by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n A review of\u00a0World War IV<\/i>.\u00a0The Long Struggle against Islamofascism<\/i>\u00a0by Norman Podhoretz (Doubleday 2007, 240 pp.)<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n W<\/b><\/span>orld War IV<\/i>\u00a0is an indispensable book for these times. The war in Iraq has occasioned some of the most shameful partisan behavior since Vietnam, as well as generating in the mainstream media a narrative filled with what Podhoretz accurately calls \u201cmisconceptions, distortions, and outright falsifications.\u201d To correct this partisan spin, Podhoretz economically and clearly surveys both the facts and the distortions, providing readers with all the ammunition they need to counter the \u201cBush lied\u201d and \u201cillegal war\u201d master narrative relentlessly peddled by the Democrats and their shills in the media. Even more important,\u00a0World War IV<\/i>\u00a0sets out the case for sticking with the Bush Doctrine, whatever its drawbacks, as the best policy for countering the threat of Islamic jihad. All serious voters this coming year should not pull the lever until they have read this book and understood what is at stake for America\u2019s security in the coming decades.<\/p>\n As its title makes clear, Podhoretz\u2019s book sees the struggle against what he calls Islamofascism as the defining challenge of this generation, one equal to the threats of fascism and communism, the one defeated in World War II, the other in the long Cold War that Podhoretz calls World War III. Dismissing those who see terrorism as, in John Kerry\u2019s words, a \u201cnuisance\u201d to be controlled through intelligence and police work, Podhoretz instead recognizes that Islamic jihad is the instrument of a totalitarian global ideology like fascism or communism, one inimical to freedom, human rights, respect for the individual, and all the other goods of Western civilization. As such, it must be met with the same total military, economic, and psychological mobilization that defeated the Axis powers and that sustained the West during the half-century struggle against communism.<\/p>\n World War IV<\/i>\u00a0first traces the inattention and bungling that allowed 19 terrorists armed with nothing but box-cutters to inflict on the United States the worst attack in its history. For three decades previous, neither Republican nor Democratic administrations had taken seriously the growing threat of Islamic jihad. With some few notable exceptions, most politicians and intelligence agencies considered the terrorist attacks of those decades \u201cnot as deliberate acts of war demanding a military response but as common crimes or the work of rogue groups operating on their own that could best be handled by the cops and the courts.\u201d Podhoretz\u2019s detailing of those attacks \u2013\u2013 and the U.S.\u2019s flabby response \u2013\u2013 makes for harrowing reading, not least because each failure to respond vigorously was correctly seen by the jihadists as an act of appeasement that emboldened them even more, the result being the spectacular carnage of 9\/11.<\/p>\n As useful as this history is, the heart of the book is Podhoretz\u2019s discussion of the Bush Doctrine, one of the strangest political phenomena of recent years \u2013\u2013 one \u201cincredible,\u201d as Podhoretz says, given that Bush came into office as a foreign policy realist adverse to foreign policy as \u201csocial work.\u201d Following Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, Bush articulated a U.S. foreign policy based on the obligation of the United States actively to support and advance the cause of freedom and just as actively to oppose and dismantle authoritarian tyranny. Podhoretz\u2019s generous quotations from Bush\u2019s speeches after 9\/11 give the lie to the oft-repeated claim that the President has failed to articulate clearly why we are fighting in the Middle East. Stranger still is the opposition to the Bush Doctrine on the part of many liberals, who for years have castigated the United States for ignoring genocide and slaughter, and for supporting brutal dictators because they served U.S. interests.<\/p>\n Podhoretz goes on to analyze the opposition to the Bush Doctrine on the part of anti-war radicals reliving the mythic Vietnam War narrative; the foreign policy establishment, comprising old-style realists and liberal internationalists; and the isolationists of both the left and the right. Along the way, he explodes myth after myth about the Iraq war, particularly the canard that Bush manipulated intelligence to justify invading Iraq. Podhoretz\u2019s parade of quotes from the Democratic leadership, all of whom believed Hussein had WMD\u2019s and posed a threat, and his withering critique of the mendacious opportunist Joe Wilson, are alone worth the price of the book.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he importance of Podhoretz\u2019s ideas and the Bush Doctrine, however, requires that we confront their weaknesses. Our first clue is the term Podhoretz uses to describe the threat we face, \u201cIslamofascism.\u201d The problem with this term is its implication that a pristine Islam has been distorted by a modern totalitarian ideology. Yet modern jihad is completely consistent with traditional Islam; indeed, the theorists of modern jihad like Aymin al Zawahiri can quote more Koranic suras, hadiths, and Islamic jurisprudents and theologians supporting jihadist terrorism, than can those Muslims who support the idea that Islam can coexist with democracy, human rights, rule by secular law, and all the other components of Western liberal democracy. Podhoretz is right that we face a committed enemy as inimical to our political freedom as were fascism and communism; but we need to understand correctly who that enemy is, and the spiritual roots of his actions: the same enemy of the West that for centuries occupied Spain, Greece, the Balkans, and Sicily; that plundered and ravaged southern Europe; that kidnapped and enslaved Europeans; and that suffered non-Muslims to live in their ancestral homelands as social and political inferiors shielded only by a \u201ctruce\u201d to be raised at the whim of their Muslim overlords.<\/p>\n Podhoretz at times seems to understand this historical continuity \u2013\u2013 when he acknowledges that the enemy we now face \u201ccomes from a religious force that was born in the seventh century,\u201d or notes the \u201cleading Muslim clerics\u201d who celebrated suicide bombers as \u201cmartyrs,\u201d or refers to polling data that showed after 9\/11 widespread Muslim support for bin Laden as an \u201cArab hero and an Islamic jihad warrior.