5: The need for iron control of the population.

In any war, and in particular in the war on terrorism, you can only win if your system of administration, covering everything from the military to education, is superior to that of your enemies. Here there is much work to be done. Most Empires in history, the Persian, Roman, Chinese, Spanish, French and the Soviet Union, to name only a few, grew powerful in tandem with growing bureaucratic control.

Control was maintained and increased by dividing and sub-dividing the bureaucracy, increasing its numbers and its power. It became stronger and more centralized and more ‘efficient’ as a way of controlling every aspect of people’s lives. The aim was to create a world where no one was more than a heart-beat away from some official, some file, some rule which they must not be, but almost inevitably was, broken. This process of the inexorable progress of bureaucracy filled almost all civilizations with an army of officials and petty rules.

Unfortunately there were a few exceptions, and the countries you lead in the west are among them. For peculiar reasons the English operated a de-centralized and rather informal and shamelessly ad hoc and non-bureaucratic system. Their appalling jumble is well described by the philosopher Tocqueville who also noticed how this system was transferred to America. The bureaucracy was small and relatively weak, and most of the administration, whether of justice, local politics, or the local economy was undertaken by unpaid ‘amateurs’. What kept the system going was a system of voluntary responsibility, numerous associations and organizations not owned by the State. This is what some people have recently termed ‘civil society’. These stood outside the State and could not easily be controlled by it.

This was a very unprincipled and dangerously confused system, which might have been just about tolerable at the primitive stage of development of Britain and America in the past. It even muddled through in a couple of World Wars, but it was a close thing against the more sophisticated bureaucratic machines of Germany, Italy and Japan. It will not do now in this new war against terror.

4:8 Create a new world order based on your supremacy.

Since the message here is absolutely central, it is worth repeating and expanding on what you have to do. To encourage you, we can remind you of how much you have already achieved towards destroying the unsatisfactory state of affairs which had developed by the end of the last millenium.

For a time after the Second World War your predecessors seemed to cede the right of pre-emptive strike to that ineffectual body, the United Nations. For fifty years a new principle seemed to be gaining ground that the sovereignty of a nation state could not legally be infringed without authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations.

This appeared to reverse a dog-eat-dog, fear-filled, history that had lasted for ten thousand years since the start of settled civilizations. For the first time, the world seemed to have agreed to play by universal rules which made people moderately safe from sudden attack. In fact, what you know, was that it shackled the major players like yourself. It bound you to a system of international law that gave power to the weaker nations as well. It protected them against your arbitrary will. The Darwinian imperative of the survival of the fittest was suspended.

This was clearly not in your self-interest and it hampered you in the great war against terror. It might have been useful in the Cold War, when two sets of players could have easily triggered off the annihilation of the human race. But once that was over, it could be and should be abandoned. It was particularly important to abandon it since some of the very countries which were themselves filled with dangerous subversives and critics of your glorious capitalist and democratic way were on that very United Nations which bound you.

So you are pleased to see that in invading Iraq without United Nations authorization you have shattered irretrievably that unfortunate chance for international peace. The head of the U.N. may accuse you of waging an illegal war. He may be technically right under the old rules to which you signed up. But why should you care? You have your retained lawyers and experts who can challenge him (even if they cannot give their reasons), and anyway what can he and the others do? You have the power and the weapons. If you withdraw from the U.N. it will be nothing. If you want to scrap the whole post Second World War settlement and the apparent false dawn that raised peoples hopes after the fall of the last ‘Empire of Evil’ collapsed, why shouldn’t you?

It is true that many people falsely assumed that with the collapse of communism the War was over. They did not realize that the War is everlasting, that the Evil One has just shifted his strategy. Having failed to topple your world with the vile teachings of Karl Marx, He has found a new set of operatives. They are even more dangerous since they work in secret and inside your nations as well as across the border.

This change of the Evil One’s strategy happened in the past. In the thirteenth century you fought nice clean wars. There was Us (Christendom) and them (the infidel followers of Mohammed). Our crusades took our wars to them and finally, with the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, Europe was cleansed of these infidels and their false, but open, threat was diminished. Then the Devil reverted to his secret attack through witches, enemies within as well as without, and you faced something even more dangerous. So be warned, it has happened before.

