`Fear's Empire' addresses the flawed logic of pre-emptive strikes

[dArKeR]

Benjamin Barber contends that the Bush administration's strategy of imposing a world pact rooted in force is hazardous and likely to provoke enemies
By Michiko Kakutani
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Sunday, Oct 12, 2003,Page 19

Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy
By Benjamin R. Barber
220 pages
W.W.Norton & Co

Benjamin R. Barber's 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld, was a provocative and in some ways eerily prescient work. It depicted the post-Cold War world as a place simultaneously subject to the fragmenting forces of religious and ethnic fundamentalism and the homogenizing forces of global capitalism: forces, he suggested, that were threats to democracy, and that were on a dangerous collision course with each other. The paperback edition of that book quickly surfaced on best-seller lists after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Barber's latest book, Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy, was written as a kind of response to the Bush administration's "rollout of a new preventive war strategy after 9/11 leading to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq" and the "prospect of pre-emptive moves" on its part toward other hostile regimes.

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