‘Hysteria over the barbarians at the gate has destroyed republics from Rome to Germany. Will President Bush's post-Sept. 11 America meet a similar fate?

In the name of stopping the new bogeyman of international terrorism, our government has claimed an unfettered right to torture foreigners, eavesdrop on citizens and reorder the world with our military might. It is a policy that depends for its domestic political success on the specter of an enemy whose power and purpose must never be subject to logical and factual inquiry, lest it lose its power to alarm.

Five years ago, a moribund Bush administration seized upon the national fear and revulsion over the Sept. 11 attack to tighten its grip on power. Quickly diverting the nation into a disastrous foreign military adventure in Iraq, which had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, the Republicans happily shed painstakingly established domestic civil liberties and mocked the ideal of representative democracy by lying to the American public. A July 21 Harris Poll revealed that fully half the public still buys the carefully constructed Bush falsehood that Saddam Hussein had usable weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, the president continues to assert constitutionally indefensible powers to the office of the president. As the conservative Salt Lake Tribune editorialized July 29, "Congress and the courts must rein in this presidential power grab. To do otherwise would be to court tyranny." Perhaps most frightening of all, however, is the enraptured talk of a World War III by influential neo-con ideologues nurturing a self-fulfilling clash-of-civilizations worldview. These ideologues are oddly aligned in a pincer movement on our president's malleable brain with Christian fundamentalists, who hope violence in the Middle East presages a coming Apocalypse.’

Why We Don't Know Our Enemy