March 14, 2004

PAUL Berman is a prominent exponent of liberalism. In an attempt to present a considered stance of America’s community of liberals on the US war on terror, he ends up extending, to one’s surprise, support to the Bush administration’s dangerous unilateralism and neoconservatives’ myopic perceptions. He does not say it in so many words but the reader can discern his sympathies in his new book Terror and Liberalism.

In an earlier book, A Tale of Two Utopias, he had developed some ideas about liberalism by looking at the 1968 generation of radical students and those intellectuals in America and France who have lived through these events but from the prism of a narrow anticommunist outlook.

In the days after September 11, he wrote an essay proposing ways to apply those ideas to the current circumstances. The essay “Terror and Liberalism” appeared in the conservative magazine The American Prospect in October, 2001 and was later revised and expanded to become the present book. The book, which is more a polemical work than a scholarly pursuit, is highly unconvincing. The author tries to build the case of Islamic extremism — finding an enemy to replace communism — in a fashion similar to the one Samuel Huntington employs in his offendingly controversial book, Clash of Civilizations. His ideas are confused, his arguments untenable and his priorities misjudged.

Berman’s case is based on the premise that the “Islamist” terrorism of today, led or influenced by Osama bin Laden, is no different from the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. The liberals must resist this “menace” in the manner they did to defeat communism and Hitler’s fascism. He is not ready to enter into any discourse on the real causes that made the 9/11 happen. He builds his arguments by drawing upon different sources — one such source being the role of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founders he asserts propagated “anti-liberal” ideologies (nothing surprising) which, he thinks, shaped to a large extent the course of history of the preceding century.

The West, according to him, once again faces a grave challenge from the forces of hatred and reaction in the way it did from the Bolsheviks and fascists in the first half of the 20th century. He does not suggest any rational remedy to overcome the crises such as removing the irritants that go a long way to spawn terrorism and instigate the youth in the Muslim world to turn to guns. His criticism of the Bush administration and Israel is harsh, on occasions, simply because he finds them wanting in proceeding ahead with an appropriate response to Islamist threat.

Berman suggests all those things that the mainstream American media is too happy to accommodate. For instance, he hurls dirty abuses on the Mujahideen of the 1980s saying Reagan aided them in their war against Soviet occupation, then Bush Sr continued the aid, even Bill Clinton did not stop it for a while but still they “turned against us”.

He is ready to forget the “bitter” experience America had in Afghanistan and proudly points out that the US had still been giving support to the Muslims in their struggle although, he is convinced, it is “a foolish policy” on the part of Washington. He comfortably ignores the corporate interests that compelled the US to go into Afghanistan. Why the Muslims hate America, he is unwilling to ponder and figure out the reasons. He simply boasts of the “fact” that “no country on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States” on the side of the Muslims — be it Palestine, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq’s Shias and Kurds and Kosovo. Hence, what he implies is that the Muslims have no reason to oppose the American policies and should, instead, be grateful to Washington.

There are interesting twists of facts at some places that tend to mislead the readers. For instance, in the first chapter which deals with first Gulf war and Saddam’s “condemnable” policies, the author laments that Saddam threw the inspectors out in 1998. He is unaware of the fact that they were withdrawn under severe White House pressure and not thrown out.

Looking into history, he discovers that political Islam came to prominence much later than Pan-Arabism and the Baathists although their journey began at almost the same time. That was in the lands that eventually became Pakistan and in Egypt. But early Islamists did not resemble European fascists. He confuses the readers by his inadequate knowledge about Islam and Pakistan. He says, “Islamism got underway in Pakistan during the 1930s”. Neither did Pakistan exist at the time nor did the Islamist movement had taken any roots.

Berman displays how a spiritual inspiration has been twisted into a fanatical demand for murder and goes on to highlight the trends and conflicts influencing Islamic radicalism. He traces connections between different political movements and comes to the conclusion that Islamic extremism resembles some familiar past episodes in the American and European experience. The current battle is, therefore, between liberalism and its totalitarian enemies, meaning Islam (and its militant exponents). But he does not say so as a formal statement. According to him, Islam is not the cause of the war on terror. It is only an arena in which the war is currently being fought.

The author draws upon sources that range from Albert Camus and his book The Rebel to Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutub and his book In the Shade of the Quran. He devotes full chapters to their ideas for an exercise in polemics, which may be too taxing for the readers. He condemns Nixon’s foreign policy of “realism”, and considers the political left too naive in its approach towards the war on terror. He wonders why Noam Chomsky, whom American mainstream media simply ignores, is so warmly and closely listened to by the rest of the world and the youth in the West.

He calls on liberals to give birth to ‘a new radicalism’ to promote democratic values throughout the world even if it requires some kind of intervention, thus endorsing indirectly the neocons’ illiberal philosophy and the administration’s national security strategy (document issued in September 2003). His main effort revolves around what he calls the ‘uniqueness’ of the threat that Islamic fundamentalism poses and has given birth to “pathological mass movements”. He foresees a long war between liberalism and these movements.

 

Terror and Liberalism

By Paul Berman

W.W. Norton & Company. Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026

Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website: www.libertybooks.com

ISBN 0-393-05775-5

214pp. Rs650

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