Hours after the 9/11 attacks President Bush told the world that terrorism was the main danger to US interests and extremism the main cause of suffering in this world. Now that the US president is in the Middle East on a tour that some see as a peace mission and others as a call to arms it is clear he hasn't changed his mind. George Bush cannot get it in his mind that terror didn't come out of the void, or that extremism may be a reaction to injustice. Poverty, the bleeding of developing countries, the attempts to control the world's wealth and destiny have all conspired to unleash anger and fanaticism across the world. And yet President Bush doesn't seem to realise that even before terror had a name, even before religious fanaticism became so prevalent, the world was caught up in destructive wars. The US president wants to reduce all conflicts to a single common denominator. Extremism, he claims, is responsible for all the calamities visited upon humanity. It is a view that conveniently absolves a great many ill-doers from responsibility for the consequences of your actions. You can be rapacious and unjust, could be the very incarnation evil but as long as you're not a fanatic it's OK. Bush's only frame of reference is circumscribed by only his division of the world into good and bad guys. And anyone challenging the US, be it Al-Qaeda or Hugo Chavez, is lumped in the same boat. They are bad guys. They are fanatics. Bush seems to think that eliminating Hizbullah will resolve all of Lebanon's problems overnight. He believes the problem in Iraq is not one of occupation but one of resistance and that ending the bloodshed in Iraq hinges not on pulling out foreign troops but on eliminating "extremism". The world according to Bush is made up of two camps: extremists and non-extremists. This is more or less what he meant when he spoke about the Axis of Evil. It is not that this one-dimensional view of world affairs, one in which you can resolve any problem by calling your opponents extremists and then walking all over them until they capitulate, is not getting us anywhere. The problem is that we are sleepwalking to the brink of calamity. The most dangerous extremists in this world are not the ones at which Bush forever points his finger, they are the neo-conservative hawks that populate the White House. Their war on terror has been one of the costliest adventures since WWII. And their tunnel vision is shared by Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who believes the world is made up of true believers and the rest of humanity, and it matters not a jot who gets caught up in the crossfire between the two.
