Liberal hawk Josh Marshall reviews Berman's book and reaches the same conclusions I did based on reading interviews with Berman:
Though this is a serious book, it is shot through with an equally serious flaw: the desire to inflate the threat of Islamist violence--and particularly its intellectual stakes--to levels beyond what they merit and to force them into a template of an earlier era, for which Berman has an evident and understandable nostalgia. Over the course of the book, the disjointedness between what the radical Islamist menace is and what Berman wants to make it ranges from merely apparent to downright painful, and ends up obscuring as much as it clarifies. And, unfortunately, the obscuring elements may be the more important ones. Given the role intellectuals are playing in this war, these are mistakes that could have dire real-world costs.


- tom moody 4-26-2003 7:12 am





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