I’ve been meaning to read Frum and Perle’s ridiculously named narrative since it came out in 2003, particularly given their influence on the rhetoric and thinking of the Bush Administration. I finished it over the weekend, somewhat relieved that the content didn’t quite match the absurdity of the title. I’m reading Mayer’s text now, in which she chronicles how we executed Dick Cheney’s plan of working on “the dark side” by instituting a policy of torture. I also happen to be revisiting R.A. Salvatore’s fantasy series The Dark Elf Trilogy, but that’s probably not related to my other pre-Lenten reading.
Frum and Pearl, both fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, pitched their book as “a manual for victory” in the War on Terror—victory defined not as managing or minimizing the evil of terrorism, but rather as ending “this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale.” They framed this war as a war at home, abroad, and a war of ideas. At home, they pushed for an enforced immigration policy, measures like the Patriot Act, and a “national identity card that registers the bearer’s name and biometric data.”
They proposed we fight abroad by imposing an air and naval blockade of North Korea, redeploying our ground troops on the Korean peninsula, developing detailed plans for a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities, toppling the Iranian regime and establishing in its place a secular democracy—in part by supporting Iranian dissidents, insisting upon a “Westward reorientation” of Syrian economic and political policies, halting the flow of oil to Syria from Iraq, and treating Libya as “an implacably hostile regime” aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Frum and Perle also offered guidance on how to handle Hamas and Hezbollah and how to get tough with and tell the terrible truth about Saudi Arabia.
How to pay for this long war? Frum and Pearl: “We can pay for it by holding the line on federal spending, setting tax rates at levels that promote economic growth, and borrowing the remainder.” Not to worry, though, “victory triggers economic prosperity—which in turn repays the debt we incurred to achieve that victory.”
I didn’t find the book impressive, to say the least. The authors wrote weak versions of counter-arguments and spared no superlatives in introducing experts who supported their positions. What really frustrated me, though, was their neglect to consider what all these actions would have upon the people and complex social structures of the countries they would attack, liberate, or protect us from. They didn’t seem to care that our actions in the name of fighting terror or keeping us safe may be terribly destructive to others, especially if we don’t have the faintest clue about their countries and who they are as a people. The authors did finally approach the ludicrousness of their title in their concluding paragraph, which ends with what I assume is intentionally religious language:
A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too. America’s vocation is not an imperial vocation. Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies. It is a vocation that has made us, at our best moments, the hope of the world.The hope of the world?