Hang on! Stop the presses! Stop the blogs! Big news! Big fat honking big freakin' news!
Norman Podhoretz has written something in the Wall Street Journal opinion section that actually makes sense:
the military campaign in Iraq cannot be understood
Whoa! AMAZING! ASTOUNDING! Norman Podhoretz said something rational. Un-believable.
Wow.
(*whistles in nonchalant fashion*)
Ah, no, sorry, just messing with you. No, he's still completely demented. The article is actually entitled, and I shit you not, "The Case for Bombing Iran: I Hope and Pray President Bush Will Do It." I myself am unfamiliar with the "Bombing Prayer," but am given to understand that it has pride of place in the Wingnut Liturgy. Here's the whole quote:
Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.
What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right.
Well, me, I call this new war GAMBLOR! Or, "Betsy."
There's really no point in engaging with this sort of stuff, except to simply point at it and back away slowly, making soothing noises at the lunatic.
Because the big problem with Pod's thesis is that it is confused and makes no sense. In "WWIII," there was an "other side" comprised of, um, people. In "World War IV," or, remember, "GAMBLOR" or "Betsy," the "other side" is an ill-defined ideology capable of encompassing such diverse individuals as Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and, well, whoever. All it has to offer as far as policy recommendations is "exterminate all the brutes."
It's spoilt warmed over 19th century imperialism only without the attempt at internal coherence or the stab at aesthetic grandeur.