The fanaticism of your current enemies is equal to that of the witches who renounced all that was good and entered into a pact to destroy our civilization, come what may. The rabid belief that they are fighting for a worthwhile cause for which they are prepared to die in martyrdom is evident and is further proof of their insanity and enthusiasm. As far as you know none of you who send your troops to fight the Evil threat has ever been foolhardy enough to actually put yourself in any danger. You have never personally witnessed the horror of war and have by all sensible means avoided that unpleasant activity.

This is wise since you are too valuable to be in the front line. This does not, of course, prevent you from putting on a uniform and parading and giving speeches well away from the action, which is good for your image. As was said of that great leader, the Duke of Plazatoro, ‘He led his regiment from behind, he found it less exciting’.

So, to conclude, here are a few of the political tools. Self-interest first (your own and the nations, which blessedly coincide); distrust and deceit both towards your own populations, your allies and of course your enemies. This is how the glorious war you are fighting must and will be fought. May Christ be with you as He was with your predecessors in earlier Crusades against Evil.

4:7 Who should be your allies in the war on Evil?

Obviously crucial in all this is to work out your alliances properly. Here the important thing is not to let romantic or old-fashioned ideas cloud your judgements. Your great goal is to rid the world of Evil. Yet the Evil you wish to destroy cannot be equated with facile matters such as human rights records, democratic achievements, liberal policies or even, sadly, the Christian faith. Wishy-washy friends who have these values, what some have called for instance ‘old Europe’ (out-dated, liberal, socialist, anti-totalitarian), needs to be set on one side. Much better to have the people with the tanks and the vision.

Or the money. For there may be a few big economies who can help to bank-roll you, even if they are unfortunately (and you should work on this) bound by the outmoded constitution you imposed on them, and hence debarred from sending their troops along. Since these wars are tremendously expensive, and you are already hugely in debt, the money bags are needed. If the friends are reluctant, you can threaten and blackmail them in various ways. Make sure their relations with other neutral countries in their region do not become too friendly so that they slip out of your power.

So you really must think radically. This is a changed world. The United Nations path was a necessary, but very limited, experiment. We must return to the time-honoured crusade by the strong and noble to crush the godless minions of Satan by whatever means is at your disposal.

If you act in your own self-interest, or at least a pair of you do, then you can talk about the ‘coalition of the willing’ and the preservation of the international order against the vacillating feebleness of other nations. If the members of the United Nations try to work out a road-map which will establish a peaceful path, sabotage it.

There are various ways to do this. One successful way you have used in the past is to infiltrate the ‘inspectors’ from the international organization with your spies, impose humiliating and degrading regimes on the regimes to be inspected, and then to respond in fury when the spies and inspectors are thrown out, saying it is tantamount to an attack on you.

If this does not entirely work, and the inspectors are invited in again, despite the humiliation, do not allow them to finish their work. Hurry and harry them along. Say that a few weeks will make all the difference between your world being attacked or not. Forget the decades of turning a blind eye to other powers proven to have nuclear and other weapons. This must be dealt with tomorrow. And if the inspectors plead for more time or say they have not found anything, or are close to establishing the truth, brush them aside.

4:6 Acting as the world's policeman and judge

Another good technique is to appeal to the very international bodies which are such an impediment to your freedom of action. Say that your decision to act without their authorization is in their best interest. They are too weak and indecisive to act, so you are doing it to preserve their credibility. Like a citizen who shoots a suspected thief to preserve the credibility of an inefficient police force, you act on their behalf by taking upon you to judge their best interests.

This is even more plausible if you can find an earlier resolution of the international bodies which is of a general kind, a kind of blank cheque stating that ‘something must be done’ if you enemies do not behave. You can fill in this cheque as you like.

Of course, if this technique is used by others it is unacceptable, since there are many quite specific resolutions against your friends, demanding that they cease occupying other people’s countries or annihilating their own stubborn populations. These must be ignored as impractical. They can be sidelined with arguments such as ‘the time is not ripe’, ‘when we’ve sorted out the real terrorists’, ‘we have a road map’ and so on.

Obviously one particular thing to avoid is to let your actions be judged by any legal authority above your own national one. We hear that there has been a ridiculous attempt to try to move to a truly global world by setting up an ‘International Court of Justice’ at the Hague. Under no circumstances should you recognize its jurisdiction (and you are glad to see that the most powerful of you have not done so). It could become filled with dangerously liberal lawyers who feel that they should apply the same rules to all nations. Imagine being treated in the same way as some tin-pot little country filled with godless peoples! Imagine your troops being indicted for war crimes just because they are a little over-zealous or indiscrete in their torture. It is clearly unthinkable.

