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Excerpts from, MALIGNANTS IN THE BODY POLITIC: REDEFINING WAR THROUGH METAPHOR
BY DOUGLAS R. STICKLE, THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIRPOWER STUDIES
AIR UNIVERSITY, MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, ALABAMA, JUNE 2002
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On September 11, 2001, President George Bush stated that as a result of the terrorist attacks, “an illusion of immunity was shattered.” In January 2002, Bush said that his hope was that all nations would “head our call” and “eliminate the terrorist parasites who threats their countries & our own.”
His colleague Condoleezza Rice reinforced Bush’s conception or perception, declaring that the United States was “actively helping countries to improve their immune systems against terrorism.”
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Dr. Richard N. Haas suggested we view international terrorism as “a terrible, lethal virus.” Like a virus, international terrorism “respects no boundaries--moving from country to country.“
We also need to make sure, Haas said that this virus “does not mutate into something ever more deadly.” The United States was actively helping countries to “improve their immune systems against cancer.” Eradicating cells is like “cutting out a cancer.” |
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In this astonishing document, Major Stickle draws the analogy between the United States as a nation and a body with an immune system. He suggests that we accept—or at least not reject—the assumption that “conflict in one area of life (particularly when it involves life and death) might reveal strategies or concepts relevant to war.”
In other words, processes occurring within the body—the immune struggle against malignant cells—might illuminate political warfare.
Stickle assumes that terrorists are “infections or cancer cells.” Medical discourse about the body’s immune system warding off microbial invaders reflects “how a state’s protective system might ward off terrorist invaders.”
Cancer, Stickle says, “violates the norms of cellular behavior,” stimulating its own growth and “ignoring signals from neighboring cells to stop growing.” Cancer, the “renegade of cellular society,” manifests “uncontrolled cell proliferation.” We may understand terrorism, therefore, Stickle concludes, as a “meta-sizing cancer: a plague from which we are not immune.”
Throughout his document, Stickle cites policy makers who compare terrorism to a disease within the American body, and terrorists to malignant cells within this body.
Donald Rumsfeld professed his belief that terrorism was a “cancer on the human condition that the United States intended to “oppose wherever it is.”
Paul Wolfowitz compared terrorism to a “cancer that has spread throughout the world.”
While Ambassador John D. Negroponte responded to the 9/11 attacks by declaring that “We knew we had cancer. Now we know it has metastasized.” The al-Qaeda terrorist network “reaches into the very system of cooperation and communication.”
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