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

Islamist terrorism is unique, they argue, because it flows from Islam itself. "The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself. Unlike Christianity, Islam offers its believers rewards on earth as well as in heaven ... The Islamic world has lagged further and further behind the Christian West ... These defeats and disasters have been more than a wound to Muslims: They directly challenge the truth of Islam itself." Enraged, humiliated, sexually frustrated, young Muslim men turn to militant Islam.

This is, of course, the pathological collision with modernity explanation advanced by historian Bernard Lewis, a favorite of neocon polemicists because he conveniently downplays or ignores specific Muslim/Arab grievances, in particular the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem with Lewis' thesis isn't that it isn't true, but that it isn't the whole truth. Yes, if the Israelis withdrew from the Occupied Territories tomorrow, the Arab world would still be appallingly backward. The region would still be subject to all the woes that Lewis, Thomas L. Friedman, Kanan Makiya and others have accurately chronicled. Nor would Islamist terrorism come to an immediate end. But if the U.S. helped heal that festering sore, as only it can do, only good things would follow. Such an intervention would immediately prove to the Arab/Muslim world that the U.S. can indeed be an honest broker. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Arabs and Muslims in and out of Iraq currently regard with great suspicion because they doubt that the U.S. has honorable intentions, would be seen in a radically different light. This would not assure that that high-risk adventure would succeed, but it certainly would not hurt. Arab reformers would be strengthened; sclerotic regimes would no longer be able to maintain power simply by blaming America or Israel. The Arab world would be forced to do something it has long avoided doing: look inward, and acknowledge that it must set its own house in order.

Perle and Frum reject this argument because, astoundingly, they deny that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the source, or even a source, of Arab and Palestinian anger at Israel and its ally and protector America. "The greatest -- indeed the sole -- obstacle to peace is the feeling among many people in the Arab and Muslim world that anything that was once theirs can never legitimately be anybody else's. It would be as if the Greeks felt themselves entitled to blow up school buses in Turkey until the Turks returned Constantinople. The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism; the unwillingness of the Arabs to end the quarrel is a manifestation of the underlying cultural malaise from which Islamic extremism emerges."

One scarcely knows what to call such an argument: To label it arrogant, ahistorical, dismissive and callous seems insufficient. The brazen historical simile is particularly striking, although it would perhaps be more convincing if Constantinople had been seized in 1967, not 1453. But when you're dealing with crazed ragheads, 500 years here or there doesn't mean anything -- they live in the world of eternity! It is also worth noting the authors' slippery conflation of "Islamic extremism" with Palestinian resistance, which until fairly recently was secular in nature. (Just as the U.S. foolishly helped create Osama bin Laden -- a fact the authors naturally gloss over -- so the Israelis helped create Hamas, which they saw as a way to weaken Arafat's secular Fatah.) But a non-Islamic resistance at the heart of the Middle East's most crucial conflict does not sit well with their thesis that religious fanaticism, not a political grievance, is behind it. (That the authors believe the Palestinians have no legitimate grievances whatsoever is made clear when they casually refer to the current bloody conflict as "the Oslo war" -- like Sharon, they believe everything began to go wrong when the peace process started.)

Above all, their proposal to abandon any idea of a Palestinian state is fantastic: The idea that the Palestinians, and the larger Arab and Muslim world, would ever consent to such an arrangement is pure fantasy. And any attempts to implement such a policy by force (i.e., the involuntary "transfer" of Palestinians out of the Occupied Territories into neighboring states, an idea long popular with the Israeli right) would take the world to the edge of a nuclear abyss. So why do they even bring it up?

The authors' extreme line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes well beyond official U.S. policy. (Actual U.S. policy is another matter: As Salon columnist and Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn recently noted, the U.S. has now completely abandoned the road map and the peace process and given Sharon almost unlimited authority to do what he wants.) Indeed, it goes beyond much opinion in Israel. That fact, and the contorted lengths they go to to argue that Hamas and al-Qaida are one and the same thing, raise a by now familiar question: To what degree are the authors' ideology -- and, by extension, the Bush administration's -- driven by attachment to Israel?

