BuzzFlash Reviews

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This is a fascinating exploration of the failure of liberalism to stand up against the radical Republican hordes.

It's sub-title at first scared us off: "The New Liberal Meance in America." It sounds like it was published by the radical right wing Regnery Press, which mass-produced all those Clinton attack and slander books.

But actually "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing" is quite the opposite. It is a scintillating intellectual journey that explores how liberalism for many politicians and pundits has become associated with expanding U.S. global markets under the theory that "open economic markets" (which is an ideal, not a reality) guarantee democracy and liberty.

So much of the behavior of "liberal politicians" in D.C. can be explained by understanding that they want to complain about the Iraq War, but they don't want to disrupt the economic status quo. (This is also true, the book's author contends, of well-meaning celebrities like Bono. Bono makes us feel better by seemingly raising more money to fight poverty, without changing institutions that perpetuate economic injustice like the World Bank.)

Stephen Marshall, the author of the book and a founder of Guerilla News Network, weaves interviews with "neo-liberals" into his thought-provoking analysis, as he travels the country and the globe.

"Wolves in Sheep's Clothing" is one of those challanging, eye-opening books that makes you step outside of your personal intellectual prism and look at some basic political assumptions anew.

You may not agree with all of Marshall's conclusions, but you finish the book with a new awareness about how liberalism can be contorted to perpetuate a superpower that uses war to advance its economic interests.

The "neo-liberal" poobahs in D.C. wouldn't like "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing," but they probably won't read it anyway.

It's much too insightful for them -- and would make them angry and resentful if they understood it.

In a blog he keeps about "Sheep's Clothing," Marshall recently wrote something that gets to the core of the book:

I find that �the truest thing I ever heard was from a tank commander on the front lines of the Iraq war.�

His name was Sgt. Hollis and after we had returned from a mission to engage enemy fighters on the streets of Samara, he told me that the goal of the war was �globalization. It�s about expansion of economies� We�re into the stage where we have to stabilize new and emerging markets in order to secure resources. Fifty years, hundred years, it�s not about what it can do us in the short term, it�s what it can do us in the long term.�

Of course, this was just one man�s opinion. But it echoed the beliefs of so many of us who could not accept the Bush administration�s WMD argument, nor the bleating on of leftists like Hitchens and Cohen that it was all for the good of democracy and standing up for the oppressed - indeed massacred - minority in Iraq. It almost seemed too good to be true� this bastard son of John Pilger strapped into an Abrams tank.

So I asked him why he believed this was the true function of the war. And he plainly told me that it was one thing for politicians to make the case to a weary public. Or for intellectuals to advocate intervention for the good of humanity. But for him, who was willing to risk his life, it had to be about something more than ideas.

�When Americans say �liberation,� we mean, capitalism. It�s our way of life. And we believe in it. Can you tell mothers and daughters and sisters that your sons are dying for the American way of life? Can you say that they�re dying for capital goods, this and that? No you cannot. So you have to make sure that whenever you fight, you fight for moral and ethical reasons.�

And this is what begins the odyssey that is �Wolves in Sheep�s Clothing.� There are many ideas presented in the book, which is not a polemic like Nick Cohen�s �What�s Left.� Rather, it is a journey into the hearts and minds of a liberal elite who once fought against supposedly ideological, state-sponsored war.


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