Six years before the shock of September 11th, Benjamin Barber published a brilliant and prescient account of the global conflict between the forces of aggressive capitalism in the west and radical islamic movements which, he perceived, were gathering to mount violent resistance.
Now, two years after the terrible vengeance, Barber contemplates the debris in the damage to democracy, freedom, and relations between states wrought by America's self-righteousness and its manipulation of fear as an instrument of foreign policy.
Hastily written in the months leading to war with Iraq, as he acknowledges, the book is made up of two essays - the first a summary and critique of the new strategic doctrine of the United States under the heading 'Preventive War', and the second outlining Barber's alternative response to terrorism which he calls 'Preventive Democracy'.
Among the ideas, values, and interests which go into the pot of US foreign policy, there is one ingredient above all which fascinates and nauseates in equal measure. This is American moralism - a kind of unctuous innocence bequeathed by the puritans and deployed to political effect by presidents ever since. Barber adds to the left's stock of useful quotes to illustrate the piety of Bush and the cynicism of some of his neo-conservative advisers. But the difficult question is not addressed: presidential piety may delight some Americans and disgust Europeans, but how do we demonstrate - as Barber merely implies - that it does anything else? That it is more than rhetoric and actually influences foreign policy? This part of the book is somewhat disappointing - too derivative of familiar anti-war material to do more than nourish prejudice.
The more authoritative discussion in the book is that which dissects the all-American ideas of freedom and democracy, drawing liberally on the author's earlier study, Jihad vs. McWorld. The leading premise of the new US imperialism, he writes, is that "free markets will breed free women and men, that markets and democracy are pretty much the same thing". But the peculiar American take on free markets is that which is expressed globally through the practices of the WTO and IMF, the powerful champions of the idea that privatisation is indeed cousin to democracy. On the contrary, argues Barber. "Privatisation effectively gives public power away, yielding it to private elites beyond scrutiny and control. In the name of liberty, it destroys democracy . . . "
Barber's book offers a very readable critique of current US policy for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. But there is little here of the originality, and none of the sharpness, which Barber fans would expect.
After four chapters setting the historical background to modern Iraq, in which the author tells a tragic tale of imperial conquest, native resistance, and endemic local corruption, left-wing author and critic Tariq Ali focuses on what is his central preoccupation also - American imperialism under the Bush administration. While the earlier history is quirky, intriguing, novel and well-researched, it is not clearly related to the political analysis of US foreign policy which follows - other than to underscore the dismal reality of relations between the strong and the weak in international affairs.
The discussion of 'War and Empire' in Chapter Six is too disorganised to sustain interest, shifting repeatedly as it does between elucidating the military doctrine which legitimised the war and illustrating the evils of empire with juicy quotes from the American trenches - "Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi".
The author reserves his final chapter for a biting attack on British journalist Christopher Hitchens, contrasting the Hitchens who wrote virulent criticism of the conduct of the first Iraq war with "the vile replica currently on offer" who gushes in support of US imperialism in the second. Hitchens is a professional iconoclast - a sort of Kevin Myers but without the wit and playfulness - who scatters vitriol with the indiscriminateness of cluster bombs, and who has alienated erstwhile friends and admirers with abandon. One of them is cited here by Ali with unconcealed glee: "I can barely read \ anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid the Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast . . . Sweet Jesus. What next?"
In his comments on the European Union's role in the Iraq war, Ali betrays the same principled antagonism towards the EU which has characterised the British left for half a century. His assessment of the capacity of the UN to resist the imperialism of the US does little justice to the complexity of the famous negotiations up to the eve of war in March. It leaves the reader no better informed to be told that hopes of UN resistance to the US is like "expecting the butler to sack the master". Between the sarcasm of Ali and the venom of Hitchens, a plague on both their houses.
It felt something of a relief to turn to the third book and find a French lawyer and journalist pleading for greater European understanding of the American position after September 11th. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi departs radically from the historical French stereotype of Gaullist anti-Americanism in this account of the dangers of transatlantic division and the folly of European belligerence towards the current US administration. "Europe's criticism of US foreign policy found a convenient scapegoat in George W. Bush", he writes. "Far from matching the caricature of the simplistic and warlike Texan decried by so many Europeans, George W. Bush quite simply put America back on its feet."
And so he goes on in like vein to analyse what he terms "global anti-Americanism" - its errors, its venality, and its likely deleterious effect on the security and prosperity of us all. At the root of the transatlantic alliance is the conviction of shared values and culture between the US and western Europe. At the root of European anti-Americanism, for Cohen-Tanugi, is the myth that these ties have been rent, with the consequence of political drift to European separatism.
In stark opposition to the argument of Barber, Cohen-Tanugi affirms the reality of the transatlantic relationship, and he cites freedom, the market economy and democracy as the binding force. But he offers no support for this claim and shows no interest in, even awareness of, the contrary views of Will Hutton, or Barber's earlier work, both of which tease out the multiple meanings of "freedom" and expose the political message packaged for export in star-spangled wrapping and labelled "democracy for all".
He writes that there is no basis for claiming that Europeans and Americans differ on other matters of substance - Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, GM food, all exaggerated or misunderstood. For Cohen-Tanugi "the only truly ethical question that separates Europe and America is the use of the death penalty".
On the EU question of the day concerning the establishment of a common defence capability outside NATO, Cohen-Tanugi repeats the limp argument of the British right. Even if the EU succeeds in its objective, it will still depend on the US for protection against serious external threat. "Nothing could be more damaging to transatlantic relations," he claims, "than a Europe that was seen by the United States as simultaneously irrelevant, irresponsible, and ungrateful." Sweet Jesus indeed! This is politics for Tory pensioners. Read Barber instead.
Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy By Benjamin R. Barber
W.W. Norton, 220pp. £17.95
Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq By Tariq Ali Verso, 214pp. £13
An Alliance at Risk: The United States and Europe since September 11th
By Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, translated by George Holoch Jr
Johns Hopkins Press, 141pp. £15