'He that stands it now ...' A writer responds to his critics.

WHEN Richard Perle and I published An End to Evil at the beginning of the year, we touched off about as nasty a literary brawl as the book-review pages have witnessed in some time. Michiko Kakutani, the daily book reviewer for the New York Times, was reduced to sputtering indignation: "absolutist ... cocky ... swaggering ... smug ... shrill ... deliberately provocative." "Reckless disregard for complexity, shades of grey or the possibility of unintended consequences," huffed The Economist. And so on and on it went.

Well, we can't complain. We started it.

Richard and I began work on An End to Evil because it seemed to us that much of our political and policy elite was losing its stomach for the fight against terrorism. They had been nervous enough when President Bush overthrew the Taliban: Senator Tom Daschle was worrying about the American military mission in Afghanistan as early as March 2002. Since the invasion of Iraq, however, many in Washington have suffered something close to a moral collapse. Sen. John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, even argued in January that the War on Terror should revert to being primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement matter: the same strategy that failed so dismally in the 1990s.

Our purpose in writing An End to Evil was to do our part to help summon Americans back to the mood of determination and resolution of September 2001. We opened with a quotation from Tom Paine: "He that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." We tried in the spirit of Paine to persuade Americans that this too is a time when it is necessary to take and hold our stand.

Not everybody agrees. But for too long, those who disagree with the strong anti-terror policies of the Bush administration have evaded their responsibility to offer adequate alternatives. It's a striking fact, for example, that when two leading counterterrorism officials of the Clinton National Security Council published their book on terrorism in 2002 (The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon), they spent so long tracing the origins of the terror threat--and devising excuses for the Clinton administration's failure to come decisively to grips with it--that they left themselves virtually no room at all to offer any suggestions about what might actually be done to protect the country from that threat.

Even now, with the nation readying itself for an election campaign in which war and peace will loom large, those who oppose strong anti-terror policies still have not articulated their alternative. Should we leave Iraq? No answer. What if anything should we do about Saudi Arabia? Radio silence. And how about that Iranian bomb? Mumble, mumble. What we get instead is a lot of angry shouting about neocons, neocons, neocons--as if the nation's foreign-policy doves had been simultaneously seized by a wonk's version of Tourette's syndrome. And yet we seem to hear the same themes, and the same errors, repeated again and again. Richard and I group these errors into three main categories: errors of the intellect, errors of the will, and errors of the heart. In our view, these erroneous beginnings explain why our principal critics arrive at their flawed, often fatally flawed, conclusions.

ERRORS OF THE INTELLECT

One common criticism is that Richard and I slight the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. This criticism occupies almost the entirety of Thomas Powers's review in The New York Review of Books. "Everything [in An End to Evil] is clear and all choices are stark--except when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza.... China, Russia, the CIA, the State Department, 'the underlying cultural malaise' in the Middle East--all these he [referring to my co-author, Richard Perle] can fix. But when it comes to the longest-running open sore in the clash of civilizations, his advice to the Palestinians is what Lucy in her role as psychiatrist used to tell the troubled Charlie Brown--'Get over it!'"

Yet there is something very peculiar about this line of criticism. It's based on a pair of assumptions: 1) that the creation of a Palestinian state would somehow ease our terrorism problem, and 2) that this state could be swiftly achieved if only the U.S. would put more pressure on Israel to offer greater concessions. Our critics, however, never quite articulate these assumptions--very possibly because they understand how silly these assumptions would sound if pronounced aloud.

Would it be a good thing to solve the Palestinian problem if it could be solved? Obviously yes. A solution would reduce the amount of human unhappiness in the world, deny America's enemies a talking point, and enhance the security of our Israeli ally. Would such a solution ease the terrorism problem? Well, Osama bin Laden himself has repeatedly made clear that the Palestinian problem constitutes only one of his grievances, and nowhere near the most important: In his first fatwa, issued in 1996, Chechnya, Bosnia, and even the Ogaden Desert and Tajikistan all concerned him much more. By 1998, the Israeli-Palestinian issue had risen to third place, still behind America's Iraq sanctions and the basing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. In his statements since 9/11, he has also complained of Australian support for the independence of East Timor, the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924, and the Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492. Osama bin Laden is a man with a large agenda, to put it mildly.

As for the fancy that the creation of a Palestinian state would somehow discredit extremism in the Islamic world--and thus win the U.S. Muslim friends against al-Qaeda--that idea too flunks the plausibility test. Through the 1990s, the Clinton administration did just what people like Powers would have President Bush do. The Clinton administration set the creation of a Palestinian state as one of its supreme foreign-policy priorities, and pushed the Israelis to one concession after another. In 1996, for example, President Clinton pressured Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu into surrendering Hebron to the Palestinian Authority. And what did the Clinton administration get for its hard work? Nineteen ninety-six was not only the year of bin Laden's first fatwa. It was also the year that Saudi Arabia stonewalled the U.S. investigation into the Khobar Towers attack that killed 19 American service personnel; that a huge cache of Iranian weapons intended for use in terror attacks against European Jews was intercepted in Antwerp; and, finally, that the allied coalition against Saddam began to crumble.

