Changes

In The Minority Report (2002), Steven Spielberg's last film based on a Phillip Dick short story, criminals are arrested before they commit their crime, since three humans who, through monstrous scientific experiments, acquired the capacity to foresee the future, can exactly predict their acts (the "minority report" from the title refers to those rare cases where one of the three mediums employed by the police disagrees with the other two about a crime to be committed)… If one transposes this idea to international relations, does one not get the new "Bush (or, rather, Cheney) doctrine," now publicly declared as the official US "philosophy" of international politics (in the 31 pages paper entitled "The National Security Strategy," issued by the White House on September 20 2002)? Its main points are: the American military might should remain "beyond challenge" in the foreseeable future; since the main enemy today is an "irrational" fundamentalist who, in contrast to Communists, lacks even the elementary sense of survival and respect of his own people, America has the right to preemptive strikes, i.e., to attack countries which do not already pose a clear threat to the US, but MIGHT pose such a threat in the foreseeable future; while the US should seek ad hoc international coalitions for such attacks, it should reserve the right to act independently if it will not get sufficient international support.

What, then, are we blinded for when are dreaming the dream of the "war on terror"? Perhaps the first thing to note here is the deep satisfaction of the American commentators in ascertaining how, after September 11, the anti-globalist movement has lost its raison — what if this satisfaction tells more than it meant to say? What if the War on Terror is not so much an answer to the terrorist attacks themselves as an answer to the rise of the anti-globalist movement, a way to contain it and distract attention from it? What if this "collateral damage" of the War on Terror is its true aim? One is tempted to say that we are dealing here with a case of what Stephen Jay Gould would have called (ideological) ex-aptation: the apparent secondary effect or profit (the fact that the anti-globalist protest is now also listed in the series of "terrorist" supporters) is crucial.

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