Part I: What Kind of War Are We Fighting, and Can We Win It?
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm?id=10959&page=allTo mark the publication of Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (Doubleday), the editors of COMMENTARY addressed the following questions to a group of leading thinkers:
1. Do you accept the term “World War IV,” or the idea behind it, as an apt characterization of the West’s battle with Islamic extremism, and do you, like Norman Podhoretz, see Iraq as a crucial early theater in that conflict?
2. Six years after 9/11, how would you assess our progress? What would you like to see happen next?
3. On the specific issue of the spread of democracy—a linchpin of the Bush Doctrine and a point of acute controversy between foreign-policy realists and neoconservatives—do you agree or disagree with Podhoretz that “democratization represents the best and perhaps even the only way to defeat Islamofascism and the terrorism it uses as its main weapon against us”?
4. Turning to the political climate at home, do you think the Bush Doctrine has a chance of surviving the elections of 2008, and if so in what form?
Fouad Ajami
Norman Podhoretz’s depiction of the war against Islamist radicalism as World War IV is apt. I have no quarrel with the description: I take it as pedagogy and exhortation and a call to vigilance. The radical Islamists have been sly enemies of order; they have flown under the radar, as it were. Theirs is more, much more, than a problem of freelance terror, to be met by police operations. They have declared nothing less than an unrelenting war against the American presence in the Arab-Islamic world, and they should be taken for the menace they are.
The region they contest—the Arab and Persian heartland of the Islamic world—cannot be ceded to them, for its obvious importance to the global economy. A challenge of this magnitude has to be thoroughly defeated. It is commonplace—but “soft” in the main—to say that this is a war of ideas for the hearts and minds of the populations of that region. What happens on the battlefield will settle this great contest. Hearts and minds will follow, and mirror, the military outcome.
The origins and legitimacy of the Iraq war have been endlessly debated. For me, it is and remains a just and noble war, waged by an American leader who was fated to take on the troubles and malignancies of the Arab-Islamic world. The distinction between the Islamism of al Qaeda and the “secularism” of the Iraqi regime is a distinction without a difference. A road led from Kabul to Baghdad. We took the war from the Afghan front, which the Arab preachers and financiers and jihadists had secured as a base for their operations, to the Arab world itself. In Baghdad, a despot at once cruel and (fortunately) clumsy held out to the Arabs an example of defiance, proof that no price would be paid by those who took on American power. Once we pulled the trigger in 2003, Iraq became the central front in the war on terror. Fail there, and our enemies would have been emboldened beyond measure, and the world would have depicted our failure as evidence that history’s tide was running against us.
We have paid dearly in Iraq, but we held the line, we maintained the American position in the region, we supplied proof that we would not scurry for cover and that we believed there were things worth fighting for. The despots in the region feigned a lack of interest in the fate of Saddam’s brutal sons, and in Saddam’s execution. But make no mistake: these personalistic regimes got the message. There but for the grace of God, they thought, go we. The sacrifices in Iraq paid dividends in Iraq’s neighborhood.
We have done reasonably well since 9/11. American memory is unduly short, and the memory of 9/11 is steadily being lost to us. There is a growing conviction that this was a single day of grief, that the warrant given to our government back then by the most liberal of the liberals should now be withdrawn. The vigilance our country sanctioned after 9/11 is now seen as overly intrusive and given to paranoia. But we take the world as it is, and at least some of the illusions held about Arab and Muslim affairs, about the sources and wellsprings of anti-Americanism, have been shed.
I would very much want to see a more critical assessment of the role of Egypt and of Egyptians in the trail that led to 9/11. Here is a country on the American payroll, a regime in the orbit of American power. But Egypt’s ruler has snookered us all along. He takes America’s coin but rides with its enemies. He has winked at, and fed, a culture suffused with anti-modernism and anti-Americanism—and anti-Semitism, their inevitable companion. The prestige of Egypt in Arab affairs is great, and so is the influence of its radicalism.
Those in the know—and those who pretend to be—have written and spoken about the influence exercised by the Egyptian thinker and pamphleteer Sayyid Qutb (executed by the Nasser regime in 1966) on the course of modern Islamism. This is good as far as it goes. What is needed is a more sustained analysis of the depth of Egyptian radicalism, and of the skill of that despotic regime in directing the wrath of its own thwarted population toward the United States. Beyond this lies the need for a proper response to the Hosni Mubarak regime. We need to cast that regime adrift.
But grant George W. Bush his due: he broke with Scowcroftian realism, he broke with the likes of James Baker. His speech of November 6, 2003, to the National Endowment for Democracy will remain, for decades, a noble American declaration. It had a startling mea culpa:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place for stagnation, resentment, and violence for export.
It was this declaration, and the larger Bush campaign for democracy, that gave heart to the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, which rid that country of a long and cruel Syrian captivity; it was this drive that gave continued justification to the Iraq war after the hunt for weapons of mass destruction there ran aground. The historical truth of Bush’s declaration is indisputable. The Bush Doctrine brought about a veritable reversal in the realm of ideas: here was a conservative President asserting that freedom can travel to distant shores, that we can take it to strangers beyond, and here were his liberal critics at home falling back on a surly argument that Iraq, Lebanon, and other Arab and Islamic domains offer insurmountable obstacles to the spread of freedom.
