About the Author
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of several books, including Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, the New York Times bestseller Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, and The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. An investigative reporter who has written for Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Reader’s Digest, he lived in France for eighteen years.
From The Washington Post
George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 as a realist who would eschew nation building overseas, and warned that if the United States was an arrogant nation, others would not respect us. Sept. 11 changed everything. It not only shifted the focus of his foreign policy to a war on terrorism, but also provided an opportunity for some in his administration to advance their longstanding plan to use force to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
President Bush correctly refocused his foreign policy on what Lee Harris calls in Civilization and Its Enemies "the greatest threat facing us . . . the collision of this collective fantasy world of Islam with the horrendous reality of weapons of mass destruction." But the means he chose to implement that strategy have been more controversial. Harris writes that "we are now living in a world where decent and sincere men and women attack the United States for removing Saddam Hussein, the archetype of the ruthless gang leader . . . . They condemn the United States president for declaring a war on terrorism." But Harris glides over the very serious question of whether Saddam had anything to do with Sept. 11, and what connection there is between the war on international terrorism and war in Iraq. Instead, he says, the way to know whether you are standing on the right side of history is to ask, "Do you want to see the rule by gang go the way of slavery and be driven from the face of the earth, or do you believe that rule by gang is a natural right?" This is a highly oversimplified choice.
Harris argues that it is "in the interest of civilization" to keep the legitimacy of Pax Americana intact. This, he says, requires avoiding three perils: The United States cannot become an arrogant empire, but must rather be a first among equals. Intellectuals must abandon the pursuit of abstract utopias and fantasy ideologies. And we must all overcome a collective tendency toward forgetfulness. It's easy to agree with that level of generality. But Harris fails to be convincing in his defense of President Bush against charges of arrogance. "Contrary to [Fareed] Zakaria's analysis, what we are seeing is not the result of the incompetence of the Bush administration but the absolutely inevitable unfolding of an entirely new epoch in human history," Harris writes; only the United States can ultimately decide what is to be done, and "the United States represents the ultimate source of legitimacy in the world."
Harris understands the importance of America's soft power -- our ability to attract others. "America's enormous strength in the world" arises not from military hardware or technology, "but rather from the miraculous civil ecology that has no example to rival it, with the sole exception of Rome." But what Harris does not adequately examine is that our attractiveness as a shining city on the hill can be undercut by policies that others see as illegitimate. Polls show that the recent decline in America's attraction to much of the world is the result of our foreign policy rather than our culture. The way we pursue our policies has affected others' perceptions of our legitimacy. Since legitimacy rests in the eyes of the beholders, it is not sufficient to simply assert the superiority of our civic culture.
Harris believes that war is the wrong metaphor for the current struggle against terrorism. The perpetrators of Sept. 11 were not rational warriors in the tradition of Clausewitz, but fantasists in a symbolic drama in which the United States was a prop. The action was valuable to them in itself, not as a means to a political bargain. Such useful insights, as well as interesting detours into Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and other philosophers make the book valuable, if not always convincing.
The Iraq war is also a major factor in Kenneth Timmerman's view that France "in many ways has declared itself an enemy" and is "growing away from America." While "France has always loved to play the spoiler's role," he writes in The French Betrayal of America, in this case it went too far. "The enormous difference between those two positions -- legitimate dissent and active subversion of America's right of self-defense -- was not lost on George W. Bush and his top advisers, who renamed the French toast served on Air Force One 'Freedom toast.' " Timmerman does not dwell on the question of the extent to which the Iraq war was self-defense, but he points out that French claims of logic and consistency in their objections "were based on the role of France -- not the United Nations -- in determining world affairs."
Why did President Chirac part ways with President Bush over Iraq? Why, in Timmerman's analysis, did he "cast aside the 225-year-old alliance with America in favor of a tinpot dictator from a mud-and-wattle village on the outskirts of Tikrit whose ability to survive was cast in doubt"? One reason was popular politics: Eighty percent of the French public supported the decision to keep France out of the war. In addition, he was concerned not to anger the more than five million Muslim residents of France. A third reason was oil, not only because of the potential lucrative contracts, but also because of the need to assure an adequate supply. Above all, in Timmerman's view, "opposing America and saving Saddam was going to be Chirac's ticket to history's hall of fame."
Whatever the merits of these arguments, there are also credible alternative hypotheses. Writing in the Nation on Feb. 16, Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann argued that France had informed the United States that it would contribute forces if there was evidence of Saddam's terminal unwillingness to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. In addition, according to Hoffmann, France did not regard Iraq as a clear and present danger to the United States, and feared the war in Iraq would divert resources from the war on terrorism and attract terrorists to Iraq. As Hoffmann put it, "sometimes it is the sharpest critics who have the most foresight."
Timmerman is particularly strong on the history of French relations with Iraq and the massive corruption involved in arms and oil deals between the two countries over three decades. As a reporter in France for 18 years, he was a well-placed observer. While he footnotes many of his accusations, he also protects his sources in some of the most interesting cases (as any good reporter must), and we are left to judge their veracity on our own.
These books are interesting in opposite ways: Timmerman is strong in detailed reportage, Harris in high-altitude political philosophy. But both authors are supporters of the Iraq war -- and both their arguments fail to convince. As the current cliché goes, what they conclude depends on how they have chosen to connect some widely separated dots.
