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The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, by Stephen Holmes
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The Matador's Cape delves into the causes of the catastrophic turn in American policy at home and abroad since 9/11. In a collection of searing essays, the author explores Washington's inability to bring 'the enemy' into focus, detailing the ideological, bureaucratic, electoral and (not least) emotional forces that severely distorted the American understanding of, and response to, the terrorist threat. The author's breadth of knowledge about the War on Terror leads to conclusions about present-day America that are at once sobering in their depth of reference and inspiring in their global perspective.
- Sales Rank: #1600656 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2007-04-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .98" w x 5.98" l, 1.46 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 378 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Holmes is emerging as the foremost post-9/11 'character reader'.... The book is political psychology at its best... he writes directly, simply, elegantly, informally without ever becoming too colloquial."
Jon Elster, Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Science, Columbia University
"A brilliant dissection of the deeper causes of an American tragedy."
Bruce Ackerman, Professor of Law, Yale University Law School
"In these powerfully-argued essays, Stephen Holmes brilliantly illuminates not only why America's 'war' against Islamic terrorism has gone so wrong, but also what can be done to protect both the nation and its democratic institutions. No book could be timelier or more urgently needed."
Ronald Steel, Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California
“Stephen Holmes' impressively researched, deeply felt, and strongly argued book is an extremely valuable guide to answering the riddle of why the Bush administration reacted so disastrously to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and in doing so fell straight into the trap Al Qaeda had set for America.”
Anatol Lieven, Senior Research Fellow, New American Foundation
"The Matador's Cape, by one of America's most brilliant political philosophers, not only provides a devastating analysis of the current 'war on terror', but suggests new ways for the West to deal with the very real dangers facing it."
Tzvetan Todorov, Director of Research, National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris
"The Matador's Cape is a trenchant critical analysis of the thinking inside the Bush administration and among its defenders about the response to 9/11 and the decision to go to war in Iraq. Stephen Holmes shows just how oversimplified, contradictory, and confused their thinking was--and how dangerous it is to our true interests in security and freedom."
Paul Starr, Co-editor of The American Prospect and author of Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism.
"The Matador's Cape - the title is an allusion to Osama bin Laden's boast that the 9/11 attacks were designed to bait the United States into a berserk overreaction - is a collection of previously published essays repackaged into a semi-coherent, but often sharp, narrative of America's "reckless response" to 9/11. Holmes identifies several reasons...for the administration's decision to declare war on terrorism rather than on Islamic radicalism."
-Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
"With this book, Stephen Holmes largely succeeds in elevating criticism of contemporary American imperialism in the Middle East to a new level...Holmes has done a wonderful job of clearing the underbrush and preparing the way for the public to address this more or less taboo subject."
-Chalmers Johnson, tomdispatch.com
"Holmes provides numerous useful insights."
-David P. Nalbone, Contemporary Psychology APA Review of Books
"...the author certainly has achieved his purpose of highlighting why United States policymakers must re-examine counter terrorism strategies and policies. Holmes has effectively introduced more clarity and understanding to this tragic unfolding epic and thus has made an important contribution to the literature."
-American Review of Politics
About the Author
After receiving his PhD from Yale in 1976, Holmes taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan Universities before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1978. From Princeton, he moved to Harvard University's Department of Government, where he stayed until 1985, the year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, Professor Stephen Holmes served as Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe and as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review. He has also been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe. Holmes' research centers on the history of European liberalism and the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism. In 1984, he published Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. Since then, he has published a number of articles on democratic and constitutional theory as well as on the theoretical origins of the welfare state. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the 1991 academic year. His Anatomy of Antiliberalism appeared in 1993. And in 1995, he published Passions and Constraint: The Theory of Liberal Democracy; in this work, Holmes presents a spirited vindication of classical liberalism and its notions of constitutional government. He coauthored, with Cass Sunstein, a book on The Cost of Rights (Norton, 1998).
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant account of the 'war on terror'
By William Podmore
Stephen Holmes, Professor at the New York University School of Law, has produced an exceptionally good book exploring the tangled arguments for the US and British governments' `war on terror'. He sums up that this war has been a disaster.
He describes the US state's "excessively violent, too broadly targeted, and patently counter-productive response to 9/11." He notes the odd assumption that "American immoderation will produce Muslim moderation." As he writes, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11 provocation was not only dishonourable and unethical, given the cruel suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and docility."
Holmes demolishes the arguments used to try to justify the shift from getting Al Qa'ida to `America's gratuitous invasion and horrifyingly bloody occupation of Iraq'. He criticises idealist warmongering about the clash of civilisations, humanitarian intervention and democratisation. He notes, "Senators and Representatives who originally voted to approve a war on false pretenses have subsequently hesitated to criticize it, no matter how calamitous the outcome, because after-the-fact dissent embarrassingly reveals their own prior gullibility and lack of foresight."
He points out, "In Administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetric war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organizing a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So, when the Administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others." Gordon Brown uses the same bad comparison to continue Blair's war policies.
