Abstract

The Bush Crusade

The article looks at the reaction of United States President George W. Bush to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. New York's World Trade Center collapsed not just onto the surrounding streets but into the hearts of every person with access to cable television. But if a vast throng experienced the terrible events of 9/11 as one, only one man, the President of the United States, bore a unique responsibility for finding a way to respond to them. A few days after the assault, Bush put a word on the new American purpose that both shaped it and gave it meaning. "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism." The Crusades were a set of world-historic crimes. But crusade was a match for jihad, and such words threatened nothing less than apocalyptic conflict between irreconcilable cultures. Here is the deeper significance of Bush's inadvertent reference to the Crusades: Instead of being a last recourse or a necessary evil, violence was established then as the perfectly appropriate, even chivalrous, first response to what is wrong in the world. Religious war is the danger here, and it is a graver one than Americans think. Despite our much-vaunted separation of church and state, America has always had a quasi-religious understanding of itself. To put the best face on the Bush agenda, a humane project of antiproliferation can be seen at its core. As it pursues a world-threatening campaign against other people's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration refuses to confront the moral meaning of America's own weapons of mass destruction, not to mention their viral character, as other nations seek smaller versions of the American arsenal, if only to deter Bush's next "preventive" war.