Another useful technique is to find sympathetic people inside your enemies’ gates who, so to speak, unlock the gates from within for you. Clearly if you were fighting an old-fashioned war, you might find this difficult. But nowadays, with the kind of war you are engaged in, you are sure to find some people who are disaffected or ambitious enough to support you.

When you have found them, exaggerate their number and importance. Say that they represent the secret views of the majority of the population you wish to take over. Be careful, of course, not to take them too seriously in practical planning, since they will clearly over-sell themselves, and could lead you into a quagmire. But they are useful when answering critics of your policy.

4:5 Attack first.

Some people argue that because you are so globally inter-connected, it no longer makes sense (and is indeed tantamount to suicide), to fight wars against each other. They suggest that wars were all very well until the middle of the twentieth century, because it was possible to have separate blocks of humans in different nations who pummelled each other. But from then onwards the massive development of world trade and world communications means that you live in a ‘global village’. They criticize nationalist aspirations and conflicts, and like Einstein, describe nationalist wars as the childhood disease of measles which you should grow out of.

They point to the partial success of the United Nations in the fifty years after 1945. They refer to a consensus that the most powerful, like private individuals living in society, should forgo the short-term advantages which they could gain from their superior military power, for the long term and larger good of humankind from which they will benefit indirectly.

These critics draw attention to the international doctrine which was developed, and apparently accepted by you, that even the most powerful nations could not legally attack weaker countries unless they were themselves attacked. This new international rule, they say, has converted a world of Machiavellian pre-emptive strikes into a more stable one, even if it left some fairly nasty regimes in place.

At first sight these arguments seem a little plausible, and indeed you did sign up to such a convention. So how are you to overcome the arguments and justify breaking out of these restrictions? There are various arguments you would like to suggest to you.

One is to assert your right to do what you like. Proclaim that if your country’s self-interest is best served by attacking others, this is the primary (but don’t say, even if it is true, the only) criteria. Just as an individual has the right to take out a gun and shoot someone if they suspect them of evil intentions in the greatest of your nations, so at the governmental level you have the right to do what you like – particularly because you have the power.

That you have the power is, in fact, the key. For it is obviously not a right which others have, for if they were to assert the same right, how could you ever criticize them? So, like the possession of nuclear weapons, it is a right which only top members of the club can have.

Secondly, if you need to go further, the argument about self-defence can be endlessly manipulated. All you need to do is to say that some of your nationals, may be threatened, somewhere in the world, and you have to defend them. This was a favourite technique of the British with their gun-boat diplomacy. So, for example, when their trade in opium to China was challenged, they sent in their gunboats, as did the Americans a little later when one or two of their citizens were killed in Japan. If this technique was good enough for those glorious Christian Empires in the past, it is good enough for you.

It would be a very weak state or group that does not have even a puny weapon which, if it fell into the wrong hands, could, at a stretch of the imagination, be deployed somewhere where your citizens might be. The fear in this case can of course be multiplied and need not even be exaggerated much since your vast over-production of weapons has left the world awash with lethal tools. Anyone can just look on the internet to see how they are made. So you are always vulnerable.

You should allege that people plan, at some unspecified point, to ‘stockpile’ (whatever that means), weapons (unspecified) for use against us – in ways which you obviously cannot divulge for security reasons. Just as you struck down the witches before they attacked us in their malevolence, so you must encourage your countries to strike down the modern evil ones before they can get round to building up their reserves.

Smack a naughty child even before he or she acts. You know they hate you. You know that if you were in their position you would try to strike back against what they perceive as unfair treatment. So get them before they can.

4:4 Further thoughts on 'spin' and the media.

Since this is perhaps the key area for your attention, and since ‘spin’ and control of television and newspapers is the most important single area to make your power absolute, it is worth considering this just a little more.

The influence of newspapers and television is immense, so people should constantly be shown positive images of their own country and negative ones of your enemies. We have noted that this is particularly well followed in America, where many citizens know very little about the rest of the world, the vast majority have no passports, and where the media often portrays your enemies in a very negative light. Those who are your competitors, places like China, even if they are not conspicuously part of the conspiracy of Evil, should be treated superficially and negatively.

