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First published as a Norton paperback 2004

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barber, Benjamin R., 1939–

Fear’s empire : war, terrorism, and democracy /
by Benjamin R. Barber.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-393-05836-0

1. United States—Foreign relations—2001– 2. United States—
Foreign relations—Philosophy. 3. United States—Military policy.
4. Intervention (International law). 5. Fear—Political aspects—United States. 6. Terrorism—Political aspects. 7. Democracy.
8. International cooperation. 9. Globalization—Political aspects.
I. Title.

E902.B37 2003

327.73—dc21

2003014077

ISBN 0-393-32578-4 pbk.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

1 The official Washington reaction to the Abu Ghraib abuses was to insist they were “aberrational.” At the Congressional hearings, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld called them “fundamentally un-American,” while Army General Lance Smith insisted they were a “distasteful and criminal aberration.” Even Democrat Joe Lieberman embraced American exceptionalism, saying “Americans are different” and that the abuses were “not the real America. . . . They are not who we are.”

2 Quoted by Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 23–24.

3 “Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq,” wrote Fox Butterfield in the New York Times, “takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates” (“Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in the U.S.,” New York Times, May 5, 2004, p. A11).

4 Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment in 1971 showed that a majority of players were willing to administer apparently painful (even fatal) shocks to subjects when urged to do so by an authority figure (see Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View [New York: Harper and Row, 1974]), while in an experiment at Stanford in 1974, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo found that teams of pretend prisoners and guards turned so quickly into torturers and victims (showing some of the same inclinations to sexual abuse exhibited at Abu Ghraib) that he had to terminate the experiment just five days into what was to have been a two-week simulation.

5 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 45.

6 Niall Ferguson, quoting General Maude on the eve of a three-year failed war aimed at “liberating” Mesopotamia from the dominion of the Ottomans, in his Colossus: The Price of American Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 200. In making the comparison between 1917 and 2003, Ferguson observes that “in both cases, Anglophone troops had been able to sweep from the south of the country to the capital in a matter of weeks. In both cases, their governments disclaimed any desire to rule Iraq directly. . . . In both cases, imposing law and order proved much harder than achieving the initial military victory.”

7 As quoted in Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 86–87.

8 The failures on the ground since that time have forced Bremer to postpone privatization, but it remains a crucial part of the American ideology of democratization.

9 Even in Afghanistan, where some will argue preventive war was justified, there is little reason to believe the Bush administration policies have worked. Seymour M. Hersh notes that a year and a half after the war there, “the Taliban are still a force in many parts of Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of Al Qaeda. . . . [L]ocal warlords . . . effectively control the provinces. . . . Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime” (“The Other War,” The New Yorker, April 12, 2004).

10 Warren Hoge, “Latin America Losing Hope in Democracy, Report Says,” New York Times, April 22, 2004, p. A3. The report to which Hoge refers warns that “it must be recognized that both in terms of progress towards democracy and in terms of the economic and social dynamic, the region is experiencing a period of change that in many cases takes the form of widespread crisis . . . characterized by change, by the concentration of wealth and by the increasing internationalization of politics” (United Nations Development Programme, “Democracy in Latin America,” UNDP, 2004).

11 David D. Kirkpatrick, “Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided,” New York Times, April 19, 2004, p. A21.

1 The “mother of all bombs” (technically, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB) is the Defense Department’s new 21,000-pound “conventional” bomb; the Pentagon under President Bush has hinted that there are circumstances under which it might contemplate a “first use” of tactical nuclear weapons. See, for example, the Newsweek cover story “Why America Scares the World,” March 24, 2003.

2 A portrait drawn by former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who gets partial credit for coining the phrase “axis of evil” (he coined “axis of hate,” which became “axis of evil,” presumably to better accommodate President Bush’s evangelical moralism). Frum believes Bush’s virtues—“decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity”—outweigh the vices cited above. See David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 272.

3 Tim Wiener, “Mexico’s Influence in Security Council Decision May Help Its Ties with U.S.,” New York Times, November 9, 2002, p. A11.

4 Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2002, p. 22.

5 Walter Russell Mead, American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 10.

6 Cited by Avisahi Margalit in his revealing essay “The Suicide Bombers,” New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003.

7 Cited by Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 89. Since Woodward’s method is not so much dubious as it is inscrutable (there is no way to check his attributions or many of his direct citations), I leave it to the reader to determine their veracity. I take their cumulative force to be of relevance even where I distrust them one by one. Many of those I cite here are from public speeches or speeches made public, but others depend on the reader’s trust. For good reasons not to trust Woodward, see the reviews of Bush at War (from different sides of the political spectrum) by Eric Alterman, “War and Leaks,” American Prospect, December 30, 2002; and Edward N. Luttwak, “Gossip from the War Room,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 1, 2002.

8 See my Jihad vs. McWorld, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 2001).

9 President Bush had an instinctive grasp of this and on 9/11 tried to get commercial aviation in the air again: “We won’t be held hostage,” he said, “we’ll fly at noon tomorrow” (Woodward, Bush at War, p. 27). In fact, it was another three days before flights were resumed, with the Federal Aviation Administration inadvertently doing the terrorists’ work for them.

