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Executive
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2007
Book Reviews |
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World War
IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Endurance Neoconservative stalwart Norman
Podhoretz delivers a passionate defense of current American foreign policy in
his new book World War
IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Podhoretz argues that the
cold war was World War III, and we are now engaged in a lengthy battle
against Islamofascism, one part of which is the war in Iraq. Both opponents
and advocates of ending the war in Iraq quickly may reconsider their
positions after reading World War
IV. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 4, “From World War III to World War IV,” pp. 69-71: Both as a theoretical
construct and as a guide to policy, the new Bush Doctrine could not have been
further from the "Vietnam syndrome"—the loss of
self-confidence and the concomitant spread of neo-isolationist and pacifist
sentiment throughout the American body politic, and most prominently into the
elite institutions of American culture, that began during the last years of
the Vietnam War. I have already pointed to a likeness between the Truman
Doctrine's declaration that World War III had started and the Bush Doctrine's
equally portentous declaration that 9/11 had plunged us into World War IV.
But fully to measure the distance traveled by the Bush Doctrine, I want to
look now at the other presidential doctrines that preceded it, beginning
with the one developed by Richard Nixon in the late 1960s precisely in
response to the Vietnam syndrome. Contrary to legend,
our military intervention in Vietnam under John F. Kennedy in the early
1960s, far from being unpopular, was backed by every sector of mainstream
opinion as a legitimate application of containment. In such bastions of the
old foreign policy establishment as the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Brookings Institution, and in periodicals like the New York Times, the
Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, the consensus was that
saving South Vietnam from a Communist takeover was a vital interest of the United States. The
prevailing attitude was perfectly expressed in a Times editorial under the headline, “Prospects in
Vietnam." It began by speaking of "Communist aggression"
against South Vietnam that had been "launched as a calculated and
deliberate operation by the Communist leaders of the North" and ended
with the admonition that "Free World forces. . . still have a chance in
South Vietnam, and every effort should be made to save the situation."
Even as late as 1965, when the originally minuscule antiwar movement was
beginning to pick up steam, David Halberstam, who had been the Times correspondent in Vietnam in the early days and would
subsequently write in derisive and contemptuous terms about the American involvement
there, still believed that Vietnam is a legitimate part of the (U.S.) global commitment
.. . perhaps one of only five or six nations of the world that is truly ital
to U.S. interests. At least up until 1965, indeed, virtually the only
criticism from the mainstream concerned such tactical issues as how best to
fight the new kind of war Vietnam represented. But with Lyndon B. Johnson
having succeeded Kennedy in the White House, doubts began to arise about the
political wisdom of the intervention: was it perhaps "the wrong war, in
the wrong place, at the wrong time"—an unwise extension of containment
to a situation for which it had not been designed and to a region in which it
did not apply? What, however, would turn out to be more decisive than doubts
like these were the questions that were being asked within ever-widening
circles of the intellectual community. These questions were not about whether
the war was being conducted effectively or whether it really did represent a
proper application of containment; they were about whether we had any right
to fight all. No
sooner asked than answered: to the writers and academics and the student
radicals who were raising these questions, what the United States was doing in Vietnam was
immoral at best, and positively evil at worst. With few exceptions, even
those in the antiwar camp who dissociated themselves from the view that the
Communists deserved to win and that "Amerika"—as the radicals took
to spelling the name in order to suggest an association with Nazi Germany—was
waging a criminal war did so not because they were outraged by this kind of
talk but because it "gave the movement a bad name" and made it
difficult to recruit "ordinary people" into its ranks. Nevertheless,
by the time Richard Nixon had replaced Johnson in 1968, a surprisingly large
number of "ordinary people"—even if not large enough to prevail at
the polls—had successfully been recruited. Even more surprisingly, most of
the not-so-ordinary people who had led the country into Vietnam were now
scurrying to join the antiwar parade and even to get to the head of it. Most
of them justified this turnabout by claiming that, thanks to Johnson's
blunders, the war could no longer be won, but there were others who, while
still pretending that Kennedy's decision to intervene had not been a folly,
went all the way with the radicals in proclaiming that under Johnson it had
grown into a crime. To this new political reality the Nixon Doctrine was a reluctant
accommodation. As going into Vietnam under the aegis of containment had
worked to undermine support for that strategy, Nixon—along with his chief
adviser in foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger—thought that getting out of
Vietnam could, if managed in the right way, conversely work to create the
new strategy that had become necessary. World War
IV is a provocative book, often rife with political sniping, and with a
message that many will find hard to swallow: our current path will take a
long time to reach an end. Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2007 |
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Go to Executive
Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November
2007 issue
of Executive Times URL for this review: ttp://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/World
War IV.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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