Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times reviews David Frum and Richard Perle's An End to Evil:

The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them....

Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, "An End to Evil" is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative...

The authors make some persuasive points about the disturbing role the Saudis have played in fomenting radical Islamist doctrine, the persecution of women in some Muslim countries and the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. But these points tend to be drowned out by their triumphalist boasts ("the United States has become the greatest of all great powers in world history"), their macho posturing and their willful, flame-throwing language....

...Throughout "An End to Evil" they purvey a worldview of us-versus-them, all-or-nothing, either-or, and this outlook results in a refusal to countenance the possibility that people who do not share the authors' views about the war in Iraq or their faith in a pre-emptive, unilateralist foreign policy might have legitimate reasons for doing so....


No, the parts I didn't quote aren't any nicer.

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