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

Still, there is one encouraging fact. The U.S. has not yet made the fateful decision to attack national terrorists: We aren't hunting down Chechens, Pakistanis in Kashmir, Basques in Spain or Palestinians in the West Bank. When and if we do, we will have succeeded in expanding the list of people who want to blow us up.

Perle and Frum want us to. For them, as for the Bush administration, the enemy is Muslim terrorism -- the one-size-fits-all bogeyman of "militant Islam." For them, militant Islam is so anomic, irrational and evil that it trumps all other factors. Just as, in the eyes of U.S. Cold Warriors, a Nicaraguan or Vietnamese peasant who happened to be a communist could not be seen as fighting for national liberation or economic justice, but only as a cog in the Red Menace, so Perle and Frum see all Islamist terrorists as identical: The Hamas terrorist who attacks Israelis is identical to the al-Qaida terrorist who attacks Americans. In fact, their real bogeyman isn't even Islamist terrorism, but the even broader specter of Arab/Muslim terrorism -- whatever that is. This helps explain their insistence, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida.

Determined to demonize, Perle and Frum simply refuse to examine the varied historical contexts and causes of terrorism. From the lofty heights of their bully pulpit, they ignore the messy moral realities of human violence. As has frequently been pointed out, terrorism is the weapon of the powerless; and it is a truism that one man's freedom fighter -- or defender of a homeland -- is another man's terrorist. Israelis regard Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who carried out terrorist attacks during Israel's struggle for independence, as freedom fighters, just as Palestinians regard Yasser Arafat, whose Fatah movement has carried out many terror attacks, as the leader of a national liberation movement.

Any serious book about political violence must deal with such moral ambiguities. Terrorism is appalling, but it is simply not as morally clear-cut as we would like to believe -- for the simple reason that the world can be appalling. Take state-sanctioned slaughter. States use the mass killing of civilians to achieve their purposes: Germans referred to the strategic Allied bombing of cities like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne, which killed 600,000 civilians, as "terror bombing." U.S. planes firebombed Tokyo, killing 85,000 civilians in one night -- an appalling slaughter forgotten now except by military buffs. Yes, it took place during wartime. But does the existence of a piece of paper really alter the ethical issues involved in intentionally dropping magnesium-filled incendiary bombs on a huge city built almost entirely of wood? Perle and Frum, like most of us, would presumably defend such wartime actions by using an ends-justify-the-means argument: It was worth killing 85,000 Japanese civilians because it shortened the war, a war started by Japan. But once the Kantian categorical imperative is suspended and such justifying goals are invoked, one must also examine the justifying goals used by terrorists -- which Perle and Frum, suddenly becoming pure Kantians again, refuse to do.

It is both an American virtue and vice to insist on allocating praise and blame, to decide who is the hero and who the villain. But as both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and postwar Iraq have shown, the world does not always divide itself up like that. The American West was settled as the result of what was essentially an undirected campaign of genocide against its native inhabitants. Racist pronouncements and bloviations about "manifest destiny" did not justify this massive crime, but neither did it mark Americans with eternal guilt. A mature historical perspective sees both sides: Mere moralizing is not enough.

To say this is not to justify the atrocities carried out by Osama bin Laden, or any terrorist attacks. But it is to try to understand what motivates them, so that we can take intelligent steps to avoid future attacks -- and work to "drain the swamp" to eliminate the underlying conditions and grievances that helped create terror. In the case of bin Laden, most of what drives him is indeed so anomic and apocalyptic that there is no way we could or should do anything to avoid his attacks: The modern age would have to end, Israel cease to exist and time run backward to the end of the Ottoman Empire, if not all the way back to the first caliphate, to make him call off his jihad. But there are certain obvious moves we can make -- and have indeed already made. One of the few smart things the Bush administration has done since it began its war on terror is withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. Their presence, of course, was one of the triggers of bin Laden's rage.

In the end, defusing bin Laden's rage is not possible or desirable: Such implacable enemies must simply be defeated. But defusing the rage of the rest of the Arab and Muslim world is possible, contrary to the pessimistic views of ideologues like Perle and Frum. More than anything else, it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and America's one-sided support for the heavy-handed policies of Israeli leader Ariel Sharon, that has turned Arabs and Muslims against the U.S. Along with ending its support for autocratic and corrupt Arab regimes -- which Perle and Frum, to their credit, argue for -- helping broker a just end to that conflict would be the single most important thing the U.S. could do to win the war on terror. It would be good for Israel, good for the Palestinians and good for our relations with the Muslim and Arab world. But on this subject, Perle and Frum, like the Bush administration, are frozen in dogmatic extremity.

Their attitude becomes clear in the book's second paragraph. "The war on terror is not over. In many ways, it has hardly begun. Al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas still plot murder, and money still flows from donors worldwide to finance them." One might wonder why they didn't write "Al-Qaida, the Basque ETA and the Tamil Tigers still plot murder." After all, none of these groups except al-Qaida attack Americans. (In 1983 Hezbollah blew up 241 Marines in their barracks in Lebanon, as well as the U.S. embassy, but only after American troops blundered in there and foolishly took the Phalange/Israeli side in the Lebanese civil war. Hamas has never targeted Americans: Its quarrel is with Israel.)

But in defiance of all the facts, Perle and Frum maintain that there is no difference between Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaida. They write "Hezbollah has attacked Americans in the past and will almost certainly do so in the future" -- a prediction that has a somewhat ominous ring, since the only plausible scenario that would result in Hezbollah attacking Americans would be a U.S. invasion of Syria or Lebanon. (It worked so well in 1983, let's try it again!) Ignoring the completely different causes that animate these groups, and the fact that attacking Americans would be suicidal for Hamas and Hezbollah, they argue that they are all the same because they are all subscribers to militant Islam.

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