Stephen Holmes: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (2007, Cambridge University Press)

Chalmers Johnson wrote a review of Holmes' book for TomDispatch. Holmes provides a guide to 12 books that provide a prism into how the US reacted to the 9/11 attacks. The following is a list of books Holmes covers. The descriptions are edited down from Johnson's review (moving sentences around, cutting surplus, fixing punctuation; the quotes in these paragraphs are from Holmes' book):

• Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003, Knopf): Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus," Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics. "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).

• Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006, Pantheon): How was the war lost? Holmes regards this book as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military.

• James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004, Viking): How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmares? One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace.  . . . We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).

• Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (2003, Verso): What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration? He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p. 107)."

• Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996, Simon and Schuster): Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War? Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p. 136). [Johnson wonders why include this relatively old book. I suspect it because the neocon obsession with the Middle East dates back further, with Huntington and Bernard Lewis providing intellectual cover for the notion that Arabs are insurmountably alien.]

• Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002, Basic): What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror? As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign policy thinking after the end of the Cold War. . . . Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch -- they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do -- but Holmes' argument that "a savvy prowar party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p. 157) is worth considering.

• Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists (2005, Soft Skull Press): How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of a wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.

• Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006, Yale University Press): How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East. The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.

• Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004, WW Norton): Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

• John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (2001, Princeton University Press): How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State? This book is Holmes' oddest choice -- a dated history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialists in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.

• John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (2005, University of Chicago Press): Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-Constitutional authority in the hands of the president? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the President's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p. 291). His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure -- that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay and ignore" (p. 301).