Natan Sharansky is perhaps on the mark with his observation that Bush, in holding onto his belief, is a lonely man even within his own circle of power. To come to that belief, Bush needed no great literacy in political theory. Intuitively, he grasped the connection between autocracy and terror. Norman Podhoretz’s argument on behalf of liberty reads that landscape with clarity. The peace of pharaohs and autocrats, the stability presented by despotism, is deceptive. The politics of democracy can be messy, of new democracies messier still. But we ought to have the courage of running freedom’s risks.
Yes, a poisoned Palestinian political culture opted for Hamas in a free election in early 2006. This is what it is: an expression of the malady of Palestinian politics. The larger case for democratic reform is bigger, and nobler, than the state of Palestinian politics. Travel to Iraq, as I have done repeatedly since 2003; go to Kurdistan, which had seen endless sorrow. Faith in democracy is all these populations have going for them, their solace and their pride.
What shall stick on the ground here at home of Bush’s campaign for freedom? Hard to say. The peerless Henry Kissinger, in Diplomacy (1994), writes of the great paradox of Woodrow Wilson and his enduring influence on American thought. Wilson’s program for the League of Nations was rebuffed, his dream of collective security was set aside. But oddly, Wilsonianism triumphed. “For three generations,” Kissinger writes, “critics have savaged Wilson’s analysis and conclusions; and yet, in all this time, Wilson’s principles have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy thinking.”
Whether a similar fate awaits Bush’s diplomacy of freedom cannot be known as yet. I suppose it will be in Iraq, a hard and tough soil, where the proposition on behalf of freedom will meet its test. But Bush rolled history’s dice. He held out to the Arabs a respectful message: that despotism was not necessarily something fated— “written”—for them for all time.
Fouad Ajami is director of Middle East Studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author most recently of The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press). Mr. Ajami was awarded a Prize for Outstanding Achievement by the Bradley Foundation in 2006.
John R. Bolton
Norman Podhoretz correctly and concisely names the war we have been in, consciously or not, since well before September 11, 2001. He accurately depicts the failures of many in America and Europe to understand the nature of the Islamofascist threat, let alone formulate strategies to deal with it. He identifies the terrorist threat posed in Iraq, and places it in the larger context of what will unquestionably be a “long, hard slog.”
Well and good, but let’s cut to the chase: what does any of this have to do with promoting democracy? My response: in the short run, very little, and in the longer run, who knows?
First, I think our emphasis must be more on liberty than democracy, which a careful reading of President Bush’s speeches shows is his real emphasis. To state the obvious, liberty is not the same as democracy, the first being freedom from government, the second being one way to select governments. Many Muslim societies—and many non-Muslim societies, while we are on the subject—need the former more urgently than the latter.
Second, “democracy” is a word used so frequently and so ritualistically that, like many incantations, it loses meaning over time. Parliamentary democracies, for example, merge executive and legislative powers in the hands of one electoral majority, something the framers of our Constitution rejected as dangerous to liberty. Moreover, proportional-representation systems, especially those with national party lists, are not as reflective of electorates as are single-member districts.
Is Europe, where these approaches predominate, as “democratic” as the United States? I think not. Moreover, democracy is not necessarily an end point in politics, but perhaps only a way station. Via the European Union, “Europe” may be passing from a pre-democratic feudal society to a post-democratic bureaucratic one, parts of the continent having sojourned only relatively briefly as actual democracies. Russia may be a place where democracy was a long time in coming but only a short time in going. China, home of the original Mandarins, may never get there. These are hardly models for the Middle East or other Muslim lands.
Third, how feasible is “democracy” right now? Writing in COMMENTARY in November 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick rebuked the foreign-policy initiatives of the Carter administration by citing John Stuart Mill’s conditions for representative government:
One, that the people should be willing to receive it; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.
And Kirkpatrick went on to observe:
In the relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation during which leaders have reluctantly grown accustomed to tolerating dissent and opposition, opponents have accepted the notion that they may defeat but not destroy incumbents, and people have become aware of government’s effects on their lives and of their own possible effects on government. Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.
Fourth, having a Burkean disposition, I shy away from abstract theory. Take three specific cases: Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan.
Iraq does not appear to measure up to the Mill-Kirkpatrick standard. Its Shiites and Kurds are settling scores, retaliating for decades of brutal Baathist rule. Sunnis, acutely aware of their minority status, are engaging in terrorism precisely to prevent scores from being settled. Meanwhile, Shiites are fighting their own internecine terrorist battles, facilitated by Iran.
Once again, Kirkpatrick called the shot: “leaders of all major sectors of the society must agree to pursue power only by legal means, must eschew (at least in principle) violence, theft, and fraud, and must accept defeat when necessary.” Doesn’t sound like Baghdad.
My solution in Iraq is prosaic: praise democracy, but pass the ammunition. Critics of the Bush Doctrine, unjustifiably, will gauge its success almost entirely according to the outcome in Iraq. To preserve the doctrine beyond January 19, 2009, American interests require that no part of Iraq become a base for terrorism. If that can be done with a democratic Iraq, wonderful; if it has to be done with less than Jeffersonian purity, fine.
Next, Iran’s vigorous pursuit of deliverable nuclear weapons is a grave long-term threat to the United States, Israel, and our worldwide interests. Four-plus years of American deference to Europe’s predilection for negotiation has brought Iran that much closer to its goal, and yielded precious few options to prevent it. Of these, unfortunately, only regime change in Tehran or the use of force against Iran’s nuclear program has any realistic prospect of success. Both are grim choices, to be sure. In these very pages, Norman Podhoretz has cogently argued for military action (“The Case for Bombing Iran,” June 2007), eschewing the blossoming of democracy’s flower children in favor of cold steel.
