HAWKS STICKING THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND (OF IRAQ).

HAWKS STICKING THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND (OF IRAQ). Ezra reminds us of one of the more bizarre manifestations of pro-Bush's-war liberalism, Paul Berman's attempt to fit Islamic terrorism seamlessly into the WWII and/or Cold War models of conflict, as a fight waged against totalitarianism. A year later, sometime TAP contributor Stephen Holmes offered the definitive rebuttal of this argument in his elegy for "the 1990s liberal hawk, by no means destined to survive the blast furnace of Iraq." Particularly important, looking forward, is Holmes' point that conflating Islamic terrorism with Nazism and Stalinism is not merely a bad analogy (for one thing, these movements controlled actual states with powerful militaries, a rather crucial distinction). Such a framework does not reflect tough-mindedness but rather is a comforting narrative intended to make the problems faced by liberal democracies in the 21st century appear more tractable:

His analogies, first of all, are tendentious to an extreme. Islamist murderousness resembles Bolshevik and Nazi murderousness. The planetary battle against terrorism (World War IV) resembles the planetary battle against communism. Baath dictatorship resembles Islamic militancy. The problem with such comparisons is not only that they are strained. They are also transparently calculated to serve a partisan political program. Analogies that challenge the Bush Administration (such as Palestinian violence and anticolonial violence) are filtered out, not because they are unrevealing but because they introduce a dissonant note.Take, for instance, Berman's peculiar claim that "on the plane of anti-American propaganda, the Iraqi Baath and Al Qaeda were already allied" because Saddam's press had celebrated the September 11 attacks. The nature of this purported alliance between religious insurgents and a secular oppressor is never explained. In other passages, moreover, Berman concedes that Islamic radicalism has arisen in opposition to authoritarian secular regimes. But he is much less interested in possible causal connections between the two than in their metaphysical identity. His false moral clarity rests entirely on his assertion that spiritually they are one and the same. The Administration's attempts to associate Iraq and Al Qaeda logistically came to naught. Berman's cultural and philosophical approach, by contrast, raises the identification of Saddam and Osama, the tyrant and the terrorist, to a level of blurry abstraction that no facts can possibly refute. [...]We are dealing, admittedly, with off-the-shelf categories, since neither the war paradigm nor the crime paradigm fits perfectly the battle against transnational Islamic terrorism, which involves political violence by nonstate actors. But Berman, like Bush, prefers the war model to the crime model, because the former seems to signal a more serious approach, a willingness to send young men to die in large numbers, for example.But this suggestion of greater realism and seriousness is deceptive. The war paradigm, besides inflating all too conveniently the unsupervised powers of the executive branch, assumes that America's unrivaled military superiority guarantees its success in the current struggle. It suggests that our enemy will eventually surrender and that we will be able to put the nightmare behind us. The crime paradigm has less rosy implications. It assumes that our government can no more stop the importing of a nuclear weapon into a major urban center than it can stop the clandestine flow of contraband drugs. That is to say, the crime paradigm, when applied to terrorism, has chilling implications precisely because it denies that "the problem could be solved." To turn from the crime paradigm to the war paradigm, therefore, does not bespeak a greater willingness to face the enemy. On the contrary, it is a classic case of sticking one's head in the sand (of Iraq).

Those interested in more actual critical thought on the issue will be happy to know that Holmes has a new book about the American response to terrorism out. I feel confident that it will hold up much better than Terror and Liberalism or Power and the Idealists.

--Scott Lemieux