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
for democracy” by encouraging the spread to as
many other countries as possible of the liberties
we Americans enjoyed.
Which is why Bush’s address of September 20,
2001 came as so great a surprise. Delivered only nine
days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, and officially declaring that the United
States was now at war, the September 20 speech
put this nation, and all others, on notice that whether
or not George W. Bush had been a strictly conventional
realist in the mold of his father, he was now
politically born again as a passionate democratic
idealist of the Reaganite stamp.
It was also this speech that marked the emergence
of the Bush Doctrine, and that pointed
[26]
Commentary September 2004
4 The analysis offered by Kennan in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—
as against his own later revisionist interpretation of it—
turned out to be right in almost every important detail, except for
the timing. He thought it would take only fifteen years for the
strategy to succeed in causing the “implosion” of the Soviet empire.
just as clearly to World War IV as the Truman
Doctrine had to War World III. Bush did not
explicitly give the name World War IV to the
struggle ahead, but he did characterize it as a
direct successor to the two world wars that had
immediately preceded it. Thus, of the “global
terrorist network” that had attacked us on our
own soil, he said:
We have seen their kind before. They’re the
heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th
century. By sacrificing human life to serve their
radical visions, by abandoning every value except
the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism,
Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will
follow that path all the way to where it ends in
history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.
As this passage, coming toward the beginning
of the speech, linked the Bush Doctrine to the
Truman Doctrine and to the great struggle led by
Franklin D. Roosevelt before it, the wind-up section
demonstrated that if the second President
Bush had previously lacked “the vision thing,” his
eyes were blazing with it now. “Great harm has
been done to us,” he intoned toward the end.
“We have suffered great loss. And in our grief
and anger we have found our mission and our
moment.” Then he went on to spell out the substance
of that mission and that moment:
The advance of human freedom, the great
achievement of our time and the great hope
of every time, now depends on us. Our nation,
this generation, will lift the dark threat
of violence from our people and our future.
We will rally the world to this cause by our
efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we
will not falter, and we will not fail.
Finally, in his peroration, drawing on some of
the same language he had been applying to the
nation as a whole, Bush shifted into the first person,
pledging his own commitment to the great
mission we were all charged with accomplishing:
I will not forget the wound to our country
and those who inflicted it. I will not yield, I
will not rest, I will not relent in waging this
struggle for freedom and security for the
American people. The course of this conflict
is not known, yet its outcome is certain.
Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have
always been at war, and we know that God is
not neutral between them.
Not even Ronald Reagan, the “Great Communicator”
himself, had ever been so eloquent in
expressing the “idealistic” impetus behind his
conception of the American role in the world.5
This was not the last time Bush would sound
these themes. Two-and-a-half years later, at a moment
when things seemed to be going badly in the
war, it was with the same ideas he had originally
put forward on September 20, 2001 that he sought
to reassure the nation. The occasion would be a
commencement address at the Air Force Academy
on June 2, 2004, where he would repeatedly place
the “war against terrorism” in direct succession to
World War II and World War III. He would also
be unusually undiplomatic in making no bones
about his rejection of realism:
For decades, free nations tolerated oppression
in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In
practice, this approach brought little stability
and much oppression, so I have changed
this policy.
And again, even less diplomatically:
Some who call themselves realists question
whether the spread of democracy in the Middle
East should be any concern of ours. But
the realists in this case have lost contact with
a fundamental reality: America has always
been less secure when freedom is in retreat;
America is always more secure when freedom
is on the march.
To top it all off, he would go out of his way to
assert that his own policy, which he properly justified
in the first place as a better way to protect
American interests than the alternative favored
by the realists, also bore the stamp of the Reaganite
version of Wilsonian idealism:
This conflict will take many turns, with setbacks
on the course to victory. Through it all,
our confidence comes from one unshakable
belief: We believe in Ronald Reagan’s words
that “the future belongs to the free.”
The first pillar of the Bush Doctrine, then,
was built on a repudiation of moral relativism
and an entirely unapologetic assertion of
the need for and the possibility of moral judgment
in the realm of world affairs. And just to
make sure that the point he had first made on
September 20, 2001 had hit home, Bush returned
to it even more outspokenly and in greater detail
[27]
World War IV
5 In expressing his determination to win the war, however, Bush
was mainly reaching back to the language of Winston Churchill,
who vowed as World War II was getting under way in 1940: “We
shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end.”
in the State of the Union address of January 29,
2002.
Bush had won enthusiastic plaudits from many
for the “moral clarity” of his September 20 speech,
but he had also provoked even greater dismay and
disgust among “advanced” thinkers and “sophisticated”
commentators and diplomats both at home
and abroad. Now he intensified and exacerbated
their outrage by becoming more specific. Having
spoken in September only in general terms about
the enemy in World War IV, Bush proceeded in
his second major wartime pronouncement to single
out three such nations—Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea—which he described as forming an “axis
of evil.”
Here again he was following in the footsteps of
Ronald Reagan, who had denounced the Soviet
Union, our principal enemy in World War III, as
an “evil empire,” and who had been answered with
a veritably hysterical outcry from chancelleries and
campuses and editorial pages all over the world.
Evil? What place did a word like that have in the
lexicon of international affairs, assuming it would
ever occur to an enlightened person to exhume it
from the grave of obsolete concepts in any connection
whatsoever? But in the eyes of the “experts,”
Reagan was not an enlightened person. Instead, he
was a “cowboy,” a B-movie actor, who had by some
freak of democratic perversity landed in the White
House. In denouncing the Soviet empire, he was
accused either of signaling an intention to trigger
a nuclear war or of being too stupid to understand
that his wildly provocative rhetoric might do so
inadvertently.
The reaction to Bush was perhaps less hysterical
and more scornful than the outcry against Reagan,
since this time there was no carrying-on about a
nuclear war. But the air was just as thick with the
old sneers and jeers. Who but an ignoramus and a
simpleton—or a fanatical religious fundamentalist,
of the very type on whom Bush was declaring
war—would resort to archaic moral absolutes like
“good” and “evil”? On the one hand, it was egregiously
simple-minded to brand a whole nation as
evil, and on the other, only a fool could bring himself
to believe, as Bush (once more like Reagan)
had evidently done in complete and ingenuous
sincerity, that the United States, of all countries,
represented the good. Surely only a know-nothing
illiterate could be oblivious of the innumerable
crimes committed by America both at home and
abroad—crimes that the country’s own leading intellectuals
had so richly documented in the by-now
standard academic view of its history.
Here is how Gore Vidal, one of those intellectuals,
stated the case:
I mean, to watch Bush doing his little war dance
in Congress . . . about “evildoers” and this “axis
of evil”. . . I thought, he doesn’t even know what
the word axis means. Somebody just gave it to
him. . . . This is about as mindless a statement as
you could make. Then he comes up with about
a dozen other countries that have “evil” people
in them, who might commit “terrorist acts.”
What is a terrorist act? Whatever he thinks is a
terrorist act. And we are going to go after them.
Because we are good and they are evil. And we’re
“gonna git ’em.”
This was rougher and cruder than the language
issuing from editorial pages and think tanks and foreign
ministries and even most other intellectuals, but
it was no different from what nearly all of them
thought and how many of them talked in private.6
As soon became clear, however, Bush was not
deterred. In subsequent statements he continued
to uphold the first pillar of his new doctrine
and to affirm the universality of the moral
purposes animating this new war:
Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic
or impolite to speak the language of right and
wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require
different methods, but not different
moralities. Moral truth is the same in every
culture, in every time, and in every place. . . .
We are in a conf lict between good and evil,
and America will call evil by its name.
Then, in a fascinating leap into the great theoretical
debate of the post-cold-war era (though
without identifying the main participants), Bush
came down squarely on the side of Francis
Fukuyama’s much-misunderstood view of “the
end of history,” according to which the demise of
Communism had eliminated the only serious
competitor to our own political system7:
[28]
Commentary September 2004
6 It is worth noting that Churchill, who had been the target of
many derogatory epithets in his long career but who was never regarded
even by his worst enemies as “simple-minded,” had no hesitation
in attaching a phrase like “monster of wickedness” to Hitler.
Nor did the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose mind was,
if anything, overcomplicated rather than too simple, have any problem
in her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, with calling
both Nazism and Communism “absolute evil.”
7 Fukuyama did not return the compliment. While not exactly rejecting
the Bush Doctrine, he would later criticize it and call for a “recalibration.”
He would do this more in sorrow than in anger, but still in
terms that were otherwise not always easy to distinguish from those
of what I characterize below as the respectable opposition.
If the first of the four pillars on which the
Bush Doctrine stood was a new moral attitude,
the second was an equally dramatic shift in the conception
of terrorism as it had come to be defined in
standard academic and intellectual discourse.
Under this new understanding—confirmed over
and over again by the fact that most of the terrorists
about whom we were learning came from prosperous
families—terrorism was no longer considered a
product of economic factors. The “swamps” in which
this murderous plague bred were swamps not of
poverty and hunger but of political oppression. It was
only by “draining” them, through a strategy of
“regime change,” that we would be making ourselves
safe from the threat of terrorism and simultaneously
giving the peoples of “the entire Islamic world” the
freedoms “they want and deserve.”
In the new understanding, furthermore, terrorists,
with rare exceptions, were not individual
psychotics acting on their own but agents of organizations
that depended on the sponsorship of
various governments. Our aim, therefore, could
not be merely to capture or kill Osama bin Laden
and wipe out the al Qaeda terrorists under his direct
leadership. Bush vowed that we would also
uproot and destroy the entire network of interconnected
terrorist organizations and cells “with
global reach” that existed in as many as 50 or 60
countries. No longer would we treat the members
of these groups as criminals to be arrested by
the police, read their Miranda rights, and
brought to trial. From now on, they were to be
regarded as the irregular troops of a military alliance
at war with the United States, and indeed
the civilized world as a whole.
Not that this analysis of terrorism had exactly
been a secret. The State Department itself had a list
of seven state sponsors of terrorism (all but two of
which, Cuba and North Korea, were predominantly
Muslim), and it regularly issued reports on terrorist
incidents throughout the world. But aside from such
things as the lobbing of a cruise missile or two, diplomatic
and/or economic sanctions that were inconsistently
and even perfunctorily enforced, and a number
of covert operations, the law-enforcement approach
still prevailed.
September 11 changed much—if not yet all—of
that; still in use were atavistic phrases like “bringing
the terrorists to justice.” But no one could any longer
dream that the American answer to what had been
done to us in New York and Washington would
begin with an FBI investigation and end with a series
of ordinary criminal trials. War had been declared on
the United States, and to war we were going to go.
But against whom? Since it was certain that
Osama bin Laden had masterminded September 11,
and since he and the top leadership of al Qaeda were
holed up in Afghanistan, the first target, and thus the
first testing ground of this second pillar of the Bush
Doctrine, chose itself.
Before resorting to military force, however,
Bush issued an ultimatum to the extreme
Islamic radicals of the Taliban who were then ruling
Afghanistan. The ultimatum demanded that
they turn Osama bin Laden and his people over to
[29]
World War IV
The 20th century ended with a single surviving
model of human progress, based on non-negotiable
demands of human dignity, the rule of
law, limits on the power of the state, respect for
women and private property and free speech
and equal justice and religious tolerance.
Having endorsed Fukuyama, Bush now brushed
off the political scientist Samuel Huntington,
whose rival theory postulated a “clash of civilizations”
arising from the supposedly incompatible
values prevailing in different parts of the world:
When it comes to the common rights and
needs of men and women, there is no clash of
civilizations. The requirements of freedom
apply fully to Africa and Latin America and
the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the
Islamic nations want and deserve the same
freedoms and opportunities as people in
every nation. And their governments should
listen to their hopes.
The Second Pillar
us and that they shut down all terrorist training
camps there. By rejecting this ultimatum, the
Taliban not only asked for an invasion but, under
the Bush Doctrine, also asked to be overthrown.
And so, on October 7, 2001, the United States—
joined by Great Britain and about a dozen other
countries—launched a military campaign against
both al Qaeda and the regime that was providing
it with “aid and safe haven.”
As compared with what would come later, there
was relatively little opposition either at home or
abroad to the opening of this first front of World
War IV. The reason was that the Afghan campaign
could easily be justified as a retaliatory strike against
the terrorists who had attacked us. And while there
was a good deal of murmuring about the dangers of
pursuing a policy of “regime change,” there was very
little sympathy in practice (outside the Muslim
world, that is) for the Taliban.
Whatever opposition was mounted to the battle
of Afghanistan mainly took the form of skepticism
over the chances of winning it. True, such skepticism
was in some quarters a mask for outright
opposition to American military power in general.
But once the Afghan campaign got under way,
the main focus shifted to everything that seemed
to be going awry on the battlefield.
For example, only a couple of weeks into the
campaign, when there were missteps involving
the use of the Afghan fighters of the Northern
Alliance, observers like R.W. Apple of the New
York Times immediately rushed to conjure up the
ghost of Vietnam. This restless spirit, having
been called forth from the vasty deep, henceforth
refused to be exorcised, and would go on to
elbow its way into every detail of the debates over
all the early battles of World War IV. On this
occasion, its message was that we were falling
victim to the illusion that we could rely on an incompetent
local force to do the fighting on the
ground while we supplied advice and air support.