In Pakistan, finally, so far the only Islamic country with nuclear weapons, Pervez Musharraf’s government is under siege by civilian politicians clamoring for a return to democracy. Pakistan’s history is replete with corrupt and incompetent civilian politicians, replaced periodically by the military’s “steel skeleton,” but with neither experience yielding especially happy results. Musharraf is rightly faulted for many things, especially inadequately purging the army of Islamic militants and a listless pursuit of al Qaeda, but does anyone seriously argue that politicians will better harness Pakistan’s military?
With a nuclear arsenal up for grabs, the stakes in Pakistan are high. Bolstered by the Bush administration’s evident support, the politicians continue to try to force Musharraf out, which likely will be hailed as a triumph of democracy. That may be, but I am far from certain that elected civilians running Islamabad will make us safer from a loss of command-and-control over those nuclear weapons, or from the danger that they will come into terrorist hands. This is a risky way to experiment with democratic theory.
In prior world wars, we concentrated on victory first, not the purity of our allies. Similarly, I’d rather win World War IV distastefully than lose it for the sake of purity. I actually think Norman Podhoretz would agree.
John R. Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2005-2006, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, Surrender Is Not an Option, is forthcoming this month from Simon & Schuster.
Max Boot
By publishing World War IV, Norman Podhoretz has performed yet another important public service, showing once again why he was such a worthy recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At a time when our political leaders are split over whether we are actually at war with terrorists, when opposition to the war effort in Iraq is growing, and when apathy and complacency appear to be settling in among the public, he lucidly and compellingly explains why we are fighting, how we can prevail, and why we must do so.
My major disagreement with him is pretty minor. It concerns what to call this conflict. Labeling it World War IV assumes that the cold war was World War III, but almost nobody calls it that. Maybe they should, but they don’t. As a matter of purely historical accuracy, moreover, the cold war should be called World War V, since the first world war was really the Seven Years’ War, known in North America as the French and Indian War, while the second was the Napoleonic War. If we follow this logic, we would relabel the 1914-18 conflict World War III and the 1939-45 conflict World War IV, in the same way that George Lucas relabeled his first Star Wars film “Episode IV” after producing three “prequels.”
But merely to advance this argument is to reveal its impracticality. Accurate or not, certain terms enter widespread public usage and cannot be dislodged by argumentation, no matter how persuasive. Thus the conflict against Communism was called the cold war, not World War III, and the current conflict has been called the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) or the Long War. I am sympathetic to the objections to both those terms, but they have entered the lexicon, and for better or worse we’re stuck with them.
In any case, there is a significant difference between World Wars I and II, on the one hand, and, on the other, the cold war and the GWOT. The former were relatively short bursts of highly concentrated violence in which the U.S. and its allies waged all-out war to defeat nation-states. The latter conflicts are longer and more amorphous. Sometimes they call for direct military action (e.g., the Korean and Vietnam wars, or the Afghanistan and Iraq wars) but more often they require the use of diplomacy, propaganda, intelligence, covert action, foreign military assistance, and other policy tools. And while we sometimes have to contend with nation-state foes, in many cases our enemies are semi-autonomous guerrilla groups or political organizations.
During the latter stages of the cold war, for instance, the U.S. had to deal with organized protests like the nuclear-freeze movement as well as with terrorist groups like the Red Brigades. Both had links to Moscow and its satellites, but were more than merely Russian puppets. Today, we face a wide variety of Islamofascist groups, many of which have only the most tenuous connections with “al Qaeda Central.”
The right way to defeat most of these groups is not to wage classic conventional conflict—as might be implied by the term World War IV—but instead to carry out a global counterinsurgency. This, like all successful counterinsurgencies, must be predominantly political, not military, in its focus.
How are we doing in that counterinsurgency six years after 9/11? By the most important measure—terrorist attacks in the United States—spectacularly well. By other measures, not so well: as a recent National Intelligence Estimate noted, al Qaeda Central has managed to reconstitute itself in Pakistan, and its affiliates around the world have continued to carry out vicious attacks.
Two of the most important fronts in this larger struggle are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and here again the situation is mixed. Afghanistan seems to be doing a bit better than Iraq, while Iraq seems to be doing a bit better than it was a year ago. But it is far too soon to know whether we will succeed in creating long-term stability and representative government in either country. In both cases, but especially in Iraq, our war effort has been marred by serious mistakes on the part of the Bush administration. Whether we can overcome those setbacks at this late date remains unclear, though I believe the “surge” in Iraq is making significant progress.
I agree with Norman Podhoretz that a commitment to democratization must remain a key American objective in the GWOT, and here again the progress report is mixed. I am more critical of the Bush administration than he is for not doing enough to live up to its soaring rhetoric about spreading freedom. In too many cases we are still dancing to the tune of dictators who insist “it’s me or the mullahs” even as their own misrule actually strengthens the hand of the most radical agitators.
I admit that democracy promotion cannot be our only interest, and that we have to be careful about how we go about it. Nevertheless, I think there is more that the President could be doing to carry out his stated agenda. For a start, he should condition further aid to Egypt on the release from prison of the liberal opposition leader Ayman Nour.
For all its problems of implementation, I believe the Bush Doctrine will outlive this administration. Its two central tenets—promoting democracy and taking preemptive action when necessary—are not terribly controversial in the abstract even if one particular application, in Iraq, has become very controversial indeed. None of the major Democratic or Republican presidential contenders is pledging to eschew either one of these ideas. And that is not surprising, because both were a feature of American foreign policy long before George W. Bush was born. The Bush “revolution” primarily consists of elevating their importance rhetorically if not always in practice. (Note that we have not waged any preemptive wars since the invasion of Iraq, and that our support for democracy has become very attenuated in the second Bush term.)
