I have never before written a positive review of someone who has written for the Wall Street Journal and has had his work praised by the National Review and other journals of the right. However, politics in the treacherous times of the Bush administration can make some strange bedfellows. James Bovard might be called a libertarian conservative in the sense that he sees liberty as something to be preserved from government intervention rather than a shield to protect the privileges of the rich and powerful. In Terrorism and Tyranny, he has written a valuable answer to those in the Bush administration who advocate something like the worst of pre World War II imperialism as a policy to fight 'international terrorism' in the world, regardless of its effects on the rights of Americans or the lives of the world’s people. Like the old baseball umpire, Bill Klem, James Bovard calls them as he sees them, indicting the Reagan administration for its covert and overt interventions in the Middle East and Central America in 'the first American war on terrorism.' While Bovard, given outlook, praises Reagan for helping to bring down the Soviet Union, he concludes that 'though Reagan spent his entire time warring against terrorism, far more American civilians died in terrorist attacks at the end of his reign than at the beginning.' Reagan established the precedents that future administrations would follow. While Bovard does a decent job in presenting the long and tangled history of FBI-CIA failures and disinterest in the years prior to the September 11 attacks, his outlook makes him miss, I believe, an important point. The intelligence networks had been developed to fight the Soviet Union, revolutionaries of the left, and the Communist movement everywhere in the world. Osama bin Laden and his Al Quada network were largely the creation of U.S. intelligence agencies and their subordinates in Pakistan and other countries. When these former 'assets' turned on the United States following the destruction of the Soviet Union, it is not remarkable that the intelligence agencies didn’t take them that seriously. Also, the bin Laden family’s major contacts with U.S. corporate wealth acted as protection not only for them, but for their black sheep, Osama, who may have continued to get large sums of money from relatives after the family officially disowned him. Bovard goes on to accurately analyze the 'Patriot Act' as a monstrous violation of the U.S. constitution and the very property rights that the administration claims to defend, exposing its dubious confiscations of peoples’ bank accounts and other resources and its absurd attempt to portray those acts as military victories in the war against terrorism. Bovard very wisely concludes that 'the end result [of such policies] will be more federal controls, more intrusions, less privacy—and little or no additional protection from terrorists … the danger is the homicidal hatred, not the money.' Bovard then goes forward to catalogue in great detail the horrors of the 'Patriot Act,' the administration’s abuses of the earlier Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to create something like the secret British colonial courts, the searches and seizures, and the preventive detentions that the American revolution bravely fought against and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights outlawed. Here Bovard is at his best, detailing the Bush administration’s campaign to turn Americans into a nation of informers. The establishment of a new Pentagon office with the corporate title of Total Information Awareness, with its commitment to scan countless emails and internet-based records, creating dossiers on the entire population, and the possibilities of internet markings on the correspondence individuals, the administration wished to mark. That former Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra ill fame was the administration’s initial choice to head this office is further evidence that the administration has learned nothing from the past and believes that it can get away with everything in the present and future. Bovard captures the half-cowboy, half-gangster mentality of the administration perfectly when he quotes Bush in March 2002, walking in on a White House briefing for Senators conducted by Condolezza Rice, to say 'Fuck Saddam. We are going to take him out,' as the Senators laughed nervously and Rice smiled sympathetically. Bovard goes on to comment on the 1,000 people arrested by federal authorities at airport checkpoints over the last two years and the many horror stories that have accompanied the arrests. Bovard, unlike most conservatives and many liberals, has the courage to both cite and condemn state terrorism in the U.S. and Israel as examples of failed, morally bankrupt policies in wars against terrorism. Simply stated, Bovard’s conclusion that 'most of the people of the world had little to fear from international terrorism before 9/11—but now many of them have more reason to fear their own government' is inescapable. Bovard concludes that the U.S. government should destroy Al Quada and end the war on terrorism, stop its blind support for the Israeli right-wing and various dictatorships in the Middle East, and, in essence, act honorably in foreign affairs. This is a good set of anti-imperialist intentions, but there is no social or economic analysis of imperialism to back it up. In a sense, James Bovard’s work reminds of Lenin’s comment on the Anti-Imperialist League in the United States, that they were the 'last of the Mohicans' of the old liberal democracy, railing against the destructive effects of imperialism on free government and institutions. Terrorism and Tyranny presents a great deal of valuable information on one general theme–the 'war against international terrorism' is being prosecuted by the Bush administration as a war against the rights and freedoms of Americans. It will take advocacy and eventual implementation of a foreign policy that fosters economic and social progress through the United Nations rather than the cynical use of military force and defunds and defangs the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States to both defeat the horror that is the Bush administration and assure that its policies will be buried with it.



Terrorism and Tyranny By James Bovard New York: MacMillan/Palgrave: 2003.



Norman Mrkowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.



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