This strategy would inevitably fail, and would
suck us into the same “quagmire” into which we
had been dragged in Vietnam. After all, as Apple
and others argued, the Soviet Union had suffered
its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan—and unlike us,
it had not been hampered by the logistical problems
of projecting power over a great distance.
How could we expect to do better?
When, however, the B-52’s and the
15,000-pound “Daisy Cutter” bombs
were unleashed, 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. Far from being good for nothing
but “pounding the rubble,” as the critics had
sarcastically charged, the Daisy Cutters exerted,
as even a New York Times report was forced to
concede, “a terrifying psychological impact as
they exploded just above ground, wiping out
everything for hundreds of yards.”
But the Daisy Cutters were only the half of it.
As we were all to discover, our “smart-bomb”
technology had advanced far beyond the stage it
had reached when first introduced in 1991. In
Afghanistan in 2001, such bombs—guided by
“spotters” on the ground equipped with radios,
laptops, and lasers, and often riding on horseback,
and also aided by unmanned satellite drones
and other systems in the air—were both incredibly
precise in avoiding civilian casualties and
absolutely lethal in destroying the enemy. It was
this “new kind of American power,” added the
New York Times report, that “enabled a ragtag
opposition” (i.e., the same Northern Alliance
supposedly dragging us into a quagmire) to rout
the “battle-hardened troops” of the Taliban
regime in less than three months, and with the
loss of very few American troops.
In the event, Osama bin Laden was not captured
and al Qaeda was not totally destroyed. But
it was certainly damaged by the campaign in
Afghanistan. As for the Taliban regime, it was
overthrown and replaced by a government that
would no longer give aid and comfort to terrorists.
Moreover, while Afghanistan under the new government
may not have been exactly democratic, it
was infinitely less oppressive than its totalitarian
predecessor. And thanks to the clearing of political
ground that had been covered over by the
radical Islamic extremism of the Taliban, the
seeds of free institutions were being sown and
given a fighting chance to sprout and grow.
The campaign in Afghanistan demonstrated in
the most unmistakable terms what followed from
the new understanding of terrorism that formed
the second pillar of the Bush Doctrine: countries
that gave safe haven to terrorists and refused to
clean them out were asking the United States to do
it for them, and the regimes ruling these countries
were also asking to be overthrown in favor of new
leaders with democratic aspirations. Of course, as
circumstances permitted and prudence dictated,
other instruments of power, whether economic or
diplomatic, would be deployed. But Afghanistan
showed that the military option was open, available
for use, and lethally effective.
[30]
Commentary September 2004
The third pillar on which the Bush Doctrine
rested was the assertion of our right to
preempt. Bush had already pretty clearly indicated
on September 20, 2001 that he had no intention of
waiting around to be attacked again (“We will
pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to
terrorism”). But in the State of the Union speech
in January 2002, he became much more explicit on
this point too:
We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our
side. I will not wait on events, while dangers
gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer
and closer. The United States of America
will not permit the world’s most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world’s most
destructive weapons.
To those with ears to hear, the January speech
should have made it abundantly clear that Bush was
now proposing to go beyond the fundamentally
retaliatory strike against Afghanistan and to take
preemptive action. Yet at first it went largely unnoticed
that this right to strike, not in retaliation
for but in anticipation of an attack, was a logical
extension of the general outline Bush had provided
on September 20. Nor did the new position
attract much attention even when it was reiterated
in the plainest of words on January 29. It
was not until the third in the series of major
speeches elaborating the Bush Doctrine—the one
delivered on June 1, 2002 at West Point to the
graduating class of newly commissioned officers
of the United States Army—that the message got
through at last.
Perhaps the reason the preemption pillar finally
became clearly visible at West Point was that,
for the f irst time, Bush placed his new ideas in
historical context:
For much of the last century, America’s defense
relied on the cold-war doctrines of
deterrence and containment. In some cases,
those strategies still apply. But new threats
also require new thinking. Deterrence—the
promise of massive retaliation against
nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist
networks with no nation or citizens to
defend.
This covered al Qaeda and similar groups. But
Bush then proceeded to explain, in addition, why
the old doctrines could not work with a regime
like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq:
Containment is not possible when unbalanced
dictators with weapons of mass destruction can
deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly
provide them to terrorist allies.
Refusing to flinch from the implications of this
analysis, Bush repudiated the previously sacred
dogmas of arms control and treaties against the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a
means of dealing with the dangers now facing us
from Iraq and other members of the axis of evil:
We cannot defend America and our friends
by hoping for the best. We cannot put our
faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly
sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically
break them.
Hence, Bush inexorably continued,
If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we
will have waited too long. . . . [T]he war on
terror will not be won on the defensive. We
must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his
plans, and confront the worst threats before
they emerge. In the world we have entered,
the only path to safety is the path of action.
And this nation will act.
At this early stage, the Bush administration was
still denying that it had reached any definite decision
about Saddam Hussein; but everyone knew
that, in promising to act, Bush was talking about
him. The immediate purpose was to topple the
Iraqi dictator before he had a chance to supply
weapons of mass destruction to the terrorists. But
this was by no means the only or—surprising
though it would seem in retrospect—even the decisive
consideration either for Bush or his supporters
(or, for that matter, his opponents).8 And in any case,
the long-range strategic rationale went beyond the
proximate causes of the invasion. Bush’s idea was to
[31]
World War IV
8 As John Podhoretz would later write: “Those who supported the
war, in overwhelming numbers, believed there were multiple justifications
for it. Those who opposed and oppose it, in equally overwhelming
numbers, weren’t swayed by the WMD arguments. Indeed,
many of them had no difficulty opposing the war while believing
that Saddam possessed vast quantities of such weapons. Take
Sen. Edward Kennedy. ‘We have known for many years,’ he said in
September 2002, ‘that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing
weapons of mass destruction.’ And yet only a few weeks later he
was one of 23 senators who voted against authorizing the Iraq war.
Take French President Jacques Chirac, who believed Saddam had
WMD and still did everything in his power to block the war. So
whether policymakers supported or opposed the war effort was not
determined by their conviction about the presence of weapons of
mass destruction.”
The Third Pillar
extend the enterprise of “draining the swamps”
begun in Afghanistan and then to set the entire region
on a course toward democratization. For if
Afghanistan under the Taliban represented the
religious face of Middle Eastern terrorism, Iraq
under Saddam Hussein was its most powerful secular
partner. It was to deal with this two-headed beast
that a two-pronged strategy was designed.
Unlike the plan to go after Afghanistan, however,
the idea of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam
Hussein provoked a firestorm hardly less intense
than the one that was still raging over Bush’s insistence
on using the words “good” and “evil.”
Even before the debate on Iraq in particular,
there had been strong objection to the whole
idea of preemptive action by the United States.
Some maintained that such action would be a violation
of international law, while others contended
that it would set a dangerous precedent under
which, say, Pakistan might attack India or viceversa.
But once the discussion shifted from the
Bush Doctrine in general to the question of Iraq,
the objections became more specific.
Most of these were brought together in early
August 2002 (only about two months after Bush’s
speech at West Point) in a piece entitled “Don’t
Attack Iraq.” The author was Brent Scowcroft,
who had been National Security Adviser to the
elder President Bush. Scowcroft asserted, first,
that there was
scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations,
and even less to the September 11
attacks. Indeed, Saddam’s goals have little in
common with the terrorists who threaten us,
and there is little incentive for him to make
common cause with them.
That being the case, Scowcroft continued, “An
attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize,
if not destroy, the global counterterrorist
campaign we have undertaken,” the campaign that
must remain “our preeminent security priority.”
But this was not the only “priority” that to
Scowcroft was “preeminent”:
Possibly the most dire consequences [of attacking
Saddam] would be the effect in the
region. The shared view in the region is that
Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S.
The obsession of the region, however, is the
Israeli-Palestinian conf lict.
Showing little regard for the American “obsession,”
Scowcroft was very solicitous of the regional one:
If we were seen to be turning our backs on that
bitter [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict . . . in order
to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of
outrage against us. We would be seen as ignoring
a key interest of the Muslim world in order
to satisfy what is seen to be a narrow American
interest.
This, added Scowcroft, “could well destabilize
Arab regimes in the region,” than which, to a quintessential
realist like him, nothing could be worse.
In coming out publicly, and in these terms,
against the second President Bush’s policy, Scowcroft
underscored the extent to which the son had
diverged from the father’s perspective. In addition,
by lending greater credence to the already
credible rumor that the elder Bush opposed
invading Iraq, Scowcroft’s article belied what
would soon become one of the favorite theories
of the hard Left—namely, that the son had gone to
war in order to avenge the attempted assassination
of his father.
On the other hand, by implicitly assenting to
the notion that toppling Saddam was merely “a
narrow American interest,” Scowcroft gave a certain
measure of aid and comfort to the hard Left
and its fellow travelers within the liberal community.
For from these circles the cry had been
going out that it was the corporations, especially
Halliburton (which Vice President Dick Cheney
had formerly headed) and the oil companies that
were dragging us into an unnecessary war.
So, too, with Scowcroft’s emphasis on resolving
“the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—a standard
euphemism for putting pressure on Israel, whose
“intransigence” was taken to be the major obstacle
to peace. By strongly insinuating that the Israeli
prime minister Ariel Sharon was a greater threat to
us than Saddam Hussein, Scowcroft provided a respectable
rationale for the hostility toward Israel
that had come shamelessly out of the closet within
hours of the attacks of 9/11 and that had been
growing more and more overt, more and more virulent,
and more and more widespread ever since.
To the “paleoconservative” Right, where the
charge first surfaced, it was less the oil companies
than Israel that was mainly dragging us into invading
Iraq. Before long, the Left would add the same
accusation to its own indictment, and in due course
it would be imprinted more and more openly on
large swatches of mainstream opinion.
A cognate count in this indictment held that the
invasion of Iraq had been secretly engineered by a
cabal of Jewish officials acting not in the interest of
[32]
Commentary September 2004
their own country but in the service of Israel, and
more particularly of Ariel Sharon. At first the
framers and early spreaders of this defamatory charge
considered it the better part of prudence to identify
the conspirators not as Jews but as “neoconservatives.”
It was a clever tactic, in that Jews did in fact
constitute a large proportion of the repentant liberals
and leftists who, having some two or three
decades earlier broken ranks with the Left and
moved rightward, came to be identified as neoconservatives.
Everyone in the know knew this, and for
those to whom it was news, the point could easily be
gotten across by singling out only those neoconservatives
who had Jewish-sounding names and to ignore
the many other leading members of the group whose
clearly non-Jewish names might confuse the picture.
This tactic had been given a trial run by
Patrick J. Buchanan in opposing the first
Gulf war of 1991. Buchanan had then already denounced
the Johnny-come-lately neoconservatives
for having hijacked and corrupted the conservative
movement, but now he descended deeper
into the fever swamps by insisting that there were
“only two groups beating the drums . . . for war
in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry
and its amen corner in the United States.”
Among those standing in the “amen corner” he
subsequently singled out four prominent hawks
with Jewish-sounding names, counterposing
them to “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy,
Gonzales, and Leroy Brown” who would actually
do the fighting if these Jews had their way.
Ten years later, in 2001, in the writings of
Buchanan and other paleoconservatives within the
journalistic fraternity (notably Robert Novak,
Arnaud de Borchgrave, and Paul Craig Roberts),
one of the four hawks of 1991, Richard Perle, made
a return appearance. But Perle was now joined in
starring roles by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas
Feith, both occupying high positions in the Pentagon,
and a large supporting cast of identifiably
Jewish intellectuals and commentators outside the
government (among them Charles Krauthammer,
William Kristol, and Robert Kagan). Like their
predecessors in 1991, the members of the new ensemble
were portrayed as agents of their bellicose
counterparts in the Israeli government. But there
was also a difference: the new group had managed to
infiltrate the upper reaches of the American government.
Having pulled this off, they had conspired
to manipulate their non-Jewish bosses—Vice
President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, and George W. Bush himself—into invading
Iraq.
Before long, this theory was picked up and circulated
by just about everyone in the whole world
who was intent on discrediting the Bush Doctrine.
And understandably so: for what could suit their
purposes better than to “expose” the invasion of
Iraq—and by extension the whole of World War
IV—as a war started by Jews and being waged solely
in the interest of Israel?
To protect themselves against the taint of anti-
Semitism, purveyors of this theory sometimes
disingenuously continued to pretend that when
they said “neoconservative” they did not mean
“Jew.” Yet the theory inescapably rested on all-toofamiliar
anti-Semitic canards—principally that Jews
were never reliably loyal to the country in which
they lived, and that they were always conspiring
behind the scenes, often successfully, to manipulate
the world for their own nefarious purposes.9
Quite apart from its pernicious moral and political
implications, the theory was ridiculous in its
own right. To begin with, it asked one to believe
the unbelievable: that strong-minded people like
Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice could be
fooled by a bunch of cunning subordinates,
whether Jewish or not, into doing anything at all
against their better judgment, let alone something
so momentous as waging a war, let alone a
war in which they could detect no clear relation
to American interests.
In the second place, there was the evidence uncovered
by the purveyors of this theory themselves. That
evidence, to which they triumphantly pointed, consisted
of published articles and statements in which
the alleged conspirators openly and unambiguously
advocated the very policies they now stood accused
of having secretly foisted upon an unwary Bush
administration. Nor had these allegedly secret conspirators
ever concealed their belief that toppling
Saddam Hussein and adopting a policy aimed at
the democratization of the entire Middle East
would be good not only for the United States and
for the people of the region but also for Israel.
