Book Review: The Anti-American Chorus

March 2008 -- Jed Babbin, In the Words of Our Enemies (Regnery, 2007), 274 pages, $24.95.

Jed Babbin, a political commentator who served as a deputy undersecretary of defense for the first President Bush, warns that Americans are too optimistic about the prospects of making peace with our enemies, either because we ignore the things they write and say, or because we interpret their words through the lens of our experience with reasonable, decent people. This is a mistake because, as Newt Gingrich warns in the Foreword, “if we fail to understand that our enemy is evil, we have failed to understand what we are fighting.”

As the book’s title implies, Babbin seeks to rectify this by quoting to us the speeches and writings of our enemies. Indeed, there is very little of Babbin’s own analysis in the book. Instead, he presents very long excerpts from the words of people ranging from Osama bin Laden to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin in order to demonstrate that they hold in contempt American values and American public policy and will use any means necessary to get their way.

This book should be required reading for Jimmy Carter and others who honestly think there is moral equivalence between the government of the United States and, say, the murderous thugs of Hamas. For the rest of us, though, the repetitive quotations of known Islamist terrorists are overkill. That Osama bin Laden wants to kill Americans has been manifestly obvious for quite some time.

Furthermore, the chapters on China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela are odd additions. For one, both Gingrich’s Foreword and Babbin’s Introduction focus on the Islamist threat, making those chapters seem like last-minute filler. More importantly, while there is no doubt that Putin, Kim, Castro, and Chavez are brutal authoritarians, they are simply not in the same category as those who joyously strap bombs to their children in order to murder innocents.

This volume would have benefited from more of the author’s analysis and a more traditional format. Aside from the short Introduction, Babbin is a bystander in his own book, interjecting a few comments here and there set off in italics. The translations go on for pages at a time and are strung together rather haphazardly. It is frequently unclear whose words we are reading, because the translators interject their own commentary and analysis. It would have been far better to have written the book in a single voice with shorter excerpts set off in block quotes.

Babbin’s thesis—that our enemies must be judged in the context of their “culture, history, and ideology,” and that Saudi theocrats and Iranian mullahs are much less amenable to traditional negotiation techniques than even the likes of Joseph Stalin—is well taken. However, he too often confuses hatred with legitimate policy disagreement. In so doing, he dilutes a very important message.

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