After 9/11, Berman continues, Chomsky was similarly doctrinaire and deluded. He found the "entirely predictable" attacks by Al Qaeda "the reply of oppressed people from the Third World to centuries of American depredations." Chomsky, Berman scoffs, "had no basis at all," in his ridiculous bestseller 9/11, "to attribute these centuries of Third World motivation to bin Laden."

No; but then, he didn't. The "terrorist atrocities," Chomsky noted in 9/11, were "a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all sides." The likely perpetrators were "extreme Islamic fundamentalists," "murderous...religious elements" who "for 20 years have caused great harm to the poor and oppressed people of [the Middle East]"; not surprisingly, since the latter are "not [their] concern." Al Qaeda has "little concern for globalization and cultural hegemony," and bin Laden himself "knows virtually nothing of the world and doesn't care to." There is not a word in 9/11 ascribing Third Worldist political motivations to bin Laden or Al Qaeda. Berman had no basis at all to attribute this absurd misreading of their motives to Chomsky.

In ten pages, Berman manages to make more, and more serious, errors of fact and logic than Chomsky has made in 10,000. An impressive performance.

Berman's scorn extends to the rest of the antiwar left. Those who questioned the Bush Administration's immediate resort to massive force in Afghanistan, for example, are "useful idiots...explaining why black is white." By this last phrase I suppose he means: explaining why a war that threatened to increase by 50 percent the number of Afghan civilians at risk of starvation, according to UN officials, might not be a just war. In their inability to comprehend the radical Islamist infatuation with murder and suicide, contemporary American leftists remind Berman of those pre-World War II French Socialists, as well as of all those who could not believe in Stalin's crimes.

It is true, of course, that the fellow-traveling left did not acknowledge Soviet crimes soon enough or straightforwardly enough. Others should learn candor from that sorry episode, along with skepticism about revolutionary rhetoric. But the question of whether it was Hitler's and Stalin's crimes that led to their designation as official enemies, or whether American, British and other liberal ruling groups could have coexisted, then as now, quite happily with the perpetrators of crimes of any magnitude as long as the latter posed no threat, by conquest or example, to existing patterns of ownership, investment, trade or resource availability--this question does not arise for Berman. Too simple-minded for him, presumably.

Well, what about the prospect of Islamic totalitarianism? Is Armageddon inevitable? Berman may turn out to be right: It may be that Islamic radicals cannot be understood, reasoned with, conciliated or ignored. If so, then their enemies--including all of us, since they say so--will of course have to fight them. The first battles, in that case, will be for the allegiance of Islamic populations. Unlike Berman, I don't believe it's possible for a billion people, or any sizable fraction thereof, to go mad unless persistently abused or neglected. They may, however, eventually come to feel that only Islamic radicalism still has "the strength to drag the cart out of the mire."

Whether they do conclude this will depend in some measure on American policy, since American power and wealth are more nearly equal than anything else in the world to dragging their cart out of the mire. Until now--as American leftists are willing to say, and Berman apparently is not--American policy has given them no reason to expect any such help. Nor will it, unless American institutions are significantly democratized and reoriented. Though it may only betoken my lack of imagination, this simple-minded rationalism seems to me very much more to the point, now and probably hereafter, than darkly eloquent warnings about "mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness."

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