Reviewed by Karamatullah K. Ghori

Fear has always been a powerful and potent tool in the hands of autocrats and soldiers of fortune. George W. Bush's America exemplifies how even a democracy can be cowed down into submission to a cabal of right-wing imperialists determined to impose a Pax Americana on the world.

The bag of tricks employed by the Bush neocons - from their God-sent platform of post-9/11 - is a mixture of fear instilled in the hearts of Americans, and intimidation of aliens abroad with brute force.

Fear, given currency at home through disingenuous Orwellian institutions like the Department of Homeland Security, is subverting democratic institutions and pristine traditions of a "free America". Fear is also being ingrained in the American psyche by constant exhortations that the world "hates us" because we're free and democratic. This and other catchy slogans are instilling torpor in the American democracy and robbing it of free speech and expression.

Fear is also goading the American intelligentsia to fall in line behind the neocon "vision" of a world ruled by American standards. It has already silenced the erstwhile robustly independent American news media and made it a mouthpiece of Bush's warmongering.

However, there are still some bright exceptions to the neo-McCarthyism of our age. One such brave voice is that of Benjamin Barber, professor of civil society at the University of Maryland. A prolific writer, Barber has written a dozen books, since 1971, to become a fierce and fearless fighter for the American values he suspects are in grave peril under the Bush empire dreamers. The most prominent of his books was Jihad Vs McWorld.

Barber sets about to demolish the Bush thesis that simplistically and naively sees the world divided, in Manichaean terms, between good and evil. Self-anointed as the purveyor of good against evil, Bush's faith-driven ideology, according to Barber, is dangerous for the world and lethal for American traditions of open democracy.

The basic Bush strategy, which Barber thinks has been borrowed from the Machiavellian dictum that "it is better (for a prince) to be feared than loved", is flawed. The bog the Bush adventure in Iraq has mired itself into is best illustrative that fear cannot beat a supposedly conquered people into submission. The Bush warriors had haughtily assumed that their tactic of "shock and awe" would intimidate the Iraqis and snuff out all their resistance. That hasn't happened. Barber rightly observes that shock and awe is staple to terrorists but a democracy "takes it up only by risking its liberal essence".

He sees the Bush doctrine of 'preventive war' as a means of creating more enemies for America than winning friends for its avowed mission of spreading democracy. That is how Bush has been labouring to repackage his 'war on terror', lately, as a 'war on tyranny'.

However, Barber thinks that the world is not buying it, and is unlikely to, given so much distrust worldwide of the Bush agenda of Pax Americana. You cannot, as Barber argues eloquently, "find idealistic reasons" for blatant interventions abroad, that the world sees as sheer fulfilment of American interests and objectives. That has been the case with US "mercy missions", from the 19th century to date, to "free" the people in the Philippines from Spain (1898), in Mexico (1914), in Haiti (1915), in the Dominican Republic (in 1916 and again in 1965), and in Granada (1983). The latest in the ignoble series are the "humanitarian" interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Barber is emphatic that just as America cannot hope to win friends by being hypocritical and a warmonger, it cannot, by the same stroke, "export McWorld and call it democracy".

The Bush neocons aren't only partisans of the ultra right wing Christian missionaries and evangelicals, but they have also been acting as the ramming rods of US corporate global interests, which is an export of American plutocracy with no appeal to the poorer world.

The example of Iraq is apposite. The Iraqis have seen through the endgame of their American occupiers: to loot, wholesale, the Iraqi national assets. They have rejected what the Bush viceroy, Paul Bremer, attempted to impose on them by putting the Iraqi national silver on the auction bloc.

Pleading for a return to a softer approach that defined the post-Second World War policy of deterrence and containment, Barber reminds the Bush hawks of what Franklin Roosevelt said, succinctly: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He has no doubt that preventive war, on which the Bush doctrine is pegged, will not prevent the spread of terrorism but will, certainly, prevent democracy from taking roots.

Barber argues that an empire of fear the Bush votaries are trying to build will end up colonizing and barricading the minds of the Americans themselves. Fear cannot be the glue for a country, let alone of an empire. There is an inherent contradiction in terms in the Bush assertion of America being the most powerful country in the world and, at the same time, the most vulnerable.

A frenzied and purblind pursuit of raw power is dividing America, right down the middle, as witnessed last November in the most tightly contested presidential race. There are, now, two Americas: a conservative and jingoistic America fed on the Bush philosophy of fear, and an America hankering for a return to its old traditions of liberalism and liberty.

But is there hope for salvation and redemption from the blight of the Bush neoconservatism? Barber doesn't prognosticate an early end to this nightmare. He simply alludes to an episode, after the fall of the Taliban under American military assault, in which Colin Powell warned Bush of the likely disintegration of the coalition assembled on Afghanistan if other countries, like Iraq, were also invaded. Bush's answer was that he was not going to be dictated by other countries and added, with characteristic hubris: "At some point we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America." Bush is a disciple of Emperor Calligula whose motto, like his was: "Let them hate us as long as they fear."

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Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy

By Benjamin R. Barber

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi

Tel: 021-5683026

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.libertybooks.com

ISBN 0-393-32578-4

254pp. Rs770