(And what, an uncharacteristically puzzled
Richard Perle asked a hostile interviewer, was
wrong with that?)
Which brings us to the fourth pillar on which
the Bush Doctrine was erected.
[33]
World War IV
9 The classic expression of this fantasy was, of course, The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, a document that had been forged by the Czarist
secret police in the late 19th century but that had more recently
been resurrected and distributed by the millions throughout the
Arab-Muslim world, and beyond. It would also form the basis of a
dramatic television series produced in Egypt.
Listening to the laments of Scowcroft and
many others, one would think that George
W. Bush had been ignoring “the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict” altogether in his misplaced “obsession”
with Iraq. In fact, however, even before 9/11 it had
been widely and authoritatively reported that Bush
was planning to come out publicly in favor of establishing
a Palestinian state as the only path to a
peaceful resolution of the conflict; and in October,
after a short delay caused by 9/11, he became the
first American President actually to do so. Yet at
some point in the evolution of his thinking over the
months that followed, Bush seems to have realized
that there was something bizarre about supporting
the establishment of a Palestinian state that would
be run by a terrorist like Yasir Arafat and his
henchmen. Why should the United States acquiesce,
let alone help, in adding yet another state to
those harboring and sponsoring terrorism precisely
at a time when we were at war to rid the world
of just such regimes?
Presumably it was under the prodding of this
question that Bush came up with an idea even more
novel in its way than the new conception of terrorism
he had developed after 9/11. This idea was
broached only three weeks after his speech at West
Point, on June 24, 2002, when he issued a statement
adding conditions to his endorsement of a Palestinian
state:
Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging,
not opposing terrorism. This is unacceptable.
And the United States will not support the establishment
of a Palestinian state until its leaders
engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists
and dismantle their infrastructure.
But engaging in such a fight, he added, required
the election of “new leaders, leaders not compromised
by terror,” who would embark on building
“entirely new political and economic institutions
based on democracy, market economics, and action
against terrorism.”
It was with these words that Bush brought his
“vision” (as he kept calling it) of a Palestinian
state living peacefully alongside Israel into line
with his overall perspective on the evil of terrorism.
And having traveled that far, he went the
distance by repositioning the Palestinian issue
into the larger context from which Arab propaganda
had ripped it. Since this move passed
almost unnoticed, it is worth dwelling on why it
was so important.
Even before Israel was born in 1948, the Muslim
countries of the Middle East had been fighting
against the establishment of a sovereign Jewish
state—any Jewish state—on land they believed Allah
had reserved for those faithful to his prophet
Muhammad. Hence the Arab-Israeli conflict had pitted
hundreds of millions of Arabs and other Muslims,
in control of more than two dozen countries and vast
stretches of territory, against a handful of Jews who
then numbered well under three-quarters of a million
and who lived on a tiny sliver of land the size of
New Jersey. But then came the Six-Day war of 1967.
Launched in an effort to wipe Israel off the map, it
ended instead with Israel in control of the West Bank
(formerly occupied by Jordan) and Gaza (which had
been controlled by Egypt). This humiliating defeat,
however, was eventually turned into a rhetorical and
political victory by Arab propagandists, who redefined
the ongoing war of the whole Muslim world
against the Jewish state as, instead, a struggle merely
between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Thus was
Israel’s image transformed from a David to a Goliath,
a move that succeeded in alienating much of the old
sympathy previously enjoyed by the outnumbered
and besieged Jewish state.
Bush now reversed this reversal. Not only did he
reconstruct a truthful framework by telling the Palestinian
people that they had been treated for decades
“as pawns in the Middle East conflict.” He also insisted
on being open and forthright about the nations
that belonged in this larger picture and about what
they had been up to:
I’ve said in the past that nations are either
with us or against us in the war on terror. To
be counted on the side of peace, nations must
act. Every leader actually committed to peace
will end incitement to violence in off icial
media and publicly denounce homicide
bombs. Every nation actually committed to
peace will stop the flow of money, equipment,
and recruits to terrorist groups seeking
the destruction of Israel, including Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah. Every nation
committed to peace must block the shipment
of Iranian supplies to these groups and oppose
regimes that promote terror, like Iraq.
And Syria must choose the right side in the
war on terror by closing terrorist camps and
expelling terrorist organizations.
Here, then, Bush rebuilt the context in which
to understand the Middle East conf lict. In the
[34]
Commentary September 2004
The Fourth Pillar
Both as a theoretical construct and as a guide
to policy, the new Bush Doctrine could not
have been further from the “Vietnam syndrome”—
that loss of self-confidence and concomitant spread
of neoisolationist and pacifist sentiment throughout
the American body politic, and most prominently in
the elite institutions of American culture, which
began during the last years of the Vietnam war. I
have already pointed to a likeness between the Truman
Doctrine’s declaration that World War III had
started and the Bush Doctrine’s equally portentous
declaration that 9/11 had plunged us into World War
IV. But fully to measure the distance traveled by the
Bush Doctrine, I want to look now at yet another
presidential doctrine—the one developed by Richard
Nixon in the late 1960’s precisely in response to the
Vietnam syndrome.
Contrary to legend, our military intervention into
Vietnam under John F. Kennedy in the early 1960’s
had been backed by every sector of mainstream
opinion, with the elite media and the professoriate
leading the cheers. At the beginning, indeed, the
only criticism from the mainstream concerned tactical
issues. Toward the middle, however, and with
Lyndon B. Johnson having succeeded Kennedy in
the White House, doubts began to arise concerning
the political wisdom of the intervention, and by the
time Nixon had replaced Johnson, the moral character
of the United States was being indicted and
besmirched. Large numbers of Americans, including
even many of the people who had led the
intervention in the Kennedy years, were now joining
the tiny minority on the Left who at the time
had denounced them for stupidity and immorality,
and were now saying that going into Vietnam had
progressed from a folly into a crime.
To this new political reality the Nixon Doctrine
was a reluctant accommodation. As getting into
Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson had worked to
undermine support for the old strategy of containment,
Nixon—along with his chief adviser in foreign
affairs, Henry Kissinger—thought that our way of
getting out of Vietnam could conversely work to
create the new strategy that had become necessary.
First, American forces would be withdrawn from
Vietnam gradually, while the South Vietnamese
built up enough power to assume responsibility for
the defense of their own country. The American
role would then be limited to providing arms and
equipment. The same policy, suitably modified according
to local circumstances, would be applied to
the rest of the world as well. In every major region,
the United States would now depend on local surrogates
rather than on its own military to deter or
contain any Soviet-sponsored aggression, or any
other potentially destabilizing occurrence. We
would supply arms and other forms of assistance,
but henceforth the deterring and the fighting
would be left to others.
On every point, the new Bush Doctrine contrasted
sharply with the old Nixon Doctrine. Instead of
withdrawal and fallback, Bush proposed a highly ambitious
forward strategy of intervention. Instead of
relying on local surrogates, Bush proposed an active
deployment of our own military power. Instead of
deterrence and containment, Bush proposed preemption
and “taking the fight to the enemy.” And
instead of worrying about the stability of the region
in question, Bush proposed to destabilize it through
“regime change.”
The Nixon Doctrine had obviously harmonized
with the Vietnam syndrome. What about
[35]
World War IV
months ahead, pressured by his main European
ally, the British prime minister Tony Blair, and by
his own Secretary of State, Colin Powell, Bush
would sometimes seem to backslide into the old
way of thinking. But he would invariably recover.
Nor would he ever lose sight of the “vision” by
which he was guided on this issue, and through
which he had simultaneously made a strong start
in fitting not the Palestinian Authority alone but
the entire Muslim world, “friends” no less than
enemies, into his conception of the war against
terrorism.
With the inconsistency thus removed and the
resultant shakiness repaired by the addition of
this fourth pillar to undergird it, the Bush Doctrine
was now firm, coherent, and complete.
Saluting the Flag Again
the Bush Doctrine? Was the political and military
strategy it put forward comparably in tune with
the post-9/11 public mood?
Certainly this is how it seemed in the immediate
aftermath of the attacks: so much so that a
group of younger commentators were quick to
proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in
American history. What December 7, 1941 had
done to the old isolationism, they announced,
September 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam
syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural
fallout of that war—all the damaging changes
wrought by the 1960’s and the 1970’s—would
now follow it into the grave.
The most obvious sign of the new era was that
once again we were saluting our now ubiquitously
displayed f lag. This was the very f lag that, not
so long ago, leftist radicals had thought fit only
for burning. Yet now, even on the old flag-burning
Left, a few prominent personalities were
painfully wrenching their unaccustomed arms
into something vaguely resembling a salute.
It was a scene reminiscent of the response of some
Communists to the suppression by the new Soviet
regime of the sailors’ revolt that erupted in Kronstadt
in the early 1920’s. Far more murderous horrors
would pour out of the malignant recesses of Stalinist
rule, but as the first in that long series of atrocities
leading to disillusionment with the Soviet Union,
Kronstadt became the portent of them all. In its way,
9/11 served as an inverse Kronstadt for a number of
radical leftists of today. What it did was raise questions
about what one of them was now honest
enough to describe as their inveterately “negative
faith in America the ugly.”
September 11 also brought to mind a poem by
W.H. Auden written upon the outbreak of World
War II and entitled “September 1, 1939.” Although
it contained hostile sentiments about
America, remnants of Auden’s own Communist
period, the opening lines seemed so evocative of
September 11, 2001 that they were often quoted
in the early days of this new war:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.
Auden’s low dishonest decade was the 1930’s,
and its clever hopes centered on the construction
of a workers’ paradise in the Soviet Union. Our
counterpart was the 1960’s, and its less clever
hopes centered not on construction, however illusory,
but on destruction—the destruction of the
institutions that made up the American way of
life. For America was conceived in that period as
the great obstacle to any improvement in the lot
of the wretched of the earth, not least those within
its own borders.
As a “founding father” of neoconservatism who
had broken ranks with the Left precisely
because I was repelled by its “negative faith in
America the ugly,” I naturally welcomed this new
patriotic mood with open arms. In the years since
making that break, I had been growing more and
more impressed with the virtues of American society.
I now saw that America was a country in which
more liberty and more prosperity abounded than
human beings had ever enjoyed in any other country
or any other time. I now recognized that these
blessings were also more widely shared than even
the most visionary utopians had ever imagined possible.
And I now understood that this was an immense
achievement, entitling the United States of
America to an honored place on the roster of the
greatest civilizations the world had ever known.
The new patriotic mood therefore seemed to
me a sign of greater intellectual sanity and moral
health, and I fervently hoped that it would last.
But I could not fully share the conf idence of
some of my younger political friends that the
change was permanent—that, as they exulted,
nothing in American politics and American culture
would ever be the same again. As a veteran
of the political and cultural wars of the 1960’s, I
knew from my own scars how ephemeral such a
mood might well turn out to be, and how vulnerable
it was to seemingly insignificant forces.
In this connection, I was haunted by one memory
in particular. It was of an evening in the year 1960,
when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals
on a subject that had then barely begun to show
the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military
involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam.
Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion
Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of
which I had recently become the editor. As we
entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan,
Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the
audience, and whispered to me: “Do you realize that
every young person in this room is a tragedy to some
family or other?”
The memory of this quip brought back to life
some sense of how unpromising the future had then
appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage.
No one would have dreamed that these young
[36]
Commentary September 2004
In going over this familiar ground, I am trying
to make two points. One is that the nascent radical
movement of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s was
up against an adversary, namely, the “Establishment,”
that looked unassailable. Even so—and this is my
second point—to the bewilderment of almost everyone,
not least the radicals themselves, they blew and
they blew and they blew the house down.
Here we had a major development that slipped
in under the radar of virtually all the pundits and
the trend-spotters. How well I remember John
Roche, a political scientist then working in the
Johnson White House, being quoted by the columnist
Jimmy Breslin as having derisively labeled the
radicals a bunch of “Upper West Side jackal bins.”
As further investigation disclosed, Roche had actually
said “Jacobins,” a word so unfamiliar to his
interviewer that “jackal bins” was the best Breslin
could do in transcribing his notes.
Much ink has been spilled, gallons of it by me, in
the struggle to explain how and why a great “Establishment”
representing so wide a national consensus
could have been toppled so easily and so quickly by
so small and marginal a group as these “jackal bins.”
In the domain of foreign affairs, of course, the usual
answer is Vietnam. In this view, it was by deciding to
fight an unpopular war that the Establishment rendered
itself vulnerable.
The ostensible problem with this explanation, to
say it again, is that at least until 1965 Vietnam was a
popular war. All the major media—from the New
York Times to the Washington Post, from Time to
Newsweek, from CBS to ABC—supported our intervention.
So did most of the professoriate. And so did
the public. Even when all but one or two of the people
who had either directly led us into Vietnam, or
had applauded our intervention, commenced falling
all over themselves to join the antiwar parade, public
opinion continued supporting the war.
But it did not matter. Public opinion had
ceased to count. Indeed, as the Tet offensive of
1968 revealed, reality itself had ceased to count.
As all would later come to agree and some vainly
struggled to insist at the time, Tet was a crushing
defeat not for us but for the North Vietnamese.