The harder the U.S. worked to gain independence for the Palestinian Authority, the faster Islamic extremism seemed to grow in Egypt and the Gulf. Not only did the Clinton administration's policy fail to help; if anything, the drive to help create a Palestinian state caused American leaders to become more passive in the face of terror attacks. Clinton's fears of upending Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were very probably the most important reason for his weak response to the African embassy attacks in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

Are our critics aware of this history? I have to believe that they are. So what seems to be at issue in their complaints about our "neglect" of the Palestinian problem is less a point of principle than a point of etiquette. In a discussion of the Middle East, an omission of a bow to the essentiality of a Palestinian state is like the omission of a bow to the family idols in a classical Roman household. Nobody much believes in the idols. But it is considered a shocking violation of propriety and decency to express one's skepticism where the children might hear.

If the overestimation of the importance of a Palestinian state is the most pervasive error about terror, it is far from the most blinding. That dishonor can be claimed by Daniel Benjamin, in his January 23 review in Canada's Globe and Mail: "Perhaps the most dispiriting fact about An End to Evil is not the cartoonish prescriptions but the authors' misunderstanding of the new terrorism. Frum and Perle, like many in the Bush administration, believe that all hostile Muslims are in cahoots, and that the high road to destroying al-Qaeda is through the demolition of the rogue regimes that supposedly nourish it. Their absolute certitude blinds Frum and Perle to the reality that we face a global insurgency of radical Islamists who have nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, Iran, or Syria. Globalization and technological advances have placed enormous destructive power in the hands of non-state actors who cannot be deterred and whose religious ideology resonates in the minds of dissatisfied people spread across the globe. This is a far more complex problem than dealing with Iran or Syria."

This concept of al-Qaeda as some virtual-reality entity, operating beyond the reach of Middle Eastern governments, was a favorite conceit of the Clinton administration's counterterrorism team. Yet even as the Clinton administration was describing al-Qaeda as a "non-state" actor, al-Qaeda forces were building a terrorist infrastructure on the territory of one state (Afghanistan) using hundreds of millions of dollars raised with the indulgence of another (Saudi Arabia). Had the rulers of Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia objected to al-Qaeda's activities, it's doubtful that the group could have done business on anything like the scale it did. And today what survives of the senior leadership of al-Qaeda is hiding in Iran, again obviously with the permission of the Iranian government, as Iranian officials themselves confirm.

No dispute: Al-Qaeda is not the agent of some Middle Eastern government. But it could never have achieved its murderous effectiveness if the governments of the Middle East had all been hostile to it. Richard and I make this point in An End to Evil through an analogy to a famous credit-card commercial. "Box cutters and airline tickets: $100,000. A global network of training and recruitment: hundreds of millions of dollars. A secure piece of real estate from which to operate: priceless."

And while the states connected to al-Qaeda were in the first place Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, other terrorist groups of concern to the U.S. have other political connections. The terrorist groups that carried out the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 and risked provoking a nuclear war on the Subcontinent, could not survive without the indulgence of Pakistan. Hezbollah--which killed some 300 Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s--wholly depends on Syria and Iran.

The nexus between the terror groups and the terror states--the linkage that prompted Michael Ledeen to coin the term "the terror masters"--is a dangerous reality. The Clinton administration's vision of terror groups as global freelancers, like SPECTRE in the old James Bond movies, was a dangerous illusion--or, worse, an excuse for inaction in the face of a gathering menace to American security and freedom.

ERRORS OF THE WILL

A great many reviews have complained that An End to Evil is too blunt, too bold, too unnuanced. It was this alleged lack of nuance that incensed Michiko Kakutani, disappointed the editors of The Economist, and offended my old friend Fareed Zakaria, who reviewed the book for the Sunday New York Times. Fareed by and large agreed with most of our recommendations--and yet he was appalled by the forceful tone with which those recommendations were presented: "Frum and Perle wish to revolutionize whole cultures, change regimes, deter potential threats, 'end evil' itself. But they cannot abide the means to achieve it, which inevitably involves contact with other countries, negotiations, compromise, empathy.... Occasionally, Frum and Perle fear that a policy they suggest might seem too middle of the road, so they disguise it with acerbic rhetoric."

Now of course nuance is a very fine thing. The world is complex, and our descriptions of the world have to be complex too. And certainly it is better to express yourself with restraint. On the other hand, it is possible to pile up so many cautions and exceptions that you end up saying nothing at all. As the poet Roy Campbell once wrote to someone who offered him the same advice that Fareed offers Richard and me: "You praise the firm restraint with which they write-- / I'm with you there, of course: / They use the snaffle and the curb all right, / But where's the bloody horse?" Right now, the great problem afflicting American foreign policy is not lack of nuance, but lack of direction. Our bipartisan foreign-policy elite--the Scowcrofts, the Brzezinskis--has gone into open rebellion against the Bush administration. The leaders of the Democratic party are now denying that the War on Terror is a war at all. And the administration itself is wracked by doubt and conflict over future policy toward Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. In other words, the topic for debate at the moment is not, "How can we improve the effectiveness of our foreign policy?" It is: "What should that policy be?"

