WORLD WAR IV
The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
By Norman Podhoretz
Doubleday, 230 pages, $32
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Norman Podhoretz, a lion of U.S. neo-conservatism, believes we are in the midst of World War IV. World War IV is the war against something he calls "Islamofascism," launched in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Islamofascism is a deeply disputed and emotive phrase, but like much else in this thoroughly polemical and disappointing book, it goes undefined.
If the enemy "they" never rises beyond a vague bunch of Middle East bad guys, somehow the spawn of European totalitarian movements of decades long past, the good guys also go undefined. Podhoretz himself is clearly one, because he sees himself as standing tall for a set of beliefs about the U.S. mission in the world. George W. Bush is another. Beyond that small circle of president and self-admiring author, there are a handful of neo-con bloggers - how pathetic - and that's about it.
The political landscape is otherwise strewn with the enemies of correct thinking, from Europeans sunk in decadent passivity to ex-friends on the right to old enemies in the centre and left. Canada is spared Podhoretz's wrath, probably because as a middle power and wimpish social democracy, we are beneath notice. Podhoretz is a lonely man, over-keen to wrap himself in the heroic mantle of George Orwell's "last man" (the original title of his anti-totalitarian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four) and stand alongside his president.
World War IV is not a construct for a new era in international relations. What it really comes down to is Podhoretz's war with everyone who has lost faith in the current prosecution of the war on terror, which he takes to be everyone who has lost faith in George W. Bush himself. The book is idolatrous to a laughable degree and has been roundly skewered in thoughtful and extended reviews by the likes of Ian Buruma.
Podhoretz's method is not difficult to discern. An example is his treatment of the erroneous intelligence on the eve of the Iraq invasion. "Intelligence failure" is not a phrase Podhoretz is willing to breathe. He won't even admit that Saddam Hussein was shown to have no active WMD program (a fact proved beyond a shadow of a doubt by U.S.-led postwar weapons inspections).
Instead, he is intent on proving that Bush believed the intelligence and is blame-less for launching a war on Iraq which was both necessary and right. There is no doubt that Bush did believe, as did many others at the time. We now know, thanks to in-depth investigations and insider memoirs, that even the Bush White House had an understanding of the weakness of the intelligence case. The real question, unasked and unanswered, is why did Bush believe? For Podhoretz, to ask such a question is to give traction to critics of the Bush doctrine, and that he will not do.
And yet ... there is a book buried in the ruins of this rant. There are important questions that lurk on the margins. Podhoretz is not a marginal figure. The long-time editor of Commentary magazine has the ear of Republican contender Rudy Giuliani. Some part of the United States, probably the part Canadians tend to understand least, remains attracted to the muscular foreign policy activism, obstinacy and contempt for opposing world views and outlooks that is the intellectual centre of this book.
We do need a deep appreciation of the ideological outlook that currently holds sway in the Bush White House, even into the next presidential era, because something will linger for whatever party assumes the partly poisoned chalice after 2008. We need an understanding of the threat posed by terrorism when, six years after 9/11, al-Qaeda remains an unvanquished enemy, dreaming of a return to power in Afghanistan and of turning an Iraqi civil war into a propaganda and military triumph against the Great Satan of the day, one that would trump the other self-proclaimed triumph against an earlier Great Satan, when themujahedeen, with a lot of help from outside, drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. We mustn't underestimate the power of these two dreams, and the magnetic force they have for those drawn to the notion of anti-Western jihad.
That's the book Podhoretz might have written, but didn't. Lauding Bush is not the same as understanding the Bush doctrine. The label Islamofascism is no substitute for an analysis of the threat posed by contemporary terrorism. Podhoretz has shot himself in his neo-con foot.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his epilogue. It begins, unpromisingly, with a phony address to a "dear reader," when all along this reader sensed nothing but contempt. Podhoretz then goes on to fix us with his beady eye and pose the big one: Are we up to it as a generation? Do we have the manliness that made the Greatest Generation great? Do we have the patience to "hang in" (think locker rooms, Hemingway, the 11th round of a bruising boxing match, anything that helps get the martial spirit up). Do we have what it takes to "drain the swamp"? (Think what? Mussolini?)
These questions, Podhoretz poses in juvenile lingo to a singular U.S. audience. His only conception is the United States on a hill, alone, defiant and right. Podhoretz the neo-con lion is revealed as a shabby creature, stuck in a cage of his own making. He dislikes the world beyond because he sees it as corrupted by defeatism and skewered by a media conspiracy to replay Vietnam. Podhoretz's roar is here reduced to irrelevance, a noxious flatulence based on little more than an unwillingness to face facts.
This is, to come back at Podhoretz, defeatism in its worst guise. But then, I am just one of Podhoretz's "guerrillas with tenure," as he refers sweepingly to all his critics, real and imagined, in academe. Its good for a solitary laugh.
Wesley Wark is a visiting research professor during 2007-08 at the University of Ottawa and a fellow of the non-partisan Institute for Research on Public Policy.
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