Where does the distinct odour of fanaticism come from, as this war approaches? Osama bin Laden, of course. Saddam Hussein? Not really. He isn’t even “reckless” or a “serial miscalculator,” as the experts like to say. He made sure he had U.S. support for attacking Iran in the eighties, then cleared the invasion of Kuwait with the American ambassador. (He thought.) He’s a vicious thug, not a fanatic. But what about the U.S.?

Start with the administration A-team: Vice-President Dick Cheney; Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld; deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; the point man on Mideast policy, Elliott Abrams; chair of the defence advisory board, Richard Perle, among others. A year before 9/11, they all signed a document put out by the Project for a New American Century, calling for Saddam’s ouster and the ferocious use of U.S. power against any potential rival, but sadly fretting that their grandiose vision might never be realized unless there was — in a mesmerizing phrase — “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Then comes 9/11. There is no way they can react as most people do, with simple shock and horror. They have anticipated this. For them, it’s hellish — and opportunity knocking. That’s what they wrote. Next day, Donald Rumsfeld demands an attack on Iraq, despite any link to 9/11. He’s going for it. People have been perplexed ever since by the lack of fit between the event and their response, but they were ready. It takes cold-hearted zealotry to use such a thing in such a way. Still, it’s not quite fanaticism.

But what about the President? He’s a different case. He didn’t sign the Project statement, maybe never heard of it, or perhaps someone told him about it. This isn’t because he’s stupid — or moronic — but, as Mark Crispin Miller says in The Bush Dyslexicon, because he’s mentally lazy. He prefers to trust his “gut instinct,” which is easier than thinking a problem through. We saw him react on 9/11. First he just sat there in a classroom. Then he looked befuddled and shaken, while flying around the country. But, by evening, he started to pull a reaction together. He’s always been comfortable with vindictiveness: In the campaign debates, he smirked so hard when he spoke of executions during his time as Texas governor that a man in the audience asked about it. And he’s a born-again; he thinks God wanted him to run for president, that Jews won’t go to heaven, that “God is not neutral” in the eternal battle between good and evil.

So, by that night, he’s been pointed, or pointed himself, in the direction of a good/evil interpretation of the day’s events, along with punishing “the evildoers.” He sticks to this version, through the war on Afghanistan, then on to Iraq and others yet to come. It makes for a highly successful fusion: their complex geopolitical doctrine with his fundamentalist moral simplicity.

It’s crucial what he brings to the mix himself, unburdened by too deep a sense of that hefty analysis of U.S. power post-2000 signed by the others. He concentrates on being punitive, his strong suit. He will terminate the evil ones as he did Karla Faye Tucker. (Please — don’t kill me! was her last plea to him as governor, he “joked.”) In his State of the Union address, he spoke smugly about assassinating al-Qaeda members: “Let’s put it this way — they are no longer a problem.” That bent will emerge again if the U.S. bogs down in Iraq and there’s pressure to, for instance, use nuclear “bunker-busters.” Does anyone doubt he’ll okay it? This is his unique contribution — not just callousness à la Rumsfeld but virtual enthusiasm for righteous death-dealing — and it creates a scary resonance between Dubya and the deathly martyr mentality of fanatical Islam. Fanaticism is always about death. The others on his team are ideologues; he’s a crusader.

That’s his word, which he employed even after apologizing for insensitivity to Muslims for having used it. Because it is a crusade. Each side has its martyrs ready; the U.S., by implicitly accepting future 9/11s along with more “homeland” deaths as the price of pursuing its policies. Those are different kinds of death than you accept by reluctantly sending young people to war, as must sometimes happen. It amounts to deliberate sacrifice of American civilians, for a “higher” cause, or Project. So Osama gets what he wanted—a U.S. attack on Islam; and so do the statement signers. Each side beckons the other to the war, muttering Yes as they watch it near.

Yet the genius of George W. Bush is that he always looks as if he just arrived on the scene accidentally (which is true only in the sense that he was not very democratically elected) and is therefore absolved of too much responsibility. Can you picture Dick Cheney pulling this off? Or Al Gore?

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.