by JULIET WATERS

The theory that the U.S. is a hypocritical, self-serving bully disguised as a democracy isn't new to anyone who's read Noam Chomsky's Rogue States. Recent events, however, have given his argument a new spin. Thus we have Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows by Montrealer Peter Scowen, and Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions by Clyde Prestowitz, a leading Washington intellectual.

I only had time to read one Rogue Nation last week, so I chose Scowen's. Ex-Mirror editor, before he became ex-Hour editor, Scowen, who is now Arts and Entertainment editor at the Toronto Star, recently returned home for the Blue Metropolis festival.

First published in Quebec as the bestseller, Le Livre noir des États-Unis, Scowen wrote this book after his sister, Amy, narrowly missed being killed in the World Trade Center. It is a passionate indictment of the attitude and behaviour of the Bush administration before and after the tragedy, backed up by a primer in the atrocities of U.S. foreign policy since Hiroshima.

As Scowen describes it, Rogue Nation is a work of journalism, not of history. To mainstream readers it may be a relief, since it is less self-righteous than many other books accusing the U.S. of self-righteousness. But sophisticated lefties will crave more substance.

Scowen's strongest argument is that the "War on Terrorism" is primarily an excuse to advance the neo-conservative, neo-imperialist foreign policy of the Bush administration. Even if one doesn't believe this is the primary intention behind the recent attack on Iraq, anyone who isn't ready to be vigilant about how America exploits this victory is dangerously naïve. If Rogue Nation accomplishes anything, it will be in educating people on this point.

His weakest argument is that the war will cause more terrorism, and further endanger U.S. citizens like Amy Scowen. He reasons, like many people, that terrorism follows naturally from impotence and resentment.

But if this is were true, what stopped the Japanese, Vietnamese, North Koreans, Nicaraguans, Chileans and Guatemalans from taking up box cutters? Do they hate Americans less than the Middle East does? Have they suffered less? Or are Arab Muslims innately terrorist and likely to be more so according to the degree of their resentment?

Left-wing historian Paul Berman, author of the recently released Liberalism and Terrorism, argues against this idea. Berman believes that violent Islamic extremism is an offshoot of a type of fascism planted by the Nazis back when they were hanging out in Syria and Lebanon. Saddam's Iraq started as a regime modelled on Germany, then later morphed into Stalinism. Accordingly, resentment against the U.S. may be rational, but terrorism is coming from irrational, less predictable forces of history.

Berman has pointed out that logic like Scowen's is "entirely typical of America itself, of people across the political spectrum in America. People tend to think that everybody around the world is acting on some rational calculation, that the mad and pathological movements I describe that have merged from the First World War really can't exist, that surely everybody is acting in some way in their own self-interest in a fashion that could be calculated and addressed."

Berman might best be described as a reluctant Hawk, a supporter of the war who remains deeply anxious about how the U.S. will exploit this victory. If he's right, then stamping out the worst examples of this moribund Islamic fascism may indeed reduce Middle Eastern terrorism. But a reduction in terrorism shouldn't be interpreted as a reduction in injustice.

Scowen isn't nearly as optimistic. "I'd love to be optimistic, I really would," he said to me when he was in town. Pointing to his book he claimed, "I'd be the first to get up and say ‘Rogue Nation no more.' I would write the sequel. But I bet I don't have to."

Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows by Peter Scowen, McClelland and Stewart, pb, 309pp, $24.99