U.S. forces in Iraq is a good example here. Criticism of this publicity stunt misses the way the warrior image enacted not Bush's fantasy of U.S. militarism but the reality of U.S. militarism-the staged fantasy didn't cover up the truth of ongoing military conflict. On the contraf}lj it performed it and in so doing expressed the truth of Bush's intentions to continue in·his fight to eliminate evil from the world.)
One last aspect of the way "evil" inhabits Bush's language is crucial to understanding how Bush could invoke an axis of evil. This last aspect, moreover, points less toward Bush's serving as some kind of a master who knows than it does to Bush's functioning perversely as a kind of object or instrument of knowledge. Bush sees himself as chosen by God. He sees America as duty bound to ensure the establishment of God-given rights all over the world. To this extent, fighting evil is a false choi�e: we have no choice; or th.e orly response to this choice is to accept it, bring it on! anything else is damned from the outset. The falseness of this choice is clear when we try to introduce it into the field of politics and debate it: Oka)IJ we can end world povert)'J find a cure for cancerj or eradicate evil in the world-whoever "votes" against eradicating evil must secretly support it! Perhaps the proper response to Bush's ontological evil is to take the choice of :fighting evil seriously-yes, there is evil in the world, but there are other chalenges as well.
Once the United States is God's chosen instrument for removing evil from the world, we confront the truth of democracy in comunicative capitalism: it's a perverse form of governance protecting raw power while immunizing it from substantive change since all change has already been �oded in terms of democracy. Any mistake, problem, or excess is always already captured as demanding democracy as its solution. The invocation of evil as Real, however, belies the fetishistic denial driving such appeals to democracy. Ontological evil subverts and exceeds the symbolic order of language, rules, and norms on which democracy has been premised. Bush can barely speak. His administration uses language as a mantra, meme, or slogan to afect people directly and viscerally. His invasion of Iraq broke explicitly with previous U.S. foreign policy and the norms of the international community. How far this has gone might be seen in th.e attacks on Howard Dean during the 2004 presidential campaign. Dean was widely mocked for suggesting that Osama bin Laden should receive a fair trial. The rule of law, it seems, is now a joke, a joke preventing the United States from eradicating evil from the world, its God-given mission as a democracy.
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