The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 2007 M04 23
The Matador's Cape delves into the causes of the catastrophic turn in American policy at home and abroad since 9/11. In a collection of searing essays, the author explores Washington's inability to bring 'the enemy' into focus, detailing the ideological, bureaucratic, electoral and (not least) emotional forces that severely distorted the American understanding of, and response to, the terrorist threat. He also shows how the gratuitous and disastrous shift of attention from al Qaeda to Iraq was shaped by a series of misleading theoretical perspectives on the end of deterrence, the clash of civilizations, humanitarian intervention, unilateralism, democratization, torture, intelligence gathering and wartime expansions of presidential power. The author's breadth of knowledge about the War on Terror leads to conclusions about present-day America that are at once sobering in their depth of reference and inspiring in their global perspective.

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Contents

Section 1
13
Section 2
15
Section 3
23
Section 4
41
Section 5
71
Section 6
82
Section 7
89
Section 8
92
Section 15
158
Section 16
178
Section 17
197
Section 18
201
Section 19
211
Section 20
215
Section 21
235
Section 22
238

Section 9
107
Section 10
109
Section 11
131
Section 12
133
Section 13
146
Section 14
157
Section 23
244
Section 24
248
Section 25
257
Section 26
258
Section 27
286

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Page 56 - The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — .is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it...
Page 215 - Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To...
Page 221 - Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?
Page 21 - Ce sont d'ordinaire les fripons qui conduisent les fanatiques, et qui mettent le poignard entre leurs mains; ils ressemblent à ce Vieux de la Montagne qui faisait, diton, goûter les joies du paradis à des imbéciles, et qui leur promettait une éternité de ces plaisirs dont il leur avait donné un avantgoût, à condition qu'ils iraient assassiner tous ceux qu'il leur nommerait.
Page 108 - The president must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society....
Page 100 - For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither,
Page 299 - He alone has the prerogative of making treaties with foreign sovereigns, which, when made, have, under certain limitations, the force of legislative acts. All the members of the judiciary department are appointed by him, can be removed by him on the address of the two Houses of Parliament, and form, when he pleases to consult them, one of his constitutional councils. One branch of the legislative department forms also a great constitutional...

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About the author (2007)

After receiving his PhD from Yale in 1976, Holmes taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan Universities before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1978. From Princeton, he moved to Harvard University's Department of Government, where he stayed until 1985, the year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, Professor Stephen Holmes served as Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe and as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review. He has also been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe. Holmes' research centers on the history of European liberalism and the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism. In 1984, he published Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. Since then, he has published a number of articles on democratic and constitutional theory as well as on the theoretical origins of the welfare state. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the 1991 academic year. His Anatomy of Antiliberalism appeared in 1993. And in 1995, he published Passions and Constraint: The Theory of Liberal Democracy; in this work, Holmes presents a spirited vindication of classical liberalism and its notions of constitutional government. He coauthored, with Cass Sunstein, a book on The Cost of Rights (Norton, 1998).

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