The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America such as Paul Berman, André Glucksmann, Richard Herzinger, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, as well as Nobel Peace Prize recipient José Ramos-Horta justified, if not military intervention, then an aggressive and principled policy toward Saddam Hussein’s regime—largely on liberal-humanitarian grounds, invoking the imperative of resisting totalitarianism. Though he explicitly opposed the unilateral use of military force, Joschka Fischer, then Germany’s foreign minister, spoke of a “third totalitarianism”—after Nazism and communism—“as the major challenge facing the international community in the twenty-first century.” In...

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] The term “third totalitarianism” was first used by Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer. For a survey of antitotalitarian arguments for the war, see Thomas Cushman, ed., A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (University of California Press, 2005).
• [2] For a discussion of the term in the United States, see Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
• [3] George Packer, “Liberal Hawks Reconsidered,” Slate, www.slate.com/id/2093620/entry/2093925/