But Walter Cronkite had only to declare it a defeat
for us from the anchor desk of the CBS
Evening News, and a defeat it became.
Admittedly, in electoral politics, where numbers
are decisive, public opinion remained potent. Consequently,
none of the doves contending for the
presidency in 1968 or 1972 could beat Richard
Nixon. Yet even Nixon felt it necessary to campaign
on the claim that he had a “plan” not for
winning but for getting us out of Vietnam.
All of which is to say that, on Vietnam, elite
opinion trumped popular opinion. Nor were the
effects restricted to foreign policy. They extended
into the newly antagonistic attitude toward
everything America was and represented.
[37]
World War IV
people, and the generation about to descend from
them politically and culturally, would within the
blink of a historical eye come to be hailed as “the best
informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic
this country has ever known.” Those words, even
more incredibly, would emanate from what the new
movement regarded as the very belly of the beast:
from, to be specific, Archibald Cox, a professor at the
Harvard Law School and later Solicitor General of
the United States. Similar encomia would flow
unctuously from the mouths of parents, teachers,
clergymen, artists, and journalists.
More incredible yet, the ideas and attitudes of
the new movement, cleaned up but essentially
unchanged, would within a mere ten years turn
one of our two major parties upside down and inside
out. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy had
famously declared that we would “pay any price,
bear any burden, . . . to assure the survival and
the success of liberty.” By 1972, George McGovern,
nominated for President by Kennedy’s own
party, was campaigning on the slogan, “Come
Home, America.” It was a slogan that to an uncanny
degree ref lected the ethos of the embryonic
movement I had addressed in Union Square only
about a decade before.
The New “Jackal Bins”
It hardly needs stressing that this attitude found a
home in the world of the arts, the universities, and
the major media of news and entertainment, where
intellectuals shaped by the 1960’s, and their acolytes
in the publishing houses of New York and in the studios
of Hollywood, held sway. But it would be a
serious mistake to suppose that the trickle-down effect
of the professoriate’s attitude was confined to
literature, journalism, and show business.
John Maynard Keynes once said that “Practical
men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from
any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of
some defunct economist.” Keynes was referring
specifically to businessmen. But practical functionaries
like bureaucrats and administrators are subject to
the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not
of economists but of historians and sociologists and
philosophers and novelists who are very much alive
even when their ideas have, or should have, become
defunct. Nor is it necessary for the “practical men”
to have studied the works in question, or even ever
to have heard of their authors. All they need do is
read the New York Times, or switch on their television
sets, or go to the movies—and, drip by drip, a more
easily assimilable form of the original material is
absorbed into their heads and their nervous systems.
These, in sum, were some of the factors that
made me wonder whether the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001 would turn out to mark a
genuine turning point comparable to the bombing
of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I was
well aware that, before Pearl Harbor, several
groups ranging across the political spectrum had
fought against our joining the British, who had
been at war with Nazi Germany since 1939.
There were the isolationists, both liberal and
conservative, who detected no American interest
in this distant conf lict; there were the right-wing
radicals who thought that if we were going to go
to war, it ought to be on the side of Nazi Germany
against Communist Russia, not the other
way around; and there were the left-wing radicals
who saw the war as a struggle between two equally
malign imperialistic systems in which they had
no stake. Under the influence of these groups, a
large majority of Americans had opposed our
entry into the war right up to the moment of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But from that
moment on, the opposition faded away. The antiwar
groups either lost most of their members or
lapsed into a morose silence, and public opinion
did a 180-degree turn.
At first, September 11 did seem to resemble
Pearl Harbor in its galvanizing effect, while by all
indications the first battle of World War IV—the
battle of Afghanistan—was supported by a perhaps
even larger percentage of the public than Vietnam
had been at the beginning. Nevertheless, even
though the opposition in 2001 was still numerically
insignificant, it was much stronger than it had
been in the early days of Vietnam. The reason was
that it now maintained a tight grip over the institutions
that, in the later stages of that war, had been
surrendered bit by bit to the anti-American Left.
There was, for openers, the literary community,
which could stand in for the world of
the arts in general. No sooner had the Twin Towers
been toppled and the Pentagon smashed than a
fierce competition began for the gold in the anti-
American Olympics. Susan Sontag, one of my old
ex-friends on the Left, seized an early lead in this
contest with a piece in which she asserted that 9/11
was an attack “undertaken as a consequence of specific
American alliances and actions.” Not content
with suggesting that we had brought this aggression
on ourselves, she went on to compare the
backing in Congress for our “robotic President” to
“the unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory
bromides of a Soviet Party Congress.”
Another of my old ex-friends, Norman Mailer,
surprisingly slow out of the starting gate, soon came
up strong on the inside by comparing the Twin Towers
to “two huge buck teeth,” and pronouncing the
ruins at Ground Zero “more beautiful than the
buildings were.” Still playing the enfant terrible even
as he was closing in on his eightieth year, Mailer
denounced us as “cultural oppressors and aesthetic
oppressors” of the Third World. In what did this
oppression consist? It consisted, he expatiated, in our
establishing “enclaves of our food out there, like Mc-
Donald’s” and in putting “our high-rise buildings”
around the airports of even “the meanest, scummiest,
capital[s] in the world.” For these horrendous
crimes we had, on 9/11, received a measure—and
only a small measure at that—of our just deserts.
Then there were the universities. A report issued
shortly after 9/11 by the American Council
of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) cited about a
hundred malodorous statements wafting out of
campuses all over the country that resembled Sontag
and Mailer in blaming the attacks not on the
terrorists but on America. Among these were three
especially choice specimens. From a professor at
the University of New Mexico: “Anyone who can
blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” From a professor
at Rutgers: “[We] should be aware that the
ultimate cause [of 9/11] is the fascism of U.S. for-
[38]
Commentary September 2004
eign policy over the past many decades.” And from a
professor at the University of Massachusetts: “[The
American flag] is a symbol of terrorism and death
and fear and destruction and oppression.”
When the ACTA report was issued, protesting
wails of “McCarthyism” were heard throughout the
land, especially from the professors cited. Like them,
Susan Sontag, too, claimed that her freedom of
speech was being placed in jeopardy. In this peculiar
reading of the First Amendment, much favored by
leftists in general, they were free to say anything they
liked, but the right to free speech ended where criticism
of what they had said began.
Actually, however, with rare exceptions, attempts
to stifle dissent on the campus were largely directed
at the many students and the few faculty members
who supported the 9/11 war. All these attempts could
be encapsulated into a single phenomenon: on a
number of campuses, students or professors who displayed
American flags or patriotic posters were
forced to take them down. As for Susan Sontag’s
freedom of speech, hardly had the ink dried on her
post-9/11 piece before she became the subject of
countless fawning reports and interviews in periodicals
and on television programs around the world.
Speaking of television, it was soon drowning
us with material presenting Islam in glowing
terms. Mainly, these programs took their cue from
the President and other political leaders. Out of the
best of motives, and for prudential reasons as well,
elected officials were striving mightily to deny that
the war against terrorism was a war against Islam.
Hence they never ceased heaping praises on the
beauties of that religion, about which few of them
knew anything.
But it was from the universities, not from the
politicians, that the substantive content of these
broadcasts derived, in interviews with academics,
many of them Muslims themselves, whose accounts
of Islam were selectively roseate. Sometimes they
were even downright untruthful, especially in
sanitizing the doctrine of jihad or holy war, or in
misrepresenting the extent to which leading
Muslim clerics all over the world had been celebrating
suicide bombers—not excluding those
who had crashed into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon—as heroes and martyrs.
I do not bring this up in order to enter into a theological
dispute. My purpose, rather, is to offer
another case study in the continued workings of the
trickle-down effect I have already described. Thus,
hard on the heels of 9/11, the universities began
adding innumerable courses on Islam to their
curricula. On the campus, “understanding Islam” inevitably
translated into apologetics for it, and most of
the media dutifully followed suit. The media also
adopted the stance of neutrality between the terrorists
and ourselves that prevailed among the relatively
moderate professoriate, as when the major television
networks ordered their anchors to avoid exhibiting
partisanship.
Here the great exception was the Fox News Channel.
The New York Times, in an article deploring the
fact that Fox was covering the war from a frankly
pro-American perspective, expressed relief that no
other network had so cavalierly discarded the sacred
conventions dictating that journalists, in the words of
the president of ABC News, must “maintain their
neutrality in times of war.”
Although the vast majority of those who blamed
America for having been attacked were on the Left,
a few voices on the Right joined this perverted chorus.
Speaking on Pat Robertson’s TV program, the
Reverend Jerry Falwell delivered himself of the view
that God was punishing the United States for the
moral decay exemplified by a variety of liberal groups
among us. Both later apologized for singling out
these groups, but each continued to insist that God
was withdrawing His protection from America because
all of us had become great sinners. And in the
amen corner that quickly formed on the secular
Right, commentators like Robert Novak and Pat
Buchanan added that we had called the attack down
on our heads not so much by our willful disobedience
to divine law as by our manipulated obedience
to Israel.
Oddly enough, however, within the Arab
world itself, there was much less emphasis on
Israel as the root cause of the attacks than was placed
on it by most, if not all, of Buchanan’s fellow paleoconservatives
on the Right. Even to Osama bin
Laden himself, support of Israel ranked only third on
a list of our “crimes” against Islam.
Not, to be sure, that Arabs everywhere—together
with most non-Arab Middle Eastern Muslims like
the Iranians—had given up their dream of wiping Israel
off the map. To anyone who thought otherwise,
Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, an American who
grew up as a Muslim in Lebanon, had this to say
about the Arab world’s “great refusal” to accept Israel
under any conditions whatsoever:
The great refusal persists in that “Arab street” of
ordinary men and women, among the intellectuals
and the writers, and in the professional
syndicates. . . . The force of this refusal can be
seen in the press of the governments and of the
[39]
World War IV
oppositionists, among the secularists and the Islamists
alike, in countries that have concluded
diplomatic agreements with Israel and those that
haven’t.
Ajami emphasized that the great refusal remained
“fiercest in Egypt,” notwithstanding the peace treaty
it had signed with Israel in 1978. It might have been
expected, then, that the Egyptians would be eager to
blame the widespread animus against the U.S. in
their own country on American policy toward Israel,
especially since Egypt, being second only to the
Jewish state as a recipient of American aid, had a
powerful incentive to explain away so ungrateful
a response to the benevolent treatment it was
receiving at our hands. But no. Only about two
weeks before 9/11, Ab’d Al-Mun’im Murad, a
columnist in Al-Akhbar, a daily newspaper sponsored
by the Egyptian government, wrote:
The conflict that we call the Arab-Israeli conflict
is, in truth an Arab conflict with Western,
and particularly American, colonialism. The
U.S. treats [the Arabs] as it treated the slaves
inside the American continent. To this end,
[the U.S.] is helped by the smaller enemy, and I
mean Israel.
In another piece, the same writer expanded on this
unusually candid acknowledgment:
The issue no longer concerns the Israeli-Arab
conflict. The real issue is the Arab-American
conflict—Arabs must understand that the U.S. is
not “the American friend”—and its task, past,
present, and future, is [to impose] hegemony on
the world, primarily on the Middle East and the
Arab world.
Then, in a third piece, also published in late August,
Murad gave us an inkling of the reciprocal
“task” he had in mind to be performed on America:
The Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor,
must be destroyed because of . . . the idiotic
American policy that goes from disgrace to
disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind
fanaticism. . . . The age of the American collapse
has begun.
If this was the kind of thing we were getting
from an Arab country that everyone regarded
as “moderate,” in radical states like Iraq and Iran
nothing less would suffice than identifying America
as the “Great Satan.” As for the Palestinians,
their contempt for America was hardly exceeded by
their loathing of Israel. For example, the mufti—or
chief cleric—appointed by the Palestinian Authority
under Yasir Arafat had prayed that God would
“destroy America,” while the editor of a leading
Palestinian journal proclaimed:
History does not remember the United States,
but it remembers Iraq, the cradle of civilization.
. . . History remembers every piece of
Arab land, because it is the bosom of human
civilization. On the other hand, the [American]
murderers of humanity, the creators of the barbaric
culture and the bloodsuckers of nations,
are doomed to death and destined to shrink to
a microscopic size, like Micronesia.
The absence of even a word here about Israel
showed that if the Jewish state had never come into
existence, the United States would still have stood as
an embodiment of everything that most of these
Arabs considered evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel
was in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism,
rather than the reverse. Israel was seen as the spearhead
of the American drive for domination over the
Middle East. As such, the Jewish state was a translation
of America into, as it were, Hebrew—the “little
enemy,” the “little Satan.” To rid the region of it
would thus be tantamount to cleansing an area belonging
to Islam (dar al-Islam) of the blasphemous
political, social, and cultural influences emanating
from a barbaric and murderous force. But the force,
so to speak, was with America, of which Israel was
merely an instrument.
Although Buchanan and Novak were earlier and
more outspoken in blaming 9/11 on American
friendliness toward Israel, this idea was not confined
to the Right or to the marginal precincts of paleoconservatism.
On the contrary: while it popped up on
the Right, it thoroughly pervaded the radical Left
and much of the soft Left, and was even espoused by
a number of liberal centrists like Mickey Kaus. For
the moment, indeed, the blame-Israel-firsters were
concentrated most heavily on the Left.
