- Podhoretz, Norman.
World War IV.
New York: Doubleday, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-385-52221-2.
-
Whether you agree with it or not, here is one of the clearest
expositions of the “neoconservative” (a term the
author, who is one of the type specimens, proudly
uses to identify himself) case for the present conflict between
Western civilisation and the forces of what he identifies as
“Islamofascism”, an aggressive, expansionist, and
totalitarian ideology which is entirely distinct from Islam,
the religion. The author considers the Cold War to have
been World War III, and hence the present and likely as
protracted a conflict, as World War IV. He deems it to be as
existential a struggle for civilisation against the forces
of tyranny as any of the previous three wars.
If you're sceptical of such claims (as am I, being very much an
economic determinist who finds it difficult to believe a region
of the world whose exports, apart from natural resources
discovered and extracted largely by foreigners, are less than
those of Finland, can truly threaten the fountainhead of
the technologies and products without which its residents would remain
in the seventh century utopia they seem to idolise), read
Chapter Two for the contrary view: it is argued that since 1970,
a series of increasingly provocative attacks were made against
the West, not in response to Western actions but due to
unreconcilably different world-views. Each indication of weakness
by the West only emboldened the aggressors and escalated the
scale of subsequent attacks.
The author argues the West is engaged in a multi-decade
conflict with its own survival at stake, in which the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq are simply campaigns. This war, like the
Cold War, will be fought on many levels: not just military, but
also proxy conflicts, propaganda, covert action, economic warfare,
and promotion of the Western model as the solution to the
problems of states imperiled by Islamofascism. There is some
discussion in the epilogue of the risk posed to Europe by the
radicalisation of its own burgeoning Muslim population while its
indigenes are in a demographic death spiral, but for the most
part the focus is on democratising the Middle East, not the
creeping threat to democracy in the West by an unassimilated
militant immigrant population which a feckless, cringing political
class is unwilling to confront.
This book is well written and argued, but colour me unpersuaded.
Instead of spending decades spilling blood and squandering fortune in
a region of the world which has been trouble for every empire foolish
enough to try to subdue it over the last twenty centuries, why not
develop domestic energy sources to render the slimy black stuff in the
ground there impotent and obsolete, secure the borders against
immigration from there (except those candidates who demonstrate
themselves willing to assimilate to the culture of the West), and
build a wall around the place and ignore what happens inside? Works
for me.
July 2008 