As 'evil axis' turns, Bush sees no blur of right, wrong

Political rhetoric has always been very important ("fetuses" vs. "unborn babies," "illegal aliens" vs. "undocumented workers," etc.). In this case - tied as it is to attacks on Americans, and now a war in which American lives have been lost - such rhetoric may be even more profound. But in a way, saying "evil is real," as Bush does, also can be seen as a way of avoiding the "why do they hate us?" question. It allows one to fault "evildoers" while US policies, hubris, and culture have nothing to do with what motivates terrorists. It makes it easier to just say, "they hate freedom and our way of life."

"The great divide is economic, educational, medical - all those things that separate the haves from the have nots," says Dr. Dunn, who is also concerned about the implications for separation of church and state in the president's language.

This has led to a debate that is intellectual as well as theological and political.

"We have not seen the face of evil; we have seen the face of an enemy who comes at us with a full roster of grievances, goals, and strategies," says Stanley Fish, professor of English and criminal justice at the University of Illinois.

"If we reduce that enemy to 'evil,' we conjure up a shape-shifting demon, a wild-card moral anarchist beyond our comprehension and therefore beyond the reach of any counterstrategies," he wrote in The New York Times last October, responding to charges that "the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country's resolve."

Still, Bush's rhetoric here has some surprising supporters. "Among other virtues, what Mr. Bush said about the three countries has the advantage of being true," editorialized The Washington Post in reference to Bush's lumping together of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as a new "axis of evil."

But for most Americans, it's not what foreign policy experts think, but the obviously heightened need for a defense against attack on the homeland that is important. And here, his choice of rhetoric, whether calculated or intuitive, is an important element in his extraordinary level of public support.

"Mr. Bush's eloquence is in his plainspokenness...." Peggy Noonan, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the State of the Union address. "Its main point was to tell the American people we are in the fight of our lives and that we had better win, and will."

Bush's persistent warnings about "evil" and the need to fight it thus echo Edmund Burke, the British statesman and parliamentary orator: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Doing nothing is not a US option, and for Bush this means not only record-setting military spending but also appealing to "a land of people who are so compassionate and so decent and so kind, that evil people can't possibly put that into their calculation." He thus posits American "goodness" against "an enemy that knows no value, does not share the same values we do."

"I'm asking people to fight evil with good," he says. "Stand up to evil with acts of goodness and kindness."

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