It was also on the Left, and above all in the
universities, that their fraternal twins, the blame-
America-firsters, were located. Yet Eric Foner, a
professor of history at my own alma mater, Columbia,
risibly claimed that the ACTA report was
misleading since the polls proved that there was
“f irm support” for the war among college students.
“If our aim is to indoctrinate students with
unpatriotic beliefs,” Foner smirked, “we’re obviously
doing a very poor job of it.”
True enough. But what Foner, as a historian, must
have known but neglected to mention was that even
at the height of the radical fevers on the campus in
the 1960’s, only a minority of students sided with the
[40]
Commentary September 2004
antiwar radicals. Still, even though they were in the
majority, the non-radical students were unable to
make themselves heard above the antiwar din, and
whenever they tried, they were shouted down. This
is how it was, too, on the campus after 9/11. There
were, here and there, brave defiers of the academic
orthodoxies. But mostly, the silent majority remained
silent, for fear of incurring the disapproval of their
teachers, or even of being punished for the crime of
“insensitivity.”
Such, then, was the assault that began to be
mounted within hours of 9/11 by the guerrillas-
with-tenure in the universities, along with their
spiritual and political disciples scattered throughout
other quarters of our culture. Could this “tiny
handful of aging Rip van Winkles,” as they were
breezily brushed off by one commentator, grow
into a force as powerful as the “jackal bins” of
yesteryear? Was the upsurge of conf idence in
America, and American virtue, that spontaneously
materialized on 9/11 strong enough to withstand
them this time around?
Some who shared my apprehensions believed that
if things went well on the military front, all would
be well on the home front, too. And that is how it
appeared from the effect wrought by the spectacular
success of the Afghanistan campaign, which
disposed of the “quagmire” theory and also dampened
antiwar activity on at least a number of campuses.
Nevertheless, the mopping-up operation in
Afghanistan created an opportunity for more subtle
forms of opposition to gain traction. There were
complaints that the terrorists captured in
Afghanistan and then sent to a special facility in
Guantanamo were not being treated as regular
prisoners of war. And there were also allegations of
the threat to civil liberties posed in America itself
by measures like the Patriot Act, which had been
designed to ward off any further terrorist attacks at
home. Although these concerns were mostly based
on misreadings of the Geneva Convention and of
the Patriot Act itself, some people no doubt raised
them in good faith. But there is also no doubt that
such issues could—and did—serve as a respectable
cover for wholesale opposition to the entire war.
Another respectable cover was the charge that
Bush was following a policy of “unilateralism.”
The alarm over this supposedly unheard-of outrage
was first sounded by the chancelleries and
chattering classes of Western Europe when Bush
stated that, in taking the f ight to the terrorists
and their sponsors, we would prefer to do so with
allies and with the blessing of the UN, but if necessary
we would go it alone and without an imprimatur
from the Security Council.
This was too much for the Europeans. Having
duly offered us their condolences over 9/11, they
could barely let a decent interval pass before going
back into the ancient family business of showing how
vastly superior in wisdom and finesse they were to
the Americans, whose primitive character was once
again on display in the “simplistic” ideas and crude
moralizing of George W. Bush. Now they urged that
our military operations end with Afghanistan, and
that we leave the rest to diplomacy in deferential
consultation with the great masters of that recondite
art in Paris and Brussels.
Taking their cue from these masters, the New York
Times, along with many other publications ranging
from the Center to the hard Left—and soon to be
seconded by all the Democratic candidates in the
presidential primaries, except for Senator Joseph
Lieberman—began hitting Bush for recklessness and
overreaching. What we saw developing here was a
broader coalition than the antiwar movement
spawned by Vietnam had managed to put together,
especially in its first few years. The antiwar movement
then had been made up almost entirely of leftists
and liberals, whereas this new movement was
bringing together the whole of the hard Left, elements
of the soft Left, and sectors of the American
Right.
Treading the path previously marked out by his
colleague Mickey Kaus on the issue of Israel, Michael
Kinsley of the soft Left allied himself with Pat
Buchanan in bringing forth yet another respectable
cover. This was to indict the President for evading
the Constitution by proposing to fight undeclared
wars. Meanwhile, the same charge was moving into
the political mainstream through Democratic Senators
like Robert Byrd, Edward M. Kennedy, and
Tom Daschle, though they also continued carrying
on about quagmires and slippery slopes and “unilateralism.”
I for one was certain that, as the military facet of
World War IV widened—with Iraq clearly being the
next most likely front—opposition would not only
grow but would acquire enough assurance to dispense
with any respectable covers. Which was to say
that it would be taken over by extremists and radicalized.
About this I turned out to be correct, while
those who scoffed at the “jackal bins” and the “aging
Rip Van Winkles” as a politically insignificant bunch
turned out to be wrong. But I never imagined that
the new antiwar movement would so rapidly arrive
at the stage of virulence it had taken years for its
ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach.
[41]
World War IV
Apossible explanation of the great velocity
achieved by the new antiwar movement was
that, like the respectable critique immediately
preceding it, the radical opposition was following
the lead of European opinion. In this instance,
encouragement and reinforcement came from the
almost incredible degree of hostility to America
that erupted in the wake of 9/11 all over the European
continent, and most blatantly in France
and Germany, and that gathered even more
steam in the run-up to the battle of Iraq. If
demonstrations and public-opinion polls could be
believed, huge numbers of Europeans loathed the
United States so deeply that they were unwilling
to side with it even against one of the most tyrannical
and murderous despots on earth.
That this was the feeling in the Muslim world did
not come as a surprise. Unlike in Europe, where the
attacks of 9/11 did elicit a passing moment of sympathy
for the United States (“We Are All Americans
Now,” proclaimed a headline the next day in the
leading leftist daily in Paris), in the realm of Islam the
news of 9/11 brought dancing in the streets and
screams of jubilation. Almost to a man, Muslim
clerics in their sermons assured the faithful that in
striking a blow against the “Great Satan,” Osama bin
Laden had acted as a jihadist, or holy warrior, in strict
accordance with the will of God.
This could have been predicted from a debate
on the topic “Bin Laden—The Arab Despair and
American Fear” that was televised on the Arabiclanguage
network Al-Jazeera about two months
before 9/11. Using “American Fear” in the title
was a bit premature, since this was a time when
very few Americans were frightened by Islamic
terrorism, for the simple reason that scarcely any
had ever heard of bin Laden or al Qaeda. Be that
as it may, at the conclusion of the program, the
host said to the lone guest who had been denouncing
bin Laden as a terrorist: “I am looking
at the viewers’ reactions for one that would support
your positions—but . . . I can’t find any.” He
then cited “an opinion poll in a Kuwaiti paper
which showed that 69 percent of Kuwaitis, Egyptians,
Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians think
bin Laden is an Arab hero and an Islamic jihad
warrior.” And on the basis of the station’s own
poll, he also estimated that among all Arabs
“from the Gulf to the Ocean,” the proportion
sharing this view of bin Laden was “maybe even
99 percent.”
Surely, then, the chairman of the Syrian Arab
Writers Associations was speaking for hordes of
his “brothers” in declaring shortly after 9/11 that
When the twin towers collapsed . . . I felt deep
within me like someone delivered from the
grave; I [felt] that I was being carried in the air
above the corpse of the mythological symbol of
arrogant American imperialist power. . . . My
lungs filled with air, and I breathed in relief, as
I had never breathed before.
If this was how the Arab/Muslim world largely
felt about 9/11, what could have been expected
from that world when the United States picked
itself up off the ground—Ground Zero, to be
exact—and began fighting back? What could
have been expected is precisely what happened:
another furious outburst of anti-Americanism.
Only this time the outbursts were infused not by
jubilation but by the desperate hope that the
United States would somehow be humiliated.
This hope was soon extinguished by the quick
defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but
it was immediately rekindled by the way Saddam
Hussein was standing up against America. Saddam
had killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims
in Iran, and countless Arabs in his own country
and Kuwait. Obviously, however, to his Arab and
Muslim “brothers” this was completely canceled
out by his defiance of the United States.
Was there, perhaps, an element of the same
twisted sentiment in the willingness of millions
upon millions of Europeans to lend de-facto aid
and comfort to this monster? Of course, the claim
was that most such people were neither pro-Saddam
nor anti-American: all they wanted was to
“give peace a chance.” But this claim was belied by
the slogans, the body language, the speeches, and
the manifestos of the “peace” party. Though hatred
of America may not have been universal among
opponents of American military action, it was obviously
very widespread and very deep. And though
other considerations (pacifist sentiment, concern
about civilian casualties, contempt for George
Bush, faith in the UN, etc.) were at work, these factors
had no trouble coexisting harmoniously with
extreme hostility to the United States.
Thus, within two months of 9/11, a survey of
influential people in 23 countries was undertaken
by the Pew Research Center, the Princeton Survey
Research Associates, and the International Herald
[42]
Commentary September 2004
Varieties of Anti-Americanism
Tribune. Here is how a British newspaper summarized
the findings:
Did America somehow ask for the terrorist outrages
in New York and Washington? . . . [M]ost
people of influence in the rest of the world . . .
believe that, to a certain extent, the U.S. was asking
for it. . . . From its closest allies, in Europe,
to the Middle East, Russia, and Asia, a uniform
70 percent said people considered it good that
after September 11 Americans had realized what
it was to be vulnerable.
It would therefore seem that the Italian playwright
Dario Fo, winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1997, was more representative of
European opinion than he may at first have appeared
when spewing out the following sentiment:
The great speculators wallow in an economy
that every year kills tens of millions of people
with poverty—so what is 20,000 [sic] dead in
New York? Regardless of who carried out the
massacre, this violence is the legitimate
daughter of the culture of violence, hunger,
and inhumane exploitation.
In France, a leading philosopher and social theorist,
Jean Baudrillard, produced a somewhat different
type of apologia for the terrorists of 9/11
and their ilk. This was so laden with postmodern
jargon and so convoluted that it bordered on parody
(“The collapse of the towers of the World
Trade Center is unimaginable, but this does not
suffice to make it a real event”). But Baudrillard’s
piece did at least contain a revealing confession:
That we have dreamed of this event, that
everyone without exception has dreamed of
it, . . . is unacceptable for the Western moral
conscience, but it is still a fact. . . . Ultimately,
they [al Qaeda] did it, but we willed it.
Much the same idea, in even more straightforward
terms, was espoused across the
Channel by Mary Beard, a teacher of classics at my
other alma mater, Cambridge University, who wrote:
“[H]owever tactfully you dress it up, the United
States had it coming. . . . World bullies . . . will in the
end pay the price.” With this the highly regarded
novelist Martin Amis agreed. But Beard’s old-fashioned
English plainness evidently being a little too
plain for him, Amis resorted to a bit of fancy continental
footwork in formulating his own endorsement
of the idea that America had been asking for it:
Terrorism is political communication by
other means. The message of September 11
ran as follows: America, it is time you learned
how implacably you are hated. . . . Various national
characteristics—self-reliance, a fiercer
patriotism than any in Western Europe, an
assiduous geographical incuriosity—have created
a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of
people far away.
What on earth was going on here? After 9/11,
most Americans had gradually come to recognize
that we were hated by the terrorists who had attacked
us and their Muslim cheerleaders not for
our failings and sins but precisely for our virtues
as a free and prosperous country. But why should
we be hated by hordes of people living in other
free and prosperous countries? In their case, presumably,
it must be for our sins. And yet most of
us knew for certain that, whatever sins we might
have committed, they were not the ones of which
the Europeans kept accusing us.
To wit: far from being a nation of overbearing
bullies, we were humbly begging for the support
of tiny countries we could easily have pushed
around. Far from being “unilateralists,” we were
busy soliciting the gratuitous permission and the
dubious blessing of the Security Council before
taking military action against Saddam Hussein.
Far from “rushing into war,” we were spending
months dancing a diplomatic gavotte in the vain
hope of enlisting the help of France, Germany,
and Russia. And so on, and so on, down to the
last detail in the catalogue.
What, then, was going on? An answer to
this puzzling question that would eventually
gain perhaps the widest circulation came
from Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment.
In a catchy formulation that soon became famous,
Kagan proposed that Americans were from
Mars and Europeans were from Venus. Expanding
on this formulation, he wrote:
On the all-important question of power—the
efficacy of power, the morality of power, the
desirability of power—American and European
perspectives are diverging. Europe is
turning away from power, or to put it a little
differently, it is moving beyond power into a
self-contained world of laws and rules and
transnational negotiation and cooperation. It
is entering a post-historical paradise of peace
and relative prosperity, the realization of
Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States,
meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising
power in the anarchic Hobbesian world
where international laws and rules are unre-
[43]
World War IV
liable and where true security and the defense
and promotion of a liberal order still depend
on the possession and use of military might.
In developing his theory, Kagan got many
things right and cast a salubrious light into many
dark corners. But it also seemed to me that he
was putting the shoes of his theory on the wrong
feet. Although I fully accepted Kagan’s description
of the divergent attitudes toward military
power, I did not agree that the Europeans were
already living in the future while the United
States remained “mired” in the past. In my judgment,
the opposite was closer to the truth.
The “post-historical paradise” into which the
Europeans were supposedly moving struck me as
nothing more than the web of international institutions
that had been created at the end of World
War II under the leadership of the United States in
the hope that they would foster peace and prosperity.
