Page 2 of
4 A GUIDE FOR THE
PERPLEXED Intellectual
fallacies of the 'war on
terror' By Chalmers Johnson
and the Idealists (Soft
Skull Press, 2005)? Wildly overstating his
influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular
columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to
convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
far from being a tribal war over scarce land and
water, is part of the wider spiritual war between
liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not
worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict
between America and al-Qaeda. He then attempted to
show
that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
represented two 'branches' of an essentially
homogeneous extremism." (p 181) Berman, Holmes
points out, conflated anti-terrorism with
anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for
the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason
for including Berman is that Holmes wants to
address the views of religious fundamentalists in
their support of the war on terrorism.
How did democratization at the point of an
assault rifle become America's mission in the
world, as seen by the apostate neoconservative
Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads:
Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative
Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006)? Holmes
is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives'
perennial sophomore, because he offers an
insider's insights into the chimerical neocon
"democratization" project for the Middle East.
Fukuyama argues that democracy is the most
effective antidote to the kind of Islamic
radicalism that hit the United States on September
11, 2001. He contends that the root of Islamic
rebellion is to be found in the savage and
effective repression of protestors - many of whom
have been driven into exile - in places like
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Terrorism is
not the enemy, merely a tactic Islamic radicals
have found exceptionally effective. Holmes writes
of Fukuyama's argument, "[T]o recognize that
America's fundamental problem is Islamic
radicalism, and that terrorism is only a symptom,
is to invite a political solution. Promoting
democracy is just such a political solution." (p
209)
The problem, of course, is that not
even the neocons are united on promoting
democracy; and, even if they were, they do not
know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads
for "a dramatic demilitarization of American
foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of
policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to
its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and
incorrectly staffed to foster democratic
transitions.
Why is the contemporary American antiwar
movement so anemic, as seen through the lens of
history by Geoffrey Stone in Perilous Times:
Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of
1798 to the War on Terrorism (W W Norton,
2004)? Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's
history of expanded executive discretion in
wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the
American public has not been more concerned with
what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in
the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of
Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush
administration, at least in this one area, was
adept at subverting public protest. Among the more
important lessons George W Bush, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned
from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if
you want to suppress domestic questioning of
foreign military adventures, then eliminate the
draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce
domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity
based on foreign borrowing.
How did the embracing of American
unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary
of Defense over the Department of State, as put
into perspective by John Ikenberry in After
Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and
the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars
(Princeton University Press, 2001)? This book is
Holmes' oddest choice - a dated history from an
establishmentarian point of view of the
international institutions created by the United
States after World War II, including the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO,
all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic
specialist in international relations, applauds.
Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the
United States ruled largely through indirection,
using seemingly impartial international
institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of
other nations. He laments the failure to follow
this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which
led to the eclipse of the State Department by the
Defense Department, an institution hopelessly
ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building
missions.
Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness
(for example, by torturing prisoners) and
concentrate extra-constitutional authority in the
hands of the president, as expounded by John Yoo
in The Powers of War and Peace: The
Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11
(University of Chicago Press, 2005)? In this final
section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law
professor he is and takes on George W Bush's and
Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the
University of California, Berkeley law professor
John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for
them, denied the legality of the Geneva
Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of
the president's war-making power. Holmes wonders,
"Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for
years to develop and defend a historical thesis
that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and
what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery
of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The
Powers of War and Peace is the anemic
relations between the evidence adduced and the
inferences drawn." (p. 291)
Holmes then
points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the
Federalist Society, an association of conservative
Republican lawyers who claim to be committed to
recovering the original understanding of the
constitution and which includes several Republican
appointees to the current Supreme Court. His
conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is
devastating: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves
anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an
autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and
watches its own cable news channel to decide,
without outsider input, where to expend American
blood and treasure - that is, to decide which
looming threats to stress and which to downplay or
ignore." (p. 301)
Is Islam the culprit
or merely a distraction? In addition to
these broad themes, Holmes investigates hidden
agendas and their distorting effects on rational
policy-making. Some of these are: Cheney's desire
to expand executive power and weaken congressional
oversight; Rumsfeld's schemes to field-test his
theory that in modern warfare speed is more
important than mass; the plans by some of Cheney's
and Rumsfeld's advisers to improve the security
situation of Israel; the administration's desire
to create a new set of permanent US military bases
in the Middle East to protect the US oil supply in
case of a collapse of the Saudi monarchy; and the
desire to invade Iraq and thereby avoid putting
all the blame for 9/11 on al-Qaeda - because to do
so would have involved admitting administration
negligence and incompetence during the first nine
months of 2001 and, even worse, that Clinton was
right in warning Bush and his top officials that
the main security threat to the United States was
a potential al-Qaeda attack or attacks.
This is not the place to attempt a
comprehensive review of Holmes' detailed
critiques. For that, one should buy and read his
book. Let me instead dwell on three themes that I
think illustrate his insight and originality.
Holmes rejects any direct connection
between Islamic religious extremism and the 9/11
attacks, although he recognizes that Islamic
vilification of the United States and other
Western powers is often expressed in
apocalyptically religious language. "Emphasizing
religious extremism as the motivation for the
[9/11] plot, whatever it reveals," he argues, "…
terminates inquiry prematurely, encouraging us to
view the attack ahistorically as an expression of
'radical Salafism', a fundamentalist movement
within Islam that allegedly drives its adherents
to homicidal violence against infidels." (p 2)
This approach, he points out, is distinctly
tautological: "Appeals to social norms or a
culture of martyrdom are not very helpful ... They
are tantamount to saying that suicidal terrorism
is caused by a proclivity to suicidal terrorism."
(p 20)
Instead, he suggests, "The
mobilizing ideology behind 9/11 was not Islam, or
even Islamic fundamentalism, but rather a specific
narrative of blame" (p 63). He insists on putting
the focus on the
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