Reviews of New Books
By Radek Sikorski, Steven Vincent, Daniel Kennelly

WHEN FREEDOM REQUIRES FORCE

By Steven Vincent

 

 

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics

 of Nation Building

By Noah Feldman

Princeton University Press, 200 pages, $19.95

 

 

Recently I received an e-mail from an Iraqi friend describing his continuing struggles with electricity, heat, running water, explosions. So when I picked up Noah Feldman's short volume titled What We Owe Iraq, my immediate response was: they need help with power, gasoline, fresh water, safety. Oh, and democracy.

 

Of those necessities, Feldman really only addresses the last. As signaled by its subtitle, War and the Ethics of Nation Building, the book is not a solicitation of practical relief for Iraqis, but a lawyerly discussion of what's involved in creating democracies in conquered or failed states, a topic that has suddenly and spectacularly impressed itself on American minds.

 

Feldman focuses primarily on post-Saddam Iraq (with nods to nation-building in Germany, Japan, and the Balkans), and the moral and ethical challenges the U.S. faces in changing Iraq's destiny. He's well-suited to the task: An Arabic-speaking scholar of constitutional law and Islam, Feldman served as senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

 

Nevertheless, this book--compiled from lectures Feldman delivered at Princeton in April 2004--feels detached from the pointed question implied by its title. Not until the final line does the author offer a direct answer: "What we ultimately owe Iraq is to let the Iraqis grasp nationhood and sovereignty for themselves--and to keep it, if they can."

 

The book feels outdated, too: The recent elections and the formation of a new Iraqi government have made the question of America's role in Iraq much less urgent. We're now entering the stage where Iraqis solve their own problems. The parts of this book that have continuing value are the guidelines Feldman lays out for rescuing failed states.

 

Early on, Feldman dispatches two common attitudes toward nation-building. The first is the "realist" school, which would have America cozy up to "strongmen" congenial to our interests. If such real-politik worked in the Cold War, Feldman argues, it is disastrous today: "Terrorist movements tend to emerge where...citizens believe the state denies them their rights and does not represent them."

 

By the same token, he dismisses those who say it is indefensible to depose dictators to serve U.S. interests. Such a position subjects America to a paralyzing "moral test akin to a requirement of altruism." Instead, Feldman argues that international interventions are permissible for matters of security if "our objectives coincide with the interests of other peoples or nations, and if we adopt appropriate means to achieve them." I myself often encountered Iraqis who understood this principle of "shared interest." As one said to me, "Even if the WMDs had been a trick Bush used to invade Iraq, we'd say 'Fine--whatever it took to finish Saddam.'"

 

In order to ensure America's safety by relaunching failed nations that have become terrorist havens, Feldman argues for a "minimalist" approach that observes the "same ethical duties to the people being governed that an ordinary, elected democratic government would owe them." In other words, an occupying power must act as a trustee for the political authority of the people, putting their interests ahead of its own, allowing them freedom of assembly and speech and participation in the government. In Feldman's view, this trusteeship breaks with both the colonial and Wilsonian models of nation-building, and the paternalism that both imply.

 

At this point, the reader might note that although the U.S. has generally followed these selfless precepts in Iraq, a bloody "insurgency" still roils the country. What happened? Feldman fails to address fully the problem the U.S. faces in Iraq, and may again in a future intervention: a local populace that refuses to cooperate, and worse, acts in a violent and self-destructive manner. Even more frustrating, Feldman chastises as "paternalistic" any attempts by an occupying power to challenge or oppose objectionable impulses in a population. He offers no convincing suggestions on how the U.S. might better have responded to the bullying of renegade Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, or tamed the nihilistic "resistance" of Sunni Arabs. And he skirts Resolution 137--an attempt in 2003 by Shia members of the old Governing Council to institute sharia law over women. To Feldman, this assault on the basic rights of women was just part of the "liberation of the Shia from Sunni oppression," while Ambassador Bremer's refusal to permit the resolution from taking effect displayed the "undemocratic nature of the occupation."

