"An End to Evil" by David Frum and Richard Perle

And one other piece of bad news for Richard Perle, in particular: No one is going to install your pal Ahmad Chalabi as president of Iraq. In one of the book's most egregious passages, the authors write, "But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to let the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq's leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad." If only those camel jockeys at State and in the CIA had let the neocons' favorite puppet and his little toy army enter Baghdad before the Americans, everything would have gone so much better! These kind of absurd claims may settle some old scores, but they do nothing to enhance the authors' credibility.

Their domestic agenda is unlikely to fare much better. Despite their hyperbolic, fear-mongering claim that "the terrorist threat" menaces "our survival as a nation," Americans are not going to put up with draconian security measures like national identity cards any more than they did Adm. John Poindexter's TIA program. Even Bush knows you can only play the fear card so far before it backfires.

But this isn't to say that the authors' militarist, triumphalist, unilateral, self-righteous, black-and-white ideology will not continue to drive the Bush administration's beliefs and actions. Rejecting international treaties and institutions, embracing an unprecedented and deeply un-American doctrine of preventive war, insulting the U.N. (except when we need it to bail us out), eschewing diplomacy for force, bigfooting everybody who dares to oppose us, and above all, treating the "War on Terror" as a kind of divinely inspired crusade against "evil," which only a heretic could oppose: These are the bedrock beliefs of the Bush team. They also just so happen to be the heart of its reelection strategy, aimed at Americans who didn't know the difference between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and trusted their government when it told them they represented the same threat.

The shelf life of this screed is likely to be brief. Many Americans, to a certain degree understandably, are still locked in a vengeful, unreflecting, reactive stance toward terrorism. As such, they are open to fear-mongering books like this one. But sooner or later they will learn the lesson painfully learned by the British, the French, the Israelis, the Russians and other strong nations that have found themselves locked in no-win battles against weak opponents who are willing to die for their cause: There is no military solution to terrorism, particularly not in an open society in an age of easily concealable weapons.

They will eventually realize that not all terrorists are the same, and our approach to all of them need not, indeed must not, be the same. They will come to understand that political solutions are more powerful and lasting than military ones, that a United States that is hated and feared by most of the world (which is what Bush's policies have achieved) is less safe than one that is respected and admired. And they will learn that a policy of continuously demonizing the Arab/Muslim world and smashing it in the face will not -- in the words of the book's ludicrously overreaching title -- bring about "an end to evil," but rather the reverse.

Like President Bush, who crudely smeared Democrats in his State of the Union address for giving up on the war on terror, the authors try to paint those who don't agree with their radical doctrines as appeasers and cynics. At "this dangerous moment," they write, "many in the American political and media elite are losing their nerve for the fight. Perhaps it is the political cycle: For some Democrats, winning the war has become a less urgent priority than winning the next election." Leaving aside the obvious fact that the political cycle washes both reds and blues (Bush's trump card in the election is his touted leadership in an eternal war on terror), it's necessary to answer such vulgar attacks directly.

No, "some Democrats" (actually at least half the population of the country, with that number likely to rise every day) are not "losing their nerve for the fight." They realize that fighting terrorism is necessary. They realize it sometimes may even require military action to take out a rogue state that shelters international terrorists, as was the case with Afghanistan. But they simply don't accept the Bush administration's infinitely expansive definition of the war on terror. They believe that Bush unforgivably squandered the outpouring of support for the U.S. after 9/11. They believe that international alliances and diplomacy are good for this country, not bad. They believe that Saddam Hussein was a terrible tyrant, but that he did not represent a threat to the U.S., and that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence to justify a war that neocons like Perle and Wolfowitz had been advocating for years. They believe that invading Iraq was a risky distraction that actually weakened the real war on terror, which is against al-Qaida. And they believe that by treating every problematic nation as an enemy in a hysterical war against an abstract entity, and treating every movement that uses terror as if it were al-Qaida, the Bush administration is actually making the world, and America, much less safe.

The most dangerous aspect of Bush's war on terror is its failure to distinguish between national and international terrorism -- a distinction, with a slightly different emphasis, that is also at the heart of the debate over Iraq. In his important "Incoherent Empire" (published last year by Verso), Michael Mann argues the U.S. should avoid attacking merely national terrorists that don't threaten us, because by so doing we needlessly turn them into our enemies -- and because we are then forced to fight the war on their terms and in their country, where they are almost impossible to defeat. National terrorists, he points out, are found all over the globe: "Terrorists all begin as national 'freedom fighters,' seeking to liberate their own land from what they see as alien oppressive rule." On their own turf they can thrive "like fish in the sea," in Mao's famous formulation about guerrilla war. Our fight is not with them, but with international terrorists like al-Qaida. "The fundamental strategy of America's war against terrorism should therefore be to separate international terrorists from any national support base, forcing them to fight in more exposed international conditions and not as genuine guerrillas," Mann writes.

The Bush administration's score card here is not encouraging. Destroying the Taliban regime helped separate al-Qaida from a national support base, but thanks to our lack of follow-through (for which the gratuitous Iraq adventure is mostly to blame), Afghanistan is slowly edging toward becoming a failed state, the favorite hidey-hole of international terrorists. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration may have helped create another failed state, and the invasion, along with the U.S. refusal to take on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, has increased Muslim and Arab rage against us -- although there has as yet been no upsurge in anti-U.S. terrorism except in Iraq.

Next Page: The one-size-fits-all bogeyman of "militant Islam"

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