I had high expectations for this new book. It has received glowing reviews. Many people say that Peter L. Bergen is the premiere expert on Al Qaeda and terrorism.
So I pick the book up Friday and start reading and I am blown away by the stupid statements of partisan political opinion scattered throughout.
As E. B. White put it, a single overstatement has the power to destroy for the reader the object of the writer’s enthusiasm.
Here are some examples:
Talking about President Bush’s big speech of Sept. 20, 2001, Bergen writes: “What went unsaid in Bush’s speech was the idea that the United States, the consumer of a quarter of the world’s energy, should launch a Manhattan Project-style policy to make Americans less dependent on the Middle Eastern countries that had helped to incubate al-Qaeda.” (Pg. 58)
Is Bergen an expert in energy policy? If America wants to be less dependent on Middle East oil, wouldn’t it be at least as logical to build more nuclear power plants and to reduce restrictions on domestic drilling as to mount some fantastic government funding of green energy, which shows little promise of meeting our energy needs?
Why drop hand grenades of partisan opinion in matters in which you have no expertise into what might be (I am no expert in these matters) a sound book?
Because Bergen does this, he can’t be trusted. Some of the time, he writes as a left-wing partisan and some of the time he seems to report dispassionately, but you never know fully which role he’s playing in each sentence.
On page 97, Bergen writes that the Bush administration chose to “jettison the country’s core principle: that it is a nation of laws.”
How? By outsourcing “more than fifty suspect terrorists to countries that practice torture.”
Which laws precisely does this violate? All these terrorists are not American citizens. Non-citizens have no rights under American law. As for the Geneva Conventions, they do not apply to terrorists. They only apply to soldiers in uniform for nation-states.
Even if these decisions by the Bush administration violated some laws, were they much different than what every presidential administration does? Was Bush the first president to break the law? Extraordinary rendition was started by Bill Clinton.
On page 155, Bergen writes: “The CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq] would prove to be one of the more inept imperial administrations in modern history.”
On page 196, Bergen writes: “America’s neglect of Afghanistan was an enormous missed opportunity…”
A missed opportunity to do what? Create a functioning prosperous democracy? That was never on the cards. America can not win in Afghanistan. We can’t reshape the country. The best we can do is to hold the major cities.
