Pomposity Is Not Leadership

With everything else going on, I wanted to return to a theme I've be writing about in one form or another for almost 15 years. And quite apart from the counter-terrorism and military policies we pursue in fighting terrorism, there are a great number of people, often 'policy intellectuals' but not all, for whom the 'war on terror' is a channel for their own grandiosity, personal boredom or wish that they lived at a more dramatic historical moment.

I first wrote about this at length about a dozen years ago when I reviewed ("The Orwell Temptation") Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism for The Washington Monthly. This was Berman's stab at standing himself up as the Orwell of the 'War on Terror' and giving the whole effort an intellectual heft, gravity and pedigree. In other words, not just a vast counter-terrorism operation but a war of ideas, something that smart guys write career-making books about. Like Orwell. We're thankfully many years since this sort of grandiose intellectualism was in vogue on this topic. But we are seeing a rapid return.