World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (Vintage) | 
| Author: Norman Podhoretz
Publisher: Vintage
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Rating:  70 reviews
Sales Rank: 278723
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0307386023
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
EAN: 9780307386021
ASIN: 0307386023
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
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Product Description
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 provocative 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 65 more reviews...
 A provocative thesis about the very real threat September 11, 2007
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
263 out of 313 found this review helpful
The thesis of this book is that the United States and the free world are now engaged in a fourth world- war, this one against radical Islam. The 'third world war' ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and now according to Podhoretz the West faces another long- term struggle which will be decided not in a year or two but in the decades ahead. The point - man of this war at present is President Bush who Podhoretz sees as continually defamed and slandered by anti- American elements in the far - too- liberal for his taste Western media.
While I am fundamentally in sympathy with his approach and believe that he rightfully sees the insidious intentions of a radical revolutionary fundamentalist Islam , I have reservations about his approach. One reason for this is that when we think of War we tend to think of great military forces in direct collision. True, the United States and the Soviet Union did not come to the ultimate face off, as the Allies did against the Axis but there were two massive military and political empires in direct contention.
Here there is , as Podhoretz is well aware of, an assymetrical situation. Therefore he sees it as a new kind of war, a new kind of struggle which is especially demanding in the propaganda and media spheres. As I understand it he reads the intentions of Radical Islam rightly. Whether it be the Sunni Salafi Wahhabite strains or the Shiite Messianic strains there is an ideology whose ultimate goal is putting all of Mankind under the flag of Islam. The rise in this regard of a radical Iran on the verge of nuclear weapons is at this moment a key and most threatening development in the overall struggle.
In regard to Iran Podhoretz is most forthright and persuasive. He outlines the dangers of a nuclear Iran, and he rightly characterizes the regime as an Islamofascist one. He understands Gulf Oil, America's allies in the Middle East would all be put in great jeopardy by a nuclear Iran. And he strongly advocates as major step in the war the preempting of the Iranian nuclear threat.
Iran also plays a part in another aspect of the Islamic threat, the element of Muslim penetration into Europe. There is by this time a whole literature suggesting that in a few decades post- Christian Europe my well be Islamic.
But there are great weaknesses in the world of Islam, including the major failure to within their own societies confront the modern world and properly adapt to it. The Islamic world is by and large a backward world not simply in its political structure but in its command of the knowledge, and technique of modernity.
So my own understanding is that in the civilizational confrontations of the future it is not really poised for mastery and conquest. Its forces are too scattered, divided, and weak. Consider the chaos in Iraq with not simply Sunnite- Shiite conflicts but with internal Shiite conflicts. To my mind the danger of radical Islam and Islam's anti- American stand is in its power to weaken the U.S. isolate it from its allies, and generally serve as auxillary to the forces which present a greater real threat in the future, a renascent Russia, and far more importantly ,an ambitious rapidly developing China.
On the whole I believe Podhoretz rightly points to an ongoing, and increasing danger presented to the U.S. and the West by radical Islam. I believe he is right in seeing that this danger will not go away soon. And that the U.S. struggle will be a long term and global one. The historian Michael Oren in surveying two - hundred years of American involvement in the Middle East showed many of the U.S. involvement in that part of the world has been deeper and longer than we knew. It may be that the struggle of the kind Podhoretz rightly indicates the U.S. to be in will be going on in another one hundred years from now.
On the whole this is an informative and rich work which anyone who takes true interest in the present world- situation would do well to read.
Should Be Required Reading September 17, 2007
L. Young (West Orange, NJ USA)
149 out of 193 found this review helpful
Outstanding analysis of the five years post 911. Podoretz places The War on Terror (or what he calls WW IV) in the context of the last sixty years of U.S. foreign policy. Drawing valid parallels between the response of the media, academia, and political leaders to WW 2, and the Cold War (or what he calls WWIII) Podhoretz has a clear vision of the dangers of the world today. He compares Bush favorably to Truman and asserts that history will prove the President to be a great president in the foreign policy arena. However, what Podhoretz fails to do is to point out explicitly the dangers of pulling out of Iraq before achieving success. Should be required reading.
 The Truth Hurts September 18, 2007
Vance (buffalo, new york United States)
127 out of 168 found this review helpful
Must reading for liberals and conservatives alike. In fact, every voter should be given a copy for mandatory reading. This was a concise and insightful review of the history of US foreign policy, from the post-WW II "Truman Doctrine," which formulated the plan to fight WW III, known as the Cold War, to the Bush Doctrine, designed as a road map to fight Islamofacism in WW IV.