Holmes writes, "On the one hand, neoconservatives assert that Islamic radicals despise American values (such as religious toleration), not American policies (such as support for Israel), and deny that America's past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalized by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the United States. This suggest precisely that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies (backing the oppressors of Muslim peoples), not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America's unprincipled support for tyranny. ... That is to say, jihadism, however repugnant, is not simply `evil' but has a perfectly comprehensible rationale. If we do not honestly grapple with this rationale, we will not be able to reduce the jihadist appeal."
He concludes, "the war on terror is bound to fail when conducted, as it has been so far, against the rule of law and outside the constitutional system of checks and balances." "To `go around the law' when combating terrorism is to regress into collective punishment. ... Waiving the rules will do the work of terrorists in this sense: it will recreate a world where violence breeds violence - where terrorism breeds torture and torture breeds terrorism. This will not be a safer world."
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Terrific Book on U.S. Response to 9/11
By David Swan
In terrorizing America, Osama Bin Laden only got the ball rolling. Contrary to FDR's famous statement that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, George W. Bush seems to believe that fear should be the prime motivator in engaging Islamic radicals and of them we should be truly terrified. With much of America and Congress cowed, Bush was given carte blanche to push his right wing agenda including massive tax cuts on the wealthy, an erosion of civil rights and a stunning reelection win using a campaign of fear. It was Bush who was instrumental in bringing Bin Laden's dream to fruition by galvanizing the Islamic world against America and driving a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. The author writes, `The strength of the U.S. government, including its ability to project force abroad, not only depends on its reputation for invincibility abroad, it also relies on its domestic legitimacy.' What Bush has managed to do is completely tie down the military, demonstrate to the world its limitations and tar the image of the United States as a beacon for freedom and law.
The author devotes an entire chapter to Dept. of Justice lawyer John Yoo and with good reason. Yoo's views on presidential power can best be summed up by a quote from his book `The Powers of War and Peace' saying, "the President's authority under the Constitution did not differ in important measure from that of a king" In other words everything Americans know about checks and balances and the founding fathers desire to rid themselves of a king is wrong. To support his assertion Yoo cherry picks through historical documents, omits contrary facts and distorts reality. Yoo is to political discourse what creationism is to science. What sets Yoo apart, besides the fact that he is the reductio ad absurdum of Conservative thinking on the concept of the Unitarian Executive, is that he actually went to the effort of putting his extremist ideas into a book. Yoo is unashamed in his belief that Nixon was right when he said, `When the president does it that means that it is not illegal' The views Yoo expresses are a mirror held up to the policies practiced by the Bush Administration, that the president in time of war becomes a supreme branch of the government answerable to none.
Yoo's most infamous statement, that a president could order the brutal torture of a child in order to extract information from a parent, leads into the author's next point. Why does the Bush Administration seem so adamant about having the ability to torture detainees? Besides ignoring Global Warming, engaging in torture may be the most shameful act the Bush Administration has involved itself in. John Dean speculated that torture is encouraged by the Bush Administration in order to satisfy the leadership's authoritarian egos. Mr. Holmes takes a different approach suggesting that the Bush Administration tortures as a demonstration to our enemies and allies that the gloves are off. The U.S. intends to match ferociousness with ferociousness. Similar to Bush's belief when governor that executions are good crime deterrents even if a few innocents die, the Administration seems to believe that torture should be done for tortures sake as a symbol. Torturing innocents and breaking international law is a means to an end because the U.S. looks that much more ruthless. The author writes, "The ticking time-bomb fable also suggests the quiet heroism of those who, defying moral norms and legal conventions, choose torture"
These are just a couple of examples from a book that is jam packed with thought provoking discussions about government and the use of power. I have read more than a few books on the Bush Administration's response to 9/11 but this may be the most intellectually profound, lucid and sober account yet. Stephen Holmes doesn't just recite the Bush Administration endless buffooneries he steps beyond partisan politics and establishes solid reasons for supporting alternative solutions. The Matadors Cape is a five star book that gets my highest endorsement.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A measured, well-reasoned and deftly persuasive treatise
By Midwest Book Review
New York University School of Law research director Stephen Holmes presents The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, a scholarly examination of the failures, mismanagement, and worse rampant in the Bush-Cheney administration's response to the September 11th attacks, especially the deleterious ramifications of the war in Iraq. The Matador's Cape strongly condemns acts of terror and genocide, yet examines with equal suspicion the Bush-Cheney's administration's insistence in sequestering its intelligence and decision-making process from the public - and therefore from any solid opportunity to vette or cross-check its ideologically driven conclusions, with disastrous results. Also discussed is the significant yet by no means unilateral role of religious fundamentalism in propagating terrorism, the impact of rising birthrates in the Islamic world contrasted with falling birthrates in the Western world, the harmful and psychologically twisted effects of the Bush-Cheney administrations embrace of torture, and much more. A measured, well-reasoned and deftly persuasive treatise about the need for an immediate reexamination of America's current administration and foreign policy. Highly recommended.
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