In fact, Perle and Frum bring the question up themselves. "We write these words [arguing against the creation of a Palestinian state] fully aware of how some readers and critics may react to them. According to the BBC's flagship documentary program, 'Panorama,' 'a small and unelected group of right-wingers ... have hijacked the White House.' The members of this 'close-knit' group, according to Business Week, 'have been called extremists, warmongers, American imperialists -- and even a Zionist cabal.'"

In response, the authors raise the bloody flag of anti-Semitism. Anyone who dares suggest that the (indisputable) attachment to the Israeli right wing of so many prominent White House policymakers and advisors (including Perle) may have played a role in their policy decisions about the war on terror is tarred as a bigot, one step up from a crank waving the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The authors also bizarrely assert that the "myth of the neoconservative cabal" results from Bush-haters who "simply could not accept that it was the president's determination that was pushing the war forward. Somebody else had to be responsible." Finally, they lamely argue that "the neoconservative myth offers Europeans and liberals a useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel."

Perle and Frum's attempt to dismiss the "neoconservative myth" backfires. Their arguments are crude and unconvincing; they protest too much. One need not assert that "world events are directed by a Jewish conspiracy" -- to use their smearing formulation -- to argue that ideological attachments inevitably play a role in the shaping of policy. It would simply be naive to dismiss the fact that the Bush administration is dominated, on its intellectual wing, by pro-Likud hard-liners whose view of the Arab and Muslim world is shaped by their views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, this entire book is the clearest possible example of that. For these figures, the welfare of Israel and the welfare of the United States are axiomatically linked. There is no "Jewish conspiracy" at work, because there is a convergence of shared opinion between the Likudnik neocons like Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith and the hard-line paleocon hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Bush's fervent evangelical Christianity -- and his desire to get evangelical votes -- disposes him toward a similar worldview.

Unfortunately, fear of being accused of being anti-Semitic, and the daunting complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have all but prevented a reasoned discussion of this issue. The question is not whether "they did it for Israel," but to what degree the policy prescriptions advanced by figures like Perle, and implemented by Bush, are correct. In that vitally needed civic discussion, the central Israeli-Palestinian issue must come up.

Whatever its origins, the world imagined by Perle and Frum is a strange combination of Hobbes and Popeye. It is a world in which a mighty, hulking America walks about with a huge stick, smiting enemies like boardwalk frogs who conveniently never pop back up, with allies who never interfere, backed up by an economy able to write endless blank checks. "Will we need to go after a terrorist camp in some remote village in Indonesia? Or raid Syria to retrieve or destroy weapons of mass destruction that may have been sent there by Saddam Hussein for safekeeping?" the authors breezily ask. "Or strike a decisive blow against a North Korean facility about to produce nuclear weapons for a terrorist customer?" Who the heck knows? Maybe those frogs could do with a taste of the lash, too.

And despite its handy veneer of Wilsonian idealism, it is essentially a selfish world, a world without altruism or any higher purpose beyond city-on-a-hill banalities about American greatness. Now that the weapons of mass destruction have turned out to be a fraud, apologists for the war have become fond of touting their humanist credentials: We saved the Iraqi people from Saddam. But it rings false, just as does Bush's sudden pose as a grand humanitarian. Strip away the authors' moral pretensions and you find a philosophy of pure realpolitik, naked self-interest.

The authors are fond of hinting that "most Americans" are unflinching, heroic opponents of evil like themselves. But I doubt that most Americans really want to inhabit the America -- and the world -- depicted here. Fighting an intelligent war on terror is one thing. But when you think about it, the endless, obsessive, solitary war they recommend looks strangely self-destructive -- almost, one might say, like the mission of a suicide bomber.

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