LONDON: A tendency among politicians to exploit the Sept 11 tragedy has been apparent from the very first. In Israel and Russia governments were quick to use US agony to justify the unjustifiable in Palestine and Chechnya. India used the crisis to dramatize another, in Kashmir.

From Tehran to Khartoum to Harare, political leaders climbed aboard the anti-terrorism bandwagon with a view to domestic advantage as well as US aid and approbation. Even Tony Blair’s post-Sept 11 empathy offensive was not totally devoid of similar calculations.

Such is the inevitable way, perhaps, of a hard-hearted, cynical world. But when George Bush, president of the very nation that was targeted, follows suit and begins to exploit and manipulate the Sept 11 tragedy for political advantage, alarm bells must ring out loud.

Yet this is exactly what Bush’s first state of the union address unabashedly set out to do. All US policy, both international and domestic, is now framed in terms of last autumn’s emergency; all measures, however partisan and divisive, are justified in the name of patriotic unity and solidarity; all misgiving and dissent must be overridden for the sake of America’s “just cause”.

Bush, in his black-and-white way, has clearly convinced himself that in what he calls the “decisive decade in the history of liberty”, his duty, mission and calling is to direct the triumph of good over evil at home and abroad. “America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere,” he declared.

This is a premise fortified by falsehoods and underpinned by a delusion. The principal falsehood is that the policies Bush now advocates are dictated by an ongoing terrorist menace. They are not. Primarily they are the products of conservative Republicanism, set dangerously loose in the aftermath of Sept 11.

There is nothing new, after all, in the idea of Iran, Iraq and North Korea representing an “axis of evil”; the US right has been gunning for them for years. There is nothing new about the ballistic threat. Bush has long wanted missile defences ; now he uses Sept 11 to justify his plan.

When Bush speaks of “tens of thousands of dangerous killers schooled in the methods of murder spread throughout the world like ticking bombs, set to go off without warning”, he is not only being irresponsibly alarmist; he is also disingenuously justifying the whopping $48 billion defence budget increase he always dreamed of.

Sooner or later, Bush, self-styled universal soldier for truth, will have to stop pretending that tragedy gave him a free hand to remake the US and the world to fit his simplistic, narrow vision. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.