10 Cited in Jeanne Meserve, “Cities Respond Differently to Terror Alert,” CNN.com, May 21, 2003.

11 There are some reasonable arguments for America’s reluctance, since it deploys more troops around the world than any other nation and utilizes land mines as an inexpensive protection for outnumbered garrisons; moreover, it has a good record of picking up its mines when it leaves. But the point here is that weapons that are regularly used with far greater casualties than any chemical or biological weapons have caused are excluded from the term weapons of mass destruction, while other less historically damaging weapons are included—presumably because they help make the American case for preventive war.

12 North Korea apparently has several nuclear weapons. It is widely believed it is beginning production for fissionable material for many more.

13 This is certainly the logic of some supporters of preventive war, including Tod Lindberg, who has acknowledged with astonishing frankness that in order for preventive war to work as deterrence, “one must be able to prevail in teaching the lesson one wants learned”—something only a uniquely armed nuclear hegemon like the United States can do. In this sense, Lindberg adds altogether appropriately, “preemption or prevention cannot be said to have superseded deterrence. Rather, preemption is the violent reestablishment of the terms of deterrence” (Tod Lindberg, “Deterrence and Prevention,” Weekly Standard, February 3, 2003, p. 25).

14 Henry Sokolski, “Two, Three, Many North Koreas,” Weekly Standard, February 3, 2003.

15 On December 28, 1937, the Times of London wrote, “Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?” The Truman/Atlee/King Declaration of 1945 called for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”

16 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 121.

17 The American Dialect Society, founded in 1889, has been choosing a “word of the year” since 1990. See USATODAY.com, February 6, 2003.

18 Following the American invasion of Iraq, however, little evidence was found of what in his 2003 State of the Union address President Bush had described as a vast Iraqi weapons program including “biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax,” “more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin,” “the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent,” “upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents,” and “mobile biological weapons labs . . . designed to produce germ warfare agents” (“President’s State of the Union Message to Congress and the Nation,” New York Times, January 29, 2003, p. A12).

19 The American supply house the American Type Culture Collection in Manassas, Virginia, provided the Iraqis with multiple ampoules of seventeen types of biological agents, which were used, along with French supplies, to create biological weapons. See Philip Shenon, “Iraq Links Germs for Weapons to U.S. and France,” New York Times, March 16, 2003, p. A18.

20 The Department of Defense rightly includes delivery systems in its Weapons of Mass Destruction Technologies list, since absent such systems, weapons of mass destruction are of little consequence. In the DOD’s words: “To be truly effective, chemical or biological agents must be spread in a diffuse cloud over a large area” (The Militarily Critical Technologies List, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, Washington, D.C., February 1998).

21 Peter J. Boyer, “The New War Machine,” The New Yorker, June 30, 2003.

1 State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003.

2 “Before the [September 11] attacks, the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq,” reports Bob Woodward. At a meeting just a few days after 9/11, “Rumsfeld was raising the possibility that they could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately” (Woodward, Bush at War, p. 49).

3 In an op-ed essay laced with fear and entitled “Secret, Scary Plans,” New York Times editorial writer Nicholas D. Kristof writes that the United States is developing contingency plans for “surgical cruise missile strikes” or even a “sledgehammer bombing,” including the use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Korean nuclear facilities. Kristof notes that neither South Korea nor Japan understand “the gravity of the situation . . . partly because they do not think this administration would be crazy enough to consider a military strike against North Korea.” Kristof concludes: “They’re wrong” (New York Times, February 28, 2003, p. A25).

4 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 67.

5 President Bush first used the phrase in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union speech: “States like these,” he said, naming Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, “and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

6 Quoted by Patrick E. Tyler, “A Signal Moment Ahead,” New York Times, December 8, 2002, p. A30. Citing the interview with Bob Woodward from which the comment was taken, Tyler remarks wisely: “Those comments suggest that Mr. Bush is not engaged in an opportunistic whipping up of an Iraq crisis, as some of his critics allege, as a way to divert the country from a troubled economy.”

7 Cited by Woodward, Bush at War, p. 33.

8 George Tenet testified to Congress on February 11, 2003, that there are “disturbing signs that al Qaeda has established a presence in both Iran and Iraq.” By the same token, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea (Paul Krugman, “Things to Come,” New York Times, March 18, 2003, p. A33).

9 George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President in Commencement Address to United States Coast Guard Academy,” New London, Conn., May 21, 2003.

10 Cited by Woodward, Bush at War, p. 65. Powell made forty-seven telephone calls to world leaders in the first few days after 9/11, while the eagles were screaming for war.

11 Ibid., p. 61. By the onset of the Iraq war in March 2003, Colin Powell was himself out of the box, speaking with the eagles against the machinations of the French and their supporters at the United Nations. One may surmise, however, that having lost the struggle to prevent the intervention in Iraq, Powell was keeping his counsel for another day, hoping to be able to play the diplomatic card again after the war.

12 Ibid., p. 81.

13 Quoted in John F. Burns and David E. Sanger, “Iraq Says Report to the U.N. Shows No Banned Arms,” New York Times, December 8, 2002, p. A28.

14 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Everyman Edition (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), p. 75.

15 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 81.

