Five years on, and without a victory in sight, the war on terror has been renewed with the same evangelical vigor by which it had been launched. While priding itself on the selectivity of its targets, the claim made for this war is that it is joined by everyone everywhere, its century-long future borne as a calling in our present. Despite the assertion of September 11 as its genesis, the war of which Bush speaks in my epigraph has been a long time in the making.1 Afghanistan and Iraq were the objects of U.S. agitation long before terror made the journey from a method to an ideology.2 Yet the threat is to be met less with ideological clarity (witness how ill-defined freedom and democracy turn out to be) than with methodological rigor. A war against all is prosecuted through the protocols of risk management, a technique for converting uncertainty into calculable gain. Risk has come to be central to the present imperium’s governance of its foreign and domestic affairs.3 Where invading armies actually landed, it was to attack old allies in Afghanistan and Iraq as new enemies with swift, decapitating precision that would leave waves upon waves of volatility in its wake. Threats were not eliminated but set in motion, amplifying terror and providing the occasion for epic conflict. Denying sites of occupation their determinate history is part of the repertory of imperial war. Yet the emphasis on risk belies a history of commingling the management of populations at home and abroad along a model of war.
