Date: 22/09/2001
His address to Congress sketched a world view as simple as the Cold War division between democracy - and its symbol, the United States - and the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union.
In his address, Mr Bush defined the ideology of the new era: either you are with us, or you're with the terrorists.
Every aspect of American foreign policy will be sifted through that prism, analysts say. Every national leader who either spoke to the Bush Administration by telephone or trekked through Washington this week trying to understand what the New America would mean for their people, will have to choose.
"The world has to take sides," said Mr Bush's political adviser, Ms Karen Hughes.
"We have been called to defend freedom just as our fathers did in World War II."
From November 8, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, until September 11, 2001, when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US was the triumphalist superpower.
Content to bask in its victory as it reaped the benefits of globalisation, it touted the spread of democracy and worshipped the ideology of the market at the expense of government.
A White House spokesman was asked whether the $US40billion ($81billion) granted to help rebuild New York and improve intelligence gathering would blow the budget, until last week the subject of intense debate. He replied briskly: "National security comes first."
The editor of Newsweek International, Mr Fareed Zakaria, wrote this week: "The idea that politics was unimportant and that government didn't matter seems almost absurd in the light of last week's events.
"Around the world we will see governments become more powerful, more intrusive and more important.
"This may not please civil libertarians and human rights activists, but it will not matter. The state is back, and for the oldest Hobbesian reason in the book - the provision of security."
Mr James Lindsay, a member of President Clinton's National Security Council, said foreign policy shifted profoundly in the horrific hour last week, when the world's superpower with a military budget of more than $US300billion was left defenceless against martyrs with knives.
As in the Cold War, the over-riding mission to eradicate terrorism would mean new allegiances with countries the United States once scorned, and turning a blind eye towards abuses as long as nations would co-operate fully with America's new mission.
"Foreign policy is about making choices about competing priorities," Mr Lindsay said.
"The fight against terrorism is priority number one for the United States. That means other priorities fall down the list."
Of the new diplomacy of the Bush Administration, Mr Lindsay said: "It's very dangerous.
"There is going to be tremendous pressure to bring Russia aboard and it wants a softening of US criticism of its behaviour in Chechnya.
"We'd very much like [Indonesian President] Ms Megawati to say nice things about us. Does that mean we're going to swallow our concerns about the Indonesian Government's suppression of ethnic separatists?
"This resembles the Cold War more than a conventional war like WWII or the Gulf War, in that in the Cold War we made plenty of trade-offs," he said.
"America got into bed with unsavoury characters, Mobutu [Sese Seiko in Zaire] and [Spanish dictator Francisco] Franco, because we believed it was the lesser of the evils. In some cases people aren't persuaded that we needed to make all these friendships."
Mr Bush, in a speech compared to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 after the Japanese bombed the Pearl Harbour naval base, referred to the struggles of the 20th century when he outlined the struggle of the 21st in language reminiscent of the Cold War.
"We have seen their kind before," Mr Bush said of terrorists.
"They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century."
In a much-noted omission, he did not mention Communism, foe of the United States and particularly his Republican Party, for 50 years.
Commentators suggested that perhaps it was in deference to communist China, which America wants in its coalition against terrorism. Others said that, in the new American agenda, democracy was no long a prerequisite for American favour.
NATO has invoked the "attack on one is an attack on all" provision of its charter and Australia has invoked the ANZUS alliance for the first time. Most of Europe, with some reservations because of the still-vague plans to rid the world of terrorism, has lined up with the United States.
China wants irrefutable evidence that suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden was responsible for the terrorist strikes, and that any military action avoids civilian casualties, before it embraces any war with Afghanistan, where bin Laden has sheltered since the mid-1990s.
Friendly nations will extract a price for co-operation - a position most Americans find appallingly opportunistic.
But it is the nations which the United States believes harbour terrorists - Iran, Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Libya and Syria - that have most to fear from Mr Bush's stirring address.
Already, the Administration has not ruled out overthrowing Saddam Hussein of Iraq, whom Mr Bush's father pushed out of Kuwait in 1991.
To many key members of the Bush Administration, particularly the influential Deputy Secretary of Defence, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, the job was never finished.
Yesterday, an Administration source said Iraq's day would come but now the focus was on Afghanistan and its repressive Taliban regime.
Armed conflict with Iraq would dramatically escalate the declared war on terrorism, and risk alienating the Islamic and Arab nations that Mr Bush wants as part of his coalition to avoid any perception that his crusade is against Islam.
There is another stark similarity between this new conflict and the Cold War: the simplification of ideas and peoples.
"Our responsibility to history is already clear - to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil," Mr Bush said after the attacks last week. "The freedom-loving nations of the world stand by our side. This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail. In parts of the Islamic world, the United States is the Great Satan or the American snake."
America, which has experienced no foreign attacks on its shores since Pearl Harbour, is terrified by the terrorist strikes, fearful of further atrocities, and bewildered as to why anyone would hate it so. There is an ingrained sense in the US that, while America's foreign policy has often been flawed, it was always well intentioned.
Few question the "good versus evil" characterisation of the struggle, and no Administration official has been asked about American foreign policy in the Middle East and how it may have contributed to the hatred evident from bin Laden and his followers.
Dusko Doder, author of several books about Russia, points out the irony: "The Russians, after all, invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to provide fraternal aid to a Communist puppet regime against Islamic rebels. The US took the side of the rebels. Guess who was a main rebel leader training and supported by the United States? None other than bin Laden."
That irony, and others, have been lost in the grief and shock in the United States. Questioning Mr Bush's policy right now would be tantamount to treason. Some writers, particularly outside America, have begun the debate.
Journalist Robert Fisk said the horror last week was about more than the event itself.
"It is also about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps."
Last year, political scientist Mr Chalmers Johnson published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
Blowback is a CIA term meaning the unintended consequences of a covert operation, termed after the overthrow in 1953 of Mohamen, the elected Prime Minister of Iran, and the US-backed installation of the Shah to power.
"What the daily press reports as the malign acts of 'terrorists' or 'drug lords' or 'rogue states' or 'illegal arms merchants' often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations," he wrote.
In an interview with the Herald, Mr Johnson said the terrorist strikes last week were "blowback big time".
"The book was intended as a warning of the dangers inherent in our foreign policy. My view is this was not an attack on America, it was an attack on American foreign policy and I hate to say this but 5,000 New Yorkers may turn out to have been collateral damage."
Johnson wants a re-assessment of policy in the Middle East - from its backing of Israel to its troops in Saudi Arabia. "We ought to decide where we should pull in our horn." But the likelihood of that is nil.
As the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Donald Rumsfield put it, the terrorists "are clearly determined to try to force the United States of America and our values to withdraw from the world".
"We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable; or to change the way that they live.
"And we chose the latter."
Story Picture: Fighting words . . . President George Bush is flanked by the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, left, and Senator Robert Byrd as he addresses the Congress. Photo: AFP
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
