Undaunted by the Iraq debacle, uber-hawks David Frum and Richard Perle air their fevered wet dream of a national-security superstate that slaps down uppity Muslims, bombs North Korea, slices and dices civil liberties and scatters the Palestinians like birdseed.
By Gary Kamiya Pages 1 2 3 4
NothingJanuary 30, 2004 | Forget "The Tell-Tale Heart." Put down "The Shining." Retire that dog-eared copy of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear." If you really want to feel the cold fingers of fear running up and down your spine, pick up David Frum and Richard Perle's "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror." It's the scariest book since the novel Saddam Hussein reportedly wrote while his underlings pretended to work on those nonexistent weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities -- you remember, the ones the authors and their friends in the White House used to justify invading Iraq.
"An End to Evil" is like Bush on crack. It's a kind of neocon orgy, a Bohemian Grove weekend for militaristic moralists, a chance to get naked and do tribal, Lord of the Flies dances -- "Invade Iran! Kill Yasser! Drink Kim's blood!" But if its recommendations are a little too extreme even for the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Paul Wolfowitz triumvirate, its underlying worldview is identical to theirs. It's a kind of CAT scan of the Bush administration's collective brain, an entity so weird it should be cryogenically frozen so future scientists can study it. Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and author of a recent encomium to his ex-boss, presumably represents the right brain, glibly spinning and selling, while neocon guru Richard Perle provides the left-hemisphere gray matter. With its trademarked combination of chipper propaganda, bullying bluster, intellectual dishonesty and radical policy prescriptions, "An End to Evil" offers a guided tour of the mind of George W. Bush, as filtered through the higher-grade neurons of its authors.
Here are some of the authors' policy recommendations: Preparing to launch a preemptive attack on North Korea, after moving our troops out of range of their artillery and missiles. Taking direct action to topple the regime in Iran, by providing aid to Iranian dissidents. Being prepared to invade Syria, of whom the authors write, "Really, there is only one question to ask about Syria: Why have we put up with it as long as we have?" Being prepared to invade Libya. "The illusion that Muammar al-Qaddafi is 'moderating' should be treated as what it is: a symptom of the seemingly incurable wishful delusions that afflict the accommodationists in the foreign policy establishment." (Now that those accommodationists in State have been proven right, don't expect an apology from the authors: They'll claim Qaddafi got rid of his WMD programs only because Bush invaded Iraq. All other answers, no matter if they're true, don't fit with their Manichaean, evildoers-respond-only-to-force worldview. Besides, those who are always right must never apologize. It is a sign of weakness, which our evil Muslim terrorist enemies (TM) will exploit with evil terror.) Taking a superconfrontational line with Saudi Arabia, including letting them know that if they don't reform we would look with favor upon a Shiite uprising in their oil-rich Eastern Province. Abandoning the Israeli-Palestinian peace process altogether. In a radical departure from U.S. policy, they say the Palestinians should not be given a state. Creating a Palestinian state out of the West Bank and Gaza, they write, will not bring peace to the region, because the Palestinians and other Arabs are only interested in vengeance, not justice. Instead, the Palestinians should "let go of the past" and content themselves with becoming citizens of the Arab countries in which they now live. The authors do not say what should happen to the 3.9 million Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories: Presumably they should either agree to become second-class citizens like the other Israeli Arabs, or leave.
Their domestic policies are equally arresting: Requiring all residents to carry a national identity card that includes "biometric data, like fingerprints or retinal scans or DNA," and empowering all law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws. The authors admit that such a card "could be used in abusive ways," but reassure us by saying that victims of "executive branch abuse will be able to sue." Those who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear! Encouraging Americans to "report suspicious activity." Apparently alone among Americans, the authors lament the demise of the TIPS program. Changing immigration policy so that the U.S. can bar all would-be visitors who have "terrorist sympathies." The authors define "terrorist sympathies" so broadly that this would rule out a high percentage of visitors from Muslim or Arab countries. Reforming the CIA to make it more hard-line on the Middle East. There can be no argument that American intelligence desperately needs reform. But after the yellowcake scandal, after the Valerie Plame leak, after the lies and distortions and creation of special offices to cook evidence, for Bush hard-liners to trash the intelligence community and the State Department takes some chutzpah.
The remarkable thing about these ideas is that, just a few years ago, they existed only in the feverish fantasies of wack jobs at extreme right, virulently pro-Israel think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. But then came Sept. 11, 2001, and an ill-starred roll of the dice that brought together superhawks Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, hard-line Likud supporters Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith (and Richard Perle, offstage), and a devoutly religious, intellectually overmatched, politically shrewd president who embraced a permanent war on terror as if God had spoken to him (and as the only way to salvage his disastrous presidency). The result: Not only were these radical ideas given respectability, they actually became U.S. policy.
Not all of them, of course. One of the few interesting things about this insufferably smug, intellectually shallow book is trying to predict which of the authors' wilder policy recommendations will actually be implemented, and which will remain mere gleams in the right wing's Cyclopean eye. In fact, none of their dreams are likely to become reality. The U.S. is not going to invade North Korea, thereby condemning tens or hundreds of thousands of Koreans (from both North and South) to death. Nor will it invade Iran: After the Iraq debacle, even the most ignorant, deluded neocon is probably beginning to realize that toppling the mullahs will not guarantee that a U.S.-friendly regime would follow.
And invading Iran would exacerbate the worsening political crisis in Iraq, where the Bush administration is desperately running again to the despised United Nations to bail out the U.S. plan for rigged elections, which were put in place to prevent an Iranian-style theocratic Shiite state emerging. Typically, Perle and Frum, who wax eloquent about bringing democracy to the Arab world, have not a word to say about this -- although every knowledgeable commentator warned of this danger before the invasion. (Similarly, they make much of their concern for the woeful plight of women in the Arab world, but ignore the fact that women in Iraq now face the likelihood of being forced to live under Islamic law -- a fate they escaped under Saddam's secular regime, dreadful as it was.) It is not even likely to whack little Syria, which poses no conceivable threat to the U.S.
Next page: OK, so they think we made one mistake in Iraq: Not installing Perle's pal Ahmad Chalabi as a puppet dictator