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BACK TO : The Bush Doctrine - Key Speeches & Analysis
The dangerous return of the World Warriors by John Brown THE DANGEROUS RETURN OF THE WORLD WARRIORS - JOHN BROWN (PDPR) In his September 20 speech at New York University, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry cited a study that uncovered 23 different rationales used by the Bush administration, Congress and the media to justify the war in Iraq. Many of these justifications -- such the need to destroy Weapons of Mass Destruction -- turned out to be based on false premises. Others -- such as the assumption that a U.S.-imposed regime change in Iraq would lead to the country's democratization -- increasingly appear to be naïve illusions. Supporters of the war are undoubtedly aware that their explanations for its necessity have been exposed as erroneous and misleading. But they won't give up their crusade for the sanctity of their cause. While reality leaves them no choice but to abandon some of their former reasons for sending Americans to their death in Iraq (e.g., WMDs), they are currently revitalizing an intellectual construct used since 9/11 to push the U.S. to fight against its perceived enemies abroad. According to this concept, America is involved in a conflict of greater proportions and importance than just a war on terror: Our country is engaged in no less than a World War. Iraq is simply a battle in this war; and if the Iraqi campaign is not going as well as it should at the present moment, that is not a reason why the United States should not continue waging a global conflict on which its survival as a nation depends. This idea of a new World War, however, is a dangerous one, and does not stand up to even a layman's examination. But before looking at its flaws, let's look at its origins. It's a World War Two days after 9/11, columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times that "if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead." Friedman's world-war metaphor was slightly revised and expanded upon by Eliot A. Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, in his widely-read article, "World War IV: Let's Call This Conflict What It Is" (The Wall Street Journal November 20, 2001). Cohen states at the onset that the war in question "did not begin with bin Laden and will not end with his death." The most accurate way to name "this war" is World War IV, the Cold War being World War III. Like the Cold War, World War IV is "global"; "will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts"; "will require mobilization of skill, expertise and recourses"; "may go on for a long time" and "has ideological roots." The enemy in this war, Cohen emphasizes, is not terrorism, but militant Islam. Afghanistan, he is quick to add, "constitutes just one front in World War IV," and "the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped Al Quaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction." Since the appearance of Cohen's article, the World War idea has been repeated in a considerable number of publications, with surprisingly little variation, except that it is sometimes characterized, a la Friedman, as World War III. Among the first to trumpet Cohen's concept was Norman Podhoretz in Commentary (February 2002) in his "How to Win World War IV." Other World War IV advocates have included former CIA director R. James Woolsey, Robert Kagan and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Inigo Thomas in Slate, Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe, and Larry Haas, a former Clinton Administration official. Scholar Harold Bloom seems to share their vision when he states that "fundamentalist Islam conducts a world-wide terror onslaught&our wars with fundamentalist Islam will continue, and will broaden; others will be attacked. We have no option except imposing a Roman peace" (The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2003). TV news anchor Bill O'Reilly has not failed to get into the "it's a World War" act, noting that "the sad truth is that most people don't even know that World War III is under way and have little understanding of the stakes" (Nashville City Paper, September 14, 2003). Bring Back the World War In recent weeks, with the news from Iraq going worse and worse, and with the war there increasingly an issue in a tightly contested presidential election, pro-Iraq war advocates, desperate for a way to justify the deaths of over 1,000 Americans soldiers in a conflict fought for reasons that are still unclear, are resurfacing the World War IV paradigm with a vengeance. This fall-season world-war assault is led by none other than Norman Podhoretz, in a lengthy article in the September Commentary, "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," in which he declares that "radical Islamism" has as its objective "not merely to murder as many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before him, [this new enemy] is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America stands." The we're-in-a-world-war charge led by General Podhoretz has been joined by many avid and vocal foot soldiers. David Brooks, in The New York Times (August 29), argues that "We are in the beginning of this war [on Islamic extremism], where we were against Bolshevism around 1905 or Fascism in the