A NEOCONSERVATIVE END TO EVIL?
A Review of David Frum and Richard Perle, An End To Evil
New York: Random House, 2003; 284 pp.

After the defiant op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and all of the media hype, "An End To Evil" is a disappointment to those who want to engage neoconservatives on foreign policy doctrine and issues. As the book makes clear, it is a "manual for victory" not an argument for its thesis that America must "end this evil" of terrorism at all costs.

The manual does make an argument that the authors think justifies a worldwide war against terrorism, based upon the presumption that post 9/11 militant Islamic terrorism cannot be deterred, nor appeased nor accommodated. But it does not say why it cannot be deterred. To them, militant Islam "commands wide support and even wider sympathy, among Muslims worldwide, including Muslim minorities in the West." An aggressive Islam justifies a wide-ranging war, including invading Iraq. "Even if Saddam Hussein refrained from waging war on us and our allies," America should have invaded because he would have encouraged terrorism worldwide if he had merely survived. But Iraq is "nowhere near the end of the war on terror," which must be fought worldwide and at home.

Unfortunately, the brunt of the war will be on Americans at home. Not only must they appropriately remain alert to possible sabotage at work and while traveling, they must report all suspicious activity, demanding revival of the discredited TIPS program forbidden by Congress that asked Americans to spy on their neighbors. On the other hand, they say, citizens must not report using Arab racial profiling. The solution is that not just aliens but all Americans must be issued a national identity card with biometric data like fingerprints, retinal scans and DNA, which would be checked upon any contact with authorities down to a parking ticket. The IRS would decide what is a bona fide religious institution to weed out the bad from the good. And "anti-Semitism must stop."

The example of Maher Mofeid Hawash, a Palestinian in America since 1984 who was charged with conspiracy to help the Taliban (but not al-Quaeda), is offered as a positive example of what should occur. He had earned $360,000 per year before but became an orthodox Muslim, beginning to wear Arab dress and to grow a beard, and was reported to police by neighbors who were suspicious of his bearded Arab visitors. The proof of his guilt was that he pleaded guilty. Yet, the authors seem innocent of the problems with forced plea bargains and of general charges of conspiracy, both long the subject of conservative concern. Few people under such stress will not settle for a shorter term when it is so difficult to show that mere contact, the basis for a conspiracy, was not for an unlawful purpose. And why was this not a case of racial profiling?

The authors subject the rest of the world to a variety of U.S. actions. A preemptive strike is required to take out North Korean nuclear facilities (even though they admit they do not know where all of them are located), after a blockade, even with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese opposition and with mass casualties inflicted by the North on the former in the process. Iran's nuclear forces are more disbursed (they think) so support for gorilla and propaganda operations are only required here, as they are for Zimbabwe and Cuba too. Syria is simple--the U.S. already surrounds it so a blockade and pursuit into its territory will bring it down. For Saudi Arabia we need merely to threaten support for the Shi'a minority in the East and encourage its succession. For the "dark places" of the world--Somalia, Sierra Leone, Columbia, Lebanon, Venezuela, Paraguay, Brazil, Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen are mentioned--a new Teddy Roosevelt Corollary needs to be developed as a revised international law of nations, where countries "are either with us or you are with the terrorists," are either on the road to democracy or to going further toward tyranny.

Our "friends" are not forgotten either. We are to confront the French idea of Europe being a counterweight to the U.S., woo Britain, and scale back cooperation on defense and intelligence with the rest. For China, we should encourage trade and an open society but ally with Japan, Australia and other regional democracies and provide a regional missile shield against it just in case. Pakistan, Afghanistan and central Asia must be helped to modernize and reform. Russia must be treated with friendship but wariness since she also pursues her own interests with potential rouge regimes. The United Nations should not be used for any security issue until it endorses the authors' view of what is necessary to combat terrorism. They also suggest some reasonable institutional reform of the military and intelligence. All of this, they conclude, is unfairly labeled as building an empire and can be achieved without new taxation by cutting other spending.

