War By Other Means

By Henry Mark Holzer
FrontPageMagazine.com


Professor John Yoo (UC/Berkeley) has written the most important and convincing book yet about the Bush Administration’s legal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and America’s ensuing war against their al Qaeda perpetrators: War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror.

Two factors contributed to Yoo’s accomplishment.

First, his impeccable professional credentials: summa cum laude, Harvard; law review, Yale; law clerk, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (Judge Silberman); law clerk, Supreme Court of the United States (Justice Thomas); general counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee; professor of law, Berkeley.

Second, serendipitously, Professor Yoo was in the eye of the hurricane at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (DOJ’s “lawyers’ lawyer”) on September 11, 2001.
That a lawyer of Yoo’s ability was exactly where he could do the most good, at the precise moment of what may prove to be our nation’s time of greatest peril, is something for which all Americans should be grateful.

In Professor Yoo’s “insider’s account of the war on terror,” he has given us unarguably cogent proof of the nature of that war, and convincing reasons why the Bush Administration, with considerable input from Yoo himself, responded as it did to the events of September 11, 2001.

Since that time, I and many others have deplored the characterization of our struggle with al Qaeda’s Islamic terrorism as a “war on terrorism” (a phrase Yoo understandably uses, given the context in which he writes). Our quarrel has been twofold: with the term “terrorism,” because that word describes not enemies who are actors, but rather a certain type of malignant conduct; and with the term “war” because that word has been devalued by exploitative political gimmickry in such failed “wars” as the ones on poverty and drugs.

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