early 1930's, with enemies that will continue that gain strength, thanks to the demographic bulge in the Middle East&This fight will organize our politics for a generation, as the Cold War did." Columnist William Safire confirms he's on board the world-war bandwagon in his New York Times column (August 31) stating how Podhoretz's recent essay is a "brilliant" reminder that "the sustained resolve that won the three global wars of the past century can prevail in the present generation's rendez-vous with terror." World War supporters are not limited to conservative pundits in America's newspaper of record. In a September 2 posting in townhall.com, Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (a policy institute focusing on terrorism created after the 9/11), tells us what "Winning World War IV" entails -- "de-legitimizing terrorism." Commentator Lawrence Kudlow, writing in The Washington Times ("The Case for WWIV," September 12), says that Podhoretz's piece is "must reading" and "makes a trenchant case for George W. Bush as wartime visionary." Brooks, Safire, May, and Kudlow are only four of the GIs in Podhoretz's army. There are others. World War IV is also cited as a defining factor of our times in a September 13 column for Knight Rider by Peter Huessy, a member of the newly reactivated Committee on the Present Danger ("dedicated to protecting and expanding democracy by winning the global war against terrorism and the movements and ideologies that drive it," according to its homepage.) And Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, doesn't fail to join the "let's fight the world over" chorus with his piece in The Baltimore Sun (September 14) stating that the war in Iraq "isn't a stand-alone war such as the first Gulf war or the Spanish-American War. The war in Iraq is actually one theater of the greater war against Islamic terrorism, just as Europe in 1944 was simply a theater of World War II." He proclaims, in rhetoric worthy of Podhoretz: "But one thing is certain: We will win, in Iraq and in the broader war. The fate of civilization depends on it." Let's not forget about The Weekly Standard, a true believer in the World War paradigm. An article in its September 24 online edition by Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, currently in Baghdad with Multi-National Forces-Iraq, argues that Iraq isn't like Vietnam, but like Guadalcanal, a U.S. counteroffensive against the Japanese which lasted six months and resulted in 6,000 American deaths. Iraq is "one campaign of many in a global war to defeat the terrorists and their sponsors. Like the United States in the Pacific in 1943, we are in a war of national survival that will be long, hard, and fraught with casualties." President George W. Bush, we all know, doesn't read newspapers, but he appears to have been briefed by his staff about the World Warriors' pronouncements being again in circulation. That's probably why he stated in early September that the war on terrorism "is a long-lasting ideological struggle. Frankly, the war on terror is somewhat misnamed, though. It ought to be called the struggle [against] a totalitarian point of view that uses terror as a tool to intimidate the free" (David Ignatius, "Bush's Honest Mistake," The Washington Post, September 3). The White House evidently briefed Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi on the latest reason why the United States invaded his country. "The War in Iraq," he said during his recent visit to the U.S., "is really not only an Iraqi war, it's a war for the civilized world, to fight terrorists and terrorism." The terrorists "want to undermine us in Iraq and to move from Iraq to undermine the region." "And once they do this," he added, "they will hit hard at the civilized world and in Washington and New York and London and Paris and Ankara and Geneva, elsewhere, everywhere in the civilized world." (Elizabeth Bumiller, "Allawi, in U.S., is Presented as a Symbol of Iraqi Progress," The New York Times, September 22). Is a World War Necessary? The World Warriors' efforts to justify the Iraq disaster in terms of its being merely a battle in a must-win global conflict have not gone unrefuted. Commentators have pointed out that the intellectual underpinnings of the WW III/IV view are seriously flawed. Here are my thoughts on the subject, developed in part from articles by Jonathan Clarke, Ahmad Faruqui, Andrew Greeley, Keith Platfoot, Justin Raimondo, and Paul Graig Roberts. First, the claim by Podhoretz that "radical Islamism" intends to conquer America is vastly overstated. Some fanatics may want to seriously harm us, but conquer the United States? That is stretching paranoia beyond the imagination, worthy of the film Red Dawn, which depicts a Soviet invasion of the United States. The threat of the conquest of the homeland by heathen foreigners may help the World Warriors' argument that we must be engaged in a planetary conflict -- how else to confront an invader best than by mobilizing our resources and fighting him globally -- but it is simply not credible to conceive of the United States under the control of "radical Islamism." Second, while as an enemy to be defeated "radical Islamism" is more specific than "terror," it is still a very vague term, certainly less definable than ideologies (e.g., Communism, fascism, Nazism in the