These included the United Nations, the World
Bank, the World Court, and others. Then after
1947, and again under the leadership of the United
States, adaptations were made to the already
existing institutions and new ones like NATO were
added to fit the needs of World War III. With the
victorious conclusion of World War III in 1989-90,
the old international order became obsolete, and
new arrangements tailored to a new era would have
to be forged. But more than a decade elapsed
before 9/11 finally made the contours of the
“post-cold-war era” clear enough for these new
arrangements to begin being developed.
Looked at from this angle, the Bush Doctrine
revealed itself as an extremely bold effort to
break out of the institutional framework and the
strategy constructed to fight the last war. But it
was more: it also drew up a blueprint for a new
structure and a new strategy to fight a different
breed of enemy in a war that was just starting and
that showed signs of stretching out into the
future as far as the eye could see. Facing the realities
of what now confronted us, Bush had come
to the conclusion that few if any of the old instrumentalities
were capable of defeating this new
breed of enemy, and that the strategies of the past
were equally helpless before this enemy’s way of
waging war. To move into the future meant to
substitute preemption for deterrence, and to rely
on American military might rather than the “soft
power” represented by the UN and the other
relics of World War III. Indeed, not even the
hard power of NATO—which had specifically
been restricted by design to the European continent
and whose deployment in other places
could, and would be, obstructed by the French—
was of much use in the world of the future.
Examined from this same angle, the European justifications
for resisting the Bush Doctrine—the complaints
about “unilateralism,” trigger-happiness, and
the rest—were unveiled as mere rationalizations.
Here I went along with Kagan in tracing these
rationalizations to a decline in the power of the Europeans.
He put it very well:
World War II all but destroyed European nations
as global powers. . . . For a half-century
after World War II, however, this weakness was
masked by the unique geopolitical circumstances
of the cold war. Dwarfed by the two superpowers
on its flanks, a weakened Europe nevertheless
served as the central strategic theater of the
worldwide struggle between Communism and
democratic capitalism. . . . Although shorn of
most traditional measures of great-power status,
Europe remained the geopolitical pivot, and this,
along with lingering habits of world leadership,
allowed Europeans to retain international influence
well beyond what their sheer military capabilities
might have afforded. Europe lost this
strategic centrality after the cold war ended, but
it took a few more years for the lingering mirage
of European global power to fade.
So far, so good. Where I parted company with
Kagan’s analysis was over his acquiescence in the
claim that the Europeans had in fact made the leap
into the post-national, or postmodern, “Kantian paradise”
of the future. To me it seemed clear that it was
they, and not we Americans, who were “mired” in
the past. They were fighting tooth and nail against
the American effort to move into the future precisely
because holding onto the ideas, the strategic
habits, and the international institutions of the cold
war would allow them to go on exerting “international
influence well beyond what their sheer
military capabilities might have afforded.” It was
George W. Bush—that “simplistic” moralizer and
trigger-happy “cowboy,” that flouter of international
law and reckless unilateralist—who had
possessed the wit to see the future and had summoned
up the courage to cross over into it.
But Bush was also a politician, and as such he felt it
necessary to make some accommodation to the pressures
coming at him both at home and from abroad.
What this required was an occasional return visit to
the past. On such visits, as when he would seek endorsements
from the UN Security Council, he
showed a polite measure of deference to those, again
[44]
Commentary September 2004
The astonishing success of the campaigns in
Afghanistan and Iraq made a hash of the
skepticism of the many pundits who had been so
sure that we had too few troops or were following
the wrong battle plan. Instead of getting bogged
down, as they had predicted, our forces raced
through these two campaigns in record time; and
instead of ten of thousands of body bags being
flown home, the casualties were numbered in the
hundreds. As the military historian Victor Davis
Hanson summarized what had transpired in Iraq:
In a span of about three weeks, the United
States military overran a country the size of
California. It utterly obliterated Saddam Hussein’s
military hardware . . . and tore apart his
armies. Of the approximately 110 American
deaths in the course of the hostilities, fully a
fourth occurred as a result of accidents, friendly
fire, or peacekeeping mishaps rather than at
the hands of enemy soldiers. The extraordinarily
low ratio of total American casualties per
number of U.S. soldiers deployed . . . is almost
unmatched in modern military history.
True, the aftermath of major military operations,
especially in Iraq, turned out to be rougher
than the Pentagon seems to have expected.
Thanks to the guerrilla insurgency mounted by a
coalition of intransigent Saddam loyalists, radical
Shiite militias, and terrorists imported from Iran
and Syria, American soldiers continued to be
killed. Nevertheless, by any historical standard—
the more than 6,500 who died on D-Day alone in
World War II, to cite only one example—our
total losses remained amazingly low.
But it was not military matters that aroused the
equally sour skepticism of the realists. Their
doubts centered, rather, on the issue of whether
the Bush Doctrine was politically viable. Most of
all, they questioned the idea that democratization
represented the best and perhaps even the only
[45]
World War IV
both at home and abroad, who insisted on reading
the Bush Doctrine not as a blueprint for the future
but as a reckless repudiation of the approach
favored by the allegedly more sophisticated Europeans
and their American counterparts. In
Kagan’s apt description of how the Europeans
saw themselves:
Europeans insist they approach problems with
greater nuance and sophistication. They try to
influence others through subtlety and indirection.
. . . They generally favor peaceful responses
to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy,
and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to
appeal to international law, international conventions,
and international opinion to adjudicate
disputes. They try to use commercial and economic
ties to bind nations together. They often
emphasize process over result, believing that ultimately
process can become substance.
None of this was new: the Europeans had made
almost exactly the same claim of superior sophistication
during the Reagan years. At that time—in
1983—it had elicited a definitive comment from
Owen Harries (the former head of policy planning in
the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and
himself a member of the realist school):
When one is exposed to this claim of superior
realism and sophistication, one’s first inclination
is to ask where exactly is the evidence for
it. If one considers some of the salient episodes
in the history of Europe in this century—the
events leading up to 1914, the Versailles peace
conference, Munich, the extent of the effort
Europe has been prepared to make to secure its
own defense since 1948, and the current attitude
toward the defense of its vital interests in
the Persian gulf—one is not irresistibly led to
concede European superiority.
Two decades later, Harries as a realist would
have his own grave reservations about the Bush
Doctrine. But I had no hesitation in adding the
“sophisticated” European opposition to it as the
latest episode in the long string of disastrously mistaken
judgments he had enumerated back in 1983.
Unrealistic Realists
way to defeat militant Islam and the terrorism it
was using as its main weapon against us. Bush had
placed his bet on a belief in the universality of the
desire for freedom and the prosperity that freedom
brought with it. But what if he was wrong?
What if the Middle East was incapable of democratization?
What if the peoples of that region did
not wish to be as free and as prosperous as we
were? And what if Islam as a religion was by its
very nature incompatible with democracy?
These were hard questions about which reasonable
men could and did differ. But those of us
who backed Bush’s bet had our own set of doubts
about the doubts of the realists. They seemed to
forget that the Middle East of today had not been
created by Allah in the 7th century, and that the
miserable despotisms there had not evolved
through some inexorable historical process powered
entirely by internal cultural forces. Instead,
the states in question had all been conjured into
existence less than a hundred years ago out of the
ruins of the defeated Ottoman empire in World
War I. Their boundaries were drawn by the victorious
British and French with the stroke of an
often arbitrary pen, and their hapless peoples
were handed over in due course to one tyrant
after another.
Mindful of this history, we backers of the Bush
Doctrine wondered why it should have been
taken as axiomatic that these states would and/or
should last forever in their present forms, and
why the political configuration of the Middle
East should be eternally immune from the democratizing
forces that had been sweeping the
rest of the world.
And we wondered, too, whether it could really
be true that Muslims were so different from most
of their fellow human beings that they liked
being pushed around and repressed and beaten
and killed by thugs—even if the thugs wore clerical
garb or went around quoting from the
Quran. We wondered whether Muslims really
preferred being poor and hungry and ill-housed
to enjoying the comforts and conveniences that
we in the West took so totally for granted that we
no longer remembered to be grateful for them.
And we wondered why, if all this were the case,
there had been so great an outburst of relief and
happiness among the people of Kabul after we
drove out their Taliban oppressors.
Yes, came the response, but what about the
people of Iraq? Most supporters of the invasion—
myself included—had predicted that we
would be greeted there with flowers and cheers;
yet our troops encountered car bombs and hatred.
Nevertheless, and contrary to the impression created
by the media, survey after survey demonstrated
that the vast majority of Iraqis did welcome us, and
were happy to be liberated from the murderous
tyranny under which they had lived for so long
under Saddam Hussein. The hatred and the car
bombs came from the same breed of jihadists who
had attacked us on 9/11, and who, unlike the skeptics
in our own country, were afraid that we were
actually succeeding in democratizing Iraq.
Indeed, this was the very warning sent by the terrorist
leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the remnants
of al Qaeda still hunkered down in the caves
of Afghanistan: “Democracy is coming, and there
will be no excuse thereafter [for terrorism in Iraq].”
Speaking for many of his fellow realists, Fareed
Zakaria of Newsweek disagreed with al Zarqawi
that democracy was coming to Iraq and contended
that it was premature to try establishing it
there or anywhere else in the Middle East:
We do not seek democracy in the Middle East—
at least not yet. We seek first what might be
called the preconditions for democracy . . . the
rule of law, individual rights, private property, independent
courts, the separation of church and
state. . . . We should not assume that what took
hundreds of years in the West can happen
overnight in the Middle East.
Now, those of us who believed in the Bush
Doctrine saw nothing wrong with pursuing Zakaria’s
agenda. But we rejected the charge—often
made not only by realists like Zakaria but also by
paleoconservatives like Buchanan—that our position
was too “ideological” or naively “idealistic”
or even “utopian.” We agreed entirely with what
the President had long since contended: that the
realist alternative of settling for autocratic and
despotic regimes in the Middle East had neither
brought the regional stability it promised nor—
as 9/11 horribly demonstrated—made us safe at
home. Bush had also long since given his answer to
the question posed by “some who call themselves
realists” as to whether “the spread of democracy in
the Middle East should be any concern of ours.”
It was, he affirmed in the strongest terms, a concern
of ours precisely because democratization
would make us more secure, and he accused the
realists of having “lost contact with a fundamental
reality” on this point. In this respect, I would
argue, Bush was adopting a course akin to the
one taken by the Marshall Plan, which had si-
[46]
Commentary September 2004
What I have been trying to say is that the obstacles
to a benevolent transformation of the
Middle East—whether military, political, or religious—
are not insuperable. In the long run they
can be overcome, and there can be no question that
we possess the power and the means and the resources
to work toward their overcoming. But do
we have the skills and the stomach to do what will
be required? Can we in our present condition play
even so limited and so benign an imperial role as
we did in occupying Germany and Japan after
World War II?
Some of our critics on the European Right sneer
at us not, as the Left does, for being imperialists
but for being such clumsy ones—for lacking the
political dexterity to oversee the emergence of successor
governments more amenable to reform and
modernization than the despotisms now in place. I
confess that I am prey to anxieties about our capabilities,
and to others stemming from our character as
[47]
World War IV
multaneously served American interests and benef
ited others. Like the Marshall Plan, his new
policy was a synthesis of realism and idealism: a
case of doing well by doing good.
Those of us who supported the new policy also
took issue with the view that democracy and capitalism
could grow only in a soil that had been cultivated
for centuries. We reminded the realists that in the aftermath
of World War II, the United States managed
within a single decade to transform both Nazi Germany
and imperial Japan into capitalist democracies.
And in the aftermath of the defeat of Communism in
World War III, a similar process got under way on
its own steam in Central and Eastern Europe, and
even in the old heartland of the evil empire itself.
Why not the Islamic world? The realist answer was
that things were different there. To which our answer
was that things were different everywhere, and a
thousand reasons to expect the failure of any enterprise
could always be conjured up to discourage making
an ambitious effort.
To this, in turn, the counter frequently was that
the Bush administration had wildly underestimated
the special difficulties of democratizing Iraq and had
correlatively misjudged the time so great a transformation
would take, even assuming it to be possible at
all. Yet talk about a “cakewalk” and the like mainly
came from outside the administration; and in any
event it had been applied to the future military campaign
(which definitely did turn out to be a cakewalk),
not to the ensuing reconstruction of Iraq. As
to the latter, the administration kept repeating that
we would stay in Iraq “for as long as it takes and not
a day longer.” How long would that be? For those
who opposed the Bush Doctrine, a year (or even
a month?) after the end of major combat operations
was already much too much; for those of us
who supported it, “as long as it takes and not a
day longer” still seemed, given the stakes, the
only satisfactory formula.
As with democratization, so with the reform and
modernization of Islam. In considering this even
more difficult question, we found ourselves asking
whether Islam could really go on for all eternity resisting
the kind of reformation and modernization
that had begun within Christianity and Judaism in
the early modern period. Not that we were so naive
as to imagine that Islam could be reformed
overnight, or from the outside. In its heyday, Islam
was able to impose itself on large parts of the world
by the sword; there was no chance today of an inverse
instant transformation of Islam by the force
of American arms.
