The Orbis

When I hear the phrase Bush-isms, I tend to think about humans and fish coexisting peacefully or about how children in America is not learning. There is another type of Bush-ism, and it does greater harm to America’s foreign policy than the president’s malapropisms do to the English language.

The weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks were probably Bush’s best moments as president. Bush consoled and comforted a grieving nation, reassuring Americans on Oct. 4, 2001 that “this great country will not let evil stand.” Bush framed the impending war on terror concisely by saying that it would be “a monumental struggle of good versus evil,” using language that calls to mind the Judeo-Christian story of Satan’s rebellion against God.

Though President Bush soothed a grieving country, it is disturbing how many of the words he used then have come to define his administration’s foreign policy. Using general and emotive language to console heartbroken Americans is one thing, but employing the same terms in an effort to identify a complex and multifaceted enemy is another.

“We’re fighting evil” quickly became one of Bush’s refrains. The president has also often cited clarity as a virtue in fighting the war on terror, so let’s be clear: We are not fighting Evil Itself. We are fighting certain terrorists who are evil.

What Bush has spoken of is a type of monolithic terrorism, a cousin to the concept of monolithic communism that dominated U.S. foreign policy during the early stages of the Cold War. Robert Wright of the New America Foundation explained recently in Foreign Policy magazine that Bush’s view of evil seeks “a grand unified explanation of...badness, the linkage of diverse badness to a single source.” In the 50s and 60s, any communism could be traced back to the Kremlin (a notion later discredited by China). Now, we deal not with Mother Russia, but rather the Mother of All Evil, whatever that may be.

The problem with viewing terrorism as emanating from a single source is that it minimizes the importance of distinctions such as those between, say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. If all terrorism is essentially the same, then why bother with distinctions?

Characterizing terrorists with broad verbal strokes, such as “They hate freedom,” discourages any understanding of the motivations of particular terrorist groups or regimes. In the first presidential debate, the president lumped Chechen separatists, Al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents together as a singular “group of killers.” Treating three unique groups of terrorists as a single entity makes it difficult for many Americans to understand that terrorist organizations with different motivations respond to different types of pressures. The fight against terrorism must be nuanced, not one-size-fits-all.

Am I overly concerned with semantics? Not when President Bush has already taken advantage of the blurred distinctions among terrorists to mislead the public into supporting an invasion of Iraq. The president framed the war on terror as a concrete struggle between good and evil, so the public was receptive when he said, “You cannot distinguish between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in the war on terror.” Approximately two-fifths of Americans still believe that the Iraqi dictator played a direct role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

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