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COMMENTARY
August 21, 2004
World War IV
The expression "World War IV" surfaced just after Sept. 11th 2001. It came from Eliot Cohen of the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. It has been most effectively used as a concept by R. James Woolsey the man who quit in frustration as President Bill Clinton's CIA director and who should have been re-appointed to that post after George Tenet quit by President George W. Bush. The idea is to make people appreciate that wars don't necessarily have conventional front lines and trenches. The "Cold War" with Soviet Communism -- which was won finally by Reaganite America about 1989 -- was as much a planetary confrontation as the previous fight with the Axis Powers with even more at stake. And it wasn't bloodless: more than 100 000 American soldiers died on Korean Vietnamese and other remote battlefields together with innumerable allies and proxies in the prosecution of that war. Let us therefore call it "World War III". And as the conditions for World War II did not begin with the invasion of Poland but with Adolf Hitler's ascension to power in 1933 or perhaps as many argue with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 so also "World War IV" began long before 9/11. The attacks on New York and Washington came literally out of the blue and yet for decades Americans and U.S. interests had been targeted by Jihadists -- many of them enjoying the patronage of up to half-a-dozen rogue states. The only new thing was that after 9/11 America resolved to strike back. Norman Podhoretz has now used the phrase. He for many years edited Commentary Magazine in New York and is a grandfather to what are colloquially called the "neoconservatives" -- those old-fashioned liberals many of them prominent Jewish intellectuals who began calling themselves "conservative" when they realized that the word "liberal" had been appropriated by the enemies of liberty. He did this in a long essay that first appeared a fortnight ago entitled World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win . Any reader who aspires to be well-informed regardless of political persuasion will read that essay (easily Google-searched). Mr. Podhoretz whom I should say is one of my intellectual heroes draws out the comparison between World Wars IV and III. He compares the "Bush Doctrine" first enunciated in the President's famous speech of Sept. 20th 2001 and the "Truman Doctrine" of 1947 which announced that the U.S. would stand up to the challenge of Soviet expansionism. The policy of "containment" followed; the creation of NATO; and almost immediately a series of murky skirmishes in which Communist takeovers of Greece Turkey and other countries were averted. (We forget today that in the chaos and misery after World War II France and Italy were also near falling to Communist parties whose allegiance to Stalin's Soviet Union was unconcealed.) Mr. Podhoretz spells out for those who have not yet got it how completely the pre-2001 foreign policy of the U.S. has been changed by Mr. Bush; as much as the pre-1947 policy was changed by Truman once he fully realized that the Soviets were no longer war allies but deadly enemies of the free world. The surprise in both cases was huge and in neither case was it clear from the beginning that the new Doctrine would hold. For want of space I leave to Mr. Podhoretz his full masterly description of the four pillars of the Bush Doctrine which are 1. the repudiation of moral relativism; 2. the repudiation of all psychologizing or "victim" explanations for the growth of Islamic fanaticism; 3. the need for pre-emption of future threats; and most controversially 4. the resumption of America's pro-active role in spreading constitutional democracy and political liberty. The essay is optimistic by the standards of the current discussion. It reminds us how many setbacks we experienced through World War III. It worries that the same elite intellectual forces of anti-Americanism appeasement and defeatism which took more than a decade to assemble against the Vietnam War were able to re-assemble after 9/11 almost instantaneously. He prays that America has the stamina for the long fight ahead. My own fear is on the flip side: that the arguments against appeasement and defeatism are not being effectively articulated and that the deeply religious nature of the enemy is not being spelled out except by a few unpopular hacks in the newspapers. For the enemy we face in World War IV truly does not resemble any that we defeated in World Wars I II or III. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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