Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
The Truth About Terrorism
By Jonathan Raban
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism
by Stephen Flynn
HarperCollins, 234 pp., $25.95
Fortress America: On the Front Lines of Homeland Security—An Inside Look at the Coming Surveillance State
by Matthew Brzezinski
Bantam, 243 pp., $25.00
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States
by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Norton, 567 pp., $10.00
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
by "Anonymous" (Michael Scheuer)
Brassey's, 307 pp., $27.50
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
by Richard A. Clarke
Free Press, 304 pp., $27.00
The Power of Nightmares
by Adam Curtis
a three-part television series
BBC Two, October 20 and 27 and November 3, 2004
Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror
by Jason Burke
I.B. Tauris, 292 pp., $24.95
In his November 3 victory speech, President Bush, sounding the keynote of his second administration, pledged to 'fight this war on terror with every resource of our national power.' By saying 'this' rather than 'the' Bush stressed the palpable, near-at-hand quality of the war whose symbols have grown to surround us in the last three years—the tilted barrels of security cameras, BioWatch pathogen-sniffers, and all the rest of the technology of security and surveillance that Matthew Brzezinski somewhat overexcitedly details in Fortress America. Voters, at least, have been impressed. Responding to the exit pollers' question 'Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?' 32 percent of Bush supporters named 'Terrorism' (as against 5 percent of Kerry supporters), 85 percent of Bush supporters said that the country was 'safer from terrorism' in 2004 than it was in 2000, and 79 percent said that the war in Iraq 'has improved the long-term security of the United States.' Bush's successful conflation of security at home and military aggression abroad, his insistence that Iraq 'is the central front of the war on terror,' was the bravura rhetorical gambit that drove much of his electoral strategy.
Review, 6199 words
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