For Ling, the prominent positioning of the ‘rogue state’ in the discourse of the Bush administration is indicative of a logic of necessity, by which the United States was ‘compelled to war against small, impoverished, and isolated nations with the full might of a global superpower for fear of being perceived as weak.’ (link, p. 379)
When Osama the Terrorist hides as a ghost, the Bush administration has had to turn to the ‘rogue states’ as another form of prey, ‘easier to “smoke out” and “hunt down”.’(ibid, p. 391) So it is, argues Ling, that the ‘rogue state’ is suddenly equated with the monstrous sublime ‘in terror, fanaticism, and evil.’ (ibid)
While, for Derrida, the gradual normalisation of domestic roguishishness in Cheney’s ‘new normalcy’ suggested the ‘rogue state’ qualifier would fade from public discourse, it remained part of the vocabulary of the Bush administration. Like the limitless threat, it remains in a liminal state between meaning and meaningless. We are told that Iran and North Korea are rogue states, but not what a rogue state is. Taken alongside the figure of the global terrorist, the rogue state becomes part of a ‘dark, perverse and indomitable force … potentially violent and cruel … haunt[ing] and terroris[ing] the civilised, human world.’ (link, p. 621)
Take, for example, the figure of Saddam Hussein. Having provided the United States with ‘a long-standing ally and valuable economic partner’ (link, p. 97) over the course of the 1980s, Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait in 1990 marked a turning point. From his initial portrayal as a secular force of modernisation and rationalisation, an implied association with the spectral threat of weapons of mass destruction tainted his reputation, triggering a discursive metamorphosis.
By the time the United States came to mobilise its forces in 2003, Saddam – and, by extension, Baathist Iraq - was the “beast of Baghdad”; ‘not simply an animal but the very incarnation of evil, of the satanic, the diabolical, the demonic – a beast of the apocalypse.’ (ibid)
