Our Place in the World: Personifying evil a dangerous Bush strategy

On July 31, U.S. arms control diplomat John Bolton bashed North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as "a tyrannical dictator" who "keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with many more mired in abject poverty scrounging the ground for food." The statement is probably true, so why make a big deal of it? Because personification of evil is how President Bush sells his wars of choice.

To gain public support for a pre-emptive war a national leader needs a conceivable if not verifiable threat, and the threat must come from an identifiable and easy-to-hate enemy. If you want to take out a country such as Iraq, first establish danger, preferably with the scariest scenario -- the imminent unleashing of weapons of mass destruction. But you can't stop at that, because if impending danger is the only reason for going to war, Congress and the public will ask for evidence of the threat, and we know how difficult that can be.

The way to win approval for war is to arouse the people against a glaring evil behind the threat, and personified evil works best. It's far easier to hate, or to be aroused against, an evil person than a nation of people. It was hard to hate all Germans, but Hitler's terrible atrocities aroused us to action in World War II.

The public never fully supported the Vietnam War, in part because there was no outstanding evil tyrant inciting us to hatred and action against him.

In winning public approval to invade Iraq, Bush never explained the threat posed by Iraq. Instead, his pitch was against evil personified in Saddam Hussein and, to a lesser extent, Saddam's two sons.

To this end, Saddam was made in heaven. "Regime change" focused Americans on an evil person, not on the real threat of an impaired dictator of a country with a deteriorated infrastructure and a destroyed economy. Rallying the American people against Iraq's military threat, or the need to secure our oil supply, or to "install democracy" in the Middle East, wouldn't have worked.

The president needed us to fear and hate a particular evil enough that we would intuitively connect it to an alleged threat. For this he needed personified evil, and Saddam was his ace in the hole. Bush's mindset of good vs. evil, or righteousness vs. Satan, stirred public opinion by focusing the argument on an evil person rather than on an alleged threat. Never has a president so frequently and powerfully invoked his rightness against an evil so concentrated in one person. No president ever demonized Stalin or Castro to this extent. As a nation we couldn't fully understand the threat from Iraq, but we weighed in against the evil of Saddam.

Before and during the Iraq War, Bush invariably responded to any questioning of our involvement in Iraq -- even regarding cost -- with a litany of Saddam's cruelties. If asked to give evidence of bio-weapons, Bush responded that "Saddam even gassed his own people" and he has since justified the war by "getting rid of the tyrant."

Our war policy based on attacking personified evil is hollow and deceptive because it has allowed our leaders to apply it selectively according to perceived national interests. Personified evil was rife in Liberia for years, but when the rest of the world asked us to take action there to stop the carnage we declined effective military aid because it didn't serve our strategic interests to do so.

This approach of the Bush administration is extremely dangerous, as it appeals to base passions underlying intolerance and hostility rather than to realistic assessments. It leads to arbitrary and self-aggrandizing use of force. It diverts us from the real problems of terrorism and it weakens us by earning the enmity of most of the rest of the world.

Chasing personified evil has no end. For every evil tyrant we eliminate -- dead or alive -- we must find another one as a new focus of appeal for ongoing public support. This is why Kim Jong Il and North Korea are on the hit list. With Saddam out of the way we need a replacement evil tyrant to keep the ball rolling. So who's next?

Tom Preston lives in Seattle. Submissions for Our Place in the World, of up to 800 words, can be e-mailed to editpage@seattlepi.com; faxed to 206-448-8184 or mailed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, P.O. Box 1909, Seattle, WA 98111-1909.

Add P-I Opinion headlines to