1 State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003.

2 I use the term myth as Richard Slotkin does when he notes that “myth expresses ideology in a narrative, its language is metaphorical and suggestive rather than logical and analytical.” What he calls “mythic icons” offer “a poetic construction of tremendous economy and compression” evoking “an implicit understanding of the entire historical scenario” (Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America [Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1998], p. 6).

3 James Madison, Federalist Number 10, The Federalist Papers, Modern Library Edition (New York: Random House, 1937), pp. 58–59.

4 Cited by Walter LaFeber, The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad, 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 52. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws was a locus classicus for republican theory and for the claim that republics could not maintain their liberty when their territory became extensive and hence necessarily “imperial.”

5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), bk. 1, chap. 17, p. 74.

6 Cited by Jason Epstein, “Leviathan,” New York Review of Books, May 1, 2003.

7 For an account of Melville’s role in portraying the myth of American innocence see my “Melville and the Myth of American Innocence,” in Aspects of Melville, ed. David Scribner (Pittsfield, Mass.: Berkshire County Historical Society at Arrowhead, 2001).

8 “The case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world . . . we are brought at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived in the beginning of time” (Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in Complete Works, vol. 1 [New York: Citadel Press, 1945], p. 376).

9 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Penguin, 1981), pp. 68–69.

10 Readers will recall that Melville’s Billy, rendered mute by rage at the evil and duplicitous Claggart’s mischief, strikes out righteously at him with a killing blow—leading the ship’s captain to condemn Billy reluctantly to death for his understandable but nonetheless capital “crime.”

11 In “Benito Cereno,” Delano intercepts a Spanish slaver on its way to the New World on which the cargo, so to say, has taken the crew captive. When boarded by Delano’s party, the lead rebel, a bold and literate figure who is in fact in charge following a successful mutiny, pretends to be subservient to the Spanish captain. So impenetrable is Delano’s American innocence that he cannot fathom what is unfolding so clearly before him. He takes what is a relationship of treachery and dissemblance to be a “spectacle of fidelity, on the one hand, and confidence on the other.” Delano, Melville writes, is a “person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable . . . to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man.” Like Billy Budd, he can scarcely comprehend evil even when he looks deep into its eyes.

12 So dependent on provocation was American involvement in Europe’s wars that the absurd claim Roosevelt had staged Pearl Harbor (by ignoring warnings) had a certain lunatic currency among those deeply committed to isolationism.

13 Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

14 Thomas L. Friedman, “Ah, Those Principled Europeans,” New York Times, February 2, 2003, sec. 4, p. 15.

15 Time Europe, February 6, 2003. Time noted that theirs was “an unscientific, informal survey for the interest and enjoyment of Time.com users and may not be indicative of popular opinion.” Other polls confirm the Time results, however.

16 See, for example, the Newsweek cover story, “Bush and God,” March 10, 2003, or “God and American Diplomacy,” The Economist, February 6, 2003. Jimmy Carter was actually the first “born again” president.

17 William James, in a quote reprinted in The Nation, December 23, 2002. Realist criticisms of moralizing in foreign policy have been offered by theorists like Lord Acton (“a nation has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests”), Henry Morgenthau, E. H. Carr, and George Kennan, inter alios.

18 “Chronic wrongdoing . . . may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may lead the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power” (President Theodore Roosevelt, “The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” 1904).

19 Cited by David E. Sanger, ““Bush Juggles the Roles of Leader and Cheerleader,” New York Times, October 28, 2002, p. A15.

20 George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President, 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy,” West Point, N.Y., June 1, 2002. This text reappears as the epigraph of Section II, “Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity,” of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

21 “I was sensitive,” said President Bush in his interview with Bob Woodward, “to this [accusation] that this was a religious war, and that somehow the United States would be the conqueror. And I wanted us to be viewed as the liberator” (Bush at War, p. 131).

22 Quoted by Simon Schama, “The Unloved American: Two Centuries of Alienating Europe,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2003.

23 Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 11.

24 Ibid., pp. 331, 332–34.

25 Ignatieff, “The Burden.” I find Ignatieff’s use of the old term empire to portray America’s new hegemony in a world without rivals unhelpful and even misleading, especially since he recognizes (as I argue here) that “despite its overwhelming military power” America “remains vulnerable,” since its enemies are not states “susceptible to deterrence, influence and coercion, but a shadowy cell of fanatics who have proved that they cannot be deterred and coerced.”

26 The tests that have been conducted have pitted an antiballistic missile against a single warhead (“a bullet trying to intercept a bullet”) with at most a single decoy; but in reality, an aggressor will come with multiple missiles surrounded by multiple (inexpensive) decoys, making interception far more problematic than it already is, or it will use conventional delivery systems such as airplanes or boats. Such technical arguments are not, however, very useful in contesting what is, after all, more of a theology than a strategic defense doctrine. For the full controversy about the efficacy of missile defense, see the ongoing work of Professor Theodore A. Postol of MIT, who has waged a one-man campaign against what he argues are fundamental technical flaws in the antiballistic system and in MIT’s studies of it. See, for example, William J. Broad, “MIT Studies Accusations of Lies and Cover-Up of Serious Flaw in Antimissile System,” New York Times, January 2, 2003, p. A13.

