A Confident Prescription for Foiling the Terrorists
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them.
The book takes the instructive, prescriptive stance assumed by many conservative theorists in recent books, but it turns out to be less a reasoned effort to convince the unconvinced than a furious manifesto aimed at true believers. It is a screed that expends as much energy denouncing the State Department, Europe, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., Democrats, the foreign-policy establishment and even former President George H. W. Bush (the authors accuse him of trying "to prevent the Soviet Union from disintegrating"), as it does on denouncing terrorists and terror-minded states.
Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, "An End to Evil" is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative. Which might not be so surprising given the authors' track records. Mr. Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the "axis of evil" phrase that President George W. Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, adopted a similarly bellicose manner in his 2003 book "The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush." Mr. Perle, a hawkish member of the Defense Policy Board and an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, acquired the Washington nicknames Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader in the 1980's for his combative, take-no-prisoners pronouncements.
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