A very good technique you have noted on American television it to mix trivial news with serious matters, so that everything is reduced to one banal level. Show a little film of your bombing of some foreign city, then a short clip of a local sports game or festival, and so on. When there are hundreds of television channels and every item on the news is very short, it will be very difficult for people to concentrate on any items or learn much.

If you combine this, as you do, with a broadcasting culture where there is just a statement of opinion, with no counter-objections or argument (as is most beautifully shown in your presidential election debates), the chance of questioning of your approach will be minimal. Add in the strongly pro-government stance of most of your news channels, and this will create a particular kind of mix of apathy and nationalism which is much to be applauded. It is just as effective, though more discrete, than the total censorship that was practiced in the Second World War.

We would recommend this American approach to other countries. If the television stations are directly state controlled, as we believe has now become the case in Russia, there is no problem. If they persist in some wilful independence, this should be eroded as fast as possible. We saw a good technique for doing this in action in Britain recently.

The former over-mighty subject, the BBC, was smashed and laid low by clever advisors to the Prime Minister. They discovered a chink, a possible or at least unprovable (at that time) statement early one morning. The fact that after the reporter in question, the Head of the BBC and many of the top executives had been sacked and the corporation brought to heel, it was discovered that the statement was correct, that the Prime Minister had indeed exaggerated or ‘sexed up’ the threat was forgotten. The independent voice standing against power was seriously weakened, so your, and God’s, will was done.

4:3 Control the media.

In this present age, if you have neutered the elected politicians, there is really only one other group you need to deal with, and that is the ‘fourth estate’ or the media. Again how you do this will depend on how far you have got in your absorption of power.

Some of you have very little backlog of an independent and critical media. What there is can quickly be shut down, their independence crushed. This technique was easily established by twentieth century leaders in Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, China, the Soviet Union – and you are glad to see that some of you are following their methods.

Some of you have a trickier problem because you have a vast array of news media. In the end this is not too much of a problem. They can be bribed (not with money of course, but favours), or threatened (discreetly of course). They can be told, as in previous wars, that freedom of the press is all very well – but not in a time of national emergency and war.

From your point of view, of course, this is the best of wars since it will never end and will always be there as a reason for denouncing any serious criticisms as traitorous, against the national interests, weakening your resolve. And of course the ‘war’ justifies you in refusing to divulge the sources of your information or decisions – which would help your enemies.

You have a real trump card here. Whatever you say must be done cannot be challenged since your reasons cannot be revealed. For example, if you obtain ‘legal advice’ in a hurry from one of your law officers (even if it goes against majority opinion) you can accept it and refuse to give the grounds for that opinion. Remember that your population are not to be trusted with the information to make judgements. They must trust in you. This gives you the perfect freedom to do what you have to do without the delays and inefficiencies of democratic accountability. They are a luxury which you cannot afford in war time. It is not difficult to imagine what Winston Churchill would have said to someone who raised the question of democratic accountability in 1942!

4:2 Narrow the range of your advisors.

The present crisis is so grave that it forces you to re-think your whole decision-making system from the bottom up. Until recently what were called democracies encouraged a wide range of people to participate in the crucial input into decision making. The President or Prime Minister and his close personal friends and un-elected advisors were held in check by numerous other influential groups.

There were above all the elected representatives of the people, the Parliament with two balanced Houses, the Senate and the Congress and other bodies of that kind. Then the elected politicians were again balanced by permanent bureaucracies of expert civil servants, whether in Whitehall or the White House. They again formed a check. Even within the inner circle of power, the influence of the Prime Minister or President and his friends were checked by the cabinet of Senior Ministers.

This is all very well in normal times and something of which many are proud and think constitutes the essence of democracy. But it will not do in a crisis, in the hectic, fast-moving and dangerous world you live in now. Always remember that you do not live with the comforts of peace, but in a time of war. In past wars, the power has been wrenched from its distributed bases and placed in the hands of the Commander in Chief. So you can no longer afford to trust or consult your Parliaments and Senates until after you have decided to act, or to change the legal or political system. You do not have the obligation or time to let your civil servants know what you intend to do. Even your formal cabinet is to be kept in the dark, only minimally consulted in perfunctory meetings with no agendas and no minutes.

