World War IV: How It Started, What It Means,and Why We Have to Win
Back to the John F'kin' Kerry Page Back to the War Page
Norman Podhoretz
Commentary Magazine, America's Premier Monthly Magazine of Opinion
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/A11802017_1.pdf
September 2004Bob's Note: This article didn't copy well from a pdf file. If it appears choppy it's because the original article at the link above was in book format. Please forebear this and read the article. It's remarkable history.
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary,
is the author of ten books. The most recent of them, The
Norman Podhoretz Reader, a selection of his writings
from the 1950’s through the 1990’s edited by Thomas L.
Jeffers, was brought out earlier this year (Free Press). In
June, Mr. Podhoretz was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
[17]
This past spring, when it seemed that everything
that could go wrong in Iraq was going
wrong, a plague of amnesia began sweeping through
the country. Caught up in the particulars with which
we were being assaulted 24 hours a day, we seemed
to have lost sight of the context in which such details
could be measured and understood and related to
one another. Small things became large, large things
became invisible, and hysteria filled the air.
Since then, of course, and especially after the hand
over of authority on June 30 to an interim Iraqi government,
matters have become more complicated.
But the relentless pressure of events, and the continuing
onslaught both of details and of their often
tendentious or partisan interpretation, have hardly let
up at all. It is for this reason that, in what follows, I
have tried to step back from the daily barrage and to
piece together the story of what this nation has been
fighting to accomplish since September 11, 2001.
In doing this, I have drawn freely from my own
past writings on the subject, and especially from
three articles that appeared in these pages two or
more years ago.1 In some instances, I have woven
sections of these articles into a new setting; other passages
I have adapted and updated.
Telling the story properly has required more than
a straight narrative leading from 9/11 to the time of
writing. For one thing, I have had to interrupt the
narrative repeatedly in order to confront and clear
away the many misconceptions, distortions, and outright
falsifications that have been perpetrated. In
addition, I have had to broaden the perspective so as
to make it possible to see why the great struggle into
which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can
only be understood if we think of it as World War IV.
My hope is that telling the story from this perspective
and in these ways will demonstrate that the
road we have taken since 9/11 is the only safe course
for us to follow. As we proceed along this course,
questions will inevitably arise as to whether this or
that move was necessary or right; and such questions
will breed hesitations and even demands that we
withdraw from the field. Some of this happened even
in World War II, perhaps the most popular war the
United States has ever fought, and much more of it
1 “How to Win World War IV” (February 2002), “The Return of
the Jackal Bins” (April 2002), and “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine”
(September 2002). A fourth piece I used was “Israel Isn’t the Issue”
(Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2001).
A Note to the Reader
Commentary
September 2004
in World War III (that is, the cold war); and now it
is happening again, notably with respect to Iraq.
But as I will attempt to show, we are only in the
very early stages of what promises to be a very long
war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been
opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of
the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and
then in World War III, we persisted in spite of impatience,
discouragement, and opposition for as long as
it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been
called upon to do today in World War IV.
For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts,
we are up against a truly malignant force in radical
Islamism and in the states breeding, sheltering, or financing
its terrorist armory. This new enemy has al-
Reinforcing this attempt was the testimony of
Richard A. Clarke, who had been in charge of the
counterterrorist operation in the National Security
Council under Bill Clinton and then under Bush before
resigning in the aftermath of 9/11. What Clarke
for all practical purposes did—both at the hearings
and in his hot-off-the-press book, Against All Enemies—
was to blame Bush, who had been in office for
a mere eight months when the attack occurred, while
exonerating Clinton, who had spent eight long
years doing little of any significance in response to
the series of terrorist assaults on American targets
in various parts of the world that were launched on
his watch.
The point I wish to stress is not that Clarke was
exaggerating or lying.2 It is that the attack on 9/11
[18]
Commentary September 2004
2 He did, however, seem to have committed a sin of omission.
Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, reports that according
to John Lehman, one of the Republican commissioners,
“Clarke’s original testimony included ‘a searing indictment of some
Clinton officials and Clinton policies.’ That was the Clarke, evenhanded
in his criticisms of both the Bush and Clinton administrations,
whom Lehman and other Republican commissioners expected
to show up at the public hearings. It was a surprise ‘that he
would come out against Bush that way.’ Republicans were taken
aback: ‘It caught us flat-footed, but not the Democrats.’” In a different
though related context, the commission quotes material
written by Clarke while he was still in office that is inconsistent
with his more recent, much-publicized denial of any relationship
whatsoever between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Out of the Blue
The attack came, both literally and metaphorically,
like a bolt out of the blue. Literally,
in that the hijacked planes that crashed into the twin
towers of the World Trade Center on the morning
of September 11, 2001 had been flying in a cloudless
sky so blue that it seemed unreal. I happened to be
on jury duty that day, in a courthouse only a half-mile
from what would soon be known as Ground Zero.
