THE MATADOR'S CAPE: America's Reckless Response to Terror
By Stephen Holmes
Cambridge University Press,
365 pages, $34.95
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"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."
George W. Bush
Second Inaugural Address
In 1936, U.S. sociologist Robert Merton explored the cumulative risks that ignorance, faulty logic, short-term thinking and ideological devotion bring to public affairs. Seventy years later, his essay The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action could be a primer for understanding the failed foreign policies and profound misdeeds of this century's first years.
Future historians will inevitably see a world shadowed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Their narratives, like today's journalism, will highlight tactical failures and strategic mistakes, faltering alliances, tired international institutions and the many ways that strong states misuse their power even when they believe they are doing good.
These histories will depict a world where recriminatory policies and brittle politics mask their struggles with an international order on the cusp of profound change. Inevitably, though, they will also parse a literature that has been incubating since the twin towers came crashing down in 2001, complex analyses that question the meaning of this evolving world and the shaky moralities that inform our contradictory politics.
This is a task that Stephen Holmes has already begun. His latest volume, The Matador's Cape, is a collection of dense review essays which, unlike so much of today's reportage, take seriously the theoretical foundations of global politics. Intervention, humanitarianism, human rights, democracy, law and crime - Holmes subjects every byword of U.S. foreign policy (and those of its more compliant allies) to the kind of scrutiny that our political leaders habitually, and often purposefully, ignore before going to war and skewering prospects for peace.
By dissecting a range of thoughtful authors who together define the distance between today's liberals and conservatives, Holmes highlights the self-defeating predictions of this decade's warmongering, and the vacuous assumptions that have helped bring the Middle East, the Muslim world and its neighbours to such misery.
Holmes's is a particularly American task, premised on the foibles of a superpower whose sell-by date sometimes seems perilously close. He asks hard questions of the authors he reviews, and takes their answers seriously even when they fall far short of illuminating. His starting point appears to be 2001, but his writing offers a chance to examine the postwar, 20th-century United States and the world it has so often tried to remake to its liking.
It's hard to construct a seamless argument through the writings of others, but Holmes makes a valiant effort. In brief: The Bush administration's post-9/11 policy of reprisal was what Gilbert Ryle long ago termed a "category mistake." A massive crime was misinterpreted as war, and the U.S. reaction became a series of "cascading misconceptions, deceptions, and mistakes" known as the "war on terror."
Indeed, this so-called war conflated an old-fashioned, "lifelong and unrevised conviction that hostile dictatorships are the only serious threats to American security in the international environment," with an unconscious effort to correct course in the shadow of conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, East Timor and Afghanistan.
Long before the Bush administration came into office, the conservative Project for the New American Century preached the importance of shaping events "before crises emerge," and meeting threats "before they become dire." But by the time it invaded Iraq, the Bush administration had already ignored the consequences of hapless, inconsistent global engagements: state failure, sectarianism and ideological confusion. Few U.S. politicians were willing to say then what they hesitantly admit now: Such adventures fail abroad and compromise liberty at home.
"The garbled motives behind Bush's war" will no doubt occupy Washington and its allies and foes for decades to come. Holmes's contribution to these discussions, like those of the authors he reviews, is to expose the quick judgments that turn policy awry, and to examine the wisdom that should ideally anchor politics. He takes seriously what policy-makers easily ignore: intellectual contests between liberals and conservatives, interventionists and humanitarians, democracy promoters and human-rights advocates. His efforts are thoughtful and often sharply worded, because, above all, words mean something, even when they are marshalled incorrectly. (Others agree: The British government recently announced that it is no longer fighting a "war" on terror.)
Even in essays that shy only millimetres from polemic, Holmes reserves his ire mostly for those of his authors who are facile or argumentatively flat-footed: Robert Kagan, John Yoo, Samuel Huntington and others who make their points rather than proving them. He reserves sympathy for writers like David Rieff, whose intellectual journey mirrors the deep divisions that humanitarian intervention should provoke among thinking citizens. In a world long on conviction and short on doubt - as singer Peggy Seeger notes, "the world is divided into people who believe they are right" - Holmes makes clear that no one has a lock on political morality.
Washington readers will undoubtedly pay closest attention to Holmes's concluding essay, in which he tries mightily to disavow enemy-centred counterterrorism in favour of a broader, threat-centred policy. Holmes clearly believes that the United States is no longer capable of using military force to counter terror, even if the right enemy were identified. Arguing for a policy calculus at once utilitarian and existential - find the danger, not the transitory dangerous person - sounds compelling. Explaining how to think about terrorism as a crime while removing criminals from the centre of political discourse is likely to be difficult, and a hard sell in a world hard-wired to turn the complex into the simplistic.
But Holmes is right to note that the U.S. response to 9/11 provoked "as much hatred as fear." It's time to fix what has been broken.
Paula Newberg is a Washington-based author and scholar of human rights, and a specialist in governance, development and democracy.