Future Presidents may tone down the rhetoric, but they will still feel compelled to act preemptively against terrorists and in favor of democracy. At least sometimes. But then, as Norman Podhoretz also observes, no President, not even this one, is ever a model of consistency, and any “doctrine” inevitably simplifies the messy reality of policy implementation.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributor to COMMENTARY’s blog contentions, and the author of War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World (Gotham).
Reuel Marc Gerecht
If one sees the world as Islamic radicals do, Islam as a faith and as a civilization is locked in a brutal struggle with the West—usually described as a baleful place of aggressive Christians and Jews, or a seductive, immoral realm of atheists (who formerly were aggressive Christians and Jews). Where once this collision was confined primarily to the Middle East, today Islamic radicals regularly concern themselves with the situation, demands, and God-given rights of large Muslim communities living in the West itself. In the last 40 years, Islam has become a truly global faith—something that was not the case when the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential modern radicals, was in his prime in the 1950’s, or even when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini joined the ranks of the most successful modern militants.
It is certainly fair to define one’s enemies and their battles as they themselves do. Historians, diplomats, spies, and journalists who fail to do this often commit the sin of mirror-imaging—a common problem for secularized Westerners looking at the Muslim Middle East. So on these grounds it is hard to disagree with Norman Podhoretz’s use of the phrase World War IV to describe the violent onslaught of Islamic holy warriors against the West, and in particular against the United States, its cutting edge.
Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with the appellation. My objection is both philosophical and mundane: it gives too much coherence to the enemy, and sociologically and geographically it leaves me frustrated.
Islamic radicalism is still a leaderless tempest: the birth of al Qaeda was an attempt to give organization and charismatic inspiration to a movement that was easy to locate (find a Saudi-funded mosque, and you can usually find the component parts) but difficult to define consistently. Islamic extremism’s greatest growth spurt in the 20th century occurred after Saudi Arabia, spooked by Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, met Iranian proselytizing head-on. Absent this clash, which occurred concurrently with Osama bin Laden’s efforts to rouse devout but often uninterested Muslims to war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Sunni extremism would not be so globally developed today.
The United States was by no means incidental to that clash: at the mosque level, both sides gained adherents by preaching hostility to America. But this common hatred is messy and tense. Radical Iranian commentary on al Qaeda, for example, is a hodge-podge of envy, admiration, and disgust. For all Muslim holy warriors, modernity is the cause of the ethical freefall that in turn allows them to regard the slaughter of women and children as permissible. Nevertheless, these men are also at war with the vast majority of Muslims, who, regardless of their attitude toward the United States, are considered moral backsliders eagerly consuming the worst, if not the best, of the Western world.
Side by side with Sunni and Shiite holy warriors there exist fundamentalists who similarly loathe the United States and want to extirpate much of Western culture from their societies—but who are not themselves active participants in a jihad against America. In common with many liberal Arabs and (for that matter) European intellectuals, they may have experienced a gleeful frisson when the Twin Towers fell; and they would certainly prefer it if their governments limited their military and intelligence dealings with the United States. But, while knowing the risks of contamination, they might also well choose to send their children for higher education in the United States. (Iran’s Islamic revolution was born of this contradiction.)
Either voluntarily or under police pressure, devout Muslims like these have been critical to the efforts of Sunni regimes to monitor, corral, and kill violent extremists. In Shiite Iran, clerics and intellectuals who are not really enemies of the regime are at the same time capable of making trenchant, devastating critiques of the ruling mullahs. No American should want to entrust a nuclear weapon to any of these people, but they are more at odds with the clerical regime than they are with the United States.
I do not feel enough of this nuance, contradiction, and internal Muslim turbulence in World War IV. Yes, the United States must defend itself militarily against those Muslims who define their identity inextricably through violent hatred of the West. But characterizing this necessary self-defense as a world war is too unwieldy, too brusque, and too easily abused by Muslims and Westerners who really want to see a more developed clash of civilizations.
Is Iraq pivotal to the war against Islamic extremism? Absolutely. Al Qaeda now describes the ongoing struggle there in more momentous terms than those formerly used by bin Laden to describe the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The view of clerical Iran is not much different. Both parties intend to radicalize Iraq’s Shiites: to create a Hizballah in Mesopotamia. It is difficult to foresee these dueling radicalisms exhausting each other to America’s advantage.
Rating the Bush administration’s progress likewise depends on Iraq. If the administration fails there, then we will have greatly strengthened the forces of radical Islam. By comparison, Bill Clinton, who failed altogether to rise to the challenge of bin Laden, could look very good.
Is democracy the answer to this extremism? Probably yes. Even thoughtful arguments to the contrary, such as those advanced by Martin Kramer, take us back to an embrace of Muslim dictatorships in the hope that under these “stable” regimes, Islamic radicalism will die out. That is possible. But I think Islamic history teaches the opposite. We have been waiting for decades for the Middle East’s autocracies to permit, à la Atatürk, the emergence of the building blocks of freer societies. Instead, most of these oligarchies have gotten worse.
