Unconfirmed Reports

I had very high expectations for Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman. Lately I have taken up the strategy of trying to read good books that argue for opinions different to my own. I was firmly against the American invasion of Iraq, and having read that T & L is one of the most cogent arguments in favour of the invasion, I looked forward to reading it as a means of expanding my own perspective.

But I was quite disappointed by this book. The author continually tried to insinuate a close connection between Islamic fundamentalists and Nazi or Stalinist totalitarians. This connection was quite tenuous… it really came down to not much more than pointing out that both are very “radical”, follow utopian ideologies, and don’t mind exercising violence in the name of these ideologies. But all that is not really saying much at all… the same could be said of innumerable groups throughout history. When it comes to Islamist and Nazis, you could say just as much about the differences as the similarities.

A low point, for me, was when the author was comparing Islamists to Communist radicals in Europe and South America: at one point he noted that “both had beards”, which I thought was really scraping the bottom of the argumentative barrel.

In the last part of the book, Berman goes on to argue that, since Islamists are much like Nazis or Stalinists, we should definitely mount military interventions wherever they threaten to gain power. Otherwise we will be just like the 1930s passivists who let Hitler invade half of Europe. He argues (writing in 2003) that an invasion of Iraq is therefore a good idea, claiming that Saddam’s regime is an aggressive threat which must be contained. Berman does acknowledge that Bush is quite corrupt and perhaps only marginally interested in the good, liberal reasons for attacking the Islamists and Baathists: but he doesn’t draw out what is for me the logical conclusion to this: there may be good liberal reasons for attacking Saddam Hussein and other middle eastern dictators, but if the attack is mounted by someone who is motivated not for these reasons, but instead by the desire to guarantee cheap oil supplies, and set up some good deals for his corporate cronies, then the potential liberal results will be side-lined. The invasion will focus on capturing oil fields, rather than building a free and stable Iraqi nation. The invasion will be an ugly disaster.

One good aspect of T & L was the authors explanation of the writings of Sayyid Qutb, one of the key intellectual founders of Islamism. This was a useful introductionfor me, as this philosophical/theological tradition never made it onto my university reading lists.

But overall, I found the book very unconvincing. I think that the author wants to believe that the West is in the right, and that our turn-of-the-millenium societies are still somehow connected with the advance of liberal values. But there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here.