Terrorism and Pandemics: Re-Assessing the Bush Doctrine
By Quassim Cassam
In a recent tweet, the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland wrote that ‘one of Donald Trump’s achievements is that he can even make George W. Bush look like a genius’.[i] What prompted this observation was footage of a speech by President Bush in 2005 on the threat of pandemic flu.[ii] Reports suggest that he had recently read a book on the 1918 flu epidemic and was exercised by the need to prepare for a similar event in the future. In outlining a national strategy for dealing with a flu pandemic President Bush said in his speech that ‘if we wait for a pandemic to appear it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to prepare today’.[iii]