ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the use of World War II analogies by the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters, in the post-9/11 security environment. It examines historical analogies and schemas and explore some of the problems that arise from their use in international politics. Ideals of good versus evil have a long tradition in US foreign policy-making. In 1984, Philip Wander coined the term prophetic dualism to make sense of the strong self-righteous streak in US foreign policy, which divided the world into good and evil. Condoleezza Rice, in a speech in 2002 commemorating the Holocaust, made explicit connections between Americas predicament and that of the Jews. The Presidents Proclamation on the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation continued similar themes, reflecting the American Liberator analogy. Writing in 1990, Bernard Lewis defined a new and dangerous enemy. Pipes later operationalized a definition of Islamism as Americas greatest threat, a misanthropic, misogynist, triumphalist, millenarian, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, terroristic, jihadistic, and suicidal version of Islam.