1 The Leviathan, pt. 1, chap. 13.

2 Quoted by John Mintz, “15 Freighters Believed to Be Linked to Al Qaeda,” Washington Post, December 31, 2002, p. A1.

3 Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, p. 37.

4 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, p. 119. Juergensmeyer’s book offers explanations for terrorism rooted in religious ideology and makes a useful contrast with views (like mine) emphasizing the dialectical complicity of McWorld and the West in terrorism’s war against them. However, as Amy Chua argues in her World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), it can also be shown (as I have tried to do in my Jihad vs. McWorld) “that the global spread of markets and democracy is a principal, aggravating cause of group hatred and ethnic violence throughout the non-Western world” (p. 9).

5 The late Michael Rogin offers a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the relationship between Thomas Dixon, D. W. Griffith and Woodrow Wilson in his article “ ‘The Sword Became a Flaming Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” included in Ronald Reagan, The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 194–95 in particular. His work is powerfully suggestive about the relationship between film, images, and American presidential leadership.

1 Cited from Truman’s Memoirs in a letter from Mike Moore, editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, New Republic, November 4, 2002.

2 Bush, “2002 Graduation Exercise of U.S. Military Academy.”

3 Mike Allen and Barton Gellman, “Strike First, and Use Nuclear Weapons if Necessary,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 16–22, 2002.

4 White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002.

5 Quoted in Albert Eisele, “Hill Profile: George F. Kennan,” The Hill, September 25, 2002.

6 Joseph Lelyfeld, “In Guantánamo,” New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.

7 Letter from Moore, New Republic.

8 Cited by Pat M. Holt, Secret Intelligence and Public Policy: A Dilemma of Democracy (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1995), p. 239.

9 It was common to argue that because the Soviet Union was “totalitarian” and not “authoritarian,” it was invulnerable to being overthrown from the inside and would have to be vanquished from without. See, for example, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a one-time UN ambassador, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary, vol. 68, no. 5 (November 1979).

10 The matter was resolved peacefully only because both President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev gave each other “second” chances (they both allowed an initially neglected peace offer “first letter” to be reinstated after a belligerent “second letter” threatening war had been sent); in doing so, they both had to resist the calls within their respective ranks for preventive strikes. See the full account in Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

11 President George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President on Iraq at the Cincinnati Museum Center,” October 8, 2003; cited in New York Times, October 9, 2002.

12 Woodward, Bush at War, pp. 60–61.

13 Ibid., p. 100. In a column discussing the apparent willingness of President Bush to see Saddam Hussein killed, Nicholas D. Kristof argues that despite the ban on assassination signed by President Reagan (Executive Order 12333), the United States has engaged in covert assassination plans against selected adversaries more than a few times. The ban on it is not encoded in American law, and though Reagan’s ban has been renewed since, it “can easily be nullified.” Kristof argues that it at least “appears” that the U.S. government tried to kill Qaddafi of Libya in 1986, Mohammed Farah Aidid of Somalia in 1993, and Saddam Hussein in 1991. The real problem is “finding Saddam to kill him.” See Kristof, “The Osirak Option,” New York Times, November 15, 2002, p. A31. Ironically, although Baathist Iraq is gone, like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein remains at large (as of June 2003).

14 Ari Fleischer, press briefing in the James S. Brady Room, October 1, 2002.

15 Mike Allen and Barton Gellman, “Preemptive Strikes Part of U.S. Strategic Doctrine,” Washington Post, December 11, 2002, p. A1.

16 Woodward, Bush at War, pp. 52 and 103.

17 National Security Strategy.

18 Only after protests from Democrats and Republicans alike was the program refunded in the months before the war in Iraq.

19 Bill Keller, “At the Other End of the Axis: Some F.A.Q.’s,” New York Times, January 11, 2003, p. A15. Of course, as Keller acknowledges, it was the Koreans who first broke the 1994 “Agreed Framework” in which North Korea agreed to end its nuclear program in return for American assistance, two light water reactors (much harder to process weapons-grade plutonium from), and assured nonaggression from the United States. This agreement, brokered by President Carter working as an emissary for President Clinton, ended a crisis very much like the current one, in which Clinton actually entertained the idea of a strike against the nuclear facility prior to striking the deal. North Korea broke its bargain in 2002, although it hasn’t yet received the pledged light water reactors.

20 This is the clear implication of the president’s words in his National Cathedral address, September 14, 2001, when he declared that while “this conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others, it will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.”

21 Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 14.

22 Thomas Powers, “War and Its Consequences,” New York Review of Books, March 27, 2003.

23 Cited in Mansour Farhang, “A Triangle of Realpolitik: Iran, Iraq and the United States,” The Nation, March 17, 2003. Farhang notes that Sharon has urged President Bush to go after Iran “the day after [he] finishes off Saddam Hussein.”

24 David E. Sanger citing former CIA director R. James Woolsey, “Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World,” New York Times, April 6, 2003, p. B1. Sanger reports that in the first week of April 2003, when an aide warned President Bush that “his unpredictable Defense Secretary has just raised the specter of a broader confrontation [with Syria and Iran],” President Bush “said one word—‘Good’—and went back to work.”

