Book Review: Why Does Norman Podhoretz Hate America?

[BucEyedPea]

This is long, but I am going to post most of it with some reformatting to help.

by Michael Scheuer ( patteeu’s nemesis ;) )
former chief of binLaden counter-terrorism in the CIA

World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism [aka a war that may never end folks.]
Norman Podhoretz Doubleday, 2007

Norman Podhoretz's new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, (http://www.amazon.com/World-War-IV-Struggle-Islamofascism/dp/0385522215/antiwarbookstore) is a hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order.

Podhoretz hates every American who does not support the neoconservatives' views, the foreign policy they have devised, and the military and national security disasters to which they are leading America. [and is one of the chief agitators for strikes on Iran. This may create his WW IV afterall.]

Patrick Buchanan, Andrew J. Bacevich, Sir John Keegan, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and many others are all targets of Podhoretz.

These men are variously characterized as anti-Semites, isolationists, [sound familiar ?] recanters from the true creed, or simply as small men who fear the neoconservative utopia is about to arrive, discredit their views, and cost them their jobs or prestige. Podhoretz is particularly vicious toward Buchanan because he knows that Buchanan sees through the neoconservative fantasy with the most unrelenting acuity. Buchanan's frank voice and non-interventionism – not isolationism – are genuinely American characteristics, so Podhoretz must go all out to discredit Buchanan as an anti-Semite, lest Americans listen to Buchanan's advice not to get their children killed fighting other peoples' wars, be they wars for Israelis or Muslims or anyone else.

And who are the heroes of the story?
Why, Podhoretz and the familiar roster of the only real Americans and Israel-firsters, of course: Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, Victor Davis Hanson, John R. Bolton, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, and a few others who have battled so long and hard to ensure that America fights an endless war against Muslims in Israel's defense.

Podhoretz and his chums are the men responsible for the lethal mess America now faces in the Muslim world, and they have also done more than any other group – Hamas and Hezbollah included – to undermine Israel's long-term security.

In short, the influence and arrogance of this gang has been an unmitigated and accelerating disaster for the two nations they claim to love most. I will leave it up to those who read the book to decide which country they obviously love best, but I bet you can guess before turning a page.

continued... (http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=11670)

[BucEyedPea]

Podhoretz is BIG on pinning the Islamofascist label on our Islamist enemies.
The phrase has nothing to do with reality, of course, as the Islamists are far from fascists, though they clearly are the most dangerous threat America now confronts. But Podhoretz does not care about understanding the enemy's real motivation and attributes in order to annihilate [them] as quickly as possible.

By using the term Islamofascist he seeks only to block any debate on the neoconservative agenda by ensuring that its critics are identified as pro-fascist, therefore anti-American, therefore pro-Nazi, and therefore anti-Semitic.

Other notable men have described this tactic as the Big Lie, and it is a neocon specialty and trademark.

And if this Big Lie is not enough for you, try another of Podhoretz's on for size.
This one is so ahistorical and deliberately misleading that it is hard to even begin to comment on its mendacity. Podhoretz focuses on one of the terrorist Yasser Arafat's rants damning the United States as "the murderers of humanity," considering it divine revelation that Arafat did not mention Israel in the single paragraph quoted in the book. "The absence of even a word here about Israel," lectures Podhoretz to Americans he obviously sees as mindless cattle who will believe any lie thrown their way, "showed that if the Jewish state had never come into existence, the United States would still have stood as the 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."

How many major American military conflicts with Arabs can Podhoretz name that occurred prior to Israel's establishment? Clearly, Podhoretz and his heroic band want the Islamist enemy to stay in the field so that the war he and the Israel-firsters wanted and now have will go on and on and on. Like the sickest and most addled of bloodletting Wilsonian interventionists, Podhoretz quotes the puerile position of George W. Bush that U.S. security depends on building mirror images of America abroad: "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know that the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you."

continued...

[BucEyedPea]

And what is the endgame of standing with those who stand for liberty?
Quoting President Bush again, Podhoretz says U.S. military forces must "drain the swamps" of the Islamofascist world and replace incumbent regimes with elected governments that will "fulfill the hopes 'of the Islamic nations [who] want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.'" This effort, Podhoretz adds, is "marked by more than a touch of nobility."

In Podhoretz's hateful prose we find the true crusader spirit bound up with the con-man's willingness to distort history for political advantage. Again using the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Podhoretz argues "that history had called America to action and that it was both 'our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight.'" Taken to its logical bottom line, this assertion means that American parents should be delighted to nobly spend the lives of their children so Iraqis and Afghans can vote and have parliaments. Implicit in this absurd argument is that somehow U.S. national security requires that other people – not all others, of course, only Muslims – vote, behave democratically, and become secular. This is truly analysis by assertion.

