A new review by Gary Kamiya of David Frum's and Richard Perle's An End to Evil (2003) is up at Salon.com. He characterizes the book this way: "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."
Kamiya is more optimistic than I am about how much of the Frum/Perle agenda might actually become Bush Administration policy.
But this isn't to say that the authors' militarist, triumphalist, unilateral, self-righteous, black-and-white ideology will not continue to drive the Bush administration's beliefs and actions. Rejecting international treaties and institutions, embracing an unprecedented and deeply un-American doctrine of preventive war, insulting the U.N. (except when we need it to bail us out), eschewing diplomacy for force, bigfooting everybody who dares to oppose us, and above all, treating the "War on Terror" as a kind of divinely inspired crusade against "evil," which only a heretic could oppose: These are the bedrock beliefs of the Bush team. They also just so happen to be the heart of its reelection strategy, aimed at Americans who didn't know the difference between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and trusted their government when it told them they represented the same threat.
Kamiya also focuses on how crude their anti-Muslim ideology is, even if expressed in highbrow language. "One scarcely knows what to call such an argument: To label it arrogant, ahistorical, dismissive and callous seems insufficient."
He also makes an observation with which I would concur: "the world imagined by Perle and Frum is a strange combination of Hobbes and Popeye."
I've been referring to this book quite a bit here, and posted my own review earlier.
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