Fareed belongs to that centrist consensus that complains that the Bush administration is not doing its work as effectively as it could. And who would disagree? Do any of us do our work as effectively as we theoretically could? But all too often these complaints about how things are done operate as substitutes for the hard work of thinking about what should be done. The cult of technique can become an excuse for endless talk; complaints about the lack of it can sometimes conceal a lack of backbone.

The War on Terror is a new thing, and it has disturbed many comfortable and profitable old relationships. Many of our foreign-policy elite have important stakes in those relationships. They cling to them despite accumulating evidence that those relationships have become obsolete, or even dangerous. In the face of this kind of entrenched opposition, how can those who recognize the need for new ideas force change? In American policy, there is one sure way to transform any debate: Invite the larger public to join it. And if you want to invite the public in, you have to send them an invitation in a language they can read.

ERRORS OF THE HEART

Since 1940, American democracy has faced three great ideological enemies: first Nazism, then Communism, and now militant Islam. And in each of these struggles, a certain number of Americans have found themselves out of sympathy with the nation's cause. During the Cold War, many Americans succumbed to the ideology of the enemy. Nazism was and militant Islam is much less attractive to Americans. But in both cases, many Americans wished to opt out of the fight--not because they loved the enemy, but because they so intensely hated one of the enemy's targets: Britain back in 1939-41; Israel today.

It was no surprise to Richard and me that An End to Evil earned generally negative reviews from Middle Eastern officials and their state-controlled media. Former Saudi intelligence chief (now ambassador to Britain) Prince Turki al-Faisal responded to the book by denouncing Richard as a "Zionist extremist." The former boss of Gamal Abdul Nasser's propaganda network denounced Richard as "the other face of Osama bin Laden" in a column in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram on January 27. And a columnist for the Beirut newspaper Al-Hayat charged on January 24 that Richard and I belonged to the real "axis of evil; Israel, neo-conservatives and all those supporting or protecting them. This axis of evil is the reason behind the global hatred of the U.S., and the crazy terrorism that everyone suffers from."

This Middle Eastern style of rhetoric was reproduced in a pair of vehement and lengthy reviews: one published on February 23 in The Nation, the flagship magazine of the American Left; the other on March 1 in The American Conservative, a magazine that seeks to redefine the American Right. It says something interesting and maybe important that the two magazines made almost exactly the same points in almost precisely the same way.

In The Nation, Michael Lind suggested that try as Richard and I might to "ransack American history" to prove our patriotic bona fides, the truth was that we were swayed by our "ethnic, religious, or regional biases." We had "hijacked U.S. foreign policy" on behalf of "Israel's illiberal Likud party and ... the Protestant Christian Zionists of the Southern religious right." Pat Buchanan does not share Lind's dislike of southern Protestants; but otherwise, the two perceive the world and American politics in almost exactly the same way--indeed, at one point Lind reproaches "neoconservatives" for having unfairly criticized Buchanan's "blood-and-soil nationalism." In The American Conservative, Buchanan returns the compliment by translating Lind's overwrought prose into plain English. "Their agenda," Buchanan says of Richard and me, "is not America's agenda, and their fight is not America's fight." And: "They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America." Can't get clearer than that.

It is bizarre, however, to be accused of being next door to treason by a writer who can shrug off the possible deaths of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans as if they were a thing of little importance. Buchanan writes: "How is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11?" Yes, 3,000 Americans died that day. But so what? "Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of [the] Civil War." And even if al-Qaeda were to acquire weapons more deadly than 19th-century musketry--well, again so what? "Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade."

A year ago in these pages I noted that Buchanan, in the best Nation-magazine tradition, had affixed the blame for 9/11 to the United States itself. "9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted," he said on Hardball on September 30, 2002. "We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we're supporting Israel and all the rest of it."

But even I never imagined that he would advance to the next and still more abject step of explicitly accepting the risk of massive further American civilian casualties as preferable to a policy of national self-defense that in his imagination might in any conceivable way offer collateral benefits to Israel. Buchanan took offense when I suggested in NATIONAL REVIEW that he had ceased to love his country. It might be more exact to say both of him and of the line of critics who share his animus and his resentments that if they do still love their country, they nonetheless love it far less than they hate Israel.

Throughout the writing of An End to Evil and the two months of discussion afterward, Richard Perle and I strove to do our part to revitalize the patriotic consensus of the first weeks after 9/11--to give Americans a definition of victory in this war and a plan for how to achieve that victory. For me, this is a new task. For Richard, it is the culmination of 35 years of devoted service to the United States and American security.

We would certainly never insist that our ideas will prove correct in every particular detail. We will certainly be wrong about many things, possibly even many important things. We stand ready to be criticized and corrected. But too many of the criticisms and corrections we have thus far received reflect not the failings of our work, numerous as those surely are, but the blinders, weaknesses, and prejudices of the opponents of this war and this administration.

These blinders, weaknesses, and prejudices must be overcome, not for the sake of any one book or any two writers, but for the sake of victory in the great conflict of our time.

Mr. Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of NATIONAL REVIEW.