Metroland Online

Richard Perle is one of the masterminds who created American’s current foreign policy. Until some months ago he held the crucial post of chairman of the President’s Defense Policy Board. David Frum is a writer for the ultraconservative National Review. Their book, An End to Evil, defends America’s embattled foreign policy and lays out an agenda for the future.

This isn’t sunny beach reading, but it’s easy on the brain. Frum is the former presidential speechwriter who came up with the phrase “Axis of Evil,” and the prose in this volume has the simple clarity of a Saturday radio talk by George W. Bush.

The authors begin rather scarily by saying that they can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington. “The forces and people who lulled the United States into complacency in the 1990s remain potent today, and in the wake of the victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are exerting themselves ever more boldly.”

Those people include not only the administration’s opponents in the Democratic Party (with “a few stalwart exceptions such as Senator Joe Lieberman”) but also the State Department. Under Colin Powell, they say, “there is a constant pressure to return to business as usual, beginning by placating offended allies and returning to the exaggerated multilateral conceit of the Clinton administration.”

The conservative authors not only bash the previous Democratic administration, but they also reach back to beat up on the first President Bush, his secretary of state, his national security advisor and—you guessed it—his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. Those were the men who, having liberated Kuwait and having demolished the Iraqi army, decided not to take Baghdad and not to occupy Iraq. The fact that he has had his way with the younger Bush has not solaced Richard Perle.

When it comes to preventing terrorism at home, the authors come up with some suggestions that seem plausible—and others that are totalitarian. Probably Americans would go along with denying tax-exempt status to schools that actually inculcate violence. As for tracking all us law-abiding citizens by “a national identity card that registers the bearer’s name and biometric data, like fingerprints or retinal scans or DNA”—well, I hope not. Like too many parts of the Patriot Act, this would turn the Constitution inside out: It would open your private life to government oversight, while hiding government actions from your view.

The authors also have some provocative suggestions for the war on terrorism abroad. Their view of the Saudis—“The Saudis support terror on a lavish scale”—is accurate and refreshingly candid. Their solution to this problem is simple: We know that the government and the elite live in the western, Red Sea side of the country, but the oil fields are in the eastern, Persian Gulf side. The way to get the Saudis to cooperate with us is to threaten to bring independence to the Eastern Province. Yeah, sure, this might work, especially if the Islamic countries of the world don’t fuss and the Europeans stay still.

Their solution to the North Korean problem is equally straightforward: We pull our troops beyond the range of North Korea’s artillery, then isolate the North with a naval and air blockade, and prepare for a preemptive strike against their nuclear facilities. “The North Korean nuclear program is a Chinese responsibility, for which China will be held accountable.” The authors say they “hope” a credible buildup to an American strike will persuade the Chinese to “bring the North Koreans to heel.” They don’t explain what the ominous phrase “China will be held accountable” means.

One of the striking things about this book is the paranoia that seeps through it. Frum and Perle complain that “Much of the world—and much of liberal opinion in the United States—decided sometime early in 2002 that it no longer wanted to fight the war on terror.” Does that square with everything else you know?

According to the authors, parts of our own government are reluctant to fight terror. This is due to a liberal bias. Take the CIA for example: “Over the years, it has become an agency with very strong, mostly liberal views, and these views have again and again distorted its analysis and presentation of its own information.”

This book sees wily enemies everywhere: “Indeed, one important motivation of ‘globalist’ projects like Kyoto and the ICC [International Criminal Court] has been to entangle the United States in restrictions that restrain its power until the new Europe can challenge it.”

According to Perle and Frum, there’s a liberal myth that a neoconservative cabal is pushing the war on terror. This myth “offers Europeans and liberals a useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel. Israel is everything that Europeans think a state should not be: proudly nationalist, supremely confident, willing and able to use force to defend itself—alone if need be.” The logic eludes me. But we do know that the French and Germans, and other peoples of Europe, have not given up their national pride and confidence, or their willingness to fight to defend themselves.

What makes the thinking of Perle and his confederates so attractive to the president is its bold simplicity. It focuses narrowly and exclusively on a solitary problem and solves it with a bang. Unfortunately, the problems we face are enmeshed in the global web of history, society, politics and religion. They’re not simple and solitary.

Yes, we can thrust into Baghdad virtually alone, flatten the Iraqi military and capture Saddam. So now we’re there, virtually alone, losing one or two people a day, spending about a billion dollars a week trying to build a democratic political system in an Islamic nation—all this in a country that hates us and is pulling itself apart in three different directions. Neoconservatives like Richard Perle are fond of telling us that it’s a dangerous world out there. It’s a complicated world, too; far more complicated than this book knows.

	Send A Letter to Our Editor
	Back Home