This malignant little book, admirably successful in achieving the difficult feat of combining vapidity with nastiness, further exhibits dishonesty, hypocrisy, flattery, cant, and special pleading, in about equal parts. To this list of sins, we can finally add error—of the grossest magnitude. An End to Evil, though published just a few months ago, is not just hopelessly outdated, it is wholly vitiated by subsequent events “on the ground,” in Officialspeak. Really, there is something unsporting about reviewing this crippled book from the present historical vantage point. Fortunately, this hunt does not entail a long chase.
David Frum, the former White House speechwriter of “Axis of Evil” fame, and Richard “Cakewalk” Perle, he of the Department of Defense (more or less), describe their book as a “manual for victory” in the “War on Terror,” which, for them, is almost infinitely more dreadful than the French, Russian, and Maoist Revolutions combined.
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It...