Here is the WP Book Review of Frum's Book.
washingtonpost.com
The Good Fight
A new playbook for fighting terrorism, from two former Bush administration insiders.
Reviewed by Lawrence F. Kaplan
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page BW03
AN END TO EVIL
How to Win the War on Terror
By David Frum and Richard Perle
Random House. 284 pp. $25.95
Every so often, a complex and obscure term slips into media usage. After being mangled by the everyday pollution of public discourse, it then emerges unrecognizable. "Postmodernism," "libertarianism," "multilateralism" -- these are just a few of the words whose meanings commentators have distorted beyond recognition in recent years. The latest to suffer this fate is "neoconservatism." In but one of many recent examples of the confusion, Washington Post Style columnist Tina Brown recalls "the New Deal for which neocons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as 'that man.' " Never mind that "neocons" did not emerge until 30 years after FDR's death. Never mind, too, that their socialist forefathers were natural supporters of the New Deal. Today, neoconservative can mean reactionary, it can mean Jew, it can mean foreign policy hawk, or it can mean all of these things at once.
Few have found that label affixed to their names more frequently than David Frum and Richard Perle (full disclosure: Perle sits on the trustee board of the Hudson Institute, where I have just begun a part-time fellowship). Nor do Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the "axis of evil" phrase, and Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense and member of the president's Defense Policy Board, have much use for the term, as their new book makes clear. An End to Evil bears reading less for its grace as a polemic than for its value as a primer on how those hawks view the world around them. If U.S. foreign policy has undergone a profound transformation over the past two years, the authors argue, don't blame a "neoconservative cabal." Blame a much wider diplomatic failure of nerve: "Much of the rest 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." In this telling, the Bush team has responded quite logically to the realities of the international scene: in Iraq ("a test of American seriousness about the war on terror"), in North Korea ("the Clinton 'pay the North Koreans to be nice' approach has produced an utter and obvious debacle") and at the United Nations ("the stage for a hackneyed political melodrama, where bored crowds watch endless replays of the same dreary performance").
This analysis sets An End to Evil sharply apart from the catalogue of virtually indistinguishable titles that accuse the Bush team of turning the world upside down. Nonsense, argue Frum and Perle: "We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the soft-liners have not, because we have wanted to fight, and they have not." Yet their indictment of an establishment "bereft of ideas" extends well beyond the usual roster of "soft-liners." The authors charge the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI and even the military with failing to adapt to a post-Sept. 11 world. Although one suspects they would sooner dedicate An End to Evil to French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin than borrow a quote from a Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky's critique of James Burnham, which posits that he may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is surely interested in him, neatly summarizes their view of policymakers for whom Sept. 11 seems not to have made the slightest impression. As Bush advisers, however, the authors surely recognize that the president did not create his response to the events of that day out of whole cloth. After all, in his transformation from a candidate who pledged to adopt a more "humble" approach to the world into a president who speaks of remaking the world in America's image, Bush was assisted by, among others, Frum and Perle themselves.
Does this make them the heirs and custodians of Woodrow Wilson's "crusading" foreign policy style, as old-line conservatives (and, increasingly, liberals) allege? The two do little to dispel the impression. When not inveighing against enemies to their left, they indict the "sophisticated, subtle, and wrong" calculations made by the devotees of Realpolitik who populated the first Bush administration. When not ridiculing the backwardness of Islamic societies, they champion an effort "to lead the Arab and Muslim world to democracy and liberty"and make the case for enshrining women's freedom at the center of official policy. An End to Evil shares the traditionally conservative view of the world as a fundamentally dangerous and Hobbesian place. But it also argues that the condition can be ameliorated -- through the vigorous application of American power and ideals. This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth. •
Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at the New Republic and a Hudson Institute fellow.
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