James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), 426 pp., $16.
Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 272 pp., $24.95.
Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, American Alone: The Neonconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 382 pp., $28.
A few days before the U.S. presidential election, the BBC, a once renowned television network dedicated to the enlightenment of the uninformed around the world, aired a documentary called "The Power of Nightmares." The program's central thesis was that the notion of a global threat from Islamist terrorism was largely a chimera, dreamed up by the powers-that-be to scare people into supporting wars of oppression by America and its dwindling band of allies. This illusion, the documentary said, was the work of a tightly knit group of conspirators in Washington known by now to all as "the neoconservatives"--a group of warmongering fanatics morally equivalent to the Islamic fundamentalists they claim to be fighting. As the producers noted, both are organized groups of religious bigots who use deception and terror to engender fear in credulous peoples in the hope of furthering their own goals of global domination. What was most remarkable about this steadily ascending fantasy of calumnies was in the end how unremarkable it was. For the neocons, such allegations are now merely routine.
