Terror and Liberalism: Paul Berman on What the Left Should Want From the War
by Sarah Gold, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 3/25/2003
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, which will be published by Norton on April 7 ($21, ISBN 0-393-05775-5). In it, Berman explores the roots of Islamist terrorism and of totalitarianism in general. In a starred review, PW said, "The most original aspect of his analysis is to categorize Islamism as a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism."The book, which was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine this week, will undoubtedly generate discussion.
His most recent article, entitled, "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror", from this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine is online at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html
PW nonfiction Forecasts editor Sarah Gold spoke with Berman about his book, the war on terror and the war in Iraq.
PWD: In your book, you make a case for the war on Islamist terrorism. What about the war on Iraq -- do you support it? Do you see it as part of the war on terror?
Paul Berman: I do see the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror because Baathism and Islamism, although different in many ways and mutually hostile in many ways, are also related in a cousin-like fashion. And I think that the defeat of one will help greatly in the defeat of the other.
PWD: You feel this way even though there's no evidence that Saddam was directly supporting al Qaeda?
PB: Right. Bush has presented many aspects of the war in a foolish and even mendacious way. One of the worst things he's done is to try and make the case that Saddam and Bin Laden have been conspiring together in some respects. Now the possibility of Saddam and Bin Laden conspiring together is not as remote as some people like to pretend. But still, that was never the reason to go to war with Saddam Hussein, and the real reason is that Bin Laden's movement is an underground movement and a very powerful one spread across many countries.
There's no way to crush that movement directly and instantly. You do have to start somewhere, though, and Saddam's regime is, as I say, a kind of cousin movement and is itself very threatening and hostile as long as Saddam is there with his weapons and his own version of a paranoid and apocalyptic anti-American ideology. That said, I'd like to throw in that I fervently hope that the war goes well.
PWD: What do you think of Bush's handling the diplomatic lead-up to the war?
PB: I certainly think Bush has shown a hair-raising degree of incompetence in how he has presented the war and how he has gone about it diplomatically. I do not think it was necessary for us to find ourselves in such an isolated position, and I think Bush has exposed us to dangers that no other president would have done.
PWD: What would you say to those who oppose the war because it lacks U.N. sanction and wider international support?
PB: To those opposed to the war for that reason, I would say that they should remember, one, that the war has begun anyway. Two, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is something ardently to wish for, both on behalf of the Iraqis and on our own behalf. Three, they should put their energies now into trying to press Bush and the government into actually fulfilling the liberal promises that our government has made to the Iraqis as well as the Afghans. The war in Iraq is only partly a military battle. In the deepest way, it's a political and ideological battle, which is the kind of thing I'm writing about in my book, and for the U.S. to have any success, we have to be sure that we really do help the Iraqis as well as the Afghans build a liberal democratic society with some visible degree of success.
PWD: Do you think the Bush government will be committed to that?
PB: On this topic I have very little faith in George Bush, and I think that success is going to require pressure from the left. But the left has spent most of its energy in opposing the war instead of doing what I think it should have done and should do now, which is press its own notion of war aims: to help these countries in their period of reconstruction to create a successful liberal democracy. Because the only way finally to oppose totalitarianism is with liberal democracy. You cannot oppose it with bombs.
PWD: How would you define a liberal/left agenda in relation to the war on terror?
PB: In the last chapter of Terror and Liberalism , I talk about something I call the new radicalism, by which I mean a serious commitment to press for liberal aims: a society of human rights, a society that's economically decent, in which rational thought can flourish, freedom of speech and rights for minorities. I call it a new radicalism because we need a degree of ardor and engagement and energy that we haven't otherwise seen. I'm calling in effect for a left of a slightly different type than what we have now.
PWD: How would this new radicalism look different from today's left?
PB: Instead of pressing the U.S. to do less, to exert less force in other parts of the world, a new radicalism ought to be putting up its own fight on behalf of liberals and liberal democrats in other parts of the world, above all in the Middle East and the Muslim world. What I'd love to see rather than mass marches opposing the war would be even small marches in solidarity with liberal dissidents throughout the Muslim world. I would like to see also an activism that could take place in other parts of the world.
PWD: What else would you like the leave your readers with?
PB: I was guided by a fundamentally literary ambition. I, for better or worse, think of the book as something different from a policy book. I think of it as a book in which the narrator's voice and the emotions expressed are in their fashion as important as the policies that I recommend. One of my ambitions was to compose an essay that can succeed in being analytically and emotionally quite complicated while remaining at some other level quite simple: to present all this within a single voice that, if I have any success, should feel to the reader authentically human.
PWD: Do you see your book as filling a gap in the left's discussion of the war on terror?
PB: My argument goes somewhat beyond the quarrels of left and right. It's true that I'm quarreling against many of my comrades on the left...but I'm also offering a kind of analysis that I don't think anybody on the right has produced either. I think that my larger impulse to look for really deep roots is a left-wing impulse, but the roots I've come up with are not the conventional ones that Chomsky or other thinkers on the left have invoked.
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