Some time after the planes reached their targets, we
all poured into the street—just as the second tower
collapsed. And this sight, as if it were not impossible
to believe in itself, was made all the more incredible
by the perfection of the sky stretching so beautifully
over it. I felt as though I had been deposited into a
scene in one of those disaster movies being filmed (as
they used to say) in glorious technicolor.
But the attack came out of the blue in a metaphorical
sense as well. About a year later, in November
2002, a commission would be set up to investigate
how and why such a huge event could have taken us
by surprise and whether it might have been prevented.
Because the commission’s public hearings were
not held until the middle of this year’s exceptionally
poisonous presidential election campaign, they
quickly degenerated into an attempt by the Democrats
on the panel to demonstrate that the
administration of George W. Bush had been given
adequate warnings but had failed to act on them.
ready attacked us on our own soil—a feat neither
Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to
pull off—and openly announces his intention to hit
us again, only this time with weapons of infinitely
greater and deadlier power than those used on 9/11.
His objective is not merely to murder as many of us
as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis
and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the
destruction of everything good for which America
stands. It is this, then, that (to paraphrase George W.
Bush and a long string of his predecessors, Republican
and Democratic alike) we in our turn, no less
than the “greatest generation” of the 1940’s and its
spiritual progeny of the 1950’s and after, have a responsibility
to uphold and are privileged to defend.
did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that
no one ever took such a possibility seriously
enough to figure out what to do about it. Even
Clarke, who did stake a dubious claim to prescience,
had to admit under questioning by one
of the 9/11 commissioners that if all his recommendations
had been acted upon, the attack still
could not have been prevented. And in its final
report, released on July 22 of this year, the commission,
while digging up no fewer than ten
episodes that with hindsight could be seen as
missed “operational opportunities,” thought that
these opportunities could not have been acted on
effectively enough to frustrate the attack. Indeed
not—not, that is, in the real America as it existed
at the time: an America in which hobbling constraints
had been placed on both the CIA and the
FBI; in which a “wall of separation” had been
erected to obstruct communication or cooperation
between law-enforcement and national-security
agents; and in which politicians and the general
public alike were still unable and/or unwilling to
believe that terrorism might actually represent a
genuine threat.
Slightly contradicting itself, the commission said
that “the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should
not have come as a surprise.” Maybe so; and yet
there was no one, either in government or out, to
whom they did not come as a surprise, either in
general or in the particular form they took. The
commission also spoke of a “failure of imagination.”
Maybe so again; and yet the word “failure”
seems inappropriate, implying as it does that success
was possible. Surely a failure so widespread
deserves to be considered inevitable.
To the New York Times, however, the failure
was not at all inevitable. In a front-page
editorial disguised as a “report,” the Times credited
the commission’s f inal report with finding
that “an attack described as unimaginable had in
fact been imagined, repeatedly.” But not a shred
of the documentary evidence cited by the Times
for this categorical statement actually predicted
that al Qaeda would hijack commercial airliners
and crash them into buildings in New York and
Washington. Moreover, all of the evidence, such
as it was, came from the 1990’s. Nevertheless, the
Times “report” contrived to convey the impression
that in the fall of 2000 the Bush administration—
then not yet in office—had received fair warning
of an imminent attack. To bolster this impression,
the Times went on to quote from a briefing given
to Bush a month before 9/11. But the document
in question was vague about details, and in any
case was only one of many intelligence briefings
with no special claim to credibility over conf licting
assessments.
Thus the Bush administration, which had just
been excoriated in hearings held by the Senate
Intelligence Committee for having invaded Iraq
on the basis of faulty intelligence, was now excoriated
by some of the 9/11 commissioners for not
having acted on the basis of even sketchier intelligence
to head off 9/11 itself. This contradiction
elicited a mordant comment from Charles Hill,
a former government official who had been a
regular “consumer” of intelligence:
Intelligence collection and analysis is a very
imperfect business. Refusal to face this reality
has produced the almost laughable contradiction
of the Senate Intelligence Committee
criticizing the Bush administration for acting
on third-rate intelligence, even as the 9/11
commission criticizes it for not acting on
third-rate intelligence.3
However, the point I most wish to stress is that
there was something unwholesome, not to say
unholy, about the recriminations on this issue
that befouled the commission’s public hearings
and some of the interim reports by the staff. It
therefore came, so to speak, both as a shock and
as a surprise that this same unholy spirit was
almost entirely exorcised from the final report. In
the end the commission agreed that no American
President and no American policy could be held
responsible in any degree for the aggression
against the United States unleashed on 9/11.
