19 (52)
The best way to protect America is to stay on the offensive. President is logical in his narrative,
as he sets priority for the military to change its way to think and fight in order to prevent mass
terror. Therefore “what’s different today is our sense of urgency”, and “America… must not be
bound to past” (Bush 2001a). President Bush’s narrative is therefore a narrative of the future.
5. Deconstructing the “different” war
Paul Virilio believes that traditional concepts of politics, economic and international affairs no
longer have the relevance they had in earlier attempts to describe the state of the world politics.
Actually he is in the same line with President George W. Bush who argues on behalf of the ‘dif-
ferent kind of war’ that has challenged the international relations after the Cold War with the “re-
gime change” policy. The unilateral “Bush doctrine” has challenged the “world order” following
closely the American-centric worldview in which U.S. engages with the “rogue states” in the
name of the “enemies of freedom”. Can this war be described with the ‘war on terror’, and more
specifically here with the ‘different kind of war’ phrases? I shall turn on to and deconstruct in this
chapter the major elements of the ‘different kind of war’, which characterize how different this
war may be, in order to expose the inherent contradictions in apparently reasonable positions.
For a start we can ask, is the ‘different kind of war’ a phrase based on trying to get more re-
sources behind the war efforts, or better to say in trying to increase effectiveness of the war
machine with the idea of “minimum inputs with maximum outputs”. Virtually, President Bush is
requesting more capabilities that are able to transfer information from “sensor to shooter” faster
than the enemy. If we follow Jean-Francois Lyotard, he may say that this is then a typical tech-
nological game of truth and false. The progress of the ‘different kind of war’ declared by the
President, specifically when we are talking about defining meanings of information, war and in-
formation technology has not necessarily been grounded on new arguments but has ground on
invented new rules. That may be one of the reasons that Bush requests military to change the
way of thinking as the “rules of the game” or war has literally changed.
The whole argumentation of Bush narrative of “civilizations fight” to the military is based on the
many and changing faces of the enemy. In order to have a victorious fight against all enemies
there is a need to have superior information technology savvy machines such as satellites and
unmanned sensors that do not necessarily produce better knowledge from the battlefield but
more information. Instead, the narrative is based on the principle of Lyotard’s efficiency, which
highlights “good moves”. The “good move” is according to Lyotard’s thoughts defined good if the
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