Can anyone really imagine that American society is automatically safer because Mrs. Mohammed votes and wears mascara? Or, alternatively, that U.S. national security is threatened if the Pashtun tribal leaders of southeastern Afghanistan do not appoint precinct captains to get out the vote in parliamentary elections?

Clearly, Podhoretz is running a con here, and the price will be paid not in cash but in the blood of American kids. Indeed, Podhoretz can only lecture the grieving parents of the young Americans who have already died in Iraq : "By any historical standard, our total losses were still, and would remain, amazingly low." (110)

History also gets in the way of Podhoretz's worldview, so we get another con. We are not, he argues, trying to impose democracy and neuter the religion of a 14-century-old Islamic civilization and 1.4 billion Muslims, but merely trying to repair a political order that was inappropriately arranged by the Western powers a hundred years ago."But here again," Podhoretz argues,

"[T]he so-called realist [view of U.S. foreign policy that opposed the Iraq war] ignored the reality, which was that the Middle East of today was not thousands of years old, and was not created in the seventh century by Allah or the Prophet Mohammed. … Instead, the states in question had all been conjured into existence less than one hundred years ago out of the ruins of the defeated Ottoman Empire in World War I. Their boundaries had been drawn by the victorious British and French with a stroke of an often arbitrary pen, and their hapless peoples were handed over in due course to one tyrant after another."

This is another absurd argument that again reduces to nonsense, to wit: The French and British tried to dictate the organization and political system of an ancient Islamic civilization and cocked it up, but we are much smarter – and implicitly purer – than they were, so we can build the perfect Muslim world.

This smug attitude does capture in a nutshell, however, a good part of the basic un-Americanism of the neoconservatives; they are a foreign and, I think, malign influence in our body politic. America is a republic founded on the principles and insights derived from what Gertrude Himmelfarb has described in her brilliant work The Roads to Modernity as the American Enlightenment, fundamental to which is a profound belief in the utter imperfectability of man.

Podhoretz and his all-knowing and stern-minded gang of neoconservative warmongers, on the other hand, are the heirs of the French Enlightenment's faith in man's perfectibility, the principles of which have brought the world the bloody horrors and mass murder conducted by the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and any number of others who attempted to create a perfect society.

[BucEyedPea]

Creating the "perfect" Muslim society
There is no sane reason to believe that neoconservative-led efforts to "perfect" Muslim society would yield less bloodshed, much less to imagine that it would increase security for the United States.

Mis-using past ideas and heros from America such as comparisons to WWII and the Cold War that do not apply.
The other part of the fundamental un-Americanism of Podhoretz and his brothers lies in their use of the ideas and heroes of American history only if they further their "enlightened" foreign policy; all others they ignore or misrepresent. Picking and choosing from the words of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy, Podhoretz tries to infer that fighting a "world war" against the Islamofascists is identical to fighting world wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. This sounds good if you say it fast, but the selective use of our presidents' words by Podhoretz is just another of his inaccurate assertions.

Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist.

The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway.

A War we are losing...because of folks like Podhoretz
We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." (14-15) Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." (102) To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America's defeat.

A little more continued here... (http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=11670)

[patteeu]

I think Michael Schueur is either a bit dishonest or his views are evolving as he tries to more closely fit into the club of the rabid neo-isolationists. To be fair, he's been in the neo-isolationist camp from the beginning of his public life, but he was much less strident about it and much more respectful of alternative views in the early days. This book review is an excellent example of the hubris he's developed.

As just one example, here he includes Victor Davis Hanson in his list of villians "who have battled so long and hard to ensure that America fights an endless war against Muslims in Israel's defense." But in his book Imperial Hubris, he has many kind words for Mr. Hanson:

It is with some trepidation that I disagree with this line of analysis [ed: that al Qaeda is motivated by the idea that Muslim civilization if failing and that they blame this failure on the West]. First, it is held by writers for whom I have profound respect, especially Bernard Lewis, Ralph Peters, Malise Ruthven, and Victor Davis Hanson. Second, I believe that in a general sense there is much truth in this analysis. There is no avoiding that fact that there is a systemic breakdown across much of the Muslim world that is most evident in rampant illiteracy, technological backwardness, poor educational systems, decrepit public services, rudimentary health care, discrimination against women, tyrannical governments, and a host of other problems. And there indeed are many Muslims who blame other civilizations -- Western, Modern, Christian, secular, call it what you will -- for each of these misfortunes. "Meanwhile the blame game -- the Turks, the Mongols, the imperialists, the Jews, the Americans -- continues, and shows little sign of abating," wrote Bernard Lewis in the book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, in which he presents the failed-civilization thesis.

