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World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Norman Podhoretz Edition: 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 IslamofascismBook Review: A cogent analysis Summary: 5 Stars
Podhoretz does the literate public a favor by presenting the strategic perspective from which any reasonable analysis of the current basic conflict between Islamism and its many adversaries must begin.
For some reason, the Left insists on regarding al Qaeda and its relations as avenging angels of history, the apotheosis of the poor brown people come back to revenge themselves on the white oppressor-capitalists.
Underlying this is the notion that al Qaeda and its relations do not pose an "existential threat" - or, in the words of one of my law professors, "they can't destroy us."
This is an interesting tack from which to begin. Podhoretz highlights the great geopolitical framework created by the military and diplomatic dispositions resulting from the conclusion of the first Long War (1914-1945) - or the war against German Militarism. The reader ought to be reminded that the Wehrmacht managed to kill something like 5 million or so of its adversaries' armies in 1914-1918, while incurring about 1.8 million casualties, and managed to kill something like 30 million in the second, while suffering roughly 3 million casualties. The USSR suffered something like 27 million casualties. Would not one presume that such catastrophic losses, resulting from armies certainly attempting to pose an "existential threat" to their adversaries, cause national death?
Yet they did not. So perhaps whether an enemy poses an "existential threat" ought not to be construed as the apocalyptic and therefore at least quasi-mythical event of instanteous thermonuclear extinction envisaged in the Cold War. It is unlikely that even this event would in fact lead to complete "existential" destruction.
So the "existential threat" meme offered by the political critics - and they are only dealing with the domestic political aspect of the question, shamefully - is basically a straw man. The truth is one does not wield one's national defense solely in the face of existential threats. Perhaps rather one might do better to consider the threat posed by Islamism + WMD in major USA city as one which, should it occur, would result in a USA and strategic environment completely beyond the imagination of Bush's critics. It is true that the current battle, in its current phase, has already forced some changes on us; the political critics would counter that it is Bush, and not the Islamists, who have done this.
All I can say is, read Podhoretz with an open mind and attention not to the domestic political ramifications of the analysis, but with attention first to the strategic situation, with its historical roots in the geopolitical framework that emerged in 1945 - and then imagine it was your job to figure out how to preserve all the good of that system for yourself and for the other participating nations in the face of "real existing" Islamism, who are assuredly not the avenging angels of politics or teleological history they are apparently, even if only rhetorically, taken to be by so many.
And a word on "Islamofascism" - fascism as it actually occurred was a species of authoritarian movement that arose in virtually every country of Europe following the First World War. It arose in Italy, Germany, France, Romania, Finland, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, Austria - even England had a variety of fascist party. The first cause is the collapse of Empire, the second is the militarization of society required by the First World War, the third is severe economic depression. Every one of these countries' fasicsms bears certain similarities to one another, notably total control by a charismatic leader or group who promise a return to a mythologized past, but most are milieu-specific; they are ultimately idiosyncratic. Italian fascism, for example, is quite distinct from National Socialism, and both are different from Franco's government, although Spain and Italy are more alike. All three are importantly different from Romanian or Finnish fascism. All hated the liberal West, which was regarded as decadent. Ultimately, all were attempts to re-create a legitimate authoritarian antidote to the loss of the former government and against the temptation of Bolshevism - much more real a threat than is remembered (because the socialist-academic movement has obscured its role - seriously, I'm not being an idiot right-wingere here). "Islamism" - i.e., Salafi Islam as the engine of revolutionary brigades, the purpose of establishing a Caliph, anti-Semitism - is fascism in the Islamic world. Islamo-fascism is therefore a perfectly appropriate description to apply here.
Summary of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against IslamofascismFor 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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