 

Part of the problem may be that Feldman compiled the book before the militants revealed how far they were willing to go to ruin their own nation. To Feldman's credit, he does not imply that locals have a monopoly on wisdom, nor does he believe the U.S. can go straight home after elections. He recog-nizes our obligation to stay and help responsible Iraqis "monopolize force" so the country's many gangsters are eliminated or controlled.

 

How we do that in a "minimalist" manner in a land where tribal chauvinisms, religious obscurantism, diehard fascism, apathy, resentment, and conspiracy thinking sap the best energies of many people, Feldman does not say. His book may be a sensible blueprint for a future--hopefully smoother and more welcomed--effort in nation-building. Iraq, though, is home to a substantial body of sociopathic gunmen who would rather see their country destroyed than democratic. Overcoming impediments to freedom like that will sometimes require more than minimal involvement.

 

Steven Vincent is a New York journalist who spent many months in Iraq.

 

 

SEX & DRINK MAKE A DULL GIRL

By Daniel Kennelly

 

I Am Charlotte Simmons

By Tom Wolfe

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 676 pages, $28.95

 

 

When Tom Wolfe pens a novel (something that happens every decade or so), there are a couple of things you can count on. One: good, bad, or so-so, the book will vault onto the bestseller lists. Two: everyone will be expected to have an opinion on it.

 

Wolfe's latest opus, I Am Charlotte Simmons, doesn't buck this trend. The reason this novel, like his last several, has once again set Americans aflutter has much to do with Wolfe's view that incisive commentary on current-day society and politics is a central part of what an author should provide to readers. "A novel of psychological depth without social depth isn't worth an awful lot," as he puts it.

 

If this book has anything, it has social depth. Like its predecessors, Charlotte Simmons overflows with Wolfe's skillful explication of the class and status consciousness, manners, and morals that are woven almost invisibly into the fabric of our "wild, bizarre, unpredictable hog-stomping Baroque country."

 

If Wolfe's novels could be said to make one overarching epic tale of America, then Charlotte Simmons is the chapter on the decadence of modern American college life. The novel chronicles the corruption (amidst much self deception) of Charlotte, the book's eponymous young heroine, within the responsibility-free zone of a representative campus.

 

As with all of Wolfe's major characters, Charlotte is an exercise in journalistic hyperbole, archetypal in every way. She is brilliant, beautiful, and (most important to the plot of this tale of lost virtue), arch-traditional. She is hopelessly naive about the vulgarity of American life outside her tiny, backwoods hamlet of Sparta, North Carolina. And she is about to be ruined.

 

Charlotte's academic achievements (class valedictorian and a perfect 1600 on the SAT) net her a free-ride scholarship to the fictional Dupont University in Pennsylvania. The school, which lays claim in the novel to topping Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc. in the college rankings, seems to combine the elite air of an Ivy League institution with the atmosphere and athletic program of a big state school.

 

Arriving at Dupont for the first time, Charlotte fully expects to leave behind her humble, hillbilly roots to partake of the "life of the mind"; very soon she discovers that the life of the mind has lost out on campus to the life of the flesh. Her scandalized innocence becomes the perfect vehicle to explore an elite university drenched in pheromones, alcohol, and political correctness. Through her eyes we observe the absurdities of co-ed dorms and toilets, drunken frat bacchanals, and violent tailgate parties. Through her ears we hear the harsh cadence of "F--- patois"--the term Wolfe coins to describe the collegiate dialect in which the arch four-letter word is bandied about as an all-purpose noun, verb, and adjective.

 

As with Wolfe's last two novels, the question of what makes a man takes center stage. While Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998) tackled the question with male central characters, I Am Charlotte Simmons explores it in the form of the three supporting characters who move in and out of the heroine's orbit. There's Hoyt Thorpe, frat boy and high priest of cool; Adam Gellin, a "literary intellectual" type ; and Jojo Johanssen, the only Caucasian starter on Dupont's national championship-winning basketball team. These three rather thinly represent the author's spectrum of masculinity: the frat, the dork, and the jock.