\u201d These facts suggest that millions of Muslims, most likely a majority, do not see al Qaeda as some sort of fascistic distortion of Islam spawned by modernity, but rather as a traditionalist organization fulfilling the mandate of Muhammad to \u201cfight all men until they say there is no god but Allah.\u201d A term like \u201cIslamofascism\u201d obscures this continuity, and thus suggests that the enemy is more marginal or historically transient than he in fact is.<\/p>\n Another problem with the Bush Doctrine comes from the casual use of words like \u201cfreedom\u201d and \u201cdemocracy.\u201d Bush and Podhoretz are both right to say that the desire for freedom is universal in human beings. But so are many other goods, such as obedience to God and righteousness. These goods conflict, often messily, but resolving that conflict won\u2019t take place simply because we decree that one good always and everywhere trumps the others. Moreover, what do we mean by \u201cfreedom\u201d? What we need to make clear is that we are talking about\u00a0political freedom<\/i>, or \u201cordered liberty,\u201d not the freedom to do what we want, but the freedom to be certain kinds of virtuous people and citizens worthy of liberty and autonomy. So too with democracy, which is more than just holding elections. Rather, it is the complex machinery that administers, expresses, and guarantees political freedom, which, as Michael Mandelbaum has recently written, \u201cis embodied in institutions, which operate through habits and skills and are supported by values. All take time to develop, and they must develop independently and domestically; they cannot be imported ready-made.\u201d In the West, democracy and liberty are the fruit of 2500 years of Classical and Judeo-Christian culture, and even with that head start it has only been within the last two centuries that both have been achieved.<\/p>\n Consider, then, the difficulty of converting to democratic ordered liberty Muslim cultures that have little or no historical or cultural traditions of political freedom. Indeed, to many Muslims Western freedom is nothing other than license, the indulgence of appetite and pleasure that in fact enslaves the soul. True freedom comes from submission to Allah and the totalizing pattern of living transmitted in the Koran and the life of Muhammad. Podhoretz\u2019s response to this reservation is to bring up comparisons with Germany, Japan, and Eastern Europe, as other societies that labored under tyranny but then converted to political freedom. But this analogy is false. Fascism and communism were modern, irreligious ideologies with few historical or cultural antecedents, deriving instead from socialism, pseudo-scientific racial theories unknown before the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century, secularization, scientism, and a whole host of other modern pathologies. Both ran counter to the great Judeo-Christian and Classical traditions of the West, and so both had shallow roots. Particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe, an atheistic political ideology necessarily could not win over deeply religious peoples, especially when those regimes failed at providing material goods.<\/p>\n As for Germany and Japan, in 1945 both nations were literally starting from scratch, their societies having been demolished into rubble. Any German or Japanese in 1945 could see all around himself the wages of the noxious ideologies he once cheered and fought for. Yet no Arab or Muslim capital has experienced the mind-concentrating consequences of pursuing jihad. The Arabs lost three wars against Israel, but Damascus, Cairo, or Amman never paid the price for that aggression. Thus like Germany after World War I, the Arab states can continue to believe that they lost because of Jewish cabals or American chicanery rather than because they cling to an intolerant religious ideology that asserts their superiority and right to rule the world.<\/p>\n Unlike fascism and communism, then, modern jihad has roots deep in Islamic history and religion, providing a traditional answer to modern Muslim discontents created by a dominant West that once trembled at the armies of Allah. Rather than a modern, alien innovation, Islamic jihad speaks to the spiritual traditions of Muslims, calling upon a history of spectacular conquest fueled by religious fervor, a success that can be achieved again if only Muslims cast off all foreign, secular ideals, whether communism or liberal democracy, and return to the purity of Islam. That is why the jihadists enjoy such widespread support among Muslims the world over; and that is why fighting this enemy will take a much longer time, and will involve tasks much more difficult than simply changing political regimes.<\/p>\n P<\/span>odhoretz\u2019s responses to these reservations are not convincing. First he implies that the problems of the Middle East derive not from Islam but from the various sorts of despotic and dysfunctional regimes that were imposed on the Middle East by France and England after World War I. Having such \u201cshallow roots,\u201d then, it is not \u201cutopian\u201d to believe that such regimes \u201ccould be uprooted with the help of a third Western power [after France and England] and that a better political system could be put in their place.\u201d But the problem is not with those regimes, but with Islam; the conflict is not between two different kinds of government, but between spiritual obedience to Allah as defined by fourteen centuries of Islamic history and theology, and the material goods of prosperity and freedom. Perhaps Islam can solve that conflict, but so far, there is scant evidence that a majority of Muslims have found any way, or even shown much desire, to do so. In fact, all the evidence of Islamic history and theology, not to mention the widespread continuing support for jihad among millions of Muslims and their fanatical hatred of Israel, suggests that Podhoretz\u2019s hope that \u201cnew political, economic, and social conditions can grow\u201d among Muslim nations and \u201cgradually give rise to correlative religious pressures from within,\u201d pressures that will force \u201ctheologians and clerics to find warrants in the Qu\u2019ran and the\u00a0shari\u2019a<\/i>\u201d for living under \u201cpolitical and economic liberty\u201d \u2013\u2013 the evidence around us suggests sadly that this hope may be misplaced. Indeed, it is typically Western in its belief that material goods will trump spiritual, that Muslims would tailor Allah to the demands of modernity.