Shelf Life. - The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win; An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism; Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election; How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas - book review

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Michael Potemra

--Michael A. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and cocontributor to National Review Online, is one of America's most valuable experts on terrorism. In The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win (St. Martin's, 262 pp., $24.95), he provides an impressive analysis not just of the particulars of our current struggle but of the overarching truths about American identity that will be the source of our eventual victory. Just like the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets, writes Ledeen, the Taliban "grossly underestimated our enormous capacity to rapidly unite to accomplish a national mission. . . . It is because we feel ourselves part of a common enterprise -- the advance of freedom -- [that] we spontaneously organize ourselves to achieve that enterprise."

This is absolutely correct: The distinctive genius of the United States is to combine immense -- indeed, unprecedented -- military power with a remarkable lack of militarism. We don't seek out opportunities for war, in fact we do our best to avoid them; but when we are provoked, we fight to the death in the cause of peace and freedom. Ledeen explains what, specifically, this fight will entail in the coming months and years. He warns us not to "oversimplify the war by describing it as a war with Islam, or a war with Islamic Arabs. . . . While there are many peaceful Muslims, the terror masters follow a tyrannical and bellicose version of Islam" -- one that Ledeen contends will rapidly fall out of favor among Muslims once reverses on the battlefield prove it isn't history's wave of the future.

Ledeen's book is bracing but optimistic. He notes our national "tendency to overrate the terrorists and underrate ourselves" -- and gives us good reason to believe that if we stay focused on the need for regime change in terrorist-sponsoring countries, we'll win this war decisively:

Creative destruction is [America's] middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace.

America, thy name is freedom -- and woe to its enemies.

-- Also just published is An Autumn of War: What America Learned from SeSeptember 11 and the War on Terrorism (Anchor, 240 pp., $12), an anthology of Victor Davis Hanson's important writings on the current crisis. Hanson -- who recently won the 2002 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism -- is a frequent contributor to National Review Online, and readers of his columns have come to cherish his solid, accurate diagnoses of the progress of the war. "These essays," he writes in his introduction, "reflect a deep belief that September 11 has reminded us how Western civilization and its more radical manifestation of liberty and capitalism in the United States are very different from other cultures past and present."

Hanson reached the most essential point about the war in an essay written a matter of hours after the 9/11 attacks:

We are in our own outright bloody war against tyranny, intolerance, and theocracy, an age-old fight against medieval foes who despise modernism, liberalism, and freedom and all the hope they bring to the human condition. . . . We can go to battle, as we once did in the past -- hard, long, without guilt, apology, or respite until our enemies are nono more.

Hanson is clearly a writer of great seriousness and discernment, but he is also capable of the light touch; his parodies of the home front -- and especially of antiwar commentators -- are pointed and devastatingly funny.

-- Just in time for the election season, David Horowitz gives us his nenew manifesto, How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas (Spence, 261 pp., $27.95). It's a call to arms, with all the passion we have come to expect from Horowitz. He demands that conservatives stop being defensive -- especially on the race issue, which he calls "the Democrats' dirtiest weapon":

Republicans should . . . neutralize it with a countercharge like this: Democrats are conducting a racial witch hunt. They are doing it to divert attention from the fact that they have betrayed minority children and trapped them in bankrupt school systems . . . The Confederate flag may or may not be a racist symbol. But those Democratic policies are racist facts.

Horowitz is a man of insight, and a very entertaining polemicist.

-- Whenever his pontificate comes to a close, one thing is certain: PoPope John Paul II will be a hard act to follow. He is at one and the same time a scholar, a politician, a man of prayer, and a media star -- surely sui generis and thus irreplaceable. But a fine new book by Vaticanologist John L. Allen Jr. gives cause for hope: The College of Cardinals is showing some impressive bench strength, with any number of papabili (possible popes) who might capture the world's imagination.