 

Yet such stock characters work well as vehicles for the minute social observation for which Wolfe is famous. Contrary to what some have argued, Wolfe's account gets a lot more of the minutiae of the modern American college scene right than he gets wrong. You won't find each detail in the book's litany recreated at every university just so, but any given episode in Charlotte Simmons would be considered pretty unexceptional on many college campuses today.

 

Unfortunately, this very commonness of Wolfe's material makes for a dull novel at times. Despite Wolfe's observational acumen, by choosing to write a story about a character who is surrounded by banality and descends into banality herself, he set himself up to turn out a banal novel. As a six- or seven-page magazine article, I Am Charlotte Simmons would have positively sung. As a 676-page    bildungsroman...well, readers should keep in mind Bluto's immortal words from Animal House: "My advice to you is to start drinking heavily."

 

Daniel Kennelly is a TAE senior editor.

 

 

SOCIALIST DREAM

By Radek Sikorski

 

 

The European Dream: How Europe's

 Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing

 the American Dream

By Jeremy Rifkin

Penguin, 434 pages, $25.95

 

 

Jeremy Rifkin has rendered us a service in highlighting the fact that the European Union, far from the glorified European version of NAFTA that most Americans take it for, is the boldest political experiment in the Western world since the foundation of the United States.

  

He is also right to point to areas in which Europe, contrary to fashionable American opinion, is clearly ahead of the U.S. Wireless technology is more advanced in Europe than here, and more smartly used. Many powerful global conglomerates today are European. And one can't help agreeing with Rifkin when he argues that there is more to well-being than just economic output; in quality of urban life, fitness of the population, availability of free time, and so forth, Europe does well.

 

None of this, however, justifies Rifkin's tone of rapture, bordering on puppy infatuation, toward the E.U. Permit me to psychologize: This is a love letter from an American social-democrat who is so disappointed with his irredeemably reactionary homeland that he is willing to tout a risky political experiment on another continent just to bolster his ideological points back home.

 

Rifkin also makes factual errors, such as claiming that Europeans "enjoy a common E.U. passport." (That is not true--they hold national passports that conform to an E.U. standard.) What's truly odd is that Rifkin praises the nuttiest aspects of the E.U.: "There are still other rights that do not exist in our U.S. Constitution. For example, the E.U. Constitution grants everyone the right of access to a free placement service." What's next in Europe, the Constitutional right to an Internet dating service?

 

There is a lot of hocus-pocus here that sounds like a re-hash of Rifkin's earlier book The End of Work. The traditional traded-goods market is allegedly giving way to a superior network-based commerce that changes fundamental rules of the game. "Markets, by their very nature, are an adversarial forum," explains Rifkin. "They are arm's-length exchanges where each party enters into the negotiation with the idea of maximizing his own self-interest at the expense of the other party. Networks are made up of autonomous firms that give up some of their sovereignty in return for the benefits of sharing resources and risks in an extended field of operations."

 

So if a company sells music on CD-ROMs, Rifkin seems to say, it is part of the old capitalist economy. But if you buy a subscription to a download service offering the same music, that's part of the brave new networked world in which Europe has an edge. But does Europe really have an edge in such work? There is no evidence of that. And what do these different modes of business have to do with a European versus American model?

 

More fundamentally, why is one form of business good and the other bad? A subscription is a service that must compete with others to entice customers as much as any physical good. Rifkin has a fundamental misunderstanding of a market economy. Voluntary and legally regulated market exchange is not exploitation.

 

Rifkin's use of statistics is questionable, too. He accepts at face value the European definition of poverty as half of average income. That allows him to argue that Europe has lower poverty rates than the U.S., even though average incomes are a full third less in Europe. Based on this definition you can show swaths of poverty in the Hamptons   and Beverly Hills, where millionaires  no doubt seethe with class hatred for the billionaires.

 

The European Dream is more an ideological projection of the author's own prejudices than a serious analysis of how Europeans and Americans address similar challenges. By its own criteria, Europe is failing to modernize its economy, and more socialism ˆ la Rifkin, however cleverly argued, will not lurch it forward.

 

As long as people continue to vote with their feet for the American Dream, his call to swap it for the Euro version is unlikely to persuade.

 

Radek Sikorski heads the New Atlantic Initiative at AEI