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Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 11:05 AM
World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win

by Norman Podhoretz

Commentary (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/masthead.asp)
September 2004

A Note to the Reader

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. 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 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 already 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.

PDF file which contains the rest of the article (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/A11802017_1.pdf)

spurster
08-12-2004, 11:19 AM
Did I miss World War III?

Equating the Cold War and the War on Terrorism with the two world wars is ludicrous. Serious stuff yes, but nowhere near the death and mayhem of WWI or WWII.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 11:43 AM
Does the body count really matter? The Cold War certainly could have produced a body count which would have dwarfed WWI & WWII combined.

If you think about it, each of the wars was fought around a general idea. WWI dealt with the frustrations and limitations of the imperialistic powers of the day. WWII was about the repelling of fascism. The Cold War? Democratic capitalism versus communism. War on terror? Islamic extremism versus all its enemies. These were the ideas which were the genesis of the conflicts and the ideas which dominated and polarized international affairs during their respective eras.

If we really want to get into whether or not labels really reflect the realities of war then the notion of a "cold" war is preposterous. Was Korea "cold"? Vietnam?

SAmikeyp
08-12-2004, 11:43 AM
World War III (that is, the cold war);

due respect....but no.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 11:52 AM
What kind of body count could a nuke detonated in Lower Manhattan on a weekday generate?

Exactly how hard would it be for an Islamist terrorist group to get ahold of a nuclear device and smuggle it into these United States? I've yet to hear that all of the nuclear weapons once possessed by the former Soviet Union have been accounted for.

NameDropper
08-12-2004, 12:39 PM
I agree, where was WWIII?

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 12:48 PM
You can start with Korea and Vietnam if you feel that a "World War" must have been fought in the conventional sense.

Fortunately for mankind the Cold War was largely fought through a weapons race instead of use of those weapons.

Here's a way to think about it...the mode of warfare in WWI and WWII was due principally to the types of weaponry available then.

Whereas in the past it required a massive amount of time, material resources, and effort to cause wholesale destruction and astronomical body counts, all that could be accomplished with one bomb or one missle, as the primitive nuclear devices dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima demonstrated.

Once global conflict became about the potential use of such weapons (and I think the reality of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by relatively crude nukes set in), I think there was a greater reluctance to use them precisely because of their destructive power and the likely end of civilization in the West and in the USSR that it would have led to.

If it wasn't really a global conflict then why was it ever referred to as the "Cold War" to begin with?

ducks
09-13-2019, 12:30 AM
Not yet