That was the kind of measured criticism that Schueur offered in his book. The OP's book review looks more like partisan propaganda than his previous balanced analysis.

Beyond this drift toward more extreme rhetoric, Schueur doesn't recognize that the neoconservative goal of helping to foster democracy in Islamic states is born of the same diagnosis of the problem as his neo-isolationist ideology. Both schools of thought recognize that our historical "realist" foreign policy, which was aimed at propping up existing tyrannical, non-representative regimes for the sake of stability, was creating the conditions under which al Qaeda prospers. Whether OBL is driven by a religious conviction (as Schueur believes) or whether he is driven by the failed civilization concept (described above), he wouldn't have nearly the persuasiveness over large numbers of Muslims if they weren't so dissatisfied with their own governments.

Schueur, and other neo-isolationists want us to abandon the region and let it's inhabitants find their own way whether it involves massive bloodshed or peaceful revolt, while neoconservatives want to continue to have enough influence over the region to insure that oil and maritime trade aren't significantly disrupted. The difference between the neoconservatives and the realists is that the former want to become more of a friend to the people than a friend to the rulers. The neo-isolationist's view would be the more attractive of the two options, IMO, if it weren't for the fact that *someone* is going to fill the vacuum if we withdraw -- whether that someone is Iran, or al Qaeda, or China, or maybe even Russia -- and our economy could be severely damaged if that someone decides to significantly disrupt the oil flow or if war in the region disrupts it as an unintended consequence. We are more dependent on oil than any other single substance on earth for our standard of living (other than, of course, oxygen and water) and the neo-isolationists have nothing but faith that their path would not lead to serious disruptions.

[BucEyedPea]

No pat, I think Podhoretz's book show that Podhoretz is clinically anti-social aka insane....even if he is bright. He has no grip on reality, doesn't know right from wrong, wants to do more of the same that brought us terror and which has not handled terror but aggravated it. Doing the same thing over and over despite not getting desired results or the same bad or worse results IS insanity. He is delusional and paranoid.This book is the counterpart to Mein Kamp.

I also think the recharging of the "isolationist" label was created by Podhoretz and has trickled down into the debate. He's obviously a Trotskyite permanent revolution guy and/or an empire builder. He favors wars of national liberation much like the Soviet Empire. Social engineering. This just means more trouble; not less.

Scheuer is THE educated historian, not Podhoretz, in particular on the ME.

[Adept Havelock]

He is delusional and paranoid.This book is the counterpart to Mein Kamp.


Was that the book about where young Adolf spent his summers? :p

[patteeu]

No pat, I think Podhoretz's book show that Podhoretz is clinically anti-social aka insane....even if he is bright. He has no grip on reality, doesn't know right from wrong, wants to do more of the same that brought us terror and which has not handled terror but aggravated it. Doing the same thing over and over despite not getting desired results or the same bad or worse results IS insanity. He is delusional and paranoid.This book is the counterpart to Mein Kamp.

I also think the recharging of the "isolationist" label was created by Podhoretz and has trickled down into the debate. He's obviously a Trotskyite permanent revolution guy and/or an empire builder. He favors wars of national liberation much like the Soviet Empire. Social engineering. This just means more trouble; not less.

Scheuer is THE educated historian, not Podhoretz, in particular on the ME.

You didn't address my post at all. I didn't mention Podhoretz in my post once. I was criticizing the growing hubris of Michael Schueur and his relative inconsistency with the Michael Schueur of only 3 years ago. I'm not comparing Schueur with Podhoretz, I'm comparing the Schueur who now basks in the glory of anti-war.com extremists with the Schueur who wrote as Anonymous and gave what seems to be a straightforward, honest, personal analysis of the situation in his book.

As for Podhoretz, he's not my favorite commentator on GWoT issues. That [unimportant] honor goes to Ralph Peters, to whom, btw, Michael Schueur gave credit for writing "perhaps the best book" he'd read while researching Imperial Hubris ("Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?"). I think Podhoretz provides a useful template for understanding the GWoT with his WW IV construct and I think he gets it right a whole lot more than you do, but I'm also bothered by some things that he says that don't ring true to me.

The best example I can think of is when he claims that Iran's President has threatened to use nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. On this issue, I agree with you that there is most likely a failure of translation and that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is talking more about how regimes that don't reflect the will of the people (as he sees it) will eventually disappear, not that he would take the first opportunity to hurry that along with a nuclear weapon. OTOH, I think it's very likely that Iran will continue to attempt to hurry this result along through the use proxies like Hezbolah and Hamas.