Amen to that. For the plain truth is that the
sole and entire responsibility rests with al Qaeda,
along with the regimes that provided it with protection
and support. Furthermore, to the extent
that American passivity and inaction opened the
door to 9/11, neither Democrats nor Republicans,
and neither liberals nor conservatives, are in
a position to derive any partisan or ideological
advantage. The reason, quite simply, is that much
the same methods for dealing with terrorism
were employed by the administrations of both
parties, stretching as far back as Richard Nixon
in 1970 and proceeding through Gerald Ford,
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (yes, Ronald Reagan),
George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and right up to
the pre-9/11 George W. Bush.
[19]
World War IV
3 Hill was referring here to the hearings of the 9/11 commission,
not its final report, which did not single out the Bush administration
for criticism on this score.
Commentary September 2004
[20]
when the American embassy in Kuwait was
bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the
withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut,
the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was
kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley
was the fourth American to be kidnapped in
Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between
1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were
killed in captivity).
These kidnappings were apparently what led
Reagan, who had sworn that he would never
negotiate with terrorists, to make an unacknowledged
deal with Iran, involving the trading of arms
for hostages. But whereas the Iranians were paid off
handsomely in the coin of nearly 1,500 antitank missiles
(some of them sent at our request through
Israel), all we got in exchange were three American
hostages—not to mention the disruptive and damaging
Iran-contra scandal.
In September 1984, six months after the murder
of Buckley, the U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was
hit by yet another truck bomb (also traced to Hizbullah).
Again Reagan sat still. Or rather, after giving the
green light to covert proxy retaliations by Lebanese
intelligence agents, he put a stop to them when one
such operation, directed against the cleric thought to
be the head of Hizbullah, failed to get its main target
while unintentionally killing 80 other people.
It took only another two months for Hizbullah to
strike once more. In December 1984, a Kuwaiti
airliner was hijacked and two American passengers
employed by the U.S. Agency for International
Development were murdered. The Iranians, who
had stormed the plane after it landed in Tehran,
promised to try the hijackers themselves, but instead
allowed them to leave the country. At this
point, all the Reagan administration could come up
with was the offer of a $250,000 reward for information
that might lead to the arrest of the hijackers.
There were no takers.
The following June, Hizbullah operatives hijacked
still another airliner, an American one
(TWA f light 847), and then forced it to f ly to
Beirut, where it was held for more than two
weeks. During those weeks, an American naval
officer aboard the plane was shot, and his body
was ignominiously hurled onto the tarmac. For
this the hijackers were rewarded with the freeing
of hundreds of terrorists held by Israel in exchange
for the release of the other passengers.
The record speaks dismally for itself. From
1970 to 1975, during the administrations of
Nixon and Ford, several American diplomats were
murdered in Sudan and Lebanon while others were
kidnapped. The perpetrators were all agents of one
or another faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO). In Israel, too, many American
citizens were killed by the PLO, though, except for
the rockets fired at our embassy and other American
facilities in Beirut by the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP), these attacks were not
directly aimed at the United States. In any case, there
were no American military reprisals.
Our diplomats, then, were for some years already
being murdered with impunity by Muslim terrorists
when, in 1979, with Carter now in the White
House, Iranian students—with either the advance or
subsequent blessing of the country’s clerical ruler,
Ayatollah Khomeini—broke into the American embassy
in Tehran and seized 52 Americans as hostages.
For a full five months, Carter dithered. At last, steeling
himself, he authorized a military rescue operation
which had to be aborted after a series of mishaps that
would have fit well into a Marx Brothers movie like
Duck Soup if they had not been more humiliating
than comic. After 444 days, and just hours after Reagan’s
inauguration in January 1981, the hostages were
finally released by the Iranians, evidently because
they feared that the hawkish new President might
actually launch a military strike against them.
Yet if they could have foreseen what was coming
under Reagan, they would not have been so fearful.
In April 1983, Hizbullah—an Islamic terrorist organization
nourished by Iran and Syria—sent a suicide
bomber to explode his truck in front of the American
embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Sixty-three employees,
among them the Middle East CIA director, were
killed and another 120 wounded. But Reagan sat still.
Six months later, in October 1983, another
Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American
barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S.
Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81.
This time Reagan signed off on plans for a retaliatory
blow, but he then allowed his Secretary of
Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because
it might damage our relations with the
Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly
solicitous). Shortly thereafter, the President
pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.
Having cut and run in Lebanon in October,
Reagan again remained passive in December,
A “Paper Tiger”
World War IV
[21]
to adopt the approach to terrorism taken by all his
predecessors. During the elder Bush’s four-year
period in the White House, there were several attacks
on Americans in Turkey by Islamic terrorist
organizations, and there were others in Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. None of these was as
bloody as previous incidents, and none provoked
any military response from the United States.
In January 1993, Bill Clinton became President.
Over the span of his two terms in office,
American citizens continued to be injured or
killed in Israel and other countries by terrorists
who were not aiming specifically at the United
States. But several spectacular terrorist operations
occurred on Clinton’s watch of which the
U.S. was most emphatically the target.
The first, on February 26, 1993, only 38 days
after his inauguration, was the explosion of a truck
bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade
Center in New York. As compared with what
would happen on September 11, 2001, this was a
minor incident in which “only” six people were
killed and over 1,000 injured. The six Muslim terrorists
responsible were caught, tried, convicted,
and sent to prison for long terms.
But in following the by-now traditional pattern
of treating such attacks as common crimes, or the
work of rogue groups acting on their own, the
Clinton administration willfully turned a deaf ear
to outside experts like Steven Emerson and even
the director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, who
strongly suspected that behind the individual culprits
was a terrorist Islamic network with (at that
time) its headquarters in Sudan. This network,
then scarcely known to the general public, was
called al Qaeda, and its leader was a former Saudi
national who had fought on our side against the
Soviets in Afghanistan but had since turned against
us as fiercely as he had been against the Russians.
His name was Osama bin Laden.
The next major episode was not long in trailing
the bombing of the World Trade Center. In April
1993, less than two months after that attack, former
President Bush visited Kuwait, where an attempt
was made to assassinate him by—as our own investigators
were able to determine—Iraqi intelligence
agents. The Clinton administration spent two more
months seeking approval from the UN and the
“international community” to retaliate for this egregious
assault on the United States. In the end, a few
cruise missiles were fired into the Iraqi capital of
Baghdad, where they fell harmlessly onto empty
buildings in the middle of the night.
Both the United States and Israel denied that they
were violating their own policy of never bargaining
with terrorists, but as with the arms-for-hostages
deal, and with equally good reason, no one believed
them, and it was almost universally assumed that
Israel had acted under pressure from Washington.
Later, four of the hijackers were caught but
only one wound up being tried and jailed (by
Germany, not the United States).
The sickening beat went on. In October 1985,
the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, was hijacked
by a group under the leadership of the PLO’s Abu
Abbas, working with the support of Libya. One of
the hijackers threw an elderly wheelchair-bound
American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard.
When the hijackers attempted to escape in a plane,
the United States sent Navy fighters to intercept it
and force it down. Klinghoffer’s murderer was eventually
apprehended and sent to prison in Italy, but
the Italian authorities let Abu Abbas himself go.
Washington—evidently having exhausted its repertoire
of military reprisals—now confined itself to
protesting the release of Abu Abbas. To no avail.
Libya’s involvement in the Achille Lauro hijacking
was, though, the last free pass that country’s dictator,
Muammar Qaddafi, was destined to get from the
United States under Reagan. In December 1985, five
Americans were among the 20 people killed when
the Rome and Vienna airports were bombed, and
then in April 1986 another bomb exploded in a discotheque
in West Berlin that was a hangout for
American servicemen. U.S. intelligence tied Libya to
both of these bombings, and the eventual outcome
was an American air attack in which one of the
residences of Qaddafi was hit.
In retaliation, the Palestinian terrorist Abu
Nidal executed three U.S. citizens who worked at
the American University in Beirut. But Qaddafi
himself—no doubt surprised and shaken by the
American reprisal—went into a brief period of
retirement as a sponsor of terrorism. So far as we
know, it took nearly three years (until December
1988) before he could pull himself together to the
point of undertaking another operation: the
bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland, in which a total of 270 people lost their
lives. Of the two Libyan intelligence agents who
were tried for planting the bomb, one was convicted
(though not until the year 2001) and the
other acquitted. Qaddafi himself suffered no
further punishment from American warplanes.