25 Lelyveld, “In Guantánamo.”

26 Lelyveld quoting Paul Wolfowitz. Lelyveld’s “Waldorf-Astoria” quote is from an unnamed officer.

27 Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). See chap. 4, “Should the Ticking Bomb Terrorist Be Tortured?” Dershowitz would legalize torture only when it seemed likely that it would be deployed illegally anyway, asking for “a formal requirement of a judicial warrant as a prerequisite to nonlethal torture” (p. 158). Better under legislative and judicial oversight than in the dark of foreign prisons like the one at Guantánamo Bay.

28 Allen and Gellmann, “Preemptive Strike.”

29 Congressman Norman Dicks of Washington, speech at the second session of the 43rd Democratic Convention, August 15, 2000, in Los Angeles, California; cited in sidebar, New Republic, September 23, 2002.

30 Jonathan Chait, “False Alarm: Why Liberals Should Support the War,” New Republic, October 21, 2002.

31 Michael R. Gordon, “Serving Notice of a New U.S., Poised to Hit First and Alone,” New York Times, January 27, 2003, p. A1.

32 For the best philosophical account of just war debates, see Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977). For a just war discussion of terror, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

1 President Eisenhower, who had opposed Europe’s and Israel’s 1956 invasion of Egypt, was here criticizing Israel’s continued (partial) occupation of Egypt after France and Britain, under American pressure, had withdrawn.

2 President George W. Bush, press conference with Prime Minister Blair, January 31, 2003.

3 “What Does Disarmament Look Like?,” address to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, January 23, 2003.

4 Quoted by Woodward, Bush at War, p. 280.

5 President Bush used the phrase “terrorist state” for Iraq in his joint appearance with Secretary of State Powell the day after Powell’s February 2003 Security Council speech. Rumsfeld’s comment was reported in the New York Times on February 7, 2003 (James Dao, “Nuclear Standoff: Bush Administration Defends Its Approach to North Korea,” p. A13).

6 Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack has suggested that deterrence, which was such a “reasonable alternative” in dealing with “the Soviet Union for 45 years,” cannot work in Iraq because Saddam Hussein is “unintentionally suicidal.” Indeed, because “his calculations are based on ideas that do not necessarily correspond to reality and are often impervious to outside influences” and given his “history of catastrophic miscalculations,” the only question the United States faces is “war now or war later—a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them” (“Why Iraq Can’t be Deterred,” New York Times Magazine, September 26, 2002). For details, see his The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002).

On the contrary, one can suggest that Saddam Hussein’s regime survived for thirty-one years not as a result of “good luck” (Pollack’s candidate for explanation) but because Saddam has read and responded to external carrots and sticks very well. The Iraq aggression against Kuwait—his major “miscalculation”—originated as much from a lack of clear American intentions (the American ambassador to Iraq in 1991 waffled when she should have warned Iraq of dire consequences) as from his own irrationality, a thesis fortified by his responsiveness to American nuclear threats if he deployed biological and chemical weapons in that war. More important, Pollack actually makes the case for the difference between states with interests and terrorists by trying to exempt Hussein from its otherwise convincing logic. Since in the end the threat of preventive war failed to deter Saddam, it failed to do what the Bush administration hoped it would do.

7 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 174.

8 Ibid., p. 89.

9 Ibid., p. 41.

10 Lindberg, “Deterrence and Prevention.”

11 Gordon, “Serving Notice.”

12 David E. Sanger, “Nuclear Anxiety: U.S. Eases Threat on Nuclear Arms for North Korea,” New York Times, December 30, 2002, p. A1. Leon Fuerth, once Vice-President Gore’s foreign policy adviser, noted in an op-ed article that nonaction in the face of North Korea’s provocations risked turning President Bush’s preventive war rhetoric into “a bluff that is being called,” with the outcome that “we are preparing to fight a war with a country that might eventually acquire nuclear weapons, while another country is closing in on the ability to go into mass production” (Leon Fuerth, “Outfoxed by North Korea,” New York Times, January 1, 2003, p. A15).

13 Cited by Thom Shanker, “Lessons From Iraq Include How to Scare Korean Leader,” New York Times, May 12, 2003, p. A17.

14 Charles Krauthammer, “The Obsolescence of Deterrence,” Weekly Standard, December 9, 2002, p. 24.

15 At the time, this preemptive strike was roundly condemned not just by Israel’s traditional critics like France but by Britain (which called it “a grave breach of international law”) and the Reagan administration.

16 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “Keeping Saddam Hussein in a Box,” New York Times, February 2, 2003, sec. 4, p. 15. Mearsheimer and Walt offered a “realist” critique of the Iraq war strategy in the January 2003 issue of Foreign Policy, arguing that deterrence alone could have worked perfectly well in Iraq.

17 Tony Judt, “The Wrong War at the Wrong Time,” New York Times, October 20, 2002, sec. 4, p. 11.

18 Cited by Richard W. Stevenson, “North Korea Begins to Reopen Plant for Processing Uranium,” New York Times, December 24, 2002, p. A1.