Reviewed by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Le Divorce
When I first met him, many years ago, the butt end of his .357 Magnum peeped out whenever he unbuttoned his coat. Today, he has given up the Magnum in favor of around-the-clock bodyguards. At the time of the September 11 attacks on America, French counterterrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière arguably knew more about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network than any man alive. I bumped into him in the staircase of a secluded wing of the Palais de Justice in Paris in early October 2001 just ahead of a scheduled interview and remarked the almost boyish gleam in his eye. He had just come back from interrogating a detainee and looked like a cat that had swallowed a canary.
"You've heard about Moussaoui?" he said, unable to suppress a wide grin. Zacarias Moussaoui was the alleged twentieth hijacker who had been arrested on August 17, 2001, by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents because of suspicious activity while attending the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The case against Moussaoui being worked up by lead U.S. prosecutor Rob Spencer in Alexandria, Virginia, was in trouble. Evidence tying Moussaoui to al-Qaeda was circumstantial, as were his ties to the 9/11 hijackers. Indeed, the initial grand jury indictment against Moussaoui was a boilerplate document for the overall conspiracy that mentioned him by name only a handful of times. But Moussaoui had left a long trail behind him in France. If anyone had the goods on him, that would be Bruguière.
"There are new developments that are going to be of great interest to our friends in Virginia," he said with a toss of his head up toward his office. With Bruguière, that meant a file a foot high crammed with seized documents, flowcharts of conspiratorial telephone calls, interrogation transcripts, and reports from French intelligence on Moussaoui's travels, his friends, and his bank accounts. Bruguière liked to call al-Qaeda and its followers a global "spider's web." Since 1995, with method and determination, he had been pulling it apart thread by thread.
The French judge has received letters of commendation from former FBI Director Louis Freeh and from Attorney General John Ashcroft, thanking him for his help in convicting al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States, in particular "Millennium bomber" Ahmad Ressam, who plotted to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999. At Bruguière urging, French intelligence gathered on-the-ground intelligence on bin Laden's rat line into Afghanistan and his support network in Pakistan, which he personally provided to the United States in a still-classified March 1995 report. The information was so detailed it included the names of top al-Qaeda recruitment officers, detailed rosters of foreign cells, and photographs of safehouses and "welcome centers" in Islamabad, Peshawar, and elsewhere. Even more significantly: it traced the rat line back to recruiting centers in Europe, Asia, and North America. Bruguière had twice tried to warn the Clinton administration of imminent terrorist threats from al-Qaeda networks operating inside the United States, but was waved off. When by luck an alert U.S. Customs officer in Port Angeles, Washington, caught Ressam as he got off the ferry from Vancouver, British Columbia, with a truck filled with explosives, Bruguière not only turned over his files to the U.S. prosecutors: he gave detailed testimony at the trial that helped put the would-be Millennium bomber in jail for life, as I first revealed in a Reader's Digest exclusive. Now that cooperation was about to come to an end, just when America needed it the most.
Shortly after our meeting on October 8, 2001, the French Ministry of Justice put the kibosh on Bruguière's effort to assist the Moussaoui prosecutors by providing documents that could be introduced at trial. The French claimed they had a "moral" objection to providing the documents because Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, could face the death penalty for his crimes. French officials, of course, tried to paint a less dire portrait. "We gave the United States all the intelligence we had on this and indeed all other terrorist cases," a senior French official knowledgeable of the intelligence exchanges on al-Qaeda later told me in Paris, insisting that nothing had gone awry. "But French law prevents us from turning over any evidence to a U.S. prosecutor if it could help convict a French citizen to death."
The formal U.S. request for documentary assistance was known as an international rogatory letter. It had to be presented through the Ministry of Justice, which turned down the U.S. request. Bruguière complained and ultimately met with the visiting U.S. prosecutor that fall, against the will of Socialist justice minister Elisabeth Guigou. "Even if I couldn't give him documents, I agreed to walk him verbally through all we had," Bruguière said. That included the dates of Moussaoui's trips to Afghanistan, his contacts with bin Laden trainers, his precise role in the "spider's web," and lots more. Yet despite Bruguière's willingness to help, the U.S. prosecutors returned home empty-handed, because the French government wouldn't allow the judge to turn over the documents they desperately needed.
Attorney General John Ashcroft told the French during meetings in Paris in May 2003 that the lack of cooperation meant that the Justice Department probably would be forced to abandon its case against Moussaoui and hand him over to the Pentagon for trial before a military court instead. The depth of Ashcroft's deception at the lack of cooperation on the Moussaoui case must be measured by the extent of Bruguière's knowledge and his potential to help. Just one week after Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001, Bruguière had sent a fax to the FBI. "I told them Moussaoui was dangerous, that he'd been trained in Afghanistan. I told them he was capable of carrying out a terrorist attack. I told them to look at his laptop, because that was where he stored all of his contact information and plans. But by the time they got around to it, well after September 11, he had succeeded in erasing everything of interest from the hard drive."
Why did the French government show such solicitude for a self-avowed Islamic extremist, who dismissed his defense attorneys in a courtroom temper tantrum, claiming they were "Jewish zealots," "pigs," and "bloodsuckers"? Until 1973, France used to put criminals to death by lopping their heads off on the guillotine. They executed political prisoners as recently as 1963, when the last of four members of the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète that had organized a military putsch to overthrow de Gaulle was executed by a firing squad. But in the early 1980s, French president Mitterrand abolished the death penalty. Now, it seemed, his successor was bent on making sure the United States could not execute criminals in our own country, even if they were proven guilty of conspiring to mass murder. It was just one more example of a growing French effort to offer their values and political culture as a self-righteous "moral alternative" to America's.