In January 1989, Reagan was succeeded by the
elder George Bush, who, in handling the fallout
from the destruction of Pan Am 103, was content
In the years immediately ahead, there were many
Islamic terrorist operations (in Turkey, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Yemen, and Israel) that
were not specifically aimed at the United States
but in which Americans were nevertheless murdered
or kidnapped. In March 1995, however, a
van belonging to the U.S. consulate in Karachi,
Pakistan, was hit by gunfire, killing two American
diplomats and injuring a third. In November of the
same year, five Americans died when a car bomb
exploded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, near a building
in which a U.S. military advisory group lived.
All this was trumped in June 1996 when another
building in which American military
personnel lived—the Khobar Towers in Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia—was blasted by a truck bomb. Nineteen
of our airmen were killed, and 240 other
Americans on the premises were wounded.
In 1993, Clinton had been so intent on treating
the World Trade Center bombing as a common
crime that for some time afterward he refused
even to meet with his own CIA director. Perhaps
he anticipated that he would be told things by
Woolsey—about terrorist networks and the states
sponsoring them—that he did not wish to hear,
because he had no intention of embarking on the
military action that such knowledge might force
upon him. Now, in the wake of the bombing of the
Khobar Towers, Clinton again handed the matter
over to the police; but the man in charge, his FBI
director, Louis Freeh, who had intimations of an
Iranian connection, could no more get through to
him than Woolsey before. There were a few arrests,
and the action then moved into the courts.
In June 1998, grenades were unsuccessfully
hurled at the U.S. embassy in Beirut. A little later,
our embassies in the capitals of Kenya (Nairobi)
and Tanzania (Dar es Salaam) were not so lucky.
On a single day—August 7, 1998—car bombs went
off in both places, leaving more than 200 people
dead, of whom twelve were Americans. Credit for
this coordinated operation was claimed by al
Qaeda. In what, whether fairly or not, was widely
interpreted, especially abroad, as a move to distract
attention from his legal troubles over the Monica
Lewinsky affair, Clinton fired cruise missiles at an
al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where bin
Laden was supposed to be at that moment, and at
a building in Sudan, where al Qaeda also had a
base. But bin Laden escaped harm, while it remained
uncertain whether the targeted factory in
Sudan was actually manufacturing chemical
weapons or was just a normal pharmaceutical plant.
This fiasco—so we have learned from former
members of his administration—discouraged any
further such action by Clinton against bin Laden,
though we have also learned from various sources
that he did authorize a number of covert counterterrorist
operations and diplomatic initiatives leading to
arrests in foreign countries. But according to Dick
Morris, who was then Clinton’s political adviser:
The weekly strategy meetings at the White
House throughout 1995 and 1996 featured
an escalating drumbeat of advice to President
Clinton to take decisive steps to crack down
on terrorism. The polls gave these ideas a
green light. But Clinton hesitated and failed
to act, always finding a reason why some
other concern was more important.
In the period after Morris left, more began
going on behind the scenes, but most of it remained
in the realm of talk or planning that went
nowhere. In contrast to the f lattering picture of
Clinton that Richard Clarke would subsequently
draw, Woolsey (who after a brief tenure resigned
from the CIA out of sheer frustration) would
offer a devastating retrospective summary of the
President’s overall approach:
Do something to show you’re concerned.
Launch a few missiles in the desert, bop them
on the head, arrest a few people. But just keep
kicking the ball down field.
Bin Laden, picking up that ball on October 12,
2000, when the destroyer USS Cole had docked
for refueling in Yemen, dispatched a team of suicide
bombers. The bombers did not succeed in
sinking the ship, but they inflicted severe damage
upon it, while managing to kill seventeen American
sailors and wounding another 39.
Clarke, along with a few intelligence analysts, had
no doubt that the culprit was al Qaeda. But the heads
neither of the CIA nor of the FBI thought the case
was conclusive. Hence the United States did not so
much as lift a military finger against bin Laden or the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where he was now
ensconced and being protected. As for Clinton, so
obsessively was he then wrapped up in a futile
attempt to broker a deal between the Israelis and the
Palestinians that all he could see in this attack on an
American warship was an effort “to deter us from our
mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle
East.” The terrorists, he resoundingly vowed,
would “fail utterly” in this objective.
Never mind that not the slightest indication
existed that bin Laden was in the least concerned
[22]
Commentary September 2004
over Clinton’s negotiations with the Israelis and the
Palestinians at Camp David, or even that the Palestinian
issue was of primary importance to him as
compared with other grievances. In any event, it was
Clinton who failed, not bin Laden. The Palestinians
under Yasir Arafat, spurning an unprecedentedly
generous offer that had been made by the Israeli
prime minister Ehud Barak with Clinton’s enthusiastic
endorsement, unleashed a new round of
terrorism. And bin Laden would soon succeed all
too well in his actual intention of striking another
brazen blow at the United States.
