Since 9/11, there have been several books that qualify as essential reading in the new world in which we find ourselves:
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (2003) (an extraordinarily well-researched analysis, by one of the premier writers on the Left, of the intellectual foundations of Islamism).
Lee Harris, Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (2004) (a compelling historical account of the nature of social ruthlessness and of the difficulty and necessity of a response by a civilized society).
Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: Europe and America in the New World Order (2004) (a brilliant elegant essay on the naiveté of utopian Europe and its ultimate dependence on the American power it deprecates).
To these books we can now add a fourth: Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007), published today. An essay drawn from the book appears in the Wall Street Journal, concluding as follows:
It is impossible at this point to predict how and when the battle of Iraq will end. But from the vitriolic debates it has unleashed we can already say for certain that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 did not do to the Vietnam syndrome what Pearl Harbor did to the old isolationism. The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way.
But is it strong enough in its present incarnation to do what it did to the honor of this country in 1975? Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.
Anyone reading Ian Buruma’s review of Podhoretz’s book in The New York Review of Books will have cause for pessimism about the quality of the domestic debate. At various points in his review, Buruma calls Podhoretz “obtuse,” “unhinged,” a “fanatic,” a “right-wing ideologue,” someone “suffering from severe ideological blindness,” whose assertions are a “cheap form of calumny” and “symptomatic of ideological fanaticism,” someone with an “obsession.”
Buruma deals with the support that Podhoretz’s judgments have received from such people on the Left as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman by turning on them too — as “foolish” people who “betray” the principles they claim to be defending. They are, he says, simply “tub thumpers for Bush’s war.”
The New York Review of Books posted Buruma’s review yesterday, the same day the New York Times ran the full-page “General Betray Us” ad from MoveOn.org. Together they serve as Exhibits A and B of the problem Podhoretz discusses in his important book.
ADDENDUM: From James Lileks’ Bleat today:
Six years.
It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years — Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran. The idea that it would have stalled and ended up in diffuse oblique arguments about political timetables would have been immensely depressing. There was a model for this sort of thing, a template. Advance. But that requires cultural confidence, a loose agreement on the goals, the rationale, the nature of the enemy and the endgame. We don’t have those things. Imagine telling someone six years ago Iran would be allowed, by default, to make nuclear weapons. They would wonder what the hell we’d done with half a decade, plus change. What part of 25 years of Death to America didn’t we get, exactly?
UPDATE: A somewhat better review of Podhoretz’s book at American Thinker.