2:2 How to conceal your motives effectively.

A second difficulty is to conceal another part of your motivation. It is clear to all of you that you are chosen by God to defend your world. No other leader could do it so well. You have tasted power and know its sweetness. People treat you with real respect and seldom argue with you. Even if some of you in your past were often people of mediocre abilities, who would not be very successful in any other sphere of life, you have found your true vocation. Usually by chance, you have become the focus of much wider forces and powers.

Huge sums of money and expertise are channelled into your hands. You are regarded with awe and have rightly come to regard yourselves seriously. You know the answers. Your enemies are fools, or worse. It is your destiny to lead. Day by day and adulation by adulation, this conviction grows. Your courtiers make sure that you are sheltered from the critics and the realities. They flatter and press you on in your grand crusade.

After a time you begin to realize that the terrorists are not just your countries enemies, but your personal enemies. If they succeed, you will lose your power. Why should they hate you so?

Fortunately, your enemies provide an opportunity rather than a threat. In the well-worn tradition of political behaviour, you should be masculine, aggressive, confident, even a bit swaggering in your walk and talk. You should not show any signs of weakness, any ‘on the one hand or the other’, any reasonableness towards the infidels. This image of machismo man is what you should pursue.

Model yourself on other heroes, in reality and fiction. Remember Richard the Lion Heart, ‘Braveheart’, Batman (for you each have your ‘Robin’), Superman, Rambo and others. Walk tall, posture, grin, fill your speeches with threatening words and military or hunting metaphors and your population will love it. They will soon forget that much of this is designed for your own preservation and furtherance of your power and fame. They will hopefully not notice too much that if you really cared about their good, you would often have to apologise for your mistakes. If possible, forget the very concept of apology.

This may sound difficult, but we have seen some of you are masters of the art. For example, we heard the leader of the world’s greatest power, after a particularly disastrous intervention and many palpably terrible domestic errors, asked if there was anything he regretted doing, any mistakes he had made. After being dumb-struck at the very idea for a couple of minutes, he sensibly replied, no, he couldn’t think of anything at all he should apologise for – except perhaps for the fact that he had nothing to apologise for. Great stuff.

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So your problem is that your real motives are mixed and only vaguely overlap with your publicly stated motives. Your speeches are sensibly filled out with empty generalities which come in handy in every situation. You talk of ‘freedom’ (without defining for whom, how, why and what). You speak of ‘democracy’, without ever bothering to specify what that means. You proclaim ‘peace’ (after bloody war), ‘our civilization’ (meaning your way of life). Of course they are all wonderful, like mother love and apple pie. But intrinsically, unfortunately, they are so vague that they are not conspicuously more satisfactory than the vague objectives of your enemies.

For example, the ‘Evil Empire’ of Communism proclaimed that it would spread, equality, fraternity and liberty through the total involvement of the people in the running of the system. You rightly spurned those empty and hypocritical claims. Yours are true, and worthy, of course, theirs false. But it is difficult to prove.

Though at times you seek to persuade yourself that these large values are what you are fighting for, you are caught with the difficulty that even these glorious aims have to be sacrificed if they conflict with a higher cause. If a country elects a President who is part of the Axis of Evil, you need to replace him with a dictator, even if democracy’s glorious cause is cut short. If freedom from hunger, disease, poverty and fear is made more difficult by your sanctions and bombs, then these freedoms must be temporarily suspended in pursuit of the larger freedom of opening up their markets to your goods.

After all, the half a million children and others who are reported to have been killed by your blockade of Iraq’s food and medicine was perfectly reasonable. ‘They’ had a choice. ‘They’ could have listened to you and got rid of their leader, and lifted the sanctions. As for ‘peace’, that may have to be postponed indefinitely. Peace is a luxury which you can only glimpse at the rainbow’s end.

So though you have the sound conviction of your high and patriotic motives, you know that the war is about much more than what you can publicly speak. It is about oil, it is about trade, it is about influencing people to be positive about your imperial ambitions. And above all it is about your rule. You must not apologise because, unlike all other fallible mortals, you are above error. What you do is automatically right. You could be described as ‘moral supermen’. You sincerely believe in yourselves as trustworthy, good, guys. You have inherited the mantle of the our blessed Father the Pope who has always been infallible.

This self-belief is essential. Where would Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Mao have got without self-belief? Like them, you are full of sincerity. You rightly believe that God is on your side, calling and guiding you. You have a mission on earth. You are the called, the Elect. You join the blessed tradition. And if some filthy infidels and non-persons stands in your way, you should trample them down. You are St. George. Politics is a large game of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. You have your dungeons, they are the Dragons. Go forth to conquest.