The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on
to do on September 11 was unquestionably a
product of his contempt for American power. Our
persistent refusal for so long to use that power
against him and his terrorist brethren—or to do so
effectively whenever we tried—reinforced his conviction
that we were a nation on the way down,
destined to be defeated by the resurgence of the same
Islamic militancy that had once conquered and converted
large parts of the world by the sword.
As bin Laden saw it, thousands or even millions
of his followers and sympathizers all over the Muslim
world were willing, and even eager, to die a
martyr’s death in the jihad, the holy war, against the
“Great Satan,” as the Ayatollah Khomeini had
called us. But, in bin Laden’s view, we in the West,
and especially in America, were all so afraid to die
that we lacked the will even to stand up for ourselves
and defend our degenerate way of life.
Bin Laden was never reticent or coy in laying
out this assessment of the United States. In an interview
on CNN in 1997, he declared that “the
myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in
my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims”
[23]
World War IV
when the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan.
That the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan would
almost certainly have failed if not for the arms supplied
to them by the United States did not seem to
enter into the lesson he drew from the Soviet defeat.
In fact, in an interview a year earlier he had
belittled the United States as compared with the
Soviet Union. “The Russian soldier is more courageous
and patient than the U.S. soldier,” he said
then. Hence, “Our battle with the United States
is easy compared with the battles in which we
engaged in Afghanistan.”
Becoming still more explicit, bin Laden wrote
off the Americans as cowards. Had Reagan not
taken to his heels in Lebanon after the bombing of
the Marine barracks in 1983? And had not Clinton
done the same a decade later when only a few
American Rangers were killed in Somalia, where
they had been sent to participate in a “peacekeeping”
mission? Bin Laden did not boast of this as
one of his victories, but a State Department dossier
charged that al Qaeda had trained the terrorists
who ambushed the American servicemen. (The
ugly story of what happened to us in Somalia was
told in the film version of Mark Bowden’s Black
Hawk Down, which reportedly became Saddam
Hussein’s favorite movie.)
Bin Laden summed it all up in a third interview
he gave in 1998:
After leaving Afghanistan the Muslim fighters
headed for Somalia and prepared for a
long battle thinking that the Americans were
like the Russians. The youth were surprised
at the low morale of the American soldiers
and realized, more than before, that the
American soldier was a paper tiger and after
a few blows ran in defeat.
Bin Laden was not the first enemy of a democratic
regime to have been emboldened by
such impressions. In the 1930’s, Adolf Hitler was
convinced by the failure of the British to arm
themselves against the threat he posed, as well as
by the policy of appeasement they adopted toward
him, that they were decadent and would never
fight no matter how many countries he invaded.
Similarly with Joseph Stalin in the immediate
aftermath of World War II. Encouraged by the
rapid demobilization of the United States, which to
him meant that we were unprepared and unwilling
Miscalculation
to resist him with military force, Stalin broke the
pledges he had made at Yalta to hold free elections
in the countries of Eastern Europe he had occupied
at the end of the war. Instead, he consolidated his
hold over those countries, and made menacing gestures
toward Greece and Turkey.
After Stalin’s death, his successors repeatedly
played the same game whenever they sensed a
weakening of the American resolve to hold them
back. Sometimes this took the form of maneuvers
aimed at establishing a balance of military power in
their favor. Sometimes it took the form of using
local Communist parties or other proxies as their
instrument. But thanks to the decline of American
power following our withdrawal from Vietnam—a
decline ref lected in the spread during the late
1970’s of isolationist and pacifist sentiment, which
was in turn reflected in severely reduced military
spending—Leonid Brezhnev felt safe in sending his
own troops into Afghanistan in 1979.
It was the same decline of American power, so
uncannily personified by Jimmy Carter, that, less
than two months before the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, had emboldened the Ayatollah
Khomeini to seize and hold American hostages.
To be sure, there were those who denied that this
daring action had anything to do with Khomeini’s
belief that the United States under Carter
had become impotent. But this denial was impossible
to sustain in the face of the contrast between
the attack on our embassy in Tehran and the
protection the Khomeini regime extended to the
Soviet embassy there when a group of protesters
tried to storm it after the invasion of Afghanistan.
