World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
by Norman Podhoretz
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Book Summary Information
Author: Norman PodhoretzEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-11
ISBN: 0385522215
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Product features:
- Islam, History and Future
Book Reviews of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
Book Review: A hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order
Summary: 1 Stars
I think Michael Scheuer said it best in his review and I am placing the excerpts for bellow. Scheuer of course was the head of the division responsible for AQ and he would know more about them than Mr. Podhoretz.
According to Scheuer (and I fully agree with him) Podhoretz hates every American who does not support the neoconservatives' views, the foreign policy they have devised, and the military and national security disasters to which they are leading America. They are variously characterized as anti-Semites, isolationists, recanters from the true creed, or simply as small men who fear the neoconservative utopia is about to arrive, discredit their views, and cost them their jobs or prestige.
Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them ... dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." (14-15) Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." (102) To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home - and America's defeat.
Podhoretz has taken Hitler's "Big Lie" principle to the extreme. The book is full of lies. One of Podhoretz's final cons comes at the expense of the late George Kennan. Podhoretz takes some of Kennan's words and twists them in a way that makes him seem like a supporter of the neoconservatives' endless overseas interventionism and war-for-perfection agenda. At the end of his book, Podhoretz quotes Kennan: "To avoid destruction the United States need only to measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation." (215) With this passage he leaves the reader to believe that Kennan would have supported the neoconservative crusade "to beat back the 'implacable challenge' of Islamofascism as the 'greatest generation' of World War II in taking on the Nazis and their fascist allies, and as its children and grandchildren ultimately managed to do in confronting the Soviet Union and its Communist empire in World War III." (217)
This is an intolerable and deliberately misleading attempt to make Kennan appear to be an arch-interventionist. Toward the end of his long life, Kennan wrote something of a valedictory essay for his fellow citizens in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1995), "On American Principles." In this essay Kennan praised John Quincy Adams's noninterventionist foreign policy as a principle appropriate to America, and, more important, described how it was admirably applicable to the chaos and confusion of the post-Cold War world. The dangers inherent in U.S. interventionism after the Cold War, Kennan wrote, are roughly similar to those
"that clearly underlay John Quincy Adams' response to similar problems so many years ago - his recognition that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example. Adams made this clear in the address cited above. One will recall his urging that the best response we could give to those appealing to us for support would be to give them what he called 'the benign sympathy of our example.' To go further, he warned, and try to give direct assistance would be to involve ourselves beyond the power of extrication 'in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.' Who, today, looking at our involvements of recent years, could maintain that the fears these words expressed were any less applicable in our time than in his?"
Does this sound like the warmongering of the neoconservative interventionists? I think not. It rather sounds like the words of a man who knows his country's history and traditions and its peoples' character far better than the obtuse Podhoretz and crew. At one point in his book Podhoretz quotes W.H. Auden's description of the 1930s as "a low and dishonest decade." (188) There is no better overall description for Norman Podhoretz's World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism than "low and dishonest."
In Podhoretz's hateful prose we find the true crusader spirit bound up with the con-man's willingness to distort history for political advantage. Using the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Podhoretz argues "that history had called America to action and that it was both 'our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight.'" (215) Taken to its logical bottom line, this assertion means that American parents should be delighted to nobly spend the lives of their children so Iraqis and Afghans can vote and have parliaments. Implicit in this absurd argument is that somehow U.S. national security requires that other people - not all others, of course, only Muslims - vote, behave democratically, and become secular. This is truly analysis by assertion. Can anyone really imagine that American society is automatically safer because Mrs. Mohammed votes and wears mascara? Or, alternatively, that U.S. national security is threatened if the Pashtun tribal leaders of southeastern Afghanistan do not appoint precinct captains to get out the vote in parliamentary elections? Clearly, Podhoretz is running a con here, and the price will be paid not in cash but in the blood of American kids. Indeed, Podhoretz can only lecture the grieving parents of the young Americans who have already died in Iraq : "By any historical standard, our total losses were still, and would remain, amazingly low." (110)
Summary of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
For almost half a century?as a magazine editor and as the author of numerous bestselling books and hundreds of articles?Norman Podhoretz has helped drive the central political and intellectual debates in this country. Now, in this beautifully written and powerfully argued book, he takes on the most controversial issue of our time?the war against the global network of terrorists that attacked us on 9/11.
In World War IV, Podhoretz makes the first serious effort to set 9/11 itself, the battles that have followed it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war of ideas that it has provoked at home into a broad historical context. Through a brilliant telling of this epic story, Podhoretz shows that the global war against Islamofascism is as vital and necessary as the two world wars and the cold war (?World War III?) by which it was preceded. He also lays out a compelling case in defense of the Bush Doctrine, contending that its new military strategy of preemption and its new political strategy of democratization represent the only viable way to fight and win the special kind of war into which we were suddenly plunged.
Different in certain respects though the Islamofascists are from their totalitarian predecessors, this new enemy is equally dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms for which America stands and by which it lives. But it took the blatant aggression of 9/11 to make most Americans realize that war had long since been declared on us and that the time had come to fight back. Past administrations, both Republican and Democratic, had failed to respond with appropriate force to attacks by Muslim terrorists on American citizens in various countries, and even the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 was treated as a criminal act rather than an act of war. All this changed after 9/11, when the whole country rallied around President Bush?s decision to bring the war to the enemy?s home ground in the Middle East.
The successes and the setbacks that have followed are vividly portrayed by Podhoretz, who goes on to argue that, just as in the two great struggles against totalitarianism in the twentieth century, the key to victory in World War IV will be a willingness to endure occasional reverses without losing sight of what we are fighting against, what we are fighting for, and why we have to win.
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