19 David E. Sanger, “President Makes Case That North Korea Is No Iraq,” New York Times, January 1, 2003, p. A1.

20 Cited in Sanger, “Nuclear Anxiety.”

21 Cited in Howard W. French, “Nuclear Fear as a Wedge,” New York Times, December 24, 2002, p. A1.

22 Quoted in Mike Allen, “Bush Pledges Diplomatic Approach to North Korea,” Washington Post, October 22, 2002, p. A24.

23 For example, even the claim that Saddam used chemical agents on his own people, perhaps the most important and least contested of the ancillary charges used by the U.S. government to buttress the generic case against the Iraqi regime as a dangerous and brutal rogue state, has been challenged. Because the terrible Kurdish casualties from chemical agents at Halabja were inflicted during the Iraq-Iran War in the midst of a battle in which both sides may have used chemical agents, there are in fact questions both about whether the Iraqis were using the weapons against the Kurds or against their Iranian opponents and, indeed, even questions about which side employed the toxic agent. See Stephen C. Pelletiere, “A War Crime or an Act of War?,” New York Times, January 31, 2003, p. A29. Pelletiere’s arguments are controversial and have been challenged by credible critics like Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who holds Iraq alone responsible for the gassing of Kurdish civilians at Halabja. See Roth’s letter to the editor, New York Times, February 5, 2003. More serious still, it was the United States that provided Iraq with much of its chemical and biological war weapons at a time when America supported Iraq against Iran.

24 In his State of the Union address, President Bush contended that the old warheads discovered by inspectors on January 16, 2003, were proof of Saddam’s plans to use chemical and biological agents; but Blix reported that “no trace” of chemical or biological elements had been found in the warheads (or anywhere else, for that matter).

25 For documentation, see the reports of the Southern Poverty Law Center (at www.splcenter.org).

26 The distinction between national and international terrorists is, of course, slippery and problematic for those who wish to strike preemptively against “international” terrorism. Clearly even counterterrorist preventive war must be conducted with extreme caution.

27 Secretary of State Colin Powell, speech to the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, as reported in “Powell on Iraq: ‘We Reserve Our Right to Take Military Action,’ ” New York Times, January 27, 2003, p. A8.

28 Editorial, “Lighting the Fuse in Iraq,” New York Times, January 22, 2003, p. A20.

29 Max Boot, “Look Who Likes Deterrence Now,” Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002, p. 27. As Boot notes, gloatingly but also accurately, “The Left’s enthusiasm for containment and deterrence was, to put it mildly, a lot harder to detect during the Cold War.”

30 Cited by Warren Hoge, “Blair, Despite a Dubious Public, Sticks to a Firm Stance on Iraq,” New York Times, February 4, 2003, p. A12.

31 The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops regarded it as a violation of “just war theory,” arguing that “it is not morally acceptable to intend to kill the innocent as part of a strategy of deterring nuclear war” (“The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” pastoral letter, May 3, 1983, ¶ 178).

32 Quoted in Chris Hedges, “A Skeptic About Wars Intended to Stamp Out Evil,” New York Times, January 14, 2003, p. B3.

33 Krauthammer, “Obsolesence of Deterrence.”

34 Woodward’s reconstruction of the comments, Bush at War, p. 194.

35 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780), chap. 1. In Bentham’s famous opening, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. . . . They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think. . . . In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while.”

36 Bentham has proposed in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation that human behavior rested on a calculation about the likely pain or pleasure to result from the duration, propinquity, intensity, and certainty of each act.

37 J. S. Mill, “On Bentham,” in G. Himmelfarb, Essays on Politics and Culture (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1963), p. 97. Originally published in London and Westminister Review, August 1838.

38 Cited by Richard W. Stevenson, “Loss of the Shuttle: The President,” New York Times, February 3, 2003, p. A1.

39 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 136.

40 Patrick E. Tyler, “After the War: U.S. Juggling Iraq Policy,” New York Times, April 13, 1991, sec. 1, p. 5.

41 See, for example, Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2003).

42 David Rohde, “A Dead End for Afghan Children Adrift in Pakistan,” New York Times, March 7, 2003, p. A3.

43 Quoted in John Diamond and Bill Nichols, “Bush’s War Doctrine Questioned,” USA Today, June 6, 2003, p. A8.

44 Quoted in “Excerpts from News Conference: Imagine ‘Hussein and Nuclear Weapons,’ ” New York Times, November 8, 2002, p. A24.

45 The United States Strategic Command prepared a “theater Nuclear Planning Document” listing Iraqi targets for a nuclear strike, while Donald Rumsfeld, on the pretext of being reassuring, noted “we will not foreclose the possible use of nuclear weapons if attacked.” The reassurance came in the form of a caveat noting, “we can do what needs to be done using conventional capabilities.” For a critical discussion, see Nicholas D. Kristof, “Flirting with Disaster,” New York Times, February 14, 2003, p. A31.

1 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2002.

2 Elizabeth Becker, “U.S. Business Will Get Role in Rebuilding Occupied Iraq,” New York Times, March 18, 2003, p. A18. According to Neil King Jr. of the Wall Street Journal: “The Bush administration’s audacious plan to rebuild Iraq envisions a sweeping overhaul of Iraqi society within a year of a war’s end, but leaves much of the work to private U.S. companies. The Bush plan, as detailed in more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents, would sideline United Nations development agencies and other multilateral organization that have long directed reconstruction efforts in places such as Afghanistan and Kosovo. The plan also would leave big nongovernmental organizations largely in the lurch” (“Bush Has an Audacious Plan to Rebuild Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2003, p. 1).