Instead, in order to be mean and lean, you must find half a dozen dependable friends who will work with you on your plans. Preferably they should be rich and independent. They must obviously share your vision of the terrible threat of the empire of evil and your fears of what is happening. They must share your realization that in order to save democracy, democratic government must be suspended until the crisis is over. They must owe their power to your patronage, rather than the votes of the people, so that you can pressurize them if necessary. (I expect Machiavelli’s ‘Courtier’ has wise advice on this, for in the old days they would have been called courtiers). And, like courtiers, if things go wrong, they can become your scapegoats.

Their view and suggestions to you should remain secret. You should protect them from the prying eyes of the press as much as possible. And they should then work with you on your secret plans to defeat the enemy. For while your Parliaments, Cabinet and even civil service will be infiltrated by the corrupt ideas of the Devil, these people, because of their history and known interests are to be trusted – as much as anyone can be trusted. Pick them carefully, warm each other with the fire of your vision of God’s work, and do battle with the Axis of Evil together.

The reason for all this, of course, is a mixture of secrecy, speed and ruthlessness. Larger bodies are notoriously unpredictable, they are bound to be ill-informed (much of the information on which you will have to make your lonely decisions is too secret to show to them), and timorous. So leave them out of the loop – until the final rubber stamping has to be done in a rush of high emotion.

This leaves the cabinet, ministers and senior members of the government. Yet, we are must remind you, the same applies to them. A few of them are hand-picked, loyal without questioning, their careers more important to them than their principles. You can consult with them. But keep it out of full cabinet until all is sown up, for it will again only lead to argument and procrastination and old-fashioned appeals to outmoded international conventions and so on.

This leaves it to you personally and a few advisors. Who should they be? Obviously you should avoid the experts here. Ambassadors with years of experience in the region will know too much, give you too many warnings and caveats and complexities. They often go native and think that oil or idealism are not sufficient reasons to break international laws. So do not get them involved. This applies to other experts, for example academics who have specialized for years on the places in question. They are all quibblers and qualifiers, tend to be liberal, undependable, likely to question your resolution.

So go for some old friends, hand-picked for their shared ideological vision, a handful of acquiescent politicians, and a few discontented and hopeful migrants from the country in question. The last of these will help with their confident predictions of universal support for your easy conquest of their country.

With this small inner circle, take your own decisions. If anything goes wrong, round on your critics and remind them that any criticism is disloyalty, perhaps even bordering on treason in time of war, that everyone must support the desperate battle to save and extend democracy. Such an appeal rarely fails. Since you have the power, you are never likely to face trial as war criminals, which is what might well happen to failed attempts of a similar kind by weaker leaders.

4:1 Make democracy more 'flexible'.

Some of you face the problem that you live in countries which are formally ‘democratic’. This was not a difficulty which we faced in our time and we grant that it may impede you in your godly work. The general population in certain countries still seem to have the belief that you have been elected by them and should reflect their opinion. This is clearly a romantic view, and if it is a little bit true in times of peace, certainly does not apply during a war.

Yet it will be fruitless and perhaps a bad idea to disabuse them of this illusion. As the poet said, ‘Man cannot stand too much reality’. One of your powerful weapons is to pronounce that you have discovered the best of all political systems, ‘democracy’, to which all other nations must be forced to adhere. If they will not do it voluntarily, it is your historic role to force them. To make this plausible you must continue to use the supposed legitimacy of being democratically elected while re-organizing the system. There are several techniques which you are glad to see you are already using to some effect in this sphere.

For example, there is the problem of securing your election to power and maintenance of power. You can ensure this by rigging the votes with powerful allies in the judiciary, so even if you do not win the majority of votes you are proclaimed the winner. This has long been practised with success around the world, and we are glad to see it was used for the first time in America in the early twenty first century.

You can re-adjust the electoral boundaries, when in power, particularly easy now using the sophisticated computer programs on re-drawing electoral districts. After a couple of periods in success, this should ensure that ‘to those that have shall be given’ and your enemies will never be able to win again.

3:8 How to turn bad news into good news.

Unfortunately, your troubles do not end here. You may invade with overwhelming force, and then discover that the people do not come out on the streets to cheer you. Having proclaimed that the war has been won, you find that it goes on. There are various things, of course, that you can do to re-assure your populations.

Tell them that the people who are defending their countries are outsiders, fanatics, terrorists, Evil and so on. The people themselves want you there. As well as this you should put in a government which you say is independent, and acting for the people, even if everyone knows that it is your puppet. At least the mask is there.

