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.

3:5 Keep attacking and threatening your enemies.

The classic manual on all of this is, of course, that magnificent (if brutal and cynical) book by Clausewitz On War, which can be usefully supplemented by Machiavelli’s marvellous advice in The Prince, as well, nowadays, many manuals put out by your Departments of War (sorry, we should have said of Defence).

Let us remind you of a few of their central bits of advice, things like: act first, constant preparation and arms stockpiling, strike mercilessly, be prepared, iron and fire, deception and lying and so on.

So this is how you should behave in Christ’s wars. It was how we treated the heathen Saracens in the Crusades, how we exterminated the Albigensian heretics, how we destroyed the savages around the globe who opposed your glorious kingdoms. There is no room for scruple in these matters.

If all this is true of ordinary wars, imagine how much more it is the case in a religious war against civilization’s enemies. These enemies will use any tactics against you. Even if, as yet, their attacks have been limited (the whole twin towers was less than a month’s civilian death toll in Iraq), we must not be lulled, for they would kill many times that number if they could, and rejoice at the carnage. Even if the amount of death and destruction you have brought down upon them is many times more than what they have done to you, do not relent. Even if they have not done many of the things which they could have done with ease; poison the water systems, spread plagues, bomb nuclear plants, you should still speak angrily of them as ‘totally unscrupulous’. You must continue to describe them as utterly ruthless and as using all means against you. Then you are justified in whatever methods you like.

3:4 How to persuade people of the huge danger of the enemy.

So far we have mainly concentrated on individual Evil Ones (terrorists) or small cells and networks within your nations. Unfortunately, however, these servants of Satan even come to control a whole nation or state with all its weapons. In that case you must adopt another strategy. What you must do is to attack and destroy that state, depose the Evil Ones, and put in people more to your own liking. Your enemies call them ‘puppets’, but we think you should just call them ‘friends of democracy’.

Though these members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ are infinitely less powerful than your nations, you can fairly easily persuade your populations that they are a real and present threat if you follow a few well tried techniques.

One technique you can adopt was well illustrated by a recent example. A country was known to be a nest of evil people led by an evil dictator. He must therefore, you knew, be plotting against you. He must be aping (a useful animal adjective) your ways and trying to stockpile weapons. These weapons must be really dangerous, carrying mass destruction with them. They must be far more dangerous than anything that had hitherto been discovered, despite extensive searches and a kind of electronic surveillance unprecedented in history. The evil intentions were enough to allay any doubts in your populations.

Obviously in this case you must have known, with your immensely sophisticated surveillance and intelligence and billions of pounds of advice, that there was no certainty that weapons existed or that they were to be deployed. But if you had told your populations that while there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, they must nevertheless attack the servants of Satan because they were an evil-intentioned people (and held much of the world’s precious oil reserves which Christ’s Kingdom needed), the response would have been luke warm. So you used all the approved techniques instead.

You exaggerated the threat, told partial truths (that weapons were battlefield only, for example, was omitted), exaggerated, made vague claims. In a court of law you have to tell ‘truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. But this is not a court of law. By telling partial truths, by being as someone once described a former instance ‘economical with the truth’, and by mixing in untruths and exaggerations, it became impossible for the population to disentangle things. So people in fear and trust partly sanctioned the act of invasion, though even in this situation the majority were still unconvinced.

When all this (in effect) lying about the reasons for the war was revealed afterwards with the total absence of the grounds for fear, or even the links to the supposed ‘enemies’ who had attacked you earlier, you sensibly changed history. You claimed that the real reason was not the declared one at the time. It was really to rid the nation of a tyrant, to ‘liberate’ people so that they can be more like us. You should force them to accept your ‘values’, as one of you recently put it, and to abandon theirs. Since the powerful control history, might is right, this quelled criticism to a large extent.

The lesson from this is that after the event, even if it can be shown that the attack was mistaken and leads to disaster, do not apologize. Do not admit mistakes, or if you do, blame it on some technical mis-information you received. Much better to change history after the event to fit what happens. Go on the offensive. Say to people, ‘Do you want to bring XX’ back again? The threat of the return of Farmer Jones is the trump card used again and again in Orwell’s Animal Farm and is unanswerable. Your critics are put in an impossible position. They cannot say they liked the particular thug or tyrant, but if they lamely say that this was not why you went to war, it sounds a bit feeble.