One of my long-time mentors, Norman Podhoretz, wrote this great piece this month in Commentary magazine, of which he’s a long-time editor. (No, shockingly, liberals Carolyn Parrish and Svend Robinson are not among my mentors).
If you get a chance, bookmark to read the item linked at the bottom of his short article here too. It’s an essay that will take a couple hours to read online, but worth every second.
In the beginning I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush Doctrine, and I still am. Let me, then, recount the ways.
On 9/11 Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda succeeded in doing what neither Hitler’s Germany nor Tojo’s Japan nor Stalin’s Soviet Union ever managed to accomplish: an attack on the continental United States. The most novel element of George W. Bush’s response to this aggression was a strategy designed to “drain the swamps” of religio-political despotism throughout the Middle East in which, he asserted, the new enemy was bred and nurtured.
The first testing ground of Bush’s strategy was naturally Afghanistan, whose Islamofascist Taliban rulers were harboring the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us. Militarily, the campaign to topple the Taliban was brilliantly successful, and so were the subsequent political developments in Afghanistan. Within three short years, the first free election in its history was held, and Hamid Karzai, who has rightly been described as civilized, modern, and pro-American, was sworn in as president.
It was natural, too, that the next target would be Iraq. For if the Taliban best represented the religious or “Islamo-” face of the new two-headed totalitarian monster ranged against us, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the leading avatar of its secular or “fascist” component.
The military campaign against Saddam also turned out to be a brilliant success. And so has the political aftermath, notwithstanding an “insurgency” whose terrorist tactics have been maddeningly hard to counter. But three things need to be noticed:
First, in operating through an alliance between Islamist “holy warriors” and diehard Baathist fascists, the “insurgency” demonstrated that our enemy was—just as the Bush diagnosis posited—a monster with two heads, one religious and one secular.
Second, in its declared aim of preventing Iraq from moving toward democratization, the Islamofascist alliance also demonstrated its agreement with Bush that democratization was indeed the right prescription for killing off the two forces it embodied and represented.
Finally, in the Islamofascist coalition’s failure to prevent the stunning political progress the Iraqis were making even while it was murdering so many of them, it demonstrated that Bush was right in contending that “the peoples of the Islamic nations want . . .the same freedoms . . . as people in every nation.”
Thus, as if out of nowhere, some 8 million Iraqis turned up to vote in a free election; then, and again in defiance of the two-headed monster, a constitution was hammered out that will, sooner rather than later, transform Iraq into a federal republic where Islamic principles will formally serve as “a main source of legislation” but where “No law that constricts democratic principles shall be issued.”
To these achievements of the Bush Doctrine in Afghanistan and Iraq we can add the spillover effect it has had throughout the region, including the suspension by Libya of its WMD program, the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, and (probably most consequential of all) the emergence of increasingly bold reformist voices within Islam.
Now, I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could deny that all this—purchased at an astonishingly low cost in American blood when measured by the standards of every other war we have ever fought—is “making the U.S. more secure.”
But beyond security, what the United States has been doing in the Middle East is so charged with greatness and so redolent of nobility that I have lost all patience with its outright opponents. I find the haters of America among them to be morally contemptible and intellectually cretinous; and as for their more moderate fellow opponents, all they have to offer is either a long-since discredited isolationism or the risible insistence that we be guided by the political wisdom of France and the moral authority of the UN.
Yet I must confess that my patience has worn thin even with those supporters of the Bush Doctrine who spend most of their time complaining that (in the columnist Mark Steyn’s inimitable paraphrase) “we shouldda done this, and we shouldda done that,” as though it were self-evident that “this” and “that” would have worked out better than the close calls which, under prevailing circumstances, were reasonably made.
Blessed with so much confident criticism from so many besserwissers, the Bush administration hardly needs any more from me. Nevertheless, because I am convinced that if we are eventually beaten back, it will not be by the terrorist insurgency over there but by the political insurgency here at home, I believe it has become vitally necessary to re-concentrate the American mind on (so to speak) the threat of hanging that we face. I also believe that the best way for the administration to do this is to start openly identifying the enemy as Islamofascism and the struggle against it as World War IV.
I think I understand the administration’s reluctance to go this rhetorical route, but too big a price in the coin of clarity and focus is now being paid for its resort to euphemism and indirection. More specifically, the failure to call the enemy and the struggle by their proper names has allowed the opposition to rip Iraq out of its proper context as only one front in a much broader conflict, and to portray our campaign there as a self-contained war with no connection to 9/11.
Thanks largely to this loss of clarity and focus, there has been a dangerous decline in popular support for the President’s policy; and this, more than any other factor, threatens its “longer-range prospects” and its magnificently “expansive vision of America’s world role.” To put a brake on and perhaps even reverse the decline, the President will have to begin and then keep on reminding the American people that what we are fighting is indeed a world war against another totalitarian aggressor, and that the stakes are at least as great as they were in World War II and in World War III (otherwise known as the cold war).
God knows that we as a nation need just such a reminder, and God help us if it should come in the form of another attack on American soil, only this time with weapons infinitely more devastating than a few hijacked airplanes.
NORMAN PODHORETZ is the editor-at-large of Commentary. His World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win” appeared in the September 2004 issue.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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