Moral intervention often serves as the first act that prepares the stage for military intervention.
- michael hardt & tony negri, Empire

In north american and europe today, war is waged via the construction of figures of evil through the mass media. The mediation of monstrous figures, from Slobodan to Saddam to Osama, is often one of the first steps taken by the media on the path to war. This is not to uphold these figures, or deny their role in militarized violence and massive displacement, murder, and destruction. It is however, to question the selectivity and the sensationalism with which they are mediated, and to what political ends such dramatized and selective representations of monstrous non-western figures are put. In this new military humanitarianism and its accompanying language of good and ill, the demonization and personification of evil in the body of a single male strongman always leads to a process of progressive substitution. An entire peoples come to stand in for and bear the brunt of the high-tech violence meted out to eradicate this monstrous incarnation. Whether it be the war on terror, the search for weapons of mass destruction, or the doctrine of collective guilt, the effect is to reduce entire peoples to one face of evil. In the wake of September 11th, it has been unacceptable and indeed inexpressible to impute collective guilt to the entire american people for the actions of their government in other parts of the world, yet such a logic was daily paraded in the global media with respect to the deaths of yugoslavs civilians killed during the NATO bombing. In the current era of the seemingly perpetual north american drumbeat to war, the face of evil becomes a stand-in, a placeholder, for an entire peoples. Hunting down this monstrous spectre and eradicating the spectacular threat imputed to him, this becomes the justification for all the 'collateral' death and suffering that is largely untreated and suppressed by the media so long as the evil one remains untouched. In this era of seemingly perpetual war, who will be the coverboy for next year's face of evil?