The only justification other than the inherent right to fight evil is that the American people pretty much agree with them, the authors say. The military, Congress, the politicians, the State Department, the FBI, the CIA, Colin Powell, James Baker, Brent Snowcroft, the first president Bush, and "Washington" generally—to say nothing about the rest of the world--have lost the "will" (or never had it) and are reverting to "complacency and denial" by refusing to follow the plan necessary to eliminate this evil. There are only those who have the courage and insight and the shirkers. There are not even any insiders who have especially influenced President Bush, for the "myth" of neoconservative influence simply "offers Europeans and liberals a useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel." The only reason for a president or individual to oppose their plan is fear or malevolence. While it seems clear that the president made the real decision, is it not a bit disingenuous to claim no influence from fellow thinkers in high places who support the authors' plan and to label all opposition anti-Semitism? Is that more likely to stop or increase anti-Semitism?

Surprisingly, with a whole book to do so, one has to go to the January 7, 2004 Wall Street Journal op ed by the two authors to get the real thinking behind their proposal. There is no cute avoidance of euphemism there: "There are two major factions: the pragmatic neoconservatives and their opposite numbers, the soft-line ideologues." The neoconservative authors are the pragmatists, of course, with merely 16 more countries specified as enemies against whom war-like actions are to be taken, not counting Afghanistan and Iraq, which already test American resources. Additionally, if nations like South Korea and Japan or France and Germany and the rest do not like it, well that puts them against us too, to say nothing about China and Russia if they do not cooperate sufficiently. And Congress will cut spending so it will not cost anything--nothing soft or ideological about this at all!

It is critical that the authors are so wrong about Libya. They advise not to take Muammar al-Qadhafi’s recent moves toward moderation seriously but to confront him until he changes the form of his government to be more democratic. If the authors’ advice to remain absolutely inflexible and threatening towards Libya were accepted by the administration, the negotiations that did in fact take place would not have led the dictator to renounce weapons of mass destruction and agree to cooperate in the war against terrorism. The authors’ seemingly tough approach based upon a simplistic good guy-bad guy world would have worked against world peace and security.

But there is a third way, the historic conservative realist national interest standard. It sees terrorism as a problem to be confronted and believes that Islam must be engaged also. But realism suggests that one billion people (soon to be two billion) simply cannot be controlled by brute force, to say nothing of a possible billion or two more if China is a potential foe. And it is just plain common sense to develop allies rather than pushing them further than their interests will allow. Moreover, as Sec. Donald Rumsfeld said just after 9/11, if we have to end essential liberties at home for victory, the terrorists will have won. It was also Rumsfeld who insisted on a minimal military "footprint" in Iraq and Afghanistan so that timely disengagement was possible, which even so is stretching resources in both and will require a bit of luck to end unscathed. The only reasonable course really is to slog it out when necessary as best as we can without undertaking the impossible role of world policeman, securing the homeland first, then relying upon allies' foreign police overseas second and only relying on quick strike counterinsurgency forces when the first two cannot deter hostile action against us, using large ground forces only when essential to American interests and getting out as quickly as possible from local administration even then. The authors recognize that central planning cannot work in the United States but, somehow, think it can for the whole world.

Ideologues divide the world into our enlightened vision and an evil one, our perfect way or no way, them and us, agree or you are the enemy, no third way or you are vile too. The conservative philosopher Frank Meyer called this thinking utopian. The utopian temptation is to try to "set up as perfect what is by the nature of reality as imperfect." The authentic voice of America and the West accepts a tension between the vision of the perfect and the need to strive for it, against the recognition that reality is resistant to easy manipulation and rash action often causes worse complications. "The hard and glorious challenge of reality" can be rejected by men seeking "refuge from the tension by trying to impose their own limited version of perfection upon the world." Paradoxically, those who seek to rashly end evil often end by imposing more evil. Of course, there is a right to confront evil--the issue is how? Speaking against evil and building defenses while pursuing a prudent military course, as did Ronald Reagan, who committed American troops less than any other modern president, is the reasonable solution. Evil cannot be ended and those who think so must end fighting the whole world. Ultimately, they will fail, as do all utopians. The hope is that they do not drag the nation down with their utopian dream.

by Editor, Donald Devine