Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy by Benjamin R. Barber;
W. W. Norton & Company; 192 pages; ISBN
0-393-05836-0; CAN $ 37.50
Review by Paul William Roberts
Oderint
dum metuant (Let them hate as long as they fear)
---- Emperor Caligula
It is better
to be feared than loved.
---- Machiavelli, The Prince
“At some
point we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with
Me. We are America.”
---- President George W. Bush, 2002
A few
days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush in a speech
at the National Cathedral said: “We are here in the middle hour of our grief.
But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and
rid the world of evil.” At the conclusion of his speech the congregation stood
and sang ‘The Battle Hymn of the
Republic.’ The American Crusades had
officially begun. Now, two years and two
disastrous campaigns of invasion and occupation of sovereign states later,
President Bush’s ‘reponsibility to history’
can only be viewed as irresponsible, his policies dangerously bungling,
his leadership inept, and his second term unlikely.
For those
noisy few still convinced (and trying to convince the rest of us) of Washington’s
rectitude in the so-called war on terror, Benjamin Barber’s latest book, Fear’s
Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy, will provide an irreducibly concise
and fairly unanswerable rebuttal. A sane, brilliant and reasoned analysis of
this darkest period in modern American history, it is essential reading for
anyone wishing to understand the disaster of state terror that followed the
disaster of terrorism.
Perhaps best known for Jihad
vs. McWorld, his
1995 landmark – and prophetic – study of the challenges posed to democracy by
terrorism, Professor Barber is one of America’s
pre-eminent intellectuals and the author of some fourteen other books. He is
currently the Kekst Professor of Civil Society and Distinguished University
Professor at the University of Maryland, as well as a principal of The
Democracy Collaborative, an international think-tank devoted to the study and
peaceful global dissemination of democratic ideals and the civil society.
The
recent successes of terrorism, Barber argues here, pose in brutal terms to
America and the world some reasonably straightforward questions: Can the United
States really remedy the pathologies of a global interdependence it helped
create, and which has eroded the sovereignty on which it depends, by deploying
the traditional strategies of the sovereign state – above all, overweening
military power in the supposedly innovative form of preventive war? Can the old
regimes born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contend with the
globalized malevolence they have inadvertently helped to create without first creating benevolent forms of
interdependence that replace global disorder with lawful order? Can international governance come about
through the anarchic processes of markets and war? Can fear defeat fear? Can a
politics of nation-states (America vs. Iraq, South Korea vs. North Korea,
Palestine vs. Israel) contend with a world comprised more and more by a wide
variety of nonstate actors (al-Qaeda, Shell, Greenpeace, OPEC, Bertelsmann,
Hezbollah)?
His
country under attack from what was, says Barber, in effect, “a terrorist
nongovernmental organization (al-Qaeda)”, President Bush sought vengeance on
“states that harbored terrorism.” This impelled him into a strategy that
targeted Afghanistan and then Iraq (and perhaps in time North Korea and Iran),
even as terrorists moved freely from Afghanistan to Yemen and Sudan; from the
unruly and ungovernable mountain provinces of Afghanistan to the unruly and
ungovernable provinces of Pakistan; from the Middle East to Africa and
Southeast Asia, to Indonesia and the Philippines. In fact, ironically enough,
Barber points out, as America
and Europe exported their forces to confront terrorism
in the Third World, Third World
terrorists have “continued to roost in England
and Germany and
in New England and New Jersey
and Florida as well.” Such states
too must be counted (though obviously he did not) among those harboring
terrorists on whom President Bush promised to wreak a terrible vengeance ---
although some might argue that the encroachment of homeland security and the
Patriot Act on civil liberties within the United States has effectively put New
Jersey and Florida on the hit list.
Barber
goes on to demonstrate that while terrorism appears an impressive display of
brute power, it is in fact a strategy of fear rather than force, of weakness
rather than strength. Because fear is terrorism’s only weapon, the terrorist’s
primary job (as with an infectious agent) is merely to initiate the contagion.
The contaminated body’s immune system does the rest as the body struggles to
neutralize the infection by making war on its own infected systems. The author
points out the damage done by the American government to the country’s
commercial aviation system through being compelled to close it down for several
days then hem it in more or less permanently with crippling security provisions
in response to the 9/11 hijackings. The
hijackers also closed down the stock market not only by destroying facilities
in the World Trade Center but by inspiring fear – a kind of speculative immune
reaction to the attacks doing its own damage more effectively than al-Qaeda
could have. The stock market has yet to recover. Before the war in Iraq
began, the government closed off pedestrian access in front of the White House
and, with unintended irony, walled in the Liberty
Bell in Philadelphia.
