When we started the Salon Speakers Series at Grano restaurant, our intention was to invite to Toronto thinkers whose ideas may have influenced American foreign policy, whether we agreed with them or not. Reading Raymond Conlogue’s review (“Empire à la Carte,” January/February 2008) of American Power—transcriptions of the first eight talks—I suspect he judged the essays more by who gave them than by what the authors actually said. Readers will discover the book isn’t the apologia for hegemonic thinking the reviewer claims.
Conlogue accuses William Kristol, editor of the influential Weekly Standard magazine, of having no idea where terrorism comes from. What Kristol does say is that America was careless about terrorism in the 1990s, which led to problems down the road. But that was only a small part of his talk.
Conlogue’s attack on Robert Kaplan, an instructor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis and senior writer for the Atlantic Monthly, was also distorted. Kaplan reminds us that most of the U.S. military forces around the world aren’t engaged in combat, but in humanitarian and disaster relief. Just ask the thousands of grateful Indonesians after the 2004 tsunami.
But to accuse Fouad Ajami, the Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins University, of being a “nominal” Muslim not interested in a serious analysis of Islam is bizarre. To Conlogue’s mind, a serious scholar of Islam is Tariq Ramadan, “who has shown that European Islam is rapidly liberalizing.” That’s just willful ignorance. Let me suggest Bruce Bower’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within as a starter. And for all of Ramadan’s enigmatic and slippery writings about Islam and its peaceful intentions, he refuses to condemn, unequivocally, the Islamic code known as huddud, or the stoning of adulterers.
The essays by Samuel Huntington, historian John Lukacs and Michael Ignatieff meet with more approval, though Conlogue can’t resist taking a swipe at Ignatieff, accusing him of “liberal imperialism,” whatever that means. He criticizes Christopher Hitchens for despising the regime of Saddam Hussein and the clerics of Iran as if one should choose.
I assume Conlogue never approves of foreign intervention anywhere, anytime, especially if it’s American intervention. Taking that attitude overlooks a lot of evil in the world. Whether for or against the war in Iraq, let’s remember the U.S. unearthed over 240 mass graves. When Europe finally decided to intervene to stop the slaughter in the Balkans, they left it to the Americans to do the heavy lifting. When Rwandans begged for help, no one came. And we’re still waiting for someone to save Darfur.
A final criticism of the book is that most of the Grano speakers were American. Conlogue suggests a list of his own thinkers we might invite; ironically, all, with the exception of Charles Taylor, are American. Chacun à son gout. If we took his advice, it wouldn’t be our series, it would be his. But if invited, I’d gladly attend.
