is it possible to eradicate evil?

[note: I am not recommending John Gray's Heresies from which passages are excerpted below. I've been struggling with it for months, but mostly as I might post later about, it condones torture. Plus he's very pro-Bush, I mean who can forgive that?!?]

In Europe, we see terrorism as one of several threats to the world. They include poverty and climate change, and each has causes that can be alleviated. In America, by contrast, terrorism is seen as supremely evil, the work of dark forces that must be defeated and eliminated.

Dividing the world into goodies and baddies is a recurrent feature of American thinking. (Reagan, Wilson). Today, the idea that the US embodies all that is good in the world is an article of faith in the 'new strategic doctrine' presented to the US Congress in September 2002, in which President Bush declared that there is 'a single sustainable model for national success': American democracy and free entreprise.[...] It is at the bottom an indigenously American creed, rooted in the belief that the United States has been chosen by God to bring freedom and virtue into a benighted world.

It is disbelief in evil that is today peculiarly American. Contemporary American culture is founded on the Pelagian faith that evil can be defeated and eradicated from the world. In contrast, Europeans see the choices that have to be made in international relations as being unavoidably among evils. No doubt they continue to hope for a better world, but they are always conscious of the danger of too much enthusiasm.

The risks of imagining evil can be conjured away are many, and they are nowhere more evident than in US policy on Iraq. [...] far reaching lack of realism in US thinking. The relentlessly upbeat moral outlook that underpins American foreign policy prevents a clear assessment of these risks. It also inhibits honesty about more mundate interests, such as secure oil prospects and Bush's re-election prospects. The belief that evil can be driven from the world nourishes a false sense of moral purity. US policy, like that of any imperial power, is dictated largely by realpolitik. Morality, though it may constrain foreign policy, can never be the chief force in shaping it.

America's critics condemn Bush's call to take up arms against evil as an expression of religious fundamentalism. And it is true that fundamentalism has an alarming hold on US government. But if Bush talks so insistently of evil (...) it is because he does not doubt that once the world has accepted American values, it will enjoy everlasting peace and prosperity. THis has not always been the American view. For the founding fathers, human beings were flawed creatures that no change in institutions could improve fundamentally. The purpose of government was not to conduct us to the Promised Land but to stave off the recurrent evils to which human life is naturally prone.

The revival of the language of evil in the speeches of American leaders does not mean that the ancient truth [of the doctrine of original sin] has been rediscovered. On the contrary, it is a sign that we are in for another grandiose experiment in remaking the world, with all the force and horror than invariably entails.