World War IV?
by George Liebmann

Surely Nathan Podhoretz is the ultimate armchair warrior. In his August Commentary piece, "Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?", the opposing legions he assails are all helpfully labeled, in the sort of vocabulary familiar to readers of the old Daily Worker: "traditionalist conservative", "rabid paleo-conservative","old foreign policy establishment" and so on. That the people thus characterized might be engaged in their own individual quests for truth must not be acknowledged; this might require analysis and refutation. Far better to rely on prejudices against disembodied categories, which can be further marginalized, as in the case of Buchanan, et al, by piling on additional adjectives. Mr. Scowcroft, we are told, is an "enemy of Israel" On what evidence? His celebration of the fact that earlier American policies kept the United States out of middle eastern wars for 50 years?

The same dehumanized style of rhetoric informs the analysis of the fruits of the policy he celebrates. Iraquis, we are told, are enjoying "unimaginable liberties". There are sizable ‘no go’ areas in cities like Washington and Baltimore that have 300 murders a year. But Baghdad now has 300 murders every three days. "Unimaginable liberties?" Only if the progress from dictatorship to anarchy is regarded as a triumph of liberty. It was a wiser judge than Mr. Podhoretz who once observed that few things have done more to bring mankind out of the abyss than the habit of acquiescence to the law as it is. The Middle East, as Podhoretz says, has indeed been "unfrozen", but unfortunately in the same sense that Europe was "unfrozen" by the First World War.

Fixed in his armchair, Mr. Podhoretz is no detail man. He tells us of "the war that the Arab/Muslim world has been waging to wipe the Jewish state off the map." So much for Turkey and post-Sadat Egypt, both nations of seventy million. When one is waving the bloody shirt, one must make a good job of it, lest one not create what one professes to fear.

The Shiites and Sunnis, we are told, are "waging a campaign to defeat democracy". More accurately, they are waging a campaign to defeat alien rule, ours and each other’s. There is no reason to think that a multi-ethnic democracy can be created where no one has experienced limited government. As the same judge (Learned Hand) once observed, "an alien master is worst of all." Why Ambassador Galbraith and others should be derided for pointing to the example of early Switzerland as a very loose confederation passes understanding. But those who do nothing for federalism at home can scarcely be expected to propagate it abroad.

Negotiation, Mr. Podhoretz tells us, is a futile and even deplorable exercise. "We cannot put our faith in the words of tyrants." But for a hundred years after the Congress of Vienna, the world did just that. Mutuality of interest and verification have their claims. So does the efflux of time, free economic intercourse, and travel and communication. In the context of Iraq, Mr. Podhoretz proclaims that "the futility of all this became unmistakably obvious." But we are still waiting for evidence that the inspections, ongoing when war broke out, were ineffective.

"Moral equivalence" between Israel and its adversaries is deplored. Certainly Israel is a freer country, though not always a less virulently nationalistic one. Many of the dire warnings of Chaim Weizmann about the harm done to it by its own terrorists have come true. Thanks to its proportional representation system, there is also not much to choose between Hamas and some of the parties represented in the Knesset and frequently influential there. Israel’s American friends continue to pass over the dys-functionality of its electoral system; they were less kind to that of the French Third and Fourth Republic, from which it was derived, and their uncritical attitude serves Israel badly.

We can look forward to more of a "steady barrage of criticism" until Mr. Podhoretz brings "World War IV to a victorious end." He professes admiration for Truman’s containment policy. He should heed the words of its greatest exponent: "The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else’s tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion and intolerance as crimes in themselves–as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government–this sort of thing will continue to occur."

George W. Liebmann is a lawyer in Baltimore, Maryland.