’s Conservative Party before the 2005 elections, by suspicion of Muslims or
Arabs in general, and more generally by a new search for racial or religious ‘purity’, we
can (again) expect the creation of more terrorists.

More specifically, part of the humiliation of 9/11 was a feeling that the US had not been

strong enough, or macho enough, to deter it. The view that a weak response to 9/11 would
invite a worse attack was even expressed by some liberal commentators. While warning
against failing to distinguish terrorists from non-terrorists, New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman wrote just after 9/11: ‘To not retaliate ferociously for this attack on our
people is only to invite a worse attack tomorrow and an endless war with terrorists.’
(Friedman, 2001). For many officials and analysts, the US self-image as a superpower
demanded ‘tough action’. As Vice-President Cheney said when the Afghan attack ran into
significant resistance, ‘We should encourage the Northern Alliance to take Kabul. We as a
superpower should not be stalemated.’ (Woodward, 2002, p. 215). Significantly, Bush and
many members of his national security team saw the Clinton administration’s response to
bin Laden and international terrorism as so weak that it was virtually an invitation to hit
the US again. Criticism of Clinton was particularly strong when it came to his launching of
66 cruise missiles into al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in response to the
bombings of two US embassies in Africa in 1998. Bush commented:

The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile into some guy’s, you know, tent,
really is a joke. I mean, people viewed that as the impotent America . . . a flaccid,
you know, kind of technologically competent but not very tough country that was

8

Religious leaders associated with the civil defence in Sierra Leone promised some kind of immunity to violence

as long as recruits refrained from sexual intercourse and a range of abuses against civilians (Muana, 1997; Keen,
2004). On Mozambique, Wilson (1992); on Uganda, Allen (2004).

9

Getting women out of the workplace was part of this project.

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willing to launch a cruise missile out of a submarine and that’d be it. I do believe
there is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we’re almost
hedonistic, that we don’t have values, and that when struck, we wouldn’t fight back.
It was clear that bin Laden felt emboldened and didn’t feel threatened by the United
States. (Woodward, 2002, pp. 38–39).

This was to be an enduring theme. In June 2005, Bush told US soldiers at Fort Bragg,

North Carolina, ‘The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and
decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat.’

10

This analysis was part

of a much broader strain of thought that has portrayed liberal America as indecisive and
soft. Pointing to Paul Wolfowitz’s long-standing hostility to Saddam Hussein, Professor
Stephen Holmes observed that ‘Wolfowitz’s anger is fundamentally an anger against the
weakness of American liberalism . . . a source of weakness, and a source of rot and a
source of relativism that has been corroding American society for decades.’

11

If America had indeed become ‘flaccid’, ‘hedonistic’ and had lost its ‘values’, them

some kind of moral revival was apparently required to ward off future threats. This may be
an important part of the explanation for the increased emphasis on ‘moral issues’—
notably opposing abortion and gay marriage —in the 2004 elections, which saw Bush re-
elected with an increased majority and many voters galvanized and organized into
supporting Bush by the religious right (Burkeman, 2004). Fears that America had grown
weak also seem to have fed into a foreign policy backlash in which doubts about one’s own
values and vigour were violently cast aside. Norman Mailer observed of America in 2004:
‘We have become a guilty nation. Somewhere in the moil of the national conscience is the
knowledge that we are caught in the little contradiction of loving Jesus on Sunday, while
lusting the rest of the week for mega-money. How can we not be in need of someone to tell
us that we are good and pure and he will seek to make us secure?’ (Mailer, 2004, p. 13).

Compare these dynamics with an account from Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan, a

Muslim, on the process by which some young Muslims have been recruited into terror
organisations:

Young people are told: everything you do is wrong—you don’t pray, you drink, you
aren’t modest, you don’t behave. They are told that the only way to be a good
Muslim is to live in an Islamic society. Since they can’t do that, this magnifies their
sense of inadequacy and creates an identity crisis. Such young people are easy prey
for someone who comes along and says, ‘there is a way to purify yourself’. Some of
these figures even keep the young people drinking to increase their sense of guilt and
make them easier to manipulate. (Vallely, 2005).

Bush has occasionally come close to portraying 9/11 as an opportunity for moral or even

personal renewal. In February 2002, he declared, ‘None of us would ever wish on anyone
what happened on that day [9/11]. Yet, as with each life, sorrows we would not choose can
bring wisdom and strength gained in no other way. This insight is central to many faiths
and certainly to the faith that finds hope and comfort in a cross.’ The idea that worldly
suffering is some kind of message or Godly inducement to morality (cf Hilton) has a long
history and has had damaging effects in other policy arenas—notably through contribut-
ing to ambivalence and delays in tackling HIV/AIDS.

12

10

Transcript at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html.

11

‘The Power of Nightmares’, 27 October 2004, BBC2, October 2004.

12

On HIV/AIDS, see de Waal (2003).