Hopefully, our Presidential candidates are reading similar books to avoid the grave and costly mistakes of their predecessors as detailed in this interesting, and highly readable foreign affairs book.
Some may bristle at the defense of Bush's foreign policy initiative, including his doctrine of preemptive defense. That aside, it provides a cogent and readable explanation for its underpinnings rather than the puerile name-calling that the left is prone to engage in.
 Points for irony September 11, 2007
J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA)
53 out of 157 found this review helpful
During the 1960s and 70s the desire of a great many American intellectuals to excuse and minimize the brutality, oppression, and existential threat of the Soviet Union spawned a new movement which in time evolved into neo-conservatism. Men like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol did not abandon much of their essential liberalism when they began attacking their colleagues for their willful blindness, indeed they maintained certain inherently liberal beliefs not the least of them that the state could work as force for society good and an essentially positivist view of humanity marching towards progress.
On at least one score the neocons attacks on much of the intellectual establishment in the pages of journals like Commentary were certainly correct - many professors were too quick to ignore the oppression and suffering of those living under Communist rule and also showed an alarming tendency to twist reality in order to create equivalencies between the misdeeds of the West and the East. Thus while Pinochet was a murderer and a thug, on his worst day, indeed in his whole career, he murdered fewer people than did Pol Pot over his entire career. Likewise, American intervention and suppression of democratic movements in places like Iran and Guatemala were not merely misguided by terrible attacks on the principals on which America was built, they were still neither as bloody nor as direct as when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and Prague. Podhoretz and Kristol were right, in abandoning deep analysis those intellectuals who engaged in such obfuscation betrayed the inherent mission of their fields bringing disgrace on themselves and their enterprise.
Which in turn brings one to Norman Podhoretz's newest book, penned as he approaches his 78th year, "World War IV: the Long Struggle Against Islamofacism." One can only wonder at the irony of Podhoretz who began his career attacking intellectuals for failures their analysis now engaging in the twisting of facts in order to obscure reality and serve his particular political aims.
Beginning where Podhoretz begins, his core argument, that Islamic fundamentalism represents a serious challenge to the freedom on which Western civilization rests, is correct. Those who think Al Queda represents no threat ignore history and the essential importance of Hobbes' thesis, that any society which can not provide basic security to its members will surely fail. Unfortunately, from there Podhoretz speeds into intellectual nadirs with alarming speed.
While Podhoretz embraces the equivalency between World Wars I, II, III (the cold war) and the current struggle) such comparisons seems no better than the ones which as a young man he assaulted as dangerous, foolish, and self serving. The first three World Wars represented true existential threats to Western Civilization, whether Britain and the French Republic fell beneath the Kaiser's absolutism, Nazi Totalitarianism, or the whole of humanity vanished in a flash at the exchange of thousands of nuclear weapons. In all of these struggles the world lay in the balance and failure or missteps could well have left notions of human freedom and autonomy as footnotes in a history book.
Yet by no thesis is the current struggle comparable. Indeed, if they even inhabit a continuum the current struggle sits well on the far side of the others, the danger not that our enemy will destroy us, but that in our fear we will snuff out our own values. And this is only the beginning of the obfuscation peppered thorough this work any of which might well find their equivalence in the self serving analysis of the Soviets by the intellectual Left in the 60s and 70s. Equating Bin Laden with Hitler and Stalin is not only not helpful, it represents the sort of dangerous abuse of language and history which of which George Orwell warned. Yes all three are terribly bad men, but even if United and Southwest Airlines turned over their fleets to Al Queda they could not approach the body count or systematic horror unleashed by Stalinism and Fascism with body counts ranking in the tens of millions.
Sadly such comparisons, equivalencies, and violence done to language lay throughout this polemical work. Thus, while the term Islamofascism should be given kudos as propaganda for the number of emotional hot buttons it strikes in a mere five syllables, one can only wonder what it means? Fascism represents the worship of an all powerful state as the holder of all authority, political, military, and cultural. By any construction that hardly describes Bin Laden who sees the state as an imposed Western apostasy meant to destroy Islam. And while Baathist Iraq, with its Totalitarian regime and cult of personality certainly fits the fascist label perhaps better than any state in the second half of the 20th Century, but was Islamic in no sense, with Christians occupying powerful positions and power divided on the basis of clan loyalty not religion.
