October 26, 2007
Of the Words of War and the War of Ideas
By MICHIKO KAKUTANIhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/books/26Book.html

WORLD WAR IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
By Norman Podhoretz

In his bellicose new book Norman Podhoretz, one of the founding
fathers of neoconservatism, declares that the current Iraq war is only
one front (Iran being another) in what he calls "World War IV," a
"long struggle against Islamofascism," which like the cold war (the
one he counts as "World War III"), "will almost certainly go on for
three or four decades."

Mr. Podhoretz, who last summer called upon President Bush to use
military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal,
writes in these pages of all the "progress" that is being made in
neighboring Iraq, embraces the Bush administration's aggressive policy
of pre-emption and asserts that George W. Bush will one day be
recognized "as a great president," an heir not just to Truman but to
Lincoln as well.

This book appears at a time when a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll
indicates that 48 percent of Republicans want a presidential nominee
who will take a "different approach" from that of the president
(compared with 38 percent who want a "similar approach"), a time when
neoconservative ideas have come under attack not only from liberals
but also from traditional conservatives and former neoconservative
stars like Francis Fukuyama.

Mr. Podhoretz, however, remains an ardent supporter of the Bush
doctrine of unilateral action, pre-emptive war and the exportation of
democracy to the Middle East. Last summer he was made a senior foreign
policy adviser to the Republican front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani's
campaign, joining other neoconservative Giuliani consultants like
Daniel Pipes, a historian who has defended the racial profiling of
Muslims, and Peter Berkowitz, a Hoover Institution fellow.

Although Mr. Podhoretz espouses a more Pollyanna-ish view of Iraq than
Mr. Giuliani, many of his views on foreign-policy issues will remind
readers of stands recently enunciated by Mr. Giuliani: from his
contention that the realist school of foreign policy "defines
America's interests too narrowly," to his declaration that he will not
allow Iran to become a nuclear power, to his support of aggressive
(but legal) interrogation and electronic surveillance methods in the
war on terror, to his determination to "reform the international
system according to our values."

Mr. Giuliani, whose "moderate" stands on various social issues have
been the focus of the Republican primary campaign, tends to speak
about such foreign policy issues in vague, abstract terms. Mr.
Podhoretz, in contrast, is openly pugnacious and often highly specific
in these pages, to the point where the reader wants to ask Mr.
Giuliani just how closely he intends to hew to his senior foreign
policy adviser's advice. For instance, when Mr. Giuliani was recently
asked if he agreed with Mr. Podhoretz that the time to bomb Iran had
already come, Mr. Giuliani replied that, based on the information he
currently had: "We are not at that stage at this point. Can we get to
that stage? Yes. And is that stage closer than some of the Democrats
believe? I believe it is."

Mr. Podhoretz, for his part, is quoted in a recent Newsweek article
saying, "I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war
- what I call World War IV - is very close to my own."

How good a case does Mr. Podhoretz make for his hard-line views in
this volume? Instead of trying to produce a reasoned argument for a
forward-leaning foreign policy, he has served up a hectoring, often
illogical screed based on cherry-picked facts and blustering
assertions (often made without any supporting evidence), a book that
furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer
venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine, be they on the
right or the left.

A chapter about conservatives like George F. Will, who have challenged
Bush administration policy in Iraq, is titled "defeatism on the
right." Another chapter depicts "realists" (like Brent Scowcroft,
national security adviser to the first President Bush, and Zbigniew
Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter), who have
argued that the invasion of Iraq has destabilized the Middle East, as
self-serving appeasers who "were rooting for an American defeat as the
only way to save their worldview from winding up on the ash heap of
history."

As for growing antiwar sentiment on the part of the American public -
a New York Times/CBS News poll in September 2007 showed that 62
percent of Americans believe the war was a mistake - Mr. Podhoretz
blames this development on "the media spin on Iraq," asserting that
the media are motivated by "a virulent hostility to George W. Bush and
a correlative wish to see the doctrine that bore his name discredited
by an American defeat in Iraq."

Often the reasoning in this book is downright perverse. For instance
Mr. Podhoretz contends that the continuing violence in Iraq is
actually "a tribute to the enormous strides that had been made in
democratizing and unifying the country under a workable federal
system." He continues: "If the sectarian militias thought that
unification was a pipe dream, would they be shedding so much blood in
the hope of triggering a large-scale civil war? If the murderous
collection of die-hard Sunni Baathists, together with their allies
inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed,
would they have been waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it?"

Mr. Podhoretz willfully ignores many of the facts on the ground in
Iraq, a situation that the bipartisan Iraq Study Group last year
termed "grave and deteriorating." He is reluctant to concede that
people who object to the administration's Iraq war policy might be
doing so because they are troubled by what the study group called the
"scope and lethality" of violence there, by the political and military
fallout of a continuing insurgency and by deadly fighting between
Shiites and Sunnis.

In claiming that Mr. Bush's strategy of regime change is draining the
swamps that breed terrorism, he ignores experts like Michael Scheuer,
a former head of the bin Laden tracking unit at the C.I.A., who have
argued that the Iraq war, far from making America safer, has served as
a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. Mr. Podhoretz also shrugs off the much-
criticized decision to disband the Iraqi army (a decision many experts
say fatally fueled the insurgency), arguing that whatever mistakes
might have been made "amounted to chump change when stacked up against
the mistakes that were made in World War II - a war conducted by
acknowledged giants like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill."

Mr. Podhoretz is similarly glib when it comes to critics of George W.
Bush's domestic policies (including those on the right who are upset
about matters like deficit spending and immigration, and those on the
left who are concerned about issues like stem cell research). He
writes, "Who today either remembers or cares about Truman's domestic
policies?"

Regarding the question of growing tensions with Iran, Mr. Podhoretz is
both dogmatic and illogical. Although he wrote last summer that Iran
is "the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against
which we have been fighting since 9/11" and "the main sponsor of the
terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice," he fails to come
to terms with the fact that it was the United States' invasion of Iraq
that dismantled Iran's greatest foe in the region (against which it
had waged an eight-year war in the 1980s) and gave it greater sway
than ever in the Middle East.

For that matter, Mr. Podhoretz lumps together Muslims opposed to the
United States, a "two-headed beast" of "Islamofascism," whose
objective he says is "to murder as many of us as possible" and destroy
"the freedoms we cherish and for which America stands." Such
characterizations not only try to draw parallels between radical
Muslims and the Nazis, but also gloss over the many schisms and
conflicts within Islam that have pitted Shiites against Sunnis,
Iranians against Iraqis, religious fundamentalists against more
secular Baathists.

This reluctance to grapple with the enormously complicated particulars
of the Middle East, combined with Mr. Podhoretz's penchant for
demagogic generalizations, Manichean language and contempt for people
who disagree with him, makes for a shrill, unpersuasive book. It is a
book that will likely find a receptive audience only among those
dwindling numbers of Americans who already want to stay the course in
Iraq and promulgate the policies of George W. Bush for many years and
decades to come.