3 William Finnegan, “After Seattle,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2000. Then Clinton official Summers meant this as high praise, not criticism, since he was urging the Congress to support the World Bank.

4 To take one example, Richard Perle, an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld who formerly served as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, was retained by the now-bankrupt telecommunication company Global Crossing while advising the Pentagon. Six hundred thousand dollars of his $725,000 fee allegedly was contingent on Global Crossing getting Pentagon approval of its sale to a Hong Kong joint venture. See Maureen Dowd, “Perle’s Plunder Blunder,” New York Times, March 23, 2003, sec. 4, p. 13.

5 Unfortunately, it is also a story of Cold War fearfulness and a rapid forgiving and reintegrating of tens of thousands of ex-Nazi middle managers, officers, judges, and administrators into the new “democratic” Germany. See Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

6 Cover, New Republic, May 26, 2003.

1 Apostolic Exhortation, Mexico City, January 28, 1999; cited in Alessandra Stanley, “Pope Urges Bishops to Minister to the Rich,” New York Times, January 24, 1999, sec. 1, p. 10.

2 Personal correspondence with author, 2000.

3 Chua, World on Fire, pp. 9, 13.

4 Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 245.

5 Zakaria, Future of Freedom, p. 248.

6 G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 5 (September/October 2002).

7 Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The Insider: What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis,” New Republic, April 17, 2000. Stiglitz went on to argue: “Did America and the IMF push policies because we believed the policies would help East Asia or because we believed they would benefit financial interests in the United States and the industrial world? . . . As a participant in these debates, I got to see the evidence. There was none.”

8 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 30. Friedman trivializes the idea of public goods or social consequences by using “neighborhood” and goes on to dismiss the argument as a justification for democratic government since. In his too clever words, “when government engages in activities to overcome neighborhood effects, it will in part introduce an additional set of neighborhood effects” summed up in an encroachment on personal liberties (p. 32). A perfectly circular argument.

9 Pope John Paul II, “Incarnationis Mysterium,” Bull of Indiction of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Rome, November 29, 1998.

1 State of the Union Address, January 25, 1994.

2 Quoted in George Packer, “Dreaming of Democracy,” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2003.

3 Susan B. Glasser, “A Model for Democracy?,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, March 3–9, 2003. Kuwait is developing its civil society, but “it is a place without a single legally recognized human rights organization.”

4 Packer, “Dreaming of Democracy.”

5 As Howard J. Wirda argues, American notions of civil society are also difficult to export, and often are greeted with distrust by governments who fear an erosion of their power. See “Is Civil Society Exportable? The American Model and Third World Development,” working paper, Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, Aspen Institute, 2003.

6 Marlise Simons, “An Outspoken Arab in Europe: Demon or Hero?,” New York Times, March 1, 2003, p. A4.

7 See Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution (1856). Tocqueville himself actually associated the parlement with ancient liberty and their destruction with a loss of liberty, but in this he was a critic of modern centralized egalitarianism. Simon Schama takes up this theme in his conservative portrait of the revolution in Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).

8 Oscar and Lilian Handlin’s Liberty and Power: 1600–1760 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) offers a vivid picture of this slow and deliberate nurturing of democratic institutions in prerevolutionary colonial America.

9 At the time of the war’s onset there were significant differences in the Bush administration about the role of the military in a postwar Iraq, with the Pentagon far less amenable to extended military governance than the State Department. See, for example, Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Federal Reserve: The State Department’s Anti-democracy Plan for Iraq,” New Republic, March 17, 2003.

10 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 247.

11 In an early book, I tried to take the measure of these startling differences: see The Death of Communal Liberty: The History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

12 Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 247. Sen notes, for example, that “the reading of Confucianism that is now standard among authoritarian champions of Asian values does less than justice to the variety within Confucius’s own teachings” (p. 234).

13 The first quote is from Federalist Number 10, the second from Federalist Number 9.

14 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), and my “Fantasy of Fear: Huntington and the West versus the Rest,” Harvard International Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (Winter 1997–98). A weaker form of the same claim can be found in the writing of Bernard Lewis.

15 Cited by Pamela Constable, “Pakistan’s Mullah’s Speak Softly,” Washington Post, March 22, 2003, p. A12. For a view of Tatarstan’s transition from Soviet totalitarianism to Islamic authoritarian democracy under the watchful eye of Russia, see Bill Keller, “Learning from Russia: Here’s a Model for How to Shape a Muslim State,” New York Times, May 4, 2003, sec. 4, p. 1.

16 Despite Graham’s harsh comments on Islam (on NBC Nightly News in November 2001), his organization, Samaritan’s Purse, has been invited into postwar Iraq as a charitable organization. See Michelle Cottle, “Bible Brigade,” New Republic, April 21, 2003. Other American fundamentalists suggested that 9/11 was God’s punishment on a godless nation, underscoring the strange schizophrenia with which America is perceived in the world, as a harbinger of materialist secularism but stalked internally by fanatic religious fundamentalists as antimodern as the Islamicists America so fears.

