The War on Terror between Islamphobia and Reconstructing Reality

Alexander Dawoody

No 228, Apas Papers from Academic Public Administration Studies Archive - APAS

Abstract: After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States launched a "war on terror" to retaliate against the perpetrators of these attacks. As a consequence, the Bush Administration launched a military campaign against Iraq, and end up occupying the country. To rationalize its military action, especially when the stated justification for the occupation, searching and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, proven to be bogus, and after five years of failure in capturing and bringing into trial the actual perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration shifted its propaganda toward creating a new Middle East by building a new and democratic Iraq that will serve as model and permeates its democratic experiments to other countries in the region. When Bush's democracy façade evaporated with the collapse of the experiment in Iraq and the emerging of a failed, violent, and civil war-torn Iraq, the administration shifted its attempt toward blaming Islam for the problem and faulting it as the source of the conflict and the obstacle for progress. In doing so, the administration began to depart from the traditional fact-based policy in the United States and utilize a utopian faith-based political approach toward world conflicts. In this utopian world, facts are irrelevant, and reality is reconstructed in order to serve a political ideology. The world itself then is divided into two camps, those who are with the new reconstructed reality, and those who are against it. Within this clash of civilizations, history ends and the war on terror begins in order to redraw the map of the world and America's leadership in it in directing its crusade against "the others." This paper examines the ideological significance and impact of the Bush crusade and its utopian faith-based foreign policy. The examination will focus on the policy's categorization of the world according to "us versus them", and shifting the blame toward Islam as a fascist ideology in order to justify the current war in Iraq and the possible future war with Iran. It will also look at this crusade and its political resurrection of an outdated and outmoded medieval practice and belief that demonstrated its fatality and ill notion when deposited to the trash bins of history.

Keywords: Fascism; Islamphobia; Terror; Fundamentalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03-16
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