The War on the War on Terrorism

In September of last year Norman Podhoretz wrote the masterful essay World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win [pdf]. In this essay Podhoretz reasons exactly they way I do: he counts the Cold War as World War III and he considers America’s current war on Islamofanatics, jihadists and Islamic sectarian cleansers as a fourth World War.

Now Podhoretz has released yet another essay—this time examining the establishment’s struggle against Bush pursuit of wining WW IV—entitled The War Against World War IV [pdf] (html version). Podhoretz begins this essay—after a couple dozen paragraphs of rhetorical throat clearing—by concluding that Bush is unlikely to bend to the New York Times and continue fighting WW IV with his full energy. (Gee, I could have told you that.)

Podhoretz proceeds to analyze a number of players in the “War Against WW IV”. All of it is good and he zings some of my favorite subjects. I’ll quote some of his best:

America’s opponents that we’re fighting in Iraq:

In Iraq, the insurgents—a coalition of diehard Saddamists, domestic Islamofascists, and foreign jihadists—have a simple objective. They are trying to drive us out before the seeds of democratization that we are helping to sow have taken firm root and begun to flower. Only thus can the native insurgents hope to recapture the power they lost when we toppled Saddam; and only thus can the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis, who have been dispatching and/or financing the foreign jihadists, escape becoming the next regimes to go the way of Saddam’s under the logic of the Bush Doctrine.

The despots tyrannizing these countries all know perfectly well that an American failure in Iraq would rule out the use of military force against them. They know that it would rob other, non-military measures of any real effectiveness. [emphasis mine—johnh] And they know that it would put a halt to the wave of reformist talk that has been sweeping through the region since the promulgation of the Bush Doctrine and that poses an unprecedented threat to their own hold on political power, just as it does to the religious and cultural power of the radical Islamists.

But the most important thing the insurgents and their backers in the neighboring despotisms know is that the battle for Iraq will not be won or lost in Iraq; it will be won or lost in the United States of America. [emphasis mine—johnh] On this they agree entirely with General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, who recently told reporters touring Iraq: "It is all about staying the course. No military effort that anyone can make against us is going to be able to throw us out of this region." Is it any wonder, then, that the insurgents were praying for the victory of John F. Kerry—which they all assumed would mean an American withdrawal—or that the reelection of Bush—which they were not fooled by any exit polls into interpreting as anything other than a ratification of the Bush Doctrine—came as such a great blow to them? [emphasis mine—johnh] But too much is at stake in Iraq for them to give up now, especially as they are confident that they still have an excellent shot at getting the American public to conclude that the game is not worth the candle. General Abizaid again: "We have nothing to fear from this enemy except its ability to create panic . . . and gain a media victory." To achieve this species of victory—and perhaps inspired by the strategy that worked so well for the North Vietnamese— they are counting on the forces opposing the Bush Doctrine at home. These forces comprise just as motley a coalition as the one fighting in Iraq, and they are, after their own fashion, just as desperate.

For they too understand how much they for their own part stand to lose if the Bush Doctrine is ever generally judged to have passed the great test to which it has been put in Iraq. [emphasis mine—johnh]

I felt the resonance of alike-thinking minds as I read this passage.

Norman Podhoretz then examines America’s domestic transnationalist opponents:

...the liberal internationalists, with their virtually religious commitment to negotiations as the best, or indeed the only, way to resolve conflicts; their relentless faith in the UN (which they stubbornly persist in seeing as the great instrument of collective security even though its record is marked by "an unwillingness to get serious about preventing deadly violence"); and their corresponding squeamishness about military force. ….

Under Jimmy Carter (whose Secretary of State, Cyrus R. Vance, was a devout member of this school) and to a lesser extent under Bill Clinton, the liberal internationalists were at the very heart of American foreign policy. But while George W. Bush has thrown a rhetorical bone or two in their direction, and has even done them the kindness of making a few ceremonial bows to the UN, he has for all practical purposes written off the liberal-internationalist school. Nor has he been coy about this. As he declared in a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002:

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically break them.

The liberal internationalists were not slow to pick up on what statements like this held in store for them. While Kupchan [(an American transnationalist)] said f latly, "the election of George W. Bush [that] sounded the death-knell for liberal internationalism" (defined by him as "a moderate, centrist internationalism that manages the international system through compromise, consensus, and international institutions"). [Other American transnationalists], on the other hand, blamed Bush alone:

[A] set of hard-line, fundamentalist ideas have taken Washington by storm and provided the intellectual rationale for a radical post-11 September reorientation of American foreign policy. ... [This] is not leadership but a geostrategic wrecking ball that will destroy America’s own half-century-old international architecture.

…, thanks to the workings of this "wrecking ball," the liberal internationalists have been reduced to a domestic echo chamber for the French and the Germans. All they seem able to do is count the ways in which the "unilateral" invasion of Iraq has done "damage to the country’s international position" its prestige, credibility, security partnerships, and the goodwill of other countries" [emphasis mine—johnh] Since they refuse even to consider whether 9/11 demanded a "reorientation"—whether, that is, it demonstrated that "the tools and doctrines of the [old] system had outlived their utility" and had to be replaced with a "new set of rules for managing the emerging threats to international security"—they can hope for nothing better than a reversion to the status quo ante.

This observation reinforces my contention that transnationalists are patriots of “transnational organizations” (e.g., the UN) and diplomatic structures and “international goodwill” and anything else other than the U.S. and her national interests. In their worldview the U.S. interests are made to be sacrificed to what they evidently hold to be the “higher good”.

This dream, [the transnationalists think], could yet be realized by a scuttling of the Bush Doctrine through a withdrawal from Iraq that

would bring about a reconciliation with friends and allies shocked by Washington’s recent unilateralism and repudiation of international obligations, and thus do much to restore . . . American credibility and "soft power" in the world.

As against Hoffmann, neither Ikenberry nor Kupchan envisages so rosy a future for their common creed, even in the exceedingly unlikely event that the Bush Doctrine is abandoned. If, however, the doctrine should be vindicated by Iraq, they all fear—and rightly so—that it will be almost impossible, in Kupchan’s words, to “bring the U.S. back to a liberal brand of internationalism.” Or, I would add, to bring its exponents back to the center of the foreign-policy establishment.

Other players that Podhoretz covers includes “the Realists” ( i.e., Brent Scowcroft, et al), the subset of “Realists” and the entirety of the liberal internationalists who are rooting for our defeat, our media—this section is titled “All the news that fits their spin”—who are also attempting to engineer our defeat.

Podhoretz also revisits Tet, a concrete example of America being defeated by our media.

These outtakes were just the best parts of a great essay. Just read it all.