17 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 131.

18 Hell-Bent on War” was how Newsweek titled its cover essay on Iraq in its February 17, 2003, issue.

19 Kagan, Of Paradise and Power.

20 Cited by Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 157.

21 William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (London: H. Markley, 1902).

22 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy, in Social Contract and Discourses, Everyman Edition (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1913), p. 251.

23 The local Bosnian critic is Zarko Papic, and both quotes are from Daniel Simpson, “A Nation Unbuilt: Where Did All That Money in Bosnia Go?,” New York Times, February 16, 2003, sec. 4, p. 12.

24 The University of Maryland’s College of Education has conducted research on comparative education of special relevance to Islamic societies. See Jo-Ann Amadeo et al., Civic Knowledge and Engagement: An IEA Study of Upper Secondary Students in Sixteen Countries (Amsterdam: The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 1999); and Judith Torney-Purta et al., Citizenship and Education in Twenty-eight Countries: Civic Knowledge and Engagement at Age Fourteen (Amsterdam: The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2001). Also see the World Education Reports from UNESCO and Education Sector Strategy (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1999). For information on the monitoring of standards in America’s Muslim schools, consult the Council on Islamic Education.

25 For statistical corroboration of this claim and a study of how education diminishes recidivism, see James Gilligan, Preventing Violence (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001).

1 Address of His Holiness to the Diplomatic Corps, Rome, January 13, 2003.

2 Cited in Michael Tomasky, “Meet Mr. Credibility,” American Prospect, vol. 14, no. 3 (March 2003).

3 Colonel Ahmed Ghobashi, cited by Dexter Filkins, “As Many Iraqis Give Up, Some Fight Fiercely,” New York Times, March 23, 2003, p. B1.

4 Ken Adelman, a former Reagan administration national security official, had written a piece for the Washington Post in early 2002 entitled “Cakewalk in Iraq” (February 13, 2002, p. A27).

5 Nye, The Paradox of American Power, p. xv.

6 Marc Kaufman, “Embracing Nation-Building,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 21–27, 2003, p. 16.

7 Ironically, this has made it somewhat more difficult to talk sitting dictators into exile (as in the case of Saddam Hussein), because an agreement by governments that they will not be prosecuted can no longer be counted on in the face of global public opinion. Even Henry Kissinger risks trial on charges stemming from alleged activities in Cambodia during the war in Vietnam if he travels to France or certain other countries where an indictment has been threatened. See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York: Verso, 2001) and the film of the same name by Eugene Jarecki.

8 Jody Williams, address to the Treaty Signing Convention, Ottawa, Canada, December 3, 1997. For updates on this work, see the annual Landmine Monitor Reports published by Human Rights Watch.

9 There were a few exceptions, including Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who spoke fervently in opposition to war, but most Americans wishing to hear a strong and ongoing debate were left feeling voiceless.

10 Despite complaints about leftist celebrities, as Warren St. John notes, “while politically active stars have long provoked strong reactions from those who disagree with them—think of Jane Fonda, Edward Asner and Charlton Heston—opposition to celebrity activities has never been more vocal or better organized. Web sites with names like boycott-hollywood.net, Famousidiot.com, and Celiberal.com are spearheading email and telephone campaigns against stars and, in the case of television performers, the companies that advertise on their shows” (“The Backlash Grows Against Celebrity Activists,” New York Times, March 23, 2003, sec. 9, p. 1, 2003). Paul Krugman has speculated about the role of radio behemoths like Clear Channel that have “close links to the Bush administration.” See “Channels of Influence,” New York Times, March 25, 2003, 2003, p. A17.

11 See the MoveOn Web site at www.moveon.org.

12 The CivWorld Global Citizens Campaign, whose activities include a signature campaign for the Declaration of Interdependence; an annual Interdependence Day to be celebrated for the first time in Philadelphia and a number of world capitals, as well as college and school campuses, on September 12, 2003; a global citizenship education curriculum for adults and schools; a global citizens passport; and art and music activities recognizing the arts as a natural commons for the human spirit. See the Web site www.civworld.org.

13 Bangladesh is a laboratory of civic innovation, with over twenty thousand NGOs registered with the government. BRAC runs thousands of health clinics and oversees thirty-four thousand schools with more than a million students, and with its business and microcredit banking ventures, which rival the Grameen Bank, it “may be the world’s largest national nongovernmental organization.” See Amy Waldman, “Helping Hand for Bangladesh’s Poor,” New York Times, March 25, 2003, p. A8.

14 Kofi Annan, speech at College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va., February 8, 2003; cited in Julia Preston, “Annan Appeals to U.S. for More Talks Before the War,” New York Times, February 9, 2003, sec. 1, p. 15.

1 The Pentagon was also a target, but there soldiers and soldier civilians were at work, and the dynamics (though not the tragedy and the impact of the losses) were a little different.

2 The missed opportunity was the more surprising coming from a president who, though generally wed to the ABC (anything but Clinton) approach to his agenda, had embraced Clinton’s national service programs at the Corporation for National and Community Service.

3 Ikenberry, “American Imperial Ambition.”

4 President Dwight Eisenhower, presidential radio address, October 31, 1956.