Rather than reading the name as a question of military convention or a genuine indicator of the American desire for justice, Bousquiet suggests that the “infinite” qualifier hints at the Bush administration’s ‘search for a transcendent response to 9/11’s sublimity’ (link, p. 756). The “infinite” of ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ is a mirror for the “limitless” of the limitless threat.
Despite the professed ‘novelty’ and limitlessness of the terrorist threat, in each of the most obviously militarized fronts of the ‘war on terror’, the United States is pitted against other state actors. At an ideational level, the prospect of collusion between the sovereign state and the limitless threat remains fundamentally problematic in a statist reading of foreign policy.
If the limitless threat of terrorism is to be treated as a force of absolute evil, while the ‘war on terror’ is cast as an epic battle between the ordered legitimacy of the state system and the anarchic evil of non-state actors, the notion of state-sponsored terrorism threatens the coherence of the narrative.
Ultimately, this was solved in the leap from theory to practice, with the ‘war on terror’ becoming a conflict waged not only ‘against the evildoers, themselves … [but also] against those who harbor them and finance them and feed them.’ (link)