Terrorism’s strategic jujitsu, Barber states, “cannot win other
than by leveraging others into losing,” overcoming them by dint of their own
forceful momentum. The diabolical
intelligence behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was evident in
the crude but demonically imaginative use of passenger planes as lethal
firebombs by men armed otherwise only with plastic box cutters. It is even more
visible a year or two later in the way Americans anxiously watch their own
government’s colour-coded signals announcing today’s levels of risk to
determine how safe they are supposed to feel --- and feeling deeply unsafe
precisely because their level of fear is now colour-coded for them. One might
ask, as Barber does, whether any terrorist could have spread fear more
effectively than the American government inadvertently has done as it dutifully
passes on random threats against unspecified targets and warns that further
attacks are a virtual certainty. Barber writes: “When the terror alert was once
again raised to ‘high’ in spring 2003 following terrorist attacks in Riyadh and
Casablanca (despite the ‘victory’ against terrorism supposedly represented by
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) a ‘knowledgeable U.S. official’ warned that
the so-called intelligence chatter and intercepted messages contained
‘reasonably spooky stuff,’ Halloween in May.”
Terrorism
can induce a country to scare itself into a kind of paralysis. It disempowers
the powerful by provoking an anxiety that disables capacity. It turns active
citizens into fretful spectators. There is nothing more conducive to fear than
inaction. Barber cites the anthrax scare following 9/11, which, “although it
cost five precious lives, did minimal systemic damage.” Indeed, it was probably
the work of a disgruntled American laboratory employee rather than a foreign
terrorist. But “because it involved the universal postal service system, the
threat generated a nationwide fear that devastated the country’s collective
sense of security.”
Names can
contribute to the sense of fear. There is even something slippery and
distracting in the term weapons of mass destruction (WMD),
since, notes Barber, “the phrase passes easily from the certain and widely
recognized mass devastation associated with nuclear weapons to the far less
predictable outcomes associated with biological and chemical weapons.” He notes
the relatively low death toll from the 1995 sarin attack in Tokyo’s subway, a
chemical weapons attack and hence to be classified as a WMD
incident. “Though thousands were affected, only twelve people perished, and
commentators have since noted that this attack demonstrated the extraordinary
difficulties of using chemical weapons even in enclosed spaces like subway
systems.” The author goes on to argue that “conventional” weapons – including
napalm, cluster bombs, and land mines, which claim some 2000, mostly civilian
lives a month worldwide – have taken far more lives in earlier conflicts
(though the United States is not even a signatory to the International Land
Mine Ban Treaty). “Could it be,” he asks, “that the intention of the new term weapons
of mass destruction is less to create a coherent new military
classification than to reinforce a strained logic of preventive war so that it
can be applied to sovereign states rather than terrorist organizations – states
that do not yet have the nuclear weapons that might justify preventive
interdiction?”
Saddam
Hussein may have been trying to acquire nuclear weapons (as are many other
nations, including such adversaries of America
as Syria and Iran),
but he almost certainly has had, and in the past unquestionably has used,
biological and chemical weapons. This was the brunt of Colin Powell’s evidence
presented to the UN Security Council in February 2003. Yet the term WMD
implies that to have and use biochemical weapons is tantamount to having and
using nuclear weapons. “Possessing laboratory anthrax strains,” writes Barber,
“(provided at least in part by the United States
in 1980s when Saddam was America’s
‘friend’ in the war against Iran)
is no different under the loose logic of WMD
than possessing thermonuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles.” A slippery slope, indeed, leading to dangerously wayward
conclusions.
Unlike
some other critics of the Bush administration who see in its policies and
political techniques a betrayal of the Founding Fathers and the original
American Idea, Benjamin Barber sees the current doctrines possessed of deeper
roots and even the moralizing rhetoric used by President Bush in the campaign
against terrorism as anything but novel. From the Declaration of Independence
to the ‘axis of evil’, he writes, “American leadership has conceived of
American interests in terms of universal virtue.” On one level, even the
Declaration of Independence was a
permanent rebuke to realpolitik as well as to the kind of balance of power
politics that defined the interest politics of Europe’s
competing nation-states. “America’s Declaration,” states Barber, “was intent on
asserting the right of the thirteen colonies to do all those ‘Acts and Things
which Independent States may right do,’ including the ‘full Power to levy War’ with
‘Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence.’”
Even that familiar phrase in the Declaration’s opening paragraph in which
Jefferson alludes to a need to show ‘a decent Respect to the Opinions of
Mankind’ is introduced as part of a logic of declaring ‘the causes which impel
[the colonies] to the Separation.’ That is to say, Barber comments, “a respect
for the opinions of mankind requires not that America
do what mankind wishes it to do but only that it explain to mankind why it is
doing precisely what it wishes to be doing.” America
has been explaining its (often) unilateralist foreign
policy decisions ever since, usually in terms of natural rights, American
virtue, and Divine Providence.