Just as Podhoretz's early intellectual adversaries engaged in their flawed effort in order to justify an unjustifiable world view of moral equivalency, so "World War IV" will go to any length, stretch any fact, argue for any absurdity in order to justify current American policy in the Middle East and not acknowledge its mistakes. Thus in a hint of Cheney's famous "last throes" Podhoretz tells us that the destruction, anarchy, and violence in Bagdad should be taken of our success and our opponents desperation. Nor does he end there; on the home front Podhoretz engages in the worst sort of demagogy, attacking those who disagree with him in the most strident, hateful, irresponsible terms. To disagree with the President is to support America's enemies. To question Bush's policy is to "root for defeat."
Having cut my intellectual teeth on Commentary in my teens and twenties, when that journal published some of the most thoughtful and provocative articles of time it pains me to read how far Podhoretz has fallen and his willingness to sacrifice his intellectual integrity for political aims. Let it be a reminder to us all that hubris is a pitfall that may wait beneath our next step.
 Demagoguery Unrestrained September 24, 2007
George W. Liebmann
52 out of 116 found this review helpful
Surely Mr. Podhoretz is the ultimate armchair warrior. The legions he assails are all helpfully labeled, in the sort of vocabulary familiar to readers of the old Daily Worker: "traditionalist conservative", "rabid paleo-conservative","old foreign policy establishment" and so on. That the people thus characterized might be engaged in their own individual quests for truth must not be acknowledged; this might require analysis and refutation. Far better to rely on prejudices against disembodied categories, who can be further marginalized, as in the case of Buchanan, et al, by piling on additional adjectives. Mr. Scowcroft, we are told, is an "enemy of Israel" On what evidence? His celebration of the fact that earlier American policies kept the United States out of middle eastern wars for 50 years?
The same dehumanized style of rhetoric informs the analysis of the fruits of the policy he celebrates. Iraquis, we are told, are enjoying "unimaginable liberties". There are sizable `no go' areas in cities like Washington and Baltimore that have 300 murders a year. Baghdad now has 300 murders every three days. "Unimaginable liberties?" Only if the progress from dictatorship to anarchy is regarded as a triumph of liberty. It was a wiser judge than Mr. Podhoretz who once observed that few things have done more to bring mankind out of the abyss than the habit of acquiescence to the law as it is. The Middle East, as Podhoretz says, has indeed been "unfrozen", but unfortunately in the same sense that Europe was "unfrozen" by the First World War.
Fixed in his armchair, Mr. Podhoretz is no detail man. He tells us of "the war that the Arab/Muslim world has been waging to wipe the Jewish state off the map." So much for Turkey and post-Sadat Egypt, both nations of seventy million. When one is waving the bloody shirt, one must make a good job of it, lest one not create what one professes to fear.
The Shiites and Sunnis, we are told, are "waging a campaign to defeat democracy". More accurately, they are waging a campaign to defeat alien rule, ours and each other's. There is no reason to think that a multi-ethnic democracy can be created where no one has experienced limited government. As the same judge (Learned Hand) once observed, "an alien master is worst of all." Why Ambassador Galbraith and others should be derided for pointing to the example of early Switzerland as a very loose confederation passes understanding. But those who do nothing for federalism at home can scarcely be expected to propagate it abroad.
Negotiation, Mr. Podhoretz tells us, is a futile and even deplorable exercise. "We cannot put our faith in the words of tyrants." But for a hundred years after the Congress of Vienna, the world did just that. Mutuality of interest and verification have their claims. So does the efflux of time, free economic intercourse, and travel and communication. In the context of Iraq, Mr. Podhoretz proclaims that "the futility of all this became unmistakably obvious." But we are still waiting for evidence that the inspections, ongoing when war broke out, were ineffective.
"Moral equivalence" between Israel and its adversaries is deplored. Certainly Israel is a freer country, though not always a less virulently nationalistic one. Many of the dire warnings of Chaim Weizmann about the harm done to it by its own terrorists have come true. Thanks to its proportional representation system, there is also not much to choose between Hamas and some of the parties represented in the Knesset and frequently influential there. Israel's American friends continue to pass over the dys-functionality of its electoral system; they were less kind to that of the French Third and Fourth Republic, from which it was derived, and their uncritical attitude serves Israel badly.
We can look forward to more of a "steady barrage of criticism" until Mr. Podhoretz brings "World War IV to a victorious end." He professes admiration for Truman's containment policy. He should heed the words of its greatest exponent, George F. Kennan: "The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else's tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion and intolerance as crimes in themselves-as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government-this sort of thing will continue to occur."
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