“Muslims as a community cannot agree upon an error” is an old Sunni dictum waiting to be tested in the democratic arena. Muslim democracy is not likely to be pretty or particularly liberal. But it offers a chance to imbue popular will with a divine sanction, and a chance for Muslims to deracinate the holy warriors from their communities. It is hard to see anything more than continuing stagnation emerging from the Mubaraks, the ben Alis, the Assads, the Sauds, or even the Hashemites.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard, and the author of The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy (2004).
Victor Davis Hanson
I do accept the term World War IV, as well as the idea behind it, and here is why I think Norman Podhoretz is right. We are in a long, terrible war with an Islamic fascist ideology that embodies an expansionist, authoritarian creed of religious hatred, anti-Semitism, and reactionary mythology. Fighting, albeit on a sub-state level and against relatively small numbers of combatants, transcends borders, with various fronts even outside the Middle East. Worldwide, Islamists feed on both stealthy state sanction and occasional tacit approval from an aggrieved Muslim “street.” And the tenets of jihadism—best found in the rantings of Ayman al-Zawahiri and reified by the operations of bin Laden’s al Qaeda—are no more disjointed than were the World War II anti-American creeds cobbled together by the various German, Italian, and Japanese militarists.
This present war, brutal though it is, is in military terms not as ghastly as past global wars that cost tens of thousands of American lives. (At least that is the case so far, without the terrorists’ acquisition of nuclear devices.) But politically it is far harder to conduct because of international dependence on an oil-rich tribal Middle East, the influence of instantaneous global communications, and the therapeutic ethos of our own postmodern society. Another obvious difference from past global wars is that belligerents like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, all of which are involved in funding or aiding the main perpetrators, have denied culpability. Their insidious wink-and-nod diplomacy is aimed at codifying the idea of “stateless terrorists”—and, thus, the corollary idea that we cannot respond with conventional force to national practitioners or enablers of Islamic terror.
Still, this is a wholesale war against the idea of America, both in the real and metaphorical sense, conducted both through violent and non-violent means against us and our friends from Manhattan and London to Beirut and Anbar. The Islamists, like past ideological foes, are existential enemies who do indeed hate the contradictions and destabilization brought to traditional life by Western-inspired modernization. They also thirst to bring us down, empowered both by their alleged military victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan and by the long-term laxity of the West.
Iraqi democracy is an anathema to Islamists, and so Iraq is the crucial front that, magnet-like, draws in terrorists from far and wide. To suppose otherwise is to believe that we simply create terrorists ex nihilo who then flock to Iraq on the news we are there—and will leave and go home if only we would depart. But most will not leave unless and until they are driven out, and besides, their brothers are already ubiquitous and deadly in places where we have no real presence, landscapes as varied as Lebanon, Sudan, and Somalia, not to mention Europe.
Progress: the two worst regimes in the Middle East are gone. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the war has shifted to a political/military struggle to stabilize reform governments. Most of the al-Qaeda leadership that started the war is either dead, scattered, or in custody, and bin Laden, supposedly still a magnetic Saladin, dares not leave his cave in Waziristan. More to the point, a recent Pew poll revealed that his popularity is falling in the Middle East, and with it overall support for the tactic of suicide bombing.
Recent changes in European governments and immigration policy, and security measures here at home, have created a Western climate much more inimical to radical Islam than before. Our counter-efforts bear fruit. It simply is harder now—though far from impossible—to pull off an attack of a 9/11 magnitude. Majority-party congressional Democrats may damn Guantanamo, wiretaps, and the Patriot Act, but they still have enough political savvy to do little if anything to repeal such successful instruments of deterrence.
On the downside, and on the ideological front, the jihadists have shown an uncanny ability to recycle or repackage old multiculturalist slurs against Western capitalist democracy, while we too often assert rather than explain why and how we do what we do. In the meantime, still thriving at home are the more outrageous conspiracy theories. The fraud of Michael Moore, the bile of Patrick J. Buchanan, do take a toll; a Bill Maher, a MoveOn.org General “Betray Us” ad, or a Rosy O’Donnell lowers the bar of the shameful, and so too does the mainstream media’s standard narrative of Iraq as all IED’s and suicide belts.
Vietnam aside, I cannot think of any prior war in which our soldiers have been compared with the likes of Nazis, Stalinists, and other mass murderers by senior members of Congress, or pronouncements in mediis rebus by a Senate majority leader that the war is “lost.” Our country is confused and angry, and we are not sure of the morrow.
As is usual in wars, the battlefield will adjudicate things better than those who offer mere opinions. If General David Petraeus stabilizes Iraq enough to allow reconciliation to proceed, then the world will start making the necessary political adjustments in our favor; if he should not, then catastrophe looms.
What next? Immediately there should be more urgent international efforts to isolate Iran entirely, and financially to squeeze that regime by boycotts, embargos, and blockades if its nuclear program continues as envisioned. But the key right now remains Iraq. We must remember that neither the Iranian nor the Syrian regime could spread terror, or perhaps even long endure, once truly reformed governments are in place in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon. In particular, the Iraqis’ success spells their failure.
I admire Norman Podhoretz for using the much-caricatured term “democratization.” Critics seek to equate this with some sort of naïve embrace of mere plebiscites, rather than an evolutionary process toward the entire framework of constitutional government, from independent judiciaries to human-rights guarantees and freedom of expression. In any case, are we to believe that, because the terrorists of Hamas were elected in Gaza, our efforts at stabilizing the Iraqi reform government or prodding Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have thereby been refuted?