This
notion of exceptionalism, then, offers special rationalizations both for the
isolationism that has tried to separate America
from the world’s tumult and for the interventionism that has pushed America
out into its very heart. An idealist American foreign policy goes abroad in the
name of the virtues of home and remakes the world in its own image not because
it wants to dominate the world but because (it believes) it can only be safe in
a world that is like America. Isolationism – an older, more conservative
tradition --- is no less wedded to the idea of American virtue, hoping,
however, that a doctrine of independence secured by geography and arms (two
oceans in the nineteenth century, an antiballistic missile shield in the
twenty-first) will afford virtue the protection it requires. “It may seem odd,”
Barber writes, “that a policy of reclusive separation from the world and a
policy of aggressive intervention in the world are born of a single idea. Yet
making the world safe for democracy has translated all too easily both into
making America
safe from the world and making America
hegemonic in the world.” In both cases, America
prefers not to get ‘entangled’ or to know the world too well.
“President
Bush,” Barber adds, “is then on a two-century roll when he inveighs today
against the ‘axis of evil,’ calling for a worldwide war against ‘the evil ones’
in the name of ‘the greatest nation, full of the most decent people, on the
face of the earth,’ whose every action is to be seen not as that of a
‘conqueror’ but that of a ‘liberator.’” America’s
friends and allies may be appalled at the self-righteousness of this
pulpit-pounding rhetoric, but for those who know America
and its moralizing literature and have witnessed the impact of American morals
on American politics, its tone is Puritan,
exceptionalist, and moralizing in a familiar if exasperating American fashion.
Bush may wear the six-guns of Gary Cooper’s High Noon sheriff on his hips, but he carries a
Methodist Bible under one arm and the Declaration of Independence
under the other. No wonder he believes – as much of the nation believes with
him – America
will smite down the unrighteous and, however long it takes, emerge victorious
in its war against the evil ones, if necessary, all by its lonesome self.
Who among
the thinking, asks Barber, “would wish to deny that there is evil in the
machinations of nihilistic terrorists? Yet they are hardly the only evildoers
on the planet, and terrorism is not some mutant seed nurtured in the Devil’s
own hothouse. It is a product of toxic ideologies and religious fanaticism, as
well as of historical circumstances to which, given its extraordinary military,
economic, and cultural power, the United States has to some degree contributed
– whether inadvertently or through explicit imperialistic ambition or, most
probably, some confusing combination of both.” There is also something
unsettling in the parity of rhetoric that has al-Qaeda portraying America as an
infidel nation doing the work of the Devil and America deploying analogous Old
Testament language to condemn al-Qaeda as driven by evil ones (even if they are
evil).
The book
becomes increasingly frightening as – his text bolstered by references and
footnotes – Barber outlines what is, regrettably but indisputably, the Bush
Doctrine: “If America can no longer insulate itself from the planet…then it
must, in effect, rule the planet.” If American sovereignty is compromised
within its borders by a new interdependence that defies internal boundaries, America’s
borders must be extended to bring in and assimilate regions dangerous to the United
States. To cite but one of Barber’s many
examples of this doctrine in practice: “In portraying the new tactic of
tracking commercial vessels that might be linked to terrorism, Frances Fragos
Townsend, chief of the U.S. Coast Guard intelligence service, observed, ‘if all
you do is wait for ships to come to you, you’re not doing your job, the idea is
to push the borders out.’ If the world has grown too small for America
to defend its universal rights in isolation,” Barber comments, “then America
must become a universal presence: Q.E.D., Pax Americana.”
This is
the literal logic invoked by President Bush’s push for hegemony at every level.
Successful regime change in Iraq
was not enough. The objective is not merely to rid the region of a brutal tyrant
but to bring Iraq
(and with it the Middle East) within America’s
borders through a kind of utopic Americanization under the guise of
democratization. This looks to some like the kind of long-term ‘nation
building’ President Bush expressly condemned when running for the presidency;
it looks like empire building to others. The so-called reverse domino strategy
sees in the wished-for ‘democratization of Iraq the first of many democratic
victories, country after country --- helped along by M-1 tanks and F-18
fighters – falling into the American orbit. Nations, however, tend to have deeper roots than dominoes.
Professor
Barber goes on to pinpoint the difference between preventive war and the
traditional doctrines of deterrence and containment, preferred by the
administration of President Bush’s father in its dealings with Iraq.
