|
Thursday, 31 January 2008 |
|
A review of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz.
1. It is more than five years since Norman Podhoretz stood aghast outside a courthouse in lower Manhattan as the flaming towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. The remains of the victims, of so many colors and ethnicities, smoldered in the streets as the mind of Mr. Podhoretz, a prominent literary critic, began to churn. "The attack came, both literally and metaphorically, out of the blue," he writes in his new book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. "I felt as though I had been deposited into a scene in one of those disaster movies being filmed (as they used to say) in glorious color." Half a decade removed from that scene of carnage, we are more unsettled than ever about what September 11, 2001 means. Mr. Podhoretz’s powerfully argued book is an important effort to place the attack into a broader historical context. While World War IV won’t win him accolades from the "ex-friends" he lost three decades ago when he abandoned radicalism for neoconservatism, it is a serious work of the first magnitude by a man of intellectual depth who wields the pen beautifully. As Mr. Podhoretz sees it we are now embroiled in "nothing less than another world war" (this is the fourth; the Cold War was the third). Sure, the war against Islamic fanaticism looks very different than the worldwide conflicts from 1914-18 and 1939-45, but then World War II bore almost no resemblance to its precursor either. The main point is that world wars don’t necessarily involve the clashing of "multi-million man armies." In this tense historical moment, with a number of senators declaring the Iraqi front of this war lost, the book could serve as a welcome distraction from the barrage of cheap slogans and political misdirection. Hopefully it will play a role in refocusing the American mind on the project at hand and our prospects for winning it. World War IV draws on Mr. Podhoretz’s work from Commentary, the magazine he edited for over three decades and where he currently is editor-at-large. Two particular articles from Commentary inform the book, "The Case for Bombing Iran" and "How to Win World War IV." In the latter article the author talks about his view of the project he would soon undertake: The relentless pressure of events [in Iraq], and the continuing onslaught both of details and of their often tendentious or partisan interpretation, have hardly let up at all. It is for this reason that, in what follows, I have tried to step back from the daily barrage and to piece together the story of what this nation has been fighting to accomplish since September 11, 2001. Mr. Podhoretz is a relentless mind and a more relentless producer of extended argumentation. World War IV is strongly documented, and its tone is forceful but not hysterical. Any serious reader wishing to acquaint himself with the author’s thoughts about the war would do well to study this text. 2. Mr. Podhoretz’s political enemies like to cite his influence with certain conservative politicians. These people can’t countenance a sophisticated New Yorker who admires a president with a predilection for absolutes like"The Taliban… will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate." Mr. Bush awarded Mr. Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and has met with him on a number of occasions. The Sunday Times of London reported that their most recent meeting focused almost entirely on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. "I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative…." he said of the encounter, adding that he told the president, "You have the awesome responsibility to prevent another holocaust. You’re the only one with the guts to do it." Now seventy-seven years old, Mr. Podhoretz recently joined the presidential campaign of Rudolph Giuliani as the senior foreign policy advisor. A Brooklyn native and one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, he serves alongside neoconservatives like Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institute and former Bush speech writer David Frum. World War IV may be correct in asserting that the Bush Administration embraces the war against Islamic terrorism as another world war. In his now-famous speech before a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, the president identified the ambitions of Osama bin Laden and his followers as a comparable to the various strains of totalitarianism we destroyed this past century: They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions — by abandoning every value except the will to power — they follow in the path of fascism and Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies. Mr. Podhoretz is clearly influential in some conservative circles, but that influence is too often overstated. He has said he expects Mr. Bush to order sustained, devastating air strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities before the end of his term. He may be ultimately correct, but it looks increasingly like the administration is wary of another war. But the dark fact remains that either bombing Iran or allowing them to acquire the bomb could have catastrophic consequences. Mr. Bush is presented with bad and worse options upon which rests the fate of many lives. 3. What’s in a name? Why does it matter whether we use terms like "Islamofascism" or "World War IV" or "Bush Doctrine"? It’s a serious matter because the gravity of the terms we use reflects how well we understand the nature of the threat posed to us. Even so, we should be discriminating with the use of such terms and make sure reality meets our rhetoric. The stakes in what is surely a global war against a perverse enemy are too high for loaded overstatements. If any portion of World War IV is objectionable it is the hyperbole that occasions Mr. Podhoretz’s prose as he makes some of his less profound points. For instance, the author paints the vehement anti-war movement as a "domestic insurgency" engaged in a "civil war at home" that is every bit as "bloody" as the one overseas. It’s easy to see his point, but the language he uses distracts from the argument. The reality Mr. Podhoretz describes in the book is bleak — so bleak that American military superiority will hardly ensure victory. This is so because of the asymmetrical threat posed by the enemy, including WMDs, and because of the nature of the internal antiwar forces, which loathe Western civilization and express solidarity with jihad. History can be our teacher in this new war, Mr. Podhoretz writes, but it must not constrain our thinking. "For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts, we are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and in the states breeding, sheltering, or financing its terrorist armory. This new enemy has already attacked us on our own soil — a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to pull off…." If the dangers we face are really as extensive as Mr. Podhoretz posits — a war between civilization and barbarism — then the West is in for a long, bloody fight. Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes believes that ten or fifteen percent of the world’s Muslims have active or passive engagement with radical groups — over one hundred million people. There’s no way to see what’s ahead, but it’s hard to imagine another grand scale world war. If the current war expands into Iran or if other nations are drawn into conflict with the United States or if WMDs are employed, Mr. Podhoretz’s book will be viewed as prophetic, and Albert Einstein’s may be vindicated: "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." |
|
Last Updated ( Friday, 08 February 2008 )
|
|
Articles 