There was, however, a very good chance that a
clearing of the ground, and a sowing of the seeds out
of which new political, economic, and social conditions
could grow, would gradually give rise to correlative
religious pressures from within. Such pressures
would take the form of an ultimately irresistible demand
on theologians and clerics to find warrants in
the Quran and the sharia under which it would be
possible to remain a good Muslim while enjoying the
blessings of decent government, and even of political
and economic liberty. In this way a course might finally
be set toward the reform and modernization of
the Islamic religion itself.
The Democrats of 2004
a nation. And in thinking about our long record of
inattention and passivity toward terrorism before
9/11, I fear a relapse into appeasement, diplomatic
evasion, and ineffectual damage control.
Anxieties and fears like these were given a great
boost by the attacks on the Bush Doctrine that
became so poisonous in the 2004 presidential primary
campaigns of the Democratic party. I have already
told of my early apprehensions about the potential
spread of the antiwar movement from the margins to
the center, and my subsequent amazement in watching
it go so far so fast. Whereas it took twelve years
for the radicals I addressed in that drafty union hall
in 1960 to capture the Democratic party behind
George McGovern, their political and spiritual heirs
of 2001 seemed to be pulling off the same trick in less
than two. This time their leader of choice was the
raucously antiwar Howard Dean. Though he
eventually failed to win the nomination, his early
successes frightened most of the relatively moderate
candidates into a sharp leftward turn on
Iraq, and drove out the few who supported the
campaign there. As for John Kerry, in order to win
the nomination, he had to disavow the vote he had
cast authorizing the President to use force against
Saddam Hussein.
To make matters worse, the campaign to discredit
the action in Iraq moved from the hustings
into the halls of Congress, where it wore the camouflage
of a series of allegedly nonpartisan hearings.
In these hearings, the most prominent of
which was held by the Senate Intelligence Committee,
high officials of the Bush administration
were hectored by Democratic legislators (and even
a few Republicans) in terms that often came close
to sounding like the many articles and books in circulation
that were accusing the President of having
lied to us in going after Saddam Hussein. This was
no slow process of trickle-down; this was an instantaneous
inundation of the whole political landscape.
Among the lies through which Bush supposedly
misled John Kerry and everyone else was that there
might have been some connection between Saddam
and al Qaeda. Now, even those of us who believed in
such a connection were willing to admit that the
evidence was not (yet) definitive; but this was a far
cry from denying that there was any basis for it at
all.10 So far a cry, that according to the reports that
would be issued both by the Senate Intelligence
Committee and the 9/11 Commission in the summer
of 2004 (and contrary to how their conclusions
would be interpreted in the media), al Qaeda did in
fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with
Iraqi agents working under Saddam.11
It was the same with another of the lies Bush allegedly
told to justify the invasion of Iraq. In his State
of the Union address of 2003, he said that “The
British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa.” Then an obscure retired diplomat
named Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had earlier been
sent to Niger by the CIA to check out this claim,
earned his 15 minutes of fame—not to mention a
best-selling book—by loudly denouncing this assertion
as a lie. But it would in due course be established
that every one of the notorious “sixteen words” Bush
had uttered was true. This was the consensus of the
Senate Intelligence Committee report, two separate
British investigations, and a variety of European intelligence
agencies, including even the French.12 Not
only that, but it turned out that Wilson’s own report
to the CIA had tended to confirm the suspicion that
Saddam had been shopping for uranium in Africa,
and not, as he went around declaring, to debunk it.13
The liar here, then, was not Bush but Wilson.
But of course the biggest lie Bush was charged
with telling was that Saddam possessed
weapons of mass destruction. On this issue, too,
those of us who still suspected that the WMD remained
hidden, or that they had been shipped to
Syria, or both, were willing to admit that we might
well be wrong. But how could Bush have been lying
when every intelligence agency in every country in
the world was convinced that Saddam maintained an
arsenal of such weapons? And how could Bush have
“hyped” or exaggerated the reports he was given by
our own intelligence agencies when the director of
the CIA himself described the case as a “slam dunk”?
To be sure, again according to the Senate Intelligence
Committee report, the case, far from being
[48]
Commentary September 2004
10 Stephen F. Hayes has done especially good work on this issue,
both in a series of articles in the Weekly Standard and in his book
The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein
Has Endangered America.
11 Additional corroboration of “meetings . . . between senior Iraqi
representatives and senior al Qaeda operatives” would come from a
comparable British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, whose
report would be released around the same time as the Senate Intelligence
Committee.
12 From the Butler Report: “We conclude also that the statement
in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003
that ‘The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa’ was
well-founded.”
13 From the Senate Intelligence Committee Report: “He [the CIA
reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the
report [by Wilson] was that Nigerian officials admitted that the
Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerian
prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing
uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government
service reporting.”
a “slam dunk,” actually rested on weak or faulty
evidence. Yet the committee itself “did not find any
evidence that administration officials attempted to
coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change
their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
capabilities.” The CIA, that is, did not tell
the President what it thought he wanted to hear. It
told him what it thought it knew; and what it told
him, he had every reason to believe.14
In the wake of the WMD issue, several others
emerged that did even more to shake the confidence
of some who had been enthusiastic supporters of the
operation in Iraq. On top of the mounting number
of American soldiers being killed as they were trying
to bring security to Iraq, and on the heels of the horrendous
episodes of the murder and desecration of
the bodies of four American contractors in Falluja,
came the revelation that Iraqi prisoners in Abu
Ghraib had been subjected to ugly mistreatment by
their American captors.
Among supporters of the Bush Doctrine, these
setbacks set off a great wave of defeatist gloom that
was deepened by the nervous tactical shifts they produced
in our military planners (such as the decision
to hold back from cleaning out the terrorist militias
hiding in and behind holy places in Falluja and
Najaf). Even the formerly unshakable Fouad Ajami
was shaken. In a piece entitled “Iraq May Survive,
But the Dream is Dead,” he wrote: “Let’s face it: Iraq
is not going to be America’s showcase in the Arab-
Muslim world.”
That the antiwar party would batten on all this—
and would continue ignoring the enormous progress
we had made in the reconstruction of Iraqi society—
was only to be expected. It was also only natural for
the Democrats to take as much political advantage of
the setbacks as they could. But it was not necessarily
to be expected that the Democrats would seize just as
eagerly as the radicals upon every piece of bad news
as another weapon in the war against the war. Nor
was it necessarily to be expected that mainstream Democratic
politicians would go so far off the intellectual
and moral rails as to compare the harassment
and humiliation of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib—
none of whom, so far as anyone then knew, was even
maimed, let alone killed—to the horrendous torturing
and murdering that had gone on in that same
prison under Saddam Hussein or, even more outlandishly,
to the Soviet gulag in which many millions
of prisoners died.
Yet this was what Edward M. Kennedy did on
the floor of the Senate, where he declared that the
torture chamber of Saddam Hussein had been reopened
“under new management—U.S. management,”
and this was what Al Gore did when he accused
Bush of “establishing an American gulag.”
Joining with the politicians was the main financial
backer of the Democratic party’s presidential campaign,
George Soros, who actually said that Abu
Ghraib was even worse than the attack of 9/11.
On the platform with Soros when he made this
morally disgusting statement was Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton, who let it go by without a peep
of protest.
Equally ignominious was the response of
mainstream Democrats to the most effective
demagogic exfoliation of the antiwar radicals,
Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. Shortly after
9/11—that is, long before the appearance of this
movie but with many of its charges against Bush already
on vivid display in Moore’s public statements
about Afghanistan—one liberal commentator had
described him as a “well-known crank, regarded with
considerable distaste even on the Left.” The same
commentator (shades of how the “jackal bins” of yore
were regarded) had also dismissed as “preposterous”
the idea that Moore’s views “represent a significant
body of antiwar opinion.” Lending a measure of
plausibility to this assessment was the fact that Moore
elicited a few boos when, in accepting an Academy
Award for Bowling for Columbine in 2003, he declared:
We live in the time where we have fictitious
election results that elect a fictitious president.
We live in a time where we have a man sending
us to war for fictitious reasons. . . . [W]e are
against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr.
Bush, shame on you.
By 2004, however, when Fahrenheit 9/11 came
out, things had changed. True, this movie—a compendium
of every scurrility ever hurled at George
W. Bush, and a few new ones besides, all gleefully
stitched together in the best conspiratorial traditions
of the “paranoid style in American politics”—did
manage to embarrass even several liberal commentators.
One of them described the film as a product of
the “loony Left,” and feared that its extremism
might discredit the “legitimate” case against Bush
and the war. Yet in an amazing reversal of the
normal pattern in the distribution of prudence,
such fears of extremism were more pronounced
among liberal pundits than among mainstream
Democratic politicians.
[49]
World War IV
14 Going even further than the Senate Intelligence Committee, the
Butler Report concluded: “We believe that it would be a rash person
who asserted at this stage that evidence of Iraqi possession of
stocks of biological or chemical agents, or even of banned missiles,
does not exist or will never be found.”
Returning now to the gloom that aff licted
supporters of the Bush Doctrine in the
spring of 2004: one of the reasons Fouad Ajami
gave for it was that “our enemies have taken our
measure; they have taken stock of our national
discord over the war.” Emboldened by our restraint
in Falluja and elsewhere within Iraq, as
well as by our concomitant willingness to bring
the UN back into the political picture, our enemies
had begun to breathe easier—and not only
in Iraq:
Once the administration talked of a “Greater
Middle East” where the “deficits” of freedom,
knowledge, and women’s empowerment would
be tackled, where our power would be used to
erode the entrenched despotisms in the Arab-
Muslim world.
But now, Ajami lamented, it had become clear
that “we shall not chase the Syrian dictator to a spider
hole, nor will we sack the Iranian theocracy.”
There were even indications that, abandoning the
dream of democracy altogether, we might settle for
the rule of a “strong man” in Iraq.
But how accurate was the measure our enemies
had taken of us? Was it possible that their gauge
was being thrown off by the overheated atmosphere
of a more than usually bitter presidential
campaign, and by the caution George Bush felt it
necessary to adopt in seeking reelection?
This seemed to me then, and it still seems to
me now, the most decisive question of all. I
therefore want to conclude by examining it, and
I want to do so by returning to the analogy I
drew earlier between the start of World War III
in 1947 and the start of World War IV in 2001.
When the Truman Doctrine was enunciated in
1947, it was attacked from several different directions.
On the Right, there were the isolationists
who—after being sidelined by World War II—
had made something of a comeback in the Republican
party under the leadership of Senator
Robert Taft. Their complaint was that Truman
had committed the United States to endless interventions
that had no clear bearing on our national
interest. But there was also another faction
on the Right that denounced containment not as
recklessly ambitious but as too timid. This group
was still small, but within the next few years it
would find spokesmen in Republican political
figures like Richard Nixon and John Foster
Dulles and conservative intellectuals like William
F. Buckley, Jr. and James Burnham.
At the other end of the political spectrum, there
[50]
Commentary September 2004
Thus, so many leading Democrats flocked to a
screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Washington that (as
the columnist Mark Steyn quipped) the business of
Congress had to be put on hold; and when the
screening was over, nary a dissonant boo disturbed
the harmony of the ensuing ovation. The
chairman of the Democratic National Committee,
Terry McAuliffe, pronounced the film “very
powerful, much more powerful than I thought it
would be.” Then, when asked by CNN whether
he thought “the movie was essentially fair and
factually based,” McAuliffe answered, “I do. . . .
Clearly the movie makes it clear that George
Bush is not f it to be President of this country.”
Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa seconded McAuliffe
and urged all Americans to see the film: “It’s important
for the American people to understand
what has gone on before, what led us to this
point, and to see it sort of in this unvarnished
presentation by Michael Moore.”
Possibly some of the other important Democrats
who attended the screening—including Senators
Tom Daschle, Max Baucus, Barbara Boxer, and
Bill Nelson; Congressmen Charles Rangel,
Henry Waxman, and Jim McDermott; and elders
of the party like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and
Theodore Sorensen—disagreed with Harkin and
McAuliffe. But if so, they remained remarkably
quiet about it.
As for John Kerry himself, he did not take time
out to see Fahrenheit 9/11, explaining that there
was no need since he had “lived it.”
2004 and 1952
were the Communists and their “liberal” fellow
travelers who—strengthened by our alliance with
the Soviet Union in World War II—had emerged
as a relatively sizable group and would soon form a
new political party behind Henry Wallace. In their
view, the Soviets had more cause to defend themselves
against us than we had to defend ourselves
against them, and it was Truman, not Stalin, who
posed the greater danger to “free peoples everywhere.”
But criticism also came from the political
center, as represented by Walter Lippmann, the
most influential and most prestigious commentator
of the period. Lippmann argued that Truman
had sounded “the tocsin of an ideological crusade”
that was nothing less than messianic in its scope.
In the election of 1948, Truman had the seemingly
impossible task of confronting all three of
these challenges (and a few others as well).
When, against what every poll had predicted, he
succeeded in warding them off, he could reasonably
claim a mandate for his foreign policy. And
so it came about that, under the aegis of the Truman
Doctrine, American troops were sent off in
1950 to fight in Korea. “What a nation can do or
must do,” Truman would later write, “begins
with the willingness and the ability of its people
to shoulder the burden,” and Truman was rightly
confident that the American people were willing
to shoulder the burden of Korea.
Even so, enough bitter opposition remained within
and around the Republican party to leave it uncertain
as to whether containment was an American policy
or only the policy of the Democrats. This uncertainty
was exacerbated by the presidential election of
1952, when the Republicans behind Dwight D.
