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The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror
 
 
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The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (Hardcover)

by Stephen Holmes (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 378 pages
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press (30 April 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0521875161
  • ISBN-13: 978-0521875165
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 776,993 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
'Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks.' Middle East Online

Product Description
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. He also shows how the gratuitous and disastrous shift of attention from al Qaeda to Iraq was shaped by a series of misleading theoretical perspectives on the end of deterrence, the clash of civilizations, humanitarian intervention, unilateralism, democratization, torture, intelligence gathering and wartime expansions of presidential power. 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.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant study of the 'war on terror', 6 Aug 2007
By William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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."
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