Jean Bethke Elshtain
There is much that is interesting in
Anthony
Burke’s essay. Unfortunately, Burke is unable to resist hyperbolic language
and too readily substitutes rhetorical onslaught for compelling argument. For
example, those he criticizes as being neo-imperialists in liberal
internationalist clothing are many times over said to present “disturbing” or
“disturbing indeed” arguments. We are told that liberty is a “hermaphrodite”;
that the war on terrorism constitutes “the democracy that slaughters, the
liberator that tortures” (p. 73), as if Abu Ghraib is standard policy rather
than aberration and the deaths of civilians intentional rather than a tragic
unintended consequence of fighting. Burke’s opponents, he says, deploy
“notoriously vague” and “fear-soaked rhetoric” as they “scandalously” mimic the
ICISS report’s title (p. 76). Citing Jürgen Habermas, he calls the war against
Saddam Hussein an “unimaginable break” with existing norms (pp. 75, 76). This
suggests that there are “imaginable breaks,” but we do not know anything about
the criteria he is applying. Reserving sunny language for his own proposed
alternatives, Burke blasts the idea of state sovereignty itself as “violent and
exclusivist,” and “linger[ing], like a latent illness, in the very depths of
modern cosmopolitanism” (p. 74). These excesses are distracting and cloud the
observations in his essay that are perceptive and deserve serious consideration.
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