Eisenhower ran against Truman’s hand-picked successor
Adlai Stevenson in a campaign featuring strident
attacks on the Truman Doctrine by Eisenhower’s
running mate Richard Nixon and his future
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Nixon, for
example, mocked Stevenson as a graduate of the
“Cowardly College of Communist Containment”
run by Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson,
while Dulles repeatedly called for ditching
containment in favor of a policy of “rollback” and
“liberation.” And both Nixon and Dulles strongly
signaled their endorsement of General Douglas
MacArthur’s insistence that Truman was wrong to
settle for holding the line in Korea instead of going
all the way—or, as MacArthur had famously put it,
“There is no substitute for victory.”
Yet when Eisenhower came into office, he hardly
touched a hair on the head of the Truman
Doctrine. Far from adopting a bolder and more
aggressive strategy, the new President ended the Korean
war on the basis of the status quo ante—in other
words, precisely on the terms of containment. Even
more telling was Eisenhower’s refusal three years
later to intervene when the Hungarians, apparently
encouraged by the rhetoric of liberation still being
employed in the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe,
rose up in revolt against their Soviet masters. For
better or worse, this finally dispelled any lingering
doubt as to whether containment was the policy just
of the Democratic party. With full bipartisan support
behind it, the Truman Doctrine had become the official
policy of the United States of America.
The analogy is obviously not perfect, but
the resemblances between the political battles
of 1952 and those of 2004 are striking
enough to help us in thinking about what a few
moments ago I called the most decisive of all the
questions now facing the United States. To frame
the question in slightly different terms from the
ones I originally used: what will happen if the
Democrats behind John Kerry defeat George W.
Bush in November? Will they follow through on
their violent denunciations of Bush’s policy, or
will they, like the Republicans of 1952 with respect
to Korea, quietly forget their campaign
promises of reliance on the UN and the Europeans,
and continue on much the same course as
Bush has followed in Iraq? And looking beyond
Iraq itself, will they do unto the Bush Doctrine as
the Republicans of 1952 did unto the Truman
Doctrine? Will they treat Iraq as only one battle
in the larger war—World War IV—into which
9/11 plunged us? Will they resolve to go on
fighting that war with the strategy adumbrated
by the Bush Doctrine, and for as long as it may
take to win it?
From the way the Democrats have been acting
and speaking, I fear that the answer is no. Nor was
I reassured by the flamboyant display of hawkishness
they put on at their national convention in
July. Yet as a passionate supporter of the Bush Doctrine
I pray that I am wrong about this. If John
Kerry should become our next President, and he
may, it would be a great calamity if he were to
abandon the Bush Doctrine in favor of the law-enforcement
approach through which we dealt so
ineffectually with terrorism before 9/11, while leaving
the rest to those weakest of reeds, the UN and
the Europeans. No matter how he might dress up
such a shift, it would—rightly—be interpreted by
our enemies as a craven retreat, and dire consequences
would ensue. Once again the despotisms
[51]
World War IV
of the Middle East would feel free to offer sanctuary
and launching pads to Islamic terrorists; once
again these terrorists would have the confidence
to attack us—and this time on an infinitely
greater scale than before.
If, however, the victorious Democrats were
quietly to recognize that our salvation will come
neither from the Europeans nor from the UN,
and if they were to accept that the Bush Doctrine
represents the only adequate response to the
great threat that was literally brought home to us
on 9/11, then our enemies would no longer be
emboldened—certainly not to the extent they
have recently been—by “our national discord
over the war.”
In World War III, despite the bipartisan consensus
that became apparent after 1952 (and contrary
to the roseate reminiscences of how it was
then), plenty of “discord” remained, and there
were plenty of missteps—most notably involving
Vietnam—along the way to victory. There were
also moments when it looked as though we were
losing, and when our enemies seemed so strong
that the best we could do was in effect to sue for
a negotiated peace.
Now, with World War IV barely begun, a similar
dynamic is already at work. In World War
III, we as a nation persisted in spite of the inevitable
setbacks and mistakes and the defeatism
they generated, until, in the end, we won. To us
the reward of victory was the elimination of a
military, political, and ideological threat. To the
people living both within the Soviet Union itself
and in its East European empire, it brought liberation
from a totalitarian tyranny. Admittedly,
liberation did not mean that everything immediately
came up roses, but it would be foolish to
contend that nothing changed for the better
when Communism landed on the very ash heap
of history that Marx had predicted would be the
final resting place of capitalism.
Suppose that we hang in long enough to carry
World War IV to a comparably successful conclusion.
What will victory mean this time
around? Well, to us it will mean the elimination
of another, and in some respects greater, threat to
our safety and security. But because that threat
cannot be eliminated without “draining the
swamps” in which it breeds, victory will also entail
the liberation of another group of countries
from another species of totalitarian tyranny. As
we can already see from Afghanistan and Iraq,
liberation will no more result in the overnight establishment
of ideal conditions in the Middle
East than it has done in East Europe. But as we
can also see from Afghanistan and Iraq, better
things will immediately happen, and a genuine
opportunity will be opened up for even better
things to come.
The memory of how it was toward the end of
World War III suggests another intriguing
parallel with how it is now in the early days of
World War IV. We have learned from the testimony
of former officials of the Soviet Union
that, unlike the elites here, who heaped scorn on
Ronald Reagan’s idea that a viable system of missile
defense could be built, the Russians (including
their best scientists) had no doubt that the
United States could and would succeed in creating
such a system and that this would do them in.
Today the same kind of scorn is heaped by the
same kind of people on George W. Bush’s idea
that the Middle East can be democratized, while
our enemies in the region—like the Russians with
respect to “Star Wars”—believe that we are actually
succeeding.
One indication is the warning to this effect issued
by al Zarqawi to al Qaeda, from which I have already
quoted. But his letter is not the only sign that the secular
despots and the Islamofascists in the Middle East
are deeply worried over what the Bush Doctrine
holds in store for them. There is Libya’s Qaddafi,
who has admitted that it was his anxiety about “being
next” that induced him to give up his nuclear program.
And there are the Syrians and the Iranians. Of
course they keep making defiant noises and they
keep trying to create as much trouble for us as possible,
but with all due respect to the disappointed expectations
of Fouad Ajami, I have to ask: why would
they be sending jihadists and weapons into Iraq if not
in a desperate last-ditch campaign to derail a process
whose prospects are in their judgment only too fair
and whose repercussions they fear are only too likely
to send them flying?
This fear may, as Ajami says, have been tempered
by our response to the troubles they themselves
have been causing us. But it cannot have
been altogether assuaged, since it is solidly
grounded in the new geostrategic realities in
their region that have been created under the
aegis of the Bush Doctrine. Professor Haim
Harari, a former president of the Weizmann Institute,
describes these realities succinctly:
Now that Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are
out, two-and-a-half terrorist states remain:
Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the latter being a
Syrian colony. . . . As a result of the conquest
[52]
Commentary September 2004
of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria
are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly
to them. Iran is encircled by
Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq, and the
Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union.
Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan,
and Israel. This is a significant strategic change
and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist
countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active
in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq.
I do not know if the American plan was actually
to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is
the resulting situation.
Finally, there is the effect the Bush Doctrine has
had on the forces pushing for liberalization throughout
the Middle East. When Ronald Reagan used the
word “evil” in speaking of the Soviet Union, and
even confidently predicted its demise, he gave new
hope to democratic dissidents in and out of the gulag.
Back then, very much like Ajami on Bush, some of us
fell into near despair when Reagan failed to act in full
accordance with his own convictions. When, for example,
he responded tepidly to the great Polish crisis
of 1982 that culminated in the imposition of martial
law, the columnist George F. Will, one of his
staunchest supporters, angrily declared that the administration
headed by Reagan “loved commerce
more than it loathed Communism,” and I wrote an
article expressing “anguish” over his foreign policy.Yet even though (once more like Ajami today) our
criticisms were mostly right in detail, we were proved
wondrously wrong about the eventual outcome. It
was different with the dissidents behind the Iron
Curtain. They knew better than to get stuck on tactical
details, and they never once lost heart.
So it has been with the Bush Doctrine. Bush
has made reform and democratization the talk
of the entire Middle East. Where before there
was only silence, now there are countless articles
and speeches and conferences, and even sermons,
dedicated to the cause of political and religious
liberalization and exploring ways to bring it
about. Like the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain
in the 1980’s, the democratizers in the Middle East
today evidently remain undiscouraged. Falluja and
the rest notwithstanding, there has been, if anything,
a steady increase in the volume and range of
the reformist talk that was and continues to be
inspired by the Bush Doctrine.15
I do not wish to exaggerate. Except in Iran, and
perhaps also one or two other non-Arab Muslim
states, the democratizers are still a relatively small
group, and as yet their ranks seem to contain no one
comparable in intellectual stature or moral and political
influence to Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn or Sharansky.
But the editor of the Middle East Review of International
Affairs, Barry Rubin, who has generally
been very skeptical about the chances for democratization
in the region, offers a cautious assessment that
seems reasonable to me:
Democracy and reform are on the Arab world’s
agenda. It will be a long, uphill fight to bring
change to those countries, but at least a process
has begun. Liberals remain few and weak; the
dictatorships are strong and the Islamist threat
will discourage openness or innovation. Still, at
least there are more people trying to move
things in the right direction.
To which I (though not Rubin) would add, thanks
to George W. Bush.
Then there is Gaza, where at least some elements
of the fabled Palestinian street have for the
very first time exploded with denunciations not
of Israel or the United States, but of Yasir Arafat’s
tyrannical and corrupt rule. For the f irst time,
too, we f ind articles in the Arab press calling
for Arafat’s removal—in favor not of the
Islamist alternative represented by Hamas but of
a different kind of leadership.
Here, for example, is the Jordan Times:
The rapid deterioration of the domestic political
order in Gaza mirrors similar dilemmas that
plague most of the Arab world, revolving around
the tendency of small power elites or single men
to monopolize political and economic power in
their hands via their direct, personal control of
domestic security and police systems. Gaza is yet
another warning about the failure of the modern
Arab security state and the need for a better
brand of statehood based on law-based citizen
rights rather than gun-based regime protection
and perpetual incumbency.
And here is the Arab Times of Kuwait:
Arafat should quit his position because he is the
head of a corrupt authority. Arafat has destroyed
Palestine. He has led it to terrorism,
death, and a hopeless situation.
And there is this, from the Gulf News in Dubai:
Palestinians are saying their president for life—
Arafat—is the problem along with his cronies
who rule them, rob them, and impoverish them.
[53]
World War IV
15 A representative sample can be found on the website of the Middle
East Media Research Institute (http://www.memri.org/reform.
html).
Arabs have a responsibility here too. They can
say “Israel” until they are all blue in the face, but
it does not change the fact that a large part of the
fault lies with the Palestinians and the Arabs.
According to a Palestinian legislator quoted by the
Washington Post, “what is happening in the streets of
Gaza has [nothing] to do with reform. It’s a simple
power struggle.” By contrast, the Iranian-born commentator
Amir Taheri sees it as a new kind of “intifa-
In his first State of the Union address, President
Bush affirmed that history had called
America to action, and that it was both “our responsibility
and our privilege to fight freedom’s
fight”—a fight he also characterized as "a unique
opportunity for us to seize." Only last May, he
reminded us that “We did not seek this war on
terror,” but, having been sought out by it, we responded,
and now we were trying to meet the
“great demands” that “history has placed on our
country.”
In this language, and especially in the repeated references
to history, we can hear an echo of the concluding
paragraphs of George F. Kennan’s “X” essay,
written at the outbreak of World War III:
The issue of Soviet-American relations is in
essence a test of the overall worth of the United
States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction
the United States need only measure
up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy
of preservation as a great nation.
Kennan then went on to his peroration:
In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful
observer of Russian-American relations will
experience a certain gratitude for a Providence
which, by providing the American people with
[54]
Commentary September 2004
da aimed at bringing down yet another Arab tyranny.”
Chances are that there is some truth in both of
these opposing judgments, and in any event it is still
too early to tell how the turmoil in Gaza will play itself
out. But it is surely not too early to say that there
would have been no uprising against Arafat, and
much less talk about reform, if not for George W.
Bush’s policies combined with his courageous willingness
to back those of Ariel Sharon.
this implacable challenge, has made their entire
security as a nation dependent on their pulling
themselves together and accepting the responsibilities
of moral and political leadership that history
plainly intended them to bear.
Substitute “Islamic terrorism” for “Russian-American
relations,” and every other word of this magnificent
statement applies to us as a nation today. In
1947, we accepted the responsibilities of moral and
political leadership that history “plainly intended” us
to bear, and for the next 42 years we acted on them.
We may not always have acted on them wisely or
well, and we often did so only after much kicking and
screaming. But act on them we did. We thereby ensured
our own “preservation as a great nation,” while
also bringing a better life to millions upon millions
of people in a major region of the world.
Now “our entire security as a nation”—including,
to a greater extent than in 1947, our physical security—
once more depends on whether we are ready and
willing to accept and act upon the responsibilities of
moral and political leadership that history has yet
again so squarely placed upon our shoulders. Are we
ready? Are we willing? I think we are, but the jury is
still out, and will not return a final verdict until well
after the election of 2004.
—August 2, 2004
History’s Call
To learn more about Commentary, or to subscribe, click the
“Back” button on your browser’s menu bar.