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Bush’s linking of 9/11 with the perception of America as weak and without values is

odd in a number of ways. First, like a lot of statements about terrorists’ motivations, it
presumes to get inside the head of a very elusive and diverse group. (After each terrorist
attack, we hear that such-and-such a path of action—the one not favoured by the speaker
or writer—would be ‘giving the terrorists what they want’, a pitfall that I have perhaps not
managed to avoid, given my emphasis on violent counterterror as ‘giving the terrorists
what they want’!) There is a second oddity with Bush’s statement: it is almost as if the
terrorists have become a kind of ‘mouthpiece’ for the fears and prejudices of both Bush
himself and the religious right more generally. In effect, the terrorists are bizarrely credited
with accurately diagnosing American society’s faults—and the diagnosis is oddly in line
with the moral issues ‘backlash’ identified by Thomas Frank in his analysis of why
Kansas, though devastated by free market reforms, has nevertheless voted Republican.
American evangelical Jerry Falwell took Bush’s ventriloquism even further when he
portrayed 9/11 as God’s retribution for abortion, homosexuality and securalisation.

13

Here, it is God and the terrorists who are perceived as speaking with a single voice (a claim
made more obviously by the terrorists themselves).

14

6

ACTION-AS-PROPAGANDA

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of ‘action-as-propaganda’ in particular, one can analyse
the process of taking something irrational (essentially a magical solution) and making it
seem rational. Arendt drew attention to the human desire for predictability:

What the masses refuse to recognise is the fortuitousness that pervades reality. They are

predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples of laws and
eliminate coincidences by inventing an all-embracing omnipotence which is supposed to
be at the root of every accident (Arendt, 1951, pp. 351–352).

For Arendt, this desire for predictability creates opportunities for totalitarian regimes

(and, I would add, not just totalitarian regimes) to underline and bolster their own power
by making their own predictions come true. Arendt observed (Arendt, 1951, p. 363): ‘The
advantages of a propaganda that constantly ‘adds the power of organization’ to the
feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of
the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration’. Like the terrorist, the
counterterrorist may have an interest in bringing to the surface a war they had told their
supporters was hidden but real (Juergensmeyer, 2002).

Part of the ‘proof’ that legitimates the current serial witch-hunts is generated by the

witch-hunts themselves. Punishment can be used to imply guilt. As Arendt observed:
‘Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible
argument: ‘What crime must these people have committed that such things were done to

13

‘I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are

actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], People for the
American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you
helped this happen.’’ (CNN.com ‘Falwell apologizes to gays, feminists, lesbians’, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/
US/09/14/Falwell.apology/).

14

See, for example, Kellner (2003). Interestingly, hostility to secularization is something the religious right has in

common with Islamist groups. Perhaps the strange convergence of religious interpretations of 9/11 added
vehemence to the labeling of ‘Islamic terror’ as irrevocably ‘other’.

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them!’’ (Arendt, 1951). A common charge by the US command in Iraq has been that Iraqi
fighters have been using terrorist tactics. However, attacks on soldiers are not terrorism.
There is a process at work here: Iraq was portrayed as supporting the 9/11 attack; there was
no evidence for this; Iraq was attacked in any case; Iraq became, as a result, a source of
‘terrorism’. It would be hard to find a better or more pernicious example of Arendt’s
‘action-as-propaganda’.

Yet this process only replicates the fears arising from 9/11; it does not solve them.

When policy-makers in Washington and London were planning war in Iraq, the target
country stood in pleasing contrast to the terrorist. Where the terrorist was invisible and
elusive, Iraq was right there on the map with ‘Iraq’ conveniently stamped on top of it—an
identifiable, immovable enemy. But for the coalition soldiers who were sent to Iraq,
the situation was once again reversed, with the enemy again becoming elusive and
intangible. This brought the renewed danger of picking targets simply because they were
accessible —and no-one is more accessible than a prisoner.

US unilateralism also represents an enthusiastic embrace of ‘action-as-propaganda’.

Bush’s close adviser Karl Rove said of the war on terrorism: ‘Everything will be measured
by results. The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities that may not
actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated.’ In relation to the attack on Iraq in
2003, one senior White House adviser commented, ‘The way to win international
acceptance is to win. That’s diplomacy: winning.’

15

Bush himself said:

I believe in results . . . I know the world is watching carefully, would be impressed
and will be impressed with results achieved . . . we’re never going to get people all in
agreement about force and the use of force . . . but action —confident action that will
yield positive results provides kind of a slipstream into which reluctant nations and
leaders can get behind . . . (Woodward, 2002, p. 341).

There are some indications that, for the Bush administration, the aim was less to study
reality (and then base behaviour on it) that to create reality. In the summer of 2002,
journalist and author Ron Suskind met with one of Bush’s senior advisers, who was
unhappy with an article Suskind had written about the administration’s media relations.
The adviser commented that:

guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as
people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible rea-
lity.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiri-
cism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he
continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And
while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re
history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ (Suskind).

