Why Children Must Be Supervised

Reviews the book, The matador's cape: America's reckless response to terror by Stephen Holmes (see record 2007-17181-000). This book is a text aimed at explaining why the Bush administration has mismanaged the response to September 11. Holmes does not pull his punches in laying out what he sees as a dysfunctional policy-making group: "The Cheney-Rumsfeld group's fatally selective perception of the threat environment resulted from personal prejudice, bureaucratic politics, ideological rigidity, and electoral calculations. The catastrophic consequences will be felt for generations, and not only in what is left of Iraq." After initially explaining what seems to have caused (and what seems not to have caused) the September 11 attack, the author examines several writers' views on the conflict between the West and the terrorists (or, as the author notes, the Salafi radicals). Indeed, Holmes takes a rather long and, at times, laborious road to get to his central conclusion: that the Bush Administration reacted impulsively and foolishly (akin to a raging bull blindly charging a matador) in response to September 11, and that impulsiveness--coupled with the inability to admit mistakes or to be held accountable for them--has led us to the intractable position in which we currently find ourselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)