The radical Muslim fundamentalists ruling Iran
hated Communism and the Soviet Union at least
as much as they hated us—especially now that the
Soviets had invaded a Muslim country. Therefore
the difference in Khomeini’s treatment of the two
embassies could not be explained by ideological
or political factors. What could and did explain it
was his fear of Soviet retaliation as against his expectation
that the United States, having lost its
nerve, would go to any lengths to avoid the use
of force.
And so it was with Saddam Hussein. In 1990, with
the first George Bush sitting in the White House,
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in what was widely,
and accurately, seen as a first step in a bid to seize
control of the oil fields of the Middle East. The
elder Bush, fortified by the determination of Margaret
Thatcher, who was then prime minister of
England, declared that the invasion would not stand,
and he put together a coalition that sent a great
military force into the region. This alone might well
have frightened Saddam Hussein into pulling out of
Kuwait if not for the wave of hysteria in the United
States about the tens of thousands of “body bags”
that it was predicted would be flown home if we
actually went to war with Iraq. Not unreasonably,
Saddam concluded that, if he held firm, it was we
who would blink and back down.
The fact that Saddam miscalculated, and that
in the end we made good on our threat, did not
overly impress Osama bin Laden. After all—
dreading the casualties we would suffer if we
went into Baghdad after liberating Kuwait and
defeating the Iraqi army on the battlefield—we
had allowed Saddam to remain in power. To bin
Laden, this could only have looked like further
evidence of the weakness we had shown in the
ineffectual policy toward terrorism adopted by a
long string of American Presidents. No wonder
he was persuaded that he could strike us massively
on our own soil and get away with it.
Yet just as Saddam had miscalculated in 1990-91,
and would again in 2002, bin Laden misread how
the Americans would react to being hit where,
literally, they lived. In all likelihood he expected a
collapse into despair and demoralization; what he
elicited instead was an outpouring of rage and an
upsurge of patriotic sentiment such as younger
Americans had never witnessed except in the
movies, and had most assuredly never experienced
in their own hearts and souls, or, for those
who enlisted in the military, on their own f lesh.
In that sense, bin Laden did for this country
what the Ayatollah Khomeini had done before
him. In seizing the American hostages in 1979, and
escaping retaliation, Khomeini inflicted a great
humiliation on the United States. But at the same
time, he also exposed the foolishness of Jimmy
Carter’s view of the world. The foolishness did not
lie in Carter’s recognition that American power—
military, economic, political, and moral—had been
on a steep decline at least since Vietnam. This was all
too true. What was foolish was the conclusion Carter
drew from it. Rather than proposing policies aimed
at halting and then reversing the decline, he took the
position that the cause was the play of historical
forces we could do nothing to stop or even slow
down. As he saw it, instead of complaining or
f lailing about in a vain and dangerous effort to
recapture our lost place in the sun, we needed
first to acknowledge, accept, and adjust to this inexorable
historical development, and then to act
upon it with “mature restraint.”
[24]
Commentary September 2004
In “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947), the
theoretical defense he constructed of the strategy
Truman adopted for fighting the war ahead, George
F. Kennan (then the director of the State Department’s
policy planning staff, and writing under the
pseudonym “X”) described that strategy as
a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant
containment of Russian expansive tendencies . . .
by the adroit and vigilant application of
counterforce at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points.
In other words (though Kennan himself did not
use those words), we were faced with the prospect of
nothing less than another world war; and (though in
later years, against the plain sense of the words that
he himself did use, he tried to claim that the “counterforce”
he had in mind was not military) it would
not be an entirely “cold” one, either. Before it was
over, more than 100,000 Americans would die on the
far-off battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, and the
blood of many others allied with us in the political
and ideological struggle against the Soviet Union
would be spilled on those same battlefields, and in
many other places as well.
For these reasons, I agree with one of our leading
contemporary students of military strategy,
Eliot A. Cohen, who thinks that what is generally
called the “cold war” (a term, incidentally,
coined by Soviet propagandists) should be given
a new name. “The cold war,” Cohen writes, was
actually “World War III, which reminds us that
not all global conf licts entail the movement of
multimillion-man armies, or conventional front
lines on a map.” I also agree that the nature of
the conf lict in which we are now engaged can
only be fully appreciated if we look upon it as
World War IV. To justify giving it this name—
rather than, say, the “war on terrorism”—Cohen
lists “some key features” that it shares with
World War III:
that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a
mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts;
that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise,
and resources, if not of vast numbers
of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time;
and that it has ideological roots.
There is one more feature that World War IV
shares with World War III and that Cohen does
not mention: both were declared through the
enunciation of a presidential doctrine.