Advocacy of political reform offers choices other than dictatorship and theocracy. Despite the slander against it by opponents of the Bush Doctrine, promotion of democracy remains the best way to address the contradictions of fundamentalist tribal cultures that suddenly have trillions of petrodollars at their disposal to fund anti-Western terrorists. In the meantime, and along the way, a program to reduce the world price of oil through conservation, alternate energies, and increased petroleum production is now a matter not just of free-market economics but of national survival.
As for whether the Bush Doctrine will survive, in the short term I fear not. Today’s Democrats, like so many old-fashioned right-wing isolationists, appear to regard the Iraqis as unworthy of American sacrifice, and the brave emergence of Iraqi voters and reformers as signifying no more than tribal or mob rule. How odd that our pessimistic Left seems rather to have resigned itself to the ultimate triumph of the often cowardly Islamists than mobilized to help the Iraqis who bravely fight them.
For their part, the Republican presidential candidates concentrate mainly on not “losing” Iraq. Most (but not all) would seem to welcome some undefined secular, perhaps authoritarian order that would at least allow us to leave something firm behind. But otherwise, on the Right as on the Left, advocating consensual government abroad now seems to be considered equivalent to engaging in child abuse.
But the long term? The desire for freedom under popular constitutional government will not die, and neither will our national penchant for promoting it—since the alternatives are far worse. A popular desire for reform has awakened in places as diverse and unlikely as Lebanon, Libya, and Pakistan. At some point, in the not-so-distant future, despite the ordeal in Iraq, most will see that the antidote to the current pathology in the Middle East is some constitutional framework wherein the challenge of modernity is dealt with through free inquiry and debate. Otherwise, the present mess will only grow and grow before passing into a far more dangerous nuclear stage.
It was not the neoconservative support for democratization, or a determination to remove fascist regimes, that led to 9/11, but the lethal combination of appeasement of terrorism and the cynical endorsement of a Middle East dictatorial order through the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations. How peculiar, and how sad, that a mere six years after September 11, many are prepared to deem such policies preferable, if not, absurdly, to proclaim them successful.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
Daniel Henninger
Before answering whether Norman Podhoretz is correct that we have the misfortune to be living through World War IV, permit me some relevant descriptive narrative.
On the Saturday I traveled down to the Wall Street Journal’s offices in lower Manhattan to write this essay, my trip from the edge of Ground Zero through the World Financial Center’s now-restored Winter Garden took me past five groups of tourists numbering about twenty each. All were there to see Ground Zero. One group was standing by a window overlooking the site itself—still mostly stained concrete walls—while a tour guide explained the events of September 11.
For six years, I have watched these tourist groups arrive here every day. Many are middle-class Europeans, young and old, from Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. Many snap photos, trying to capture the entire sixteen-acre pit. Why do they come? Because virtually everyone in the world, together, while the event was happening, watched the two towers burn and collapse. They know that fanatical Islamic men did it, and the details of their plot. I persist in believing that the world’s watching those two office towers fall in real time produced an event of collective memory unique in history, and that its enduring effect on the consciousness of civilized peoples has been underestimated.
When I turned on my computer at the office that Saturday, the first news story I read was about the alleged leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. On an Islamist website, the pseudonymous al-Baghdadi had offered $100,000 for the murder of Lars Vilks, a cartoonist in Sweden whose drawing of Muhammad “dared insult our prophet.” The offer was upped to $150,000 if Vilks was “slaughtered like a lamb”—that is, with his throat cut. Al-Baghdadi also threatened attacks on Swedish companies, naming Ericsson, Volvo, Ikea, and Electrolux. All are global companies, which could be struck anywhere.
That we are in a war touching most of the world’s peoples, as did previous world wars, and that this war is with a strain of Islam infused with homicidal fanaticism, appears to me irrefutable. And I do not believe that the world’s peoples, particularly here or in Europe, are complacent about it. They know that a determined enemy exists, know what that enemy can do, and, I believe, would like someone to figure out how to lead them against this enemy.
Right now, the world is not being led, in part because the Democratic party has resisted allowing this particular American President to serve in that role, instead dividing the country over the design of the war on terror—detentions, interrogations, surveillance, and the like. Therefore, a big question for the future success of this war is whether, should a Republican win in 2008, the Democratic party will continue its challenge to the traditional world-leadership role of the U.S. presidency.
One of the great benefits of Norman Podhoretz’s intentionally provocative assertion that World War IV has begun is that it forces the argument toward defining the war. I am thinking in terms of a military doctrine. Obviously this war is not likely to involve the massed armies of the past century, much less the array of forces at Constantinople, which fell in 1453 to a Muslim army of several hundred thousand. After defeating Saddam’s conventional army in 2003, the U.S., it seems clear in retrospect, did not find a military doctrine appropriate for the Islamic insurgency until it adopted General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency plan in January 2007. On the evidence, that plan is making substantial gains.
Its relevance as doctrine, however, is broader. The Iraq insurgency, as with Islamic terror so far, has consisted mainly of highly explosive and dramatic bombings. Bali, the Madrid train station, the London subways—all were bombings. In his testimony to Congress, General Petraeus summed up the components of a strategy to “counter” this kind of warfare:
To do counterterrorism requires conventional as well as all types of special-operations forces, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets.
This encapsulates the worldwide war that must be waged against Islamic extremism. What we face is not the least bit like a conventional world-war battlefield. This war is being fought wholly amid civilian population centers; thus, any conceivable doctrine will have to include surveillance and intelligence as crucial elements. What that means is that the unending political battle in Washington over electronic surveillance and “intel” has to be won. Otherwise, if this internal American political battle is not won, the world’s cities will become increasingly vulnerable to bombs or, once the ingredients of WMD are purchased or assembled, worse.