<\/p>\n These reservations do not mean that the Bush Doctrine is in error or futile. Podhoretz is right that we have a \u201cfighting chance\u201d to create the conditions for the reconciliation of Islam with modernity. But we need to accept that the job is one of decades, and that it will require continued force and a strong presence in Afghanistan and Iraq for many years. It also requires that we realize that the assault on Israel is a theater in the jihadist war, not a quarrel over Palestinian \u201cnational aspirations.\u201d And it will necessitate speaking the truth about Islam and compelling Muslims to acknowledge that truth and to stop hiding behind distortions and propaganda about the \u201creligion of peace.\u201d We must compel more Muslims to step up and start telling us \u2013\u2013 and other Muslims \u2013\u2013 how that reconciliation can take place, and back their words with deeds. Yet whenever Muslims do this \u2013\u2013 Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq come to mind \u2013\u2013 they have to go into hiding from the devotees of the \u201creligion of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n But the ultimate question is whether we Americans have the stomach for this fight, whether we can drop our sentimental \u201cwe are the world\u201d multiculturalist fantasies and speak plainly about Islam and its dysfunctions, whether we can cast off the hair shirt of colonial and imperial guilt so eagerly donned by self-loathing Western elites. Podhoretz ends his important, indispensable book by affirming his belief that enough Americans do have that resolve and that we will ultimately win. But as he also says, \u201cthe jury is still out, and it will not return a final verdict for some time to come.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Podhoretz corrects the record on Islamic terrorism by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers A review of\u00a0World War IV.\u00a0The Long Struggle against Islamofascism\u00a0by Norman Podhoretz (Doubleday 2007, 240 pp.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87,22,746],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1oT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1011,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/no-labels-no-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":5387,"position":0},"title":"“No Labels,” No Democracy","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com Earlier this month, Republican David Frum and Democrat William A. Galston published a\u00a0manifesto\u00a0in the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0announcing the birth of a new political movement, No Labels, the first meeting of which was December 13. The \u201chyper-polarization of our politics,\u201d Frum and Galston write, \u201cthwarts an adult conversation\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5534,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/total-silence\/","url_meta":{"origin":5387,"position":1},"title":"Total Silence","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 4, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Conquest reveals Western \"traitors to the human mind.\" by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers I\u2019ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest\u2019s\u00a0Reflections on a Ravaged Century.\u00a0His chapter on \u201cSoviet Myths and the Western Mind\u201d is particularly fascinating, and ripe with parallels to our own battles\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5461,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-passions-of-the-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":5387,"position":2},"title":"The Passions of the Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"CIA's new revelations fans the flames of \"progressive\" myths of our past by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The publication of the CIA\u2019s \u201cfamily jewels\u201d \u2014 the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities \u2014 is sure to add fuel to that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4137,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fantasy-and-worse-from-the-los-angeles-times\/","url_meta":{"origin":5387,"position":3},"title":"Fantasy and Worse from the Los Angeles Times","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 14, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers [Editor\u2019s Note: In the Sunday February 5, 2006 edition of the\u00a0Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fresno-based\u00a0Times\u00a0reporter Mark Arax published an essay purportedly about how acrimony over 9\/11 issues, Iraq, and the war on terror has divided his community\u00a0\"The Valley's Not So\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-brief-history-of-media-bias\/","url_meta":{"origin":5387,"position":4},"title":"A Brief History of Media Bias","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Who said that newspapers are supposed to report the news in an objective and fact-based way? by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The revelation that the Department of Justice acquired and read the phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters does not change the obvious fact that the mainstream\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5458,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/by-the-sword-ibrahim-and-spencer-unveil-the-truth-of-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":5387,"position":5},"title":"By the Sword: Ibrahim and Spencer Unveil the Truth of Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The\u00a0New York Times\u2019s Thomas Friedman is right on the mark most of the time in his analysis of the dysfunctions troubling the Muslim world and of our own failures in confronting them. Particularly important is his frequent criticism of our feckless disregard of our\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5387"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5389,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5387\/revisions\/5389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}