The Truman Doctrine of 1947 was born with
the announcement that “it must be the policy of
[25]
World War IV
In one fell swoop, the Ayatollah Khomeini made
nonsense of Carter’s delusionary philosophy in the
eyes of very large numbers of Americans, including
many who had previously entertained it. Correlatively,
new heart was given to those who, rejecting
the idea that American decline was inevitable, had
argued that the cause was bad policies and that the
decline could be turned around by returning to the
better policies that had made us so powerful in the
first place.
The entire episode thereby became one of the
forces behind an already burgeoning determination
to rebuild American power that culminated in the
election of Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned on
the promise to do just that. For all the shortcomings
of his own handling of terrorism, Reagan did in fact
keep his promise to rebuild American power. And it
was this that set the stage for victory in the multifaceted
cold war we had been waging since 1947, when
the United States under President Harry Truman
(aroused by Stalin’s miscalculation) decided to resist
any further advance of the Soviet empire.
Few, if any, of Truman’s contemporaries would
have dreamed that this product of a Kansas City
political machine, who as a reputedly run-of-the-mill
U.S. Senator had spent most of his time on taxes and
railroads, would rise so resolutely and so brilliantly to
the threat represented by Soviet imperialism. Just so,
54 years later in 2001, another politician with a small
reputation and little previous interest in foreign
affairs would be confronted with a challenge perhaps
even greater than the one faced by Truman; and he
too astonished his own contemporaries by the way he
rose to it.
Enter the Bush Doctrine
the United States to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities
or by outside pressure.” Beginning with
a special program of aid to Greece and Turkey,
which were then threatened by Communist
takeovers, the strategy was broadened within a
few months by the launching of a much larger
and more significant program of economic aid
that came to be called the Marshall Plan. The
purpose of the Marshall Plan was to hasten the
reconstruction of the war-torn economies of
Western Europe: not only because this was a
good thing in itself, and not only because it
would serve American interests, but also because
it could help eliminate the grievances on which
Communism fed. But then came a Communist
coup in Czechoslovakia. Following as it had upon
the installation by the Soviet Union of puppet
regimes in the occupied countries of East
Europe, the Czech coup demonstrated that
economic measures would not be enough by
themselves to ward off a comparable danger
posed to Italy and France by huge local Communist
parties entirely subservient to Moscow. Out
of this realization—and out of a parallel worry
about an actual Soviet invasion of Western Europe—
there emerged the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).
Containment, then, was a three-sided strategy
made up of economic, political, and military components.
All three would be deployed in a shifting
relative balance over the four decades it took to win
World War III.4
If the Truman Doctrine unfolded gradually,
revealing its entire meaning only in stages, the
Bush Doctrine was pretty fully enunciated in a
single speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress
on September 20, 2001. It was then clarified
and elaborated in three subsequent statements:
Bush’s first State of the Union address on January
29, 2002; his speech to the graduating class of the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 1,
2002; and the remarks on the Middle East he
delivered three weeks later, on June 24. This difference
aside, his contemporaries were at least
as startled as Truman’s had been, both by the
substance of the new doctrine and by the transformation
it bespoke in its author. For here was
George W. Bush, who in foreign affairs had been
a more or less passive disciple of his father, talking
for all the world like a f iery follower of
Ronald Reagan.
In sharp contrast to Reagan, generally considered
a dangerous ideologue, the first President
Bush—who had been Reagan’s Vice President
and had then succeeded him in the White
House—was often accused of being deficient in
what he himself inelegantly dismissed as “the
vision thing.” The charge was fair in that the
elder Bush had no guiding sense of what role the
United States might play in reshaping the postcold-
war world. A strong adherent of the “realist”
perspective on world affairs, he believed that
the maintenance of stability was the proper
purpose of American foreign policy, and the only
wise and prudential course to follow. Therefore,
when Saddam Hussein upset the balance of
power in the Middle East by invading Kuwait in
1991, the elder Bush went to war not to create a
new configuration in the region but to restore
the status quo ante. And it was precisely out of
the same overriding concern for stability that,
having achieved this objective by driving Saddam
out of Kuwait, Bush then allowed him to remain
in power.
As for the second President Bush, before 9/11
he was, to all appearances, as def icient in
the “vision thing” as his father before him. If he
entertained any doubts about the soundness of
the “realist” approach, he showed no sign of it.
Nothing he said or did gave any indication that
he might be dissatisf ied with the idea that his
main job in foreign affairs was to keep things on
an even keel. Nor was there any visible indication
that he might be drawn to Ronald Reagan’s more
“idealistic” ambition to change the world, especially
with the “Wilsonian” aim of making it “safe