World War IV by Norman Podhoretz

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I'm currently studying for the Foreign Service Exam. I tried to register for it on February 27th (the final day of the registration period) and at this point, I'm pretty sure I was shut out of the March testing window. I haven't heard back from the State Department and I haven't emailed or called them to find out what happened to my application. Oh well. All the essays are written so I guess I'll just resubmit my application in June.

Part of my studying has been reading Foreign Affairs. It's an international relations journal that comes out 6 times a year and it's brilliant. The articles are great but I can also keep abreast of what's currently being published. According to the January/February issue, the current top-selling hardcover books on American foreign policy are The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, World War IV: The Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. "World War IV" caught my attention, so I drove out to the UNLV libraries and picked up a copy. As has been the case recently, I was the first person to check it out.

I hadn't heard of Norman Podhoretz before, but he was editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, a "leftist commentator" in the 60's, and more recently associated with the Neo-Conservative movement. He was also Rudy Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisor during his presidential bid. He supports the war in Iraq and thinks attacking Iran is a good idea. Here is the lovable scamp in a recent photo:


He's not Ron Paul adorable, but he does look snappy in a blazer.

So, welcome to World War IV. It's been going on for quite some time but only after 9/11 did we figure it out. If you're kicking yourself because you missed World War III, it's just the Cold War by another name. It was a 42-year-long world war and it wasn't without its battlefields. The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Korea were all just battles in a much larger war. Which, I think, is a fair assessment (at least in trying to understand the US' motivation).

World War IV is being fought against Islamo-fascism. The governments of the Muslim world are the true heirs to Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. In fact, Mr. Podhoretz draws a line connecting Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government in Iraq. The Nazis defeated France in World War II. The French Vichy government cooperated with the Nazis, and through that cooperation the Nazis had a hand in the French colonial governments of the Middle East. They taught those colonial governments fascism, and after World War II, the USSR picked up where the Nazis left off, thanks to their close relations with the region. The Nazis are sort of to blame for what we're seeing in the Middle East today. NAZIs! That's easy to understand, right? Everyone hates those guys. So that's who we're fighting today. Nazis. And Communists. And Muslims.

Podhoretz feels that we have only emboldened the terrorists by not confronting them directly. You can blame George Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Nixon, and especially Jimmy Carter for that. They kept passing the buck and thanks to that the terrorists have only become stronger. For example, when George Bush Sr. invaded Iraq in 1990, he pulled out before reaching Baghdad and so only defended the status quo. In the large number of terrorist attacks on American bases and embassies abroad in the past 20 years, we have failed to adequately respond and this has further emboldened the terrorists. And by the way, thank G-d George Bush was elected when he was because he has the courage and gusto to fight this war and call it what it is (ahem).

World War IV isn't going to end anytime soon and if you think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as two small battlefields in a much larger war against fascist governments in the Muslim world then the decision to invade Iraq makes more sense. Podhoretz (like George W. Bush?) thinks invading Iran is a good idea and while we may not be invading Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Pakistan any time soon, they are all important to the larger war against Islamofascism. The Cold War had many important regions too, but they didn't all turn into shooting wars.

What I found most interesting in reading Mr. Podhoretz's book was that he feels the nature of the world war has changed. There may not be another world war that resembles World War I. In the way that World War II didn't look like the static trench warfare and gas attacks of World War I, World War III didn't resemble World War II either. And it's changed again in the current situation. If you think World War IV is a bad title, then you don't understand how the nature of world wars has changed, because another world war is exactly what this is.

I guess where I disagree with Mr. Podhoretz is where he tries to lump so many different countries and situations into one large struggle. I don't think you can necessarily call the Vietnam War one part of the war against the USSR. I mean, maybe that's how the US viewed it at the time, but was that a correct assessment? We lost that battle but not the war, right? What did the Communists do when they won? Didn't Ho Chi Minh and the Communists of the north view the war against the US as a struggle for independence and less as an ideological struggle against Capitalism? Did we need to fight that war and what really turned out to be at stake? Didn't it just hurt the US in the long run because it generated so many bad feelings at home and abroad against all the things that the US claims it stands for? What have we won by fighting the war in Iraq? Even if we eliminate all the Islamofascist governments in the world, who's to say we can eliminate terrorism directed against the US? Wasn't Timothy McVeigh living in a free and democratic country when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City? Wasn't his reason for doing so that the government killed all those people at Waco and Ruby Ridge? Aren't we creating the situation we're in by having 600 military bases all over the world and putting our noses in the affairs of others? Wasn't Osama bin Laden's main grievance against the US not our support for Israel but our bases in Saudi Arabia? What are we trying to accomplish: making ourselves free from terrorist attacks or trying to convert the entire world to free-market democracies? Is the latter the best way to avoid the former?

Lastly, I love that when I searched for "World War IV" in Google, this picture came up.

Technorati tags: Norman Podhoretz, World War IV, Foreign Service, Islamofascism