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4 A GUIDE FOR THE
PERPLEXED Intellectual fallacies of the 'war
on terror' By Chalmers Johnson
(This essay reviewsThe Matador's Cape:
America's Reckless Response to Terror by
Stephen Holmes.)
There are many books
entitled A Guide for the Perplexed,
including Moses Maimonides' 12th century treatise
on Jewish law and E F Schumacher's 1977 book on
how to think about science. Book titles cannot be
copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed
might therefore be a better title for Stephen
Holmes' new book
than
the one he chose, The Matador's Cape: America's
Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps overly clever
conception, the matador is the terrorist
leadership of al-Qaeda, taunting a maddened United
States into an ultimately fatal reaction. But do
not let the title stop you from reading the book.
Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically
erudite survey of what we t
hink we understand about the 9/11 attacks - and
how and why the United States has magnified many
times over the initial damage caused by the
terrorists.
Stephen Holmes is a law
professor at New York University. In The
Matador's Cape, he sets out to forge an
understanding - in an intellectual and historical
sense, not as a matter of journalism or of
partisan politics - of the Iraq war, which he
calls "one of the worst (and least comprehensible)
blunders in the history of American foreign
policy" (p 230). His modus operandi is to survey
in depth approximately a dozen influential books
on post-Cold War international politics to see
what light they shed on America's missteps. I will
touch briefly on the books he chooses for
dissection, highlighting his essential thoughts on
each of them.
Holmes' choice of books is
interesting. Many of the authors he focuses on are
American conservatives or neoconservatives, which
is reasonable since they are the ones who caused
the debacle. He avoids progressive or left-wing
writers, and none of his choices are from
Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project.
(Disclosure: This review was written before I read
Holmes' review of my own book, Nemesis: The
Last Days of the American Republic, in the
October 29 issue of The Nation.)
He
concludes: "Despite a slew of carefully researched
and insightful books on the subject, the reason
why the United States responded to the al-Qaeda
attack by invading Iraq remains to some extent an
enigma" (p 3). Nonetheless, his critiques of the
books he has chosen are so well done and fair that
they constitute one of the best introductions to
the subject. They also have the advantage in
several cases of making it unnecessary to read the
original.
Holmes interrogates his subjects
cleverly. His main questions and the key books he
dissects for each of them are:
Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11?
Here he supplies his own independent analysis and
conclusion (to which I turn below).
Why did American military preeminence breed
delusions of omnipotence, as exemplified in Robert
Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and
Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003)?
While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the
United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus",
Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of
neoconservative thought on the use of force in
international politics: "Far from guaranteeing an
unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist
threat, as Kagan contends, American military
superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's
view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the
United States, with appalling consequences, into a
gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the
Middle East." (p 72)
How was the war lost, as analyzed in Cobra
II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and
Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and
Bernard Trainor (Pantheon, 2006)? Holmes regards
this book by Gordon, the military correspondent of
the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine
Corps lieutenant general, as the best treatment of
the military aspects of the disaster, down to and
including US envoy L Paul Bremer's disbanding of
the Iraqi military. I would argue that
Fiasco (Penguin 2006) by the Washington
Post's Thomas Ricks is more comprehensive,
clearer-eyed, and more critical.
How did a tiny group of individuals, with
eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly
compound the country's post-9/11 security
nightmare? Here Holmes considers James Mann's
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War
Cabinet (Viking, 2004). One of Mann's more
original insights is that the neocons in the Bush
administration were so bewitched by Cold War
thinking that they were simply incapable of
grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War
world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major
military rival excited some aging hardliners into
toppling a regime that they did not have the
slightest clue how to replace ... We have only
begun to witness the long-term consequences of
their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power". (p
106).
What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the
Bush administration, as captured in Michael Mann's
Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)? According
to Holmes, Mann's work "repays close study, even
by readers who will not find its perspective
altogether congenial or convincing". He argues
that perhaps Mann's most important contribution,
even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress
the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's
and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush:
"The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in
Washington, DC, allotted disproportionate
influence to the fatally blurred understanding of
the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed
and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and
Cheney controlled the military; and when they were
given the opportunity to rank the country's
priorities in the war on terror, they assigned
paramount importance to those specific threats
that could be countered effectively only by the
government agency over which they happened to
preside" (p 107).
Why did the US decide to search for a new
enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old cold
warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(Simon and Schuster, 1996)? It is not clear why
Holmes included Huntington's 11-year-old treatise
on "Allah made them do it" in his collection of
books on post-Cold War international politics
except as an act of obeisance to
establishmentarian - and especially
Council-on-Foreign-Relations - thinking. Holmes
regards Huntington's work as a "false template"
and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many
critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization"
had pointed out that there is insufficient
homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other
great religions for any of them to replace the
position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes
remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he
is looking for homogeneity" (p 136).
What role did left-wing ideology play in
legitimizing the war on terror, as seen by
Samantha Power in A Problem from Hell: America
and the Age of Genocide (Basic, 2002). As
Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian
interventionists rose to a superficial prominence
in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in US
foreign-policy thinking after the end of the Cold
War ... Their influence was small, however, and
after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether."
He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide
activists because he suspects that, by making a
rhetorically powerful case for casting aside
existing decision-making rules and protocols, they
may have emboldened the Bush administration to
follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism
outside the constitution and the law. The idea
that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld
may seem a stretch - they were, after all, doing
what they had always wanted to do - but Holmes'
argument that "a savvy pro-war party may
successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull
the wider public and to silence potential critics
on the liberal side" (p 157) is worth considering.
How did pro-war liberals help stifle national
debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war, as
illustrated by Paul Berman in Power
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hink we understand about the 9/11 attacks - and
how and why the United States has magnified many
times over the initial damage caused by the
terrorists. 