As for a political doctrine, democratization, in Norman Podhoretz’s view, may be the only force strong enough to contain the centrifugal, messianic ideology of jihadism. The “realist” opposition to this notion has been intense. As with the Democratic refusal to support, say, warrantless wiretaps, the realists’ animosity to the Bush Doctrine and to “the neocons” seems as much personal grudge as theory. Both sides, however, err by undervaluing a force likely to play as great a role in taming Islam as either military containment or elections: namely, economics.
And specifically a more liberalized trade regime. Yes, it is boring, but it is also necessary, and it is explicitly part of the Bush Doctrine. Bush in 2003 proposed the Middle East Free Trade Agreement. Already, however, U.S. labor groups are in opposition to it, and mainly against Jordan, which has attracted investment from Wal-Mart, Liz Claiborne, Kohl’s, L.L. Bean, and others.
What, across history, has been “normal” life for the world’s males? Working at some job during the day and coming home to one’s family at night. Autarky is dead. In the modern world, trade is imperative. If our politics ignore or thwart trade, why feign shock when the young men in Middle Eastern countries spend their idle hours at jihad rather than at an honest job?
The Bush Doctrine had better survive 2008. All the competing ideologies are malign or dangerous: Putin’s market nationalism without democracy; China’s soulless economic determinism; Iran’s Hizballah-ism. Our political class should want, and publicly say it wants, Indonesia’s nascent democracy of more than 200 million Muslims to improve. Why should it be any less difficult to say that we want and will encourage Iran’s people to achieve a politics based on open party competition?
Those are the alternatives to what we have now. What we have now is this war.
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. His column, “Wonder Land,” appears each Thursday.
Martin Kramer
Norman Podhoretz wants to alarm us. At a time when many in America dismiss 9/11 as an aberration, and jihadism as a specter we have conjured up to justify military adventure, he insists that the enemy is real. Mired in denial, we have refused to see the obvious pattern in the succession of attacks against us, of which 9/11 constituted one more escalation. And despite 9/11, we have slipped back into our default position of complacency, while our enemies build new capabilities, construct more outposts, and inculcate hatred in the minds of millions. This is a world war, he insists, and our refusal to name it is the most obvious sign of our confusion.
Yet the notion of “World War IV” is also meant to reassure us. The United States prevailed in every great global contest of the 20th century, whether it took four years (World War II) or forty (the cold war). Now we confront a threat from another ideology opposed to freedom and democracy. But we have defeated such ideologies before, we tell ourselves—indeed, they are destined to be defeated—and once we get ourselves in gear, the outcome cannot be in doubt. It will just take a while. This world war, Podhoretz tells us, “will almost certainly go on for three or four decades.”
That is too reassuring.
The 20th-century world wars were preceded by another species of global conflict. For more than a millennium after the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christendom and Islam were locked in almost constant warfare. Today’s war, unlike the last three world wars, is being fought largely across the very same divide of religion and civilization that separated European Christendom and Islam. The ebb and flow of that conflict extended over centuries. It is a point our enemies emphasize. “This war is fundamentally religious,” bin Laden has said. “The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathize with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the Crusaders.” That is what bin Laden needs this war to be, if he is to fight it on his terms.
We shudder to think the world might be sliding back into that sort of conflict, and so we deny even the possibility while heaping praise on Islam. “This is not a clash of religions,” President Bush has said. “The faith of Islam teaches moral responsibility that ennobles men and women, and forbids the shedding of innocent blood. Instead, this is a clash of political visions.” That is what we need it to be, if we are to fight it on our terms.
Six years after 9/11, the problem is that most Muslims believe bin Laden is right. Over the summer, a poll showed that 80 percent of the people in Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, and Pakistan agree that the United States is trying to “weaken and divide the Islamic world.” Not only have we failed to define the war for ourselves. We have failed to define it for the great mass of Muslims. The widespread belief among Muslims that we are waging war against Islam could extend it well beyond three or four decades.
We also underestimate its breadth. We conveniently prefer to think that Iraq is the central front in this war, because the United States has 150,000 troops there. For all the defeatism deftly exposed by Podhoretz, most Americans know it would be difficult for the United States to lose in Iraq. But the danger now is that we might be outflanked. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, or Pakistan falls to jihadists, or parts of Europe are colonized by Muslim radicals, the consequences could be dire.
Norman Podhoretz and I are foreign-policy advisers to presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, who sees Iraq as one of many fronts. “The danger of focusing on Iraq too much,” he has said,
is that we miss the fact that the war on terror is broader than Iraq and that it will go on no matter what happens in Iraq. If we accomplish everything we want to accomplish and more in Iraq, it’s not going to win the war on terror. And if we don’t, it’s not going to lose the war on terror.
We have a tremendous stake in the battle for Iraq. But if we invest too little on other fronts because of it, we could lose the war.
Finally, we have underestimated the resourcefulness of our enemies in exploiting our desire for democracy. Neoconservatives continue to deny the obvious: our Islamist enemies turn every “democratic” opening into their opportunity. Norman Podhoretz rightly pillories Jimmy Carter for having sacrificed the shah of Iran and allowed Ayatollah Khomeini, a “radical Islamist despot,” to seize power. The “blind” Carter administration “thought the United States would be better off without allies like the shah.” Alas, this blindness is perfectly emulated today by those who would cast aside Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak on the off chance that the Muslim Brotherhood will not replace him. Democracy promoters compete with jihadists in denouncing the evils of the Saudi monarchy, Pakistan’s president, and even Jordan’s king.