If things still go badly, there are other things you can do. You can try to chop up the actions. You can say that the war is in phases. You won the first military battles with ease. Then there was another war which went a bit badly for a year or so. But that is over (a draw perhaps). Ask people to stop criticizing those past events, ‘draw a line under them’, unite in fighting the new war which has just started and which you will undoubtedly win. That you do not have to ask your parliaments or people whether they want you to start yet another war, having not won the last one, is obvious. They have to accept what you say. Obviously you cannot withdraw and let ‘them’ win, leave the place to the chaos which would probably ensue and might be blamed (very unfairly) on you.

The central technique, of course, is to deny all the losses or defeats you can, and exaggerate any successes. By choosing the right point in time, or the right place, it is always possible to show success. If there is disaster in the north, concentrate on the great gains in the south. If the losses are great today, remind people how it was even more terrible before you started the great endeavour. All this is essential, since if your population loses hope entirely, they may turn on you. You must inspire the ‘Dunkirk spirit’, you shall overcome against the odds and so on.

You can also point out some further benefits which they may not have thought of. When a hunter is trying to shoot a tiger, he will tie up a couple of small goats and wait up a tree. This draws the tiger who starts to feast on the goats and has its attention diverted. Then the hunter blasts it. This is what you have done in several instances.

Places which had more or less eliminated terrorism, even if by cruel and despotic means, are now turned into a magnet for your enemies. It is sad that the people themselves, the small goats so to speak, have to be eaten up in the process. But at least you have a good bunch of terrorists in one place and can bomb them to bits.

A variant on this is to herd all your enemies into a confined part of their territory, build a wall round them, and then from time to time attack them with vastly overwhelming force. Again the hunting metaphors, the snares, the nets, the traps and the bait all work well.

If all of this does succeed as well as you hope, there is another resort which we hope you will not have to use, but which will bail you out. You can ‘internationalise’ the war. You can claim that you did the dirty and difficult work, the killing and the maiming and the destruction, at considerable cost, on behalf of the ‘international community’. They should now come in, gratefully, and relieve you of some of this burden. Do they not want democracy and re-construction? Of course they do. So they should pay to get it. You have levelled the Evil ones. Now everyone should join you in re-building. The United Nations and all your friends should send money and troops.

It is best to avoid this, since it carries two real dangers which you must beware of. One is that if things do start to go right, the lucrative contracts for re-construction, which should mainly be retained by you, since you did all the initial job, may be opened up to others. Secondly, it may be argued that any international force should be ruled by international law. Ensure that any wider agency has no jurisdiction over your own troops, which would be a threat to your sovereignty and might impose unwelcome limitations on your action.

Another beauty of this solution is that if things continue to go wrong, you have an easy way out. You can say that you did all the difficult bits, and handed the international forces a job on a plate. But in their typical useless and disorganized way they have muffed it. This will be useful when you again want to act unilaterally, and it will divert all blame from you. But we hope that it does not come to this, for you have another possibility at hand.

Distract people’s attention. People for a long time almost forgot about the mess that is Afghanistan, the huge expansion of warlord power, the flooding of the world with opium, the failure to re-construct, because their eyes are on Iraq. They have little time to think about the appalling mess in Israel and Palestine or the tattered road map. The same could be done again. There are others in the ‘Axis of Evil’. A crisp attack on Iran would soon concentrate people’s minds from the trail of devastation which your critics say you have created.

3:7 The nature of total war and its advantages for you.

In this ‘war’, you at last return to a form of ‘total’ war which is much more like the struggle against the witches, which lasted for over three hundred years and is still not really over. The war is perpetual, no side can ever win. It is like the war between the two nebulous states in that infamous writer George Orwell’s 1984, which always requires one more sacrifice, one more effort, one more deprivation in the glorious struggle, but lasts interminably.

Furthermore, whereas in previous wars the enemies tended to be ‘over there’, with only the occasional spy or suspect character here, now the enemy are everywhere, both over there and over here. Children, women, old men and women, all can be witches or terrorists since it requires little skill or strength to detonate a bomb or spread anthrax.

The fact that the war you’re now engaged in can never end may be thought of as distinguishing it from other wars and turning into something more like a perpetual feud. But by calling it a war, it brings into play all the normal extra powers which you need – but for ever.

