'He that stands it now …' A writer responds to his critics

National Review, March 22, 2004 by David Frum

WHEN Richard Perle and I published An End to Evil at the beginning of the year, we touched off about as nasty a literary brawl as the book-review pages have witnessed in some time. Michiko Kakutani, the daily book reviewer for the New York Times, was reduced to sputtering indignation: "absolutist ... cocky ... swaggering ... smug ... shrill ... deliberately provocative." "Reckless disregard for complexity, shades of grey or the possibility of unintended consequences," huffed The Economist. And so on and on it went.

Well, we can't complain. We started it.

Richard and I began work on An End to Evil because it seemed to us that much of our political and policy elite was losing its stomach for the fight against terrorism. They had been nervous enough when President Bush overthrew the Taliban: Senator Tom Daschle was worrying about the American military mission in Afghanistan as early as March 2002. Since the invasion of Iraq, however, many in Washington have suffered something close to a moral collapse. Sen. John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, even argued in January that the War on Terror should revert to being primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement matter: the same strategy that failed so dismally in the 1990s.

Our purpose in writing An End to Evil was to do our part to help summon Americans back to the mood of determination and resolution of September 2001. We opened with a quotation from Tom Paine: "He that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." We tried in the spirit of Paine to persuade Americans that this too is a time when it is necessary to take and hold our stand.

Not everybody agrees. But for too long, those who disagree with the strong anti-terror policies of the Bush administration have evaded their responsibility to offer adequate alternatives. It's a striking fact, for example, that when two leading counterterrorism officials of the Clinton National Security Council published their book on terrorism in 2002 (The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon), they spent so long tracing the origins of the terror threat--and devising excuses for the Clinton administration's failure to come decisively to grips with it--that they left themselves virtually no room at all to offer any suggestions about what might actually be done to protect the country from that threat.

Even now, with the nation readying itself for an election campaign in which war and peace will loom large, those who oppose strong anti-terror policies still have not articulated their alternative. Should we leave Iraq? No answer. What if anything should we do about Saudi Arabia? Radio silence. And how about that Iranian bomb? Mumble, mumble. What we get instead is a lot of angry shouting about neocons, neocons, neocons--as if the nation's foreign-policy doves had been simultaneously seized by a wonk's version of Tourette's syndrome. And yet we seem to hear the same themes, and the same errors, repeated again and again. Richard and I group these errors into three main categories: errors of the intellect, errors of the will, and errors of the heart. In our view, these erroneous beginnings explain why our principal critics arrive at their flawed, often fatally flawed, conclusions.

ERRORS OF THE INTELLECT

One common criticism is that Richard and I slight the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. This criticism occupies almost the entirety of Thomas Powers's review in The New York Review of Books. "Everything [in An End to Evil] is clear and all choices are stark--except when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza.... China, Russia, the CIA, the State Department, 'the underlying cultural malaise' in the Middle East--all these he [referring to my co-author, Richard Perle] can fix. But when it comes to the longest-running open sore in the clash of civilizations, his advice to the Palestinians is what Lucy in her role as psychiatrist used to tell the troubled Charlie Brown--'Get over it!'"

Yet there is something very peculiar about this line of criticism. It's based on a pair of assumptions: 1) that the creation of a Palestinian state would somehow ease our terrorism problem, and 2) that this state could be swiftly achieved if only the U.S. would put more pressure on Israel to offer greater concessions. Our critics, however, never quite articulate these assumptions--very possibly because they understand how silly these assumptions would sound if pronounced aloud.

Would it be a good thing to solve the Palestinian problem if it could be solved? Obviously yes. A solution would reduce the amount of human unhappiness in the world, deny America's enemies a talking point, and enhance the security of our Israeli ally. Would such a solution ease the terrorism problem? Well, Osama bin Laden himself has repeatedly made clear that the Palestinian problem constitutes only one of his grievances, and nowhere near the most important: In his first fatwa, issued in 1996, Chechnya, Bosnia, and even the Ogaden Desert and Tajikistan all concerned him much more. By 1998, the Israeli-Palestinian issue had risen to third place, still behind America's Iraq sanctions and the basing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. In his statements since 9/11, he has also complained of Australian support for the independence of East Timor, the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924, and the Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492. Osama bin Laden is a man with a large agenda, to put it mildly.