Cold War and World War II) or nation states (e.g., Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I). We have a pretty good idea of who Osama bin Laden is, but who specifically is a radical Islamist? When does an Islamist become "radical"? When he wants to destroy the United States? But there conceivably are quite a number of people who want to destroy the United States who are not "radical Islamists." Third, by calling our conflict with terrorists a "World War," Cohen, Podhoretz & Co. are suggesting that all of the world is -- or at least should be -- engaged in it. True, we have "coalition forces" in Iraq, and foreign governments cooperate with us in eliminating terrorist threats. But many countries, including some of our oldest allies, in fact do not want to take part in the "war on terror" on our terms, and especially because of how it is being waged in Iraq. Indeed, our essentially unilateral action in Iraq has increasingly made our war on terror a non-World War. It's an American, not a world, war. Fourth, Cohen, Podhoretz & Co. use the concept of a "World War" to deny the possibility of using non-military means to combat terrorism, which they naively suggest can be dealt with only by exterminating "radical Islamism," excluding the possibility of diminishing the terrorist threat by increasing communication and mutual understanding with moderates in Muslim societies, which many foreign policy experts, including in the U.S. armed forces, realize is a key to winning "hearts and minds." Indeed, Podhoretz approves of what he calls the "Bush doctrine" because, for the President, to "move into the future meant to substitute preemption for deterence, and to rely on American military might rather than the 'soft power' represented by the UN and the other relics of World War III." To win WWIV, and somehow -- in the process of killing Muslims -- democratizing the Middle East, Podhoretz calls for the incessant application of American military might, for which he has enormous admiration, as is seen in his Dr. Strangelove praise of U.S. weaponry: "When&the B-52's and the 15,000 'Daisy Cutter' bombs were unleashed [in Afghanistan], they temporarily banished the ghost of Vietnam and undercut the fears of some and the hopes of others that we were heading into a quagmire." Podhoretz has to admit one paragraph later, however, that "Osama bin Laden was not captured and al Quaeda was not totally destroyed." Fifth, the World Warriors, misuse, simplify and sometimes falsify history to make their arguments (Podhoretz claims, for example, that the Cold War was "coined by Soviet propagandists"; does this mean Walter Lippmann, the first to use the word in 1947 to describe U.S.- USSR tensions, was an agent working for Joseph Stalin?). The analogies the World Warriors make among various historical periods do violence to what is history's most important contribution to human understanding -- that the past is complex and at best a tentative guide to action. Podhoretz's efforts to link all terrorists acts since the 1970s into a broad, cohesive hate-America movement that culminated into 9/11 is especially unconvincing because it so unsubtly forces events into a pattern clearly conceived a priori. Sixth, the Warriors' pronouncements that America's conflict with terrorists is a "World War" probably fuels the latter's ambitions more than it discourages them from attacking the United States. When an obscure anti-American fanatic inclined to terrorism hears about the proclamations of Cohen, Podhoretz and Co., won't he be emboldened to act now that he's been told (by the enemy, no less) that he's playing a major role in history, challenging the most powerful nation on earth on a planetary scale? Haven't disparate, minor terrorist groups throughout the globe been, thanks to the proclamations of our Warriors, "legitimized" (both in their own eyes and for others) by having been given the status of global jihadists against the Great Satan? Similarly, dictatorial regimes become acceptable to the U.S. because they are supposedly involved in eliminating "terrorists." Finally, and most important, the World Warriors don't talk about how much the global conflict they so ardently advocate will cost the United States in human, economic, and political terms. Rather, Podhoretz suggests that a new World War will cleanse America of the "Vietnam syndrome," of a "loss of self-confidence." That this process could lead to the loss of American lives is of little concern to him (this obliviousness to individual human beings is evident in his statement, regarding a deal with the Iranians in the Reagan years, that "whereas the Iranians were paid off handsomely in the coin of nearly 1,500 antimissiles&all we got in exchange were three American hostages"). In economic terms, can the U.S., with its huge deficit and continuing social problems, afford the kind of total mobilization the World Warriors advocate? And could the Warriors' Orwellian conflict lead to even greater reductions of American freedom -- our greatest national treasure -- than we are now enduring in the era of the Patriot Act? The World Warriors' grandiose plans for perpetual war (what else can one call it, since they don't tell us how or when it will end) could lead to the ultimate, and tragic, irony: America posing a greater danger to itself than its enemies do. |