In Iraq, legitimacy was to be generated by war and by victory; but correspondingly, the

failure to achieve a lasting peace or long-term victory seems finally to be reducing Bush’s
popularity at home. Arendt noted that Nazism as an ideology collapsed very suddenly
when defeat meant it could no longer back its propaganda with imposing and successful

15

Dunn D (2003), citing McGreary J, ‘6 reasons why so many allies want Bush to slow down’, Time, 3 February

2003.

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actions. Those who claim that God is on their side may be particularly vulnerable to a loss
of popularity and prestige when defeat or stalemate imply that God is more ambivalent.

7

CONCLUSION

There is, perhaps, some tension between the proposition that the aim in the ‘war on terror’
is not necessarily to win, and the emphasis above on the ‘legitimacy’ that may come from
winning. However, the benefits of action-as-propaganda derive not so much from winning
as from appearing to win: presentation counts, particularly in the short and medium term.
Moreover, even a lack of success may lend legitimacy to the insistence that America and
its allies must devote ever-greater energy to defeating terrorism. Indeed, those waging war
on terror may need to insist simultaneously that they are both winning and losing. This is a
confusing message, to be sure; but a mixed message has the significant advantage that it
can never be disproved.

The ‘war on terror’ is based on the false promise of a finite number of evil individuals

and their ‘state backers’ and the false assumption that the source of the problem can be
physically eliminated. This damaging approach effectively reduces complex historical
processes to something akin to a crude video game in which an identifiable enemy can
simply be shot away. We need alternative models if we are to come up with less crude and
less counter-productive solutions. Even video games are not necessarily this simple: in a
game called ‘September 12’, players can blast away targets in an Arab village but it makes
women weep over their dead children as more terrorists grab guns to defend their homes
(Jenkins, 2003).

We have seen how the ‘war on terror’, like many civil wars, can be better understood as a

system than a contest. Sustained by counter-productive tactics that predictably create more
terrorists, the system simultaneously yields a range of political, economic and psychological
benefits for a variety of actors, notably those within a diverse coalition participating in the
‘counter-terror’. As in a civil war, benefits percolate through the system: the political and
economic benefits of the ‘war on terror’ accrue not only at the ‘top’ (notably, in Washington)
but among a wide range of regimes and interest groups that collaborate (or appear to
collaborate) in the attempt to eliminate the designated ‘evil’. Terrorists have also pursued
tactics that predictably alienate people and reinforce opposition.

Ultimately, whether in Africa’s neglected conflicts or in the higher-profile attacks of

September 11th, the only defence will be to defuse, rather than deepen, the underlying
anger. In the long term, this implies development and fostering democracy by peaceful
means. (The current article is not intended to address traditional ‘developmental’ issues in
any depth, but I would argue that, as with civil wars, a ‘bottom up’ approach to under-
standing the violence will be important.) In the short term, it implies not making things
worse through violence. Medical principles could usefully be applied to counterterrorism:
‘First, do no harm.’

During the Cold War and long before this, the old militaristic framework suggested that

you could sensibly respond to threats with either war or the threat of war. But this
framework is hopelessly out of date now that we are confronted with elusive and often
decentralised international terror networks, proliferating weapons, and with a type of
violence that is fuelled by widespread feelings of humiliation and anger, notably among
many Muslims. In these circumstances, trying to apply the old militaristic model to the
problem of terrorism is like trying to destroy a liquid with a sledgehammer or a virus with

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a bullet. Even when dealing with insecurity inside Iraq, there has been an erroneous
assumption among US official and generals that the enemy (like the occupying forces)
represents a hierarchy and that elimination of the leadership (first Saddam’s sons, then
Saddam) will disable the violence. The habitual sense of shock when this does not happen
reveals a particular mind-set. The much stronger hierarchy within the coalition forces was
denied when prison abuses were pinned on local initiative and ‘a few bad apples’.
Meanwhile, the easy label of evil among the enemy continues to provide space for tactics
and abuses that are counterproductive in combating terror but nevertheless functional in
important ways.

The question of intentions is a difficult one.

16

Were the counterproductive effects of the

‘war on terror’ foreseen, or even desired? It is hard to give a definitive answer. But I would
like to draw significantly on Michel Foucault

17

and suggest that key leaders in the ‘war on

terror’ have been trapped within systems of language and thought that are at once a part of
a shared culture and also (as they surround themselves with those sharing similar views)
partially of their own making. This helps to explain how the irrational can come to seem
rational. Meanwhile, the practical political and economic benefits accruing from perpetual
war have helped to ensure that challenges from within the dominant nations and their local
allies are insufficient to shake up the cozy and erroneous ‘truths’ that have underpinned the
current counterproductive approach. Although Bush, Blair and other close allies surely do
not want the ‘war on terror’ to fail, it would seem that other priorities take precedence and
help to cloud their awareness of what works and what does not. It is notable that, even once
the (foreseeable) effects of counterproductive tactics become clear, the tactics are still
adhered to. Counterproductive tactics have become part of a dysfunctional system that not
only yields certain benefits but also has a (fallacious) internal logic.

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