You can suspend all civil liberties and normal checks on your power for the duration of the war – in other words, as in 1984, for ever. Since it will never be over, as the Devil schemes and plots our downfall through the centuries, you can never rest. Once you have seized the political, legal and military force necessary, you must never let it go.

So the war continues. You are hunting a merciless and cunning animal. He will move his ‘lair’. You may destroy his habitat in one place. But it is an international conspiracy and he will move elsewhere. You must harry him like a fox or tiger, from cover to cover, ‘flush him out’ as you say, destroy his cover (his friends, villages, supporters) and then destroy him.

Your citizens might have grown restless at seeing much of their taxes being used on defence systems if there was no-one threatening you. So it is a great blessing that God has given you the terrorists to revive your morale and purpose in life. In the same way, he gave us heretics and witches to terrify your ungodless populations into supporting our cause. Humans are naturally lazy, self-seeking, even kind and tolerant. This is not a good recipe in a world where Satan stalks. You must ginger them up, keep them on their toes. By proclaiming the ultimate war, which can never be won, but must always be fought with every muscle, you have found the solution. Well done. You have not forgotten Machiavelli’s wise maxim: ‘it is safer to rule through fear than through love’.

3:6 The peculiar 'war' you are fighting - and its advantages.

In this task you have certain advantages. As mentioned above, your weapons, conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological are infinitely more powerful than theirs. And you have plenty of spare capacity at this time as you have most of the arms manufacturers in the world living in your states. Your science and technology is ever getting stronger and you can fight at night and with deadly force. You have immense wealth behind you in a way which your enemies cannot begin to match. Clearly it is not a war in the old sense of two roughly equally armed, trained and sized armies facing each other. Clearly you can flatten them.

Furthermore, you have your friends. In each part of the world you have client states which depend on your military and economic support. They will do what you tell them and help us attack whom you like. At present these include clients in the Middle East, the Far East, the Pacific and other dangerous areas. Preserve and foster these alliances in this noble struggle.

It is essential to remember that this war is different from all preceding wars. It is an extremely clever device of yours to call it a ‘war’ with all the powerful resonances of that word, but you know how different it is. In fact, technically, of course, it is not a war at all.

Wars begin with a particular declaration of war, yet this one had been dribbling along well before 9/11. Wars end on a certain date, with a treaty, agreement, unconditional surrender or whatever. Yet nothing like this is possible since the nest of vipers you are facing has no over-all leader or director (except Satan, who will never sign a peace treaty). Wars are between sovereign states, but this is between some States and an amorphous organization, even if, occasionally it involves you in attacking and destroying a sovereign state or two along the way.

Combatants in wars are ‘soldiers’, they are paid, have uniforms, can be recognized and when captured are ‘prisoners of war’. The combatants on your side, of course, are such soldiers and should be treated according to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war by the other side. For example, they should not be disgustingly paraded in front of cameras, or tortured or whatever. On the other hand, combatants on their side are treasonable terrorists who do not wear uniforms, often are unpaid, and hence not subject to the Geneva Convention. They can be paraded in front of cameras, tortured, or held for ever if you like.

There is a dangerous argument that the Geneva Convention provides not just for “soldiers”, but also for civilians (who should get a fair trial). So, some people argue that, even if one were to agree with those who argue that “terrorists” are not regular, uniformed and recognisable soldiers, then surely they should be considered “civilians” (say, criminals who tried or managed to kill people –and thus should be apprehended by the police and judged in civil courts).

The trick is to play on the ambiguity of whether there is a war or not. For general purposes, this is a war you are fighting. Yet the people you oppose are not ‘soldiers’ in the conventional sense. They are not ‘civilians’ because it is a war. They are not ‘soldiers’ because they are not regularly employed by a state, wearing uniform etc. So they are not subject to any convention and can be treated like wild things which lie outside the human world, kept in an interstitial legal no-man’s land in cages for eternity without trial.

So, to summarize the situation, the wars of the conventional kind which your populations were aware of from the previous few centuries were fought between two roughly equal sides, who wore uniforms, fought for a period, and then, when one side, as in a game, was declared to have won, the losing side laid down their arms and surrendered a few days, months or years later. Civilians were not be involved if possible. This is what people think of as war, and for it, in the past, they have been prepared to surrender for a while their lives, their liberties, their happiness and even truth itself, knowing that all these things will be returned after the emergency.