A HOLE IN THE WORLD

“The world is sick. It cannot be cured with America’s new war.” So writes Nation magazine commentator Schell (The Unconquerable World, 2003, etc.) in this selection of his post–9/11 columns.

Schell sounds several themes that were once lonely cries in a time of jingoist bluster: military escalation and action against the Muslim world is ill-advised; war is not the answer; the world has ample cause to mistrust and even hate the US; “the bombing should stop, and a new policy—perhaps one of armed humanitarian intervention on the ground—should be adopted”; the rise of terrorism provides yet more reason for nuclear disarmament, before someone gets hurt. Such views have become more current in the months since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but at the time Schell was in a distinct minority. Refreshingly, he allows some of his missed or arguable calls to stand in these pages: his view that the American bombing campaign would rally Afghans to the Taliban, for instance, and his apparent acceptance of the notion that Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il had stores of WMDs and were about to use them. But, more to the point, he records the errors of others, observing that the proffered reasons for going to war were wrong and misleading (writing in June 2003, he notes, for instance, “Hans Blix . . . never stated, as the Bush Administration did, that there were weapons of mass destruction but only that there was some evidence that there might be weapons of mass destruction”). Many of those others are fellow media pundits—Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, et al.—and Schell’s critiques are often right on the money. Indeed, they make the best parts here, the sum of which is mostly useful as a record of who said what and as a work of media criticism, a chastisement of those who should have recognized a lie but instead served it.

A mixed bag, but, at its strongest moments, a modern rejoinder to I.F. Stone’s In a Time of Torment.