In World War II, Franklin Roosevelt allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler. Norman Podhoretz elsewhere has said that that alliance “was as much a moral imperative as it was a case of realpolitik.” This war cannot be won without similar alliances, and shunning them will only abet our enemies.
For the Bush Doctrine to survive Bush, it will have to incorporate all we have learned since he formulated it. Much of it comes down to this: the Middle East is not Europe, Iraq is not Germany, and Afghanistan is not Japan. (They are not Vietnam, either.) The road to hell is paved with bad analogies, which are no substitute for lived experience and specific knowledge. According to the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The hedgehogs have taken the Bush Doctrine as far as they can. Now it is the turn of the foxes.
Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Olin Institute at Harvard.
William Kristol
Many of the quarrels that dominate American politics today turn on the status of 9/11. Is it to be understood primarily as a tragedy, or as an attack? A moment to move beyond, or a defining moment? A talking point, or a turning point?
Norman Podhoretz considers 9/11 an attack, a defining moment, and a turning point. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is as prominent a figure in the liberal foreign-policy establishment as Podhoretz is in the neoconservative counterestablishment, would beg to differ. Three years after 9/11, Friedman criticized the Bush administration and its supporters for being “addicted to 9/11.” Friedman looked forward to the day when September 11 would once again be restored
to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after September 10 and before September 12. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately September 11 is about them—the bad guys—not about us. We’re about the Fourth of July.
Now Norman Podhoretz, whose most recent memoir bears the title My Love Affair with America, is no slouch when it comes to celebrating the Fourth of July. But he would surely diagnose Friedman’s comments as symptomatic of liberals’ lack of seriousness. It would be nice to wish away the significance of 9/11 because one does not “want it to become a day that defines us.” But wishful thinking—however precious—is still wishful thinking.
What neoconservatives know is that we are not simply free to choose what defines us. They also know that 9/11 was not simply “about them—the bad guys.” It was, and is, also about us. It is about acts of heroism in New York and at the Pentagon and aboard United Flight 93. And it is about our subsequent response to that day’s attack—a response that has featured a fair amount of courage and honor and even, on occasion, genuine nobility.
Podhoretz’s book is unembarrassedly framed by 9/11. He quotes one liberal internationalist bemoaning the “post-11 September reorientation of American foreign policy.” In response, he argues that 9/11 demanded just such a reorientation, and that the President deserves great credit for providing one. The Bush Doctrine—at least as proclaimed, if not always in practice—consists of an intolerance of terror or state sponsorship of terror, a willingness to consider preemption, especially against terror-states developing weapons of mass destruction, and a commitment to fostering liberal democracy as part of a solution to the problems of the Middle East. Podhoretz ably makes the case for such a reorientation of American foreign policy.
Is “World War IV” the best term for the struggle we are in? About that I am less convinced. Analogies to the early years of the cold war, or to the rocky course of World War II, can be helpful in stimulating thinking about the challenges we face—but in the end an analogy is just an analogy. And, as is par for the course for many grand historical analogies, the differences in the cases cited are often as striking as the similarities, as Podhoretz himself sometimes acknowledges. I might add that I am also not convinced of the utility of the term Islamofascism, since the modifier seems more fundamental to the phenomenon than the noun. I would incline to use either jihadism, our enemies’ own term, or takfirism, the term favored by mainstream Muslims fighting the terrorists.
But whatever one’s terminological preferences, the core of Podhoretz’s case is eminently sensible: that, post-9/11, we live in a new world, requiring new thinking. He provides much useful guidance to such thinking, especially with respect to the war over the war: i.e., the domestic political fights both over Iraq and over the broader struggle against terror-sponsoring dictators and death-loving jihadists. Podhoretz is alarmed by the strength of the antiwar movement and of anti-Americanism more broadly. But he is heartened by the strengths of America, particularly “the young Americans in uniform, all volunteers.” To them, he offers a striking tribute: “In their determination, their courage, and their love of country, they are by all accounts a match, and more than a match, for their forebears.” The 9/11 generation is one reason Podhoretz is able to resist Whittaker Chambers-like despair.
Doubts are harder to avoid when one turns to the question of our leaders. But here, too, there are reasons for hope. Bush has in many respects risen to the occasion, and today’s leading Republican presidential candidates do not seek to shirk our post-9/11 responsibilities. For their part, the Democratic candidates at least occasionally show signs of knowing better than their campaign rhetoric typically suggests. But it is true that the vacuousness of the mainstream media, the childishness of many in Congress, and the fatuousness of the foreign-policy establishment—these do not fill one with confidence.
The columnist Mark Steyn recently reported on a speech at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, the liberal governor of Massachusetts. September 11, said Patrick, was “a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.” Steyn’s comment:
We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words “each other”: they posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim—that the “failure to understand” derives from the culpability of both parties.
And, Steyn continued:
It was the failure of one group of human beings to understand that the second group of human beings was determined to kill them that led the crew and passengers of those Boston flights to stick with the obsolescent 1970’s hijack procedures until it was too late. Unfortunately, the obsolescent 1970’s multiculti love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge.
Since 9/11, these destructive inclinations have begun to be dislodged. They would be further dislodged—perhaps even routed—if more of our leaders were animated by just a bit of Norman Podhoretz’s implacable determination and fighting spirit.
William Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard.