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

Investigates Washington's fatal misreading of 'the enemy' after 9/11 and its consequences.

Stephen Holmes (Author)

9780521875165, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 April 2007

378 pages
24.4 x 16.3 x 2.5 cm, 0.664 kg

'Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks.' Middle East Online

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.

Introduction
Part I. The Terrorist Enigma: 1. Did religious extremism cause 9/11?
Part II: Show of Force: 2. Why military superiority breeds illusions
3. How the war was lost
4. Radicals trapped in the past
5. A self-inflicted wound
Part III. False Templates: 6. Searching for a new enemy after the Cold War
7. Humanitarianism with teeth
8. The war of the liberals
9. The neoconservative intifada
Part IV. Waiving the Rules: 10. Liberalism strangled by war
11. The unilateralist curse
12. Battling lawlessness with lawlessness
13: The infallibility trap
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Politics & government [JP]