“Preemption as threat,” he writes, “lacks the force of simple preemption
(‘we’re going in no matter what!’) without achieving
the virtue of passive deterrence (‘as long as you do nothing, we will do
nothing’). Back in the Cold War years, mutual assured destruction deterred each
side from a first strike by guaranteeing a devastating counterstrike by the
aggressed-against party.” But the government of Iraq
was not told: ‘If you use chemical or biological weapons in any war that
threatens us or our allies, you will risk massive retaliation by the United
States, including possible nuclear
retaliation.’ That was in fact the message the first Bush administration
delivered to Saddam Hussein during the Kuwait
war, when it feared the Iraqis might in desperation use biochemical weapons
against the allied counter-attack following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
But prior to invasion, Iraq
was told by the second Bush administration to take specific actions, to do
rather than to desist. Show us the weapons of mass destruction America
says you have, or prove definitively you do not have them (and America
will tell you what constitutes definitive proof) or you will be destroyed. This
is ‘active deterrence’. “Unlike the traditional version,” Barber notes, “ it makes the deterring party the aggressor. It demands
that Iraq as a
sovereign state (however tyrannical and repellant its regime) accommodate its
own right to develop weapons and tactics of self-defense to the perceived
threat such weapons and tactics evoke in the United
States. It thus asks the world to legitimate
the right of the stronger, who claims to be morally superior, to intimidate the
weaker, who is deemed morally inferior.”
It is, in short, the Law of the Jungle rationalized.
In this
sense the application of preventive war as an active deterrent threat succeeds
only by failing. And fails when it succeeds. That is
to say, it works as a deterrent only when it fails as preventive war: when prevention
is threatened but not actually implemented. And it works as preventive war (a
preventive strike is launched) only by failing as deterrence: as when the Iraqi
regime was not intimidated into compliance by the threat of war and so was
attacked. This paradoxical logic of preventive war as deterrence was aptly
captured just before the war with Iraq began in a New York Times editorial
observing “If the Bush administration’s aim is to keep military pressure on Mr.
Hussein to encourage him to cooperate more fully with the inspectors or accept
a diplomatic deal, the results could be constructive. But if Washington
is actually planning an early military strike in the weeks just ahead, either
on its own or with only British support, it should reconsider.” In
other words, it’s fine to threaten preventive war to prevent war (though this
means preventive war ‘failed’ in that it was not necessary!) as long as you
don’t actually go to war (which would mean deterrence failed since it did not
deter war!). But of course you can’t effectively threaten to go to war without
being fully and believably ready to go to war, and the final proof for the
credibility of the threat is that you actually go to war.
The
preventive war doctrine also, Barber points out, increases the likelihood of
targeted nations acquiring or attempting to acquire WMD
under the (justifiable) justification of self-defense. “The defect of exceptionalism,” he writes,
“is that it assumes America’s
allies and even its enemies will share the special-case reasoning that
persuades America
it possesses unique extralegal prerogatives based on its exceptional
righteousness. Even if there are reasons to think the United
States has acted more virtuously in its
foreign affairs than most nations, American virtue can hardly be accepted by
others as a universal standard. Imagine an international law that read,
‘Nations may only resort to war in cases of self-defense, except the United
States, which because it is special can
resort to war whenever it wants.’”
But the
more serious problem with the argument pointing to America’s
democratic virtue is not that it provides hypocritical cover for base national
interests but that even where virtue can be demonstrated the doctrine fails the
basic test of international legality. Exceptionalism can never meet the Kantian
principle which requires that the morality or legality of a precept can be
measured by its susceptibility to being universalized. If preventive war is
moral for America,
everybody else has America’s
right to self-defense (just as everybody else has America’s
right to self-government and democracy). Or, if America
denies others that right, its own resort to prevention cannot be morally
justified. The whole point of exceptionalist reasoning is to exempt the United
States from universal precepts with respect
to war. It wants to persuade others that because it is uniquely moral, its
policies must be ethical. But moral principles are supposed to define moral
agents, not the other way around. Barber concludes: “The doctrine not only
fails the test of legality, it fails the test of realism. For no nation, not
even one as powerful as America, can root its foreign policy in special reasoning forbidden
to others.” No nation can realistically succeed in an interdependent world
unless it somehow secures its permanent dominion over the entire planet,
something no nation in an interdependent world can possibly do.
The last
third of this wise,
erudite, succinct and wholly admirable work is devoted to
pointing out the impossibilities of exporting American culture and values as a
solution to the terrorist threat versus the desirability of encouraging
indigenous democratic movements and evening out the imbalance of wealth in the
north-south divide. As he does so often throughout the book, here too Professor
Barber enhances his already-precise ideas with quotations, the most resonant of
which comes from T. E. Lawrence: “Better to let them do it imperfectly than to
do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way, and your time is
short.”
Paul William Roberts spent four months earlier this year
in Iraq writing
for Harper’s magazine and the Globe & Mail. He is the author of several
books on the Middle East, including The Demonic
Comedy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His second book on Iraq,
Infidels: War and the Pax Americana, will be published next year by
Raincoast Books.