The Front Lines of Manhattan

The journalistic category of war correspondence evokes images of dashing young men in flak jackets and muddy combat boots, dodging bullets and hitching rides in jeeps. It is a measure of how different the current war is that one of our finest war reporters turns out to be a 77-year-old grandfather who does most of his reporting in Manhattan rather than from Kabul or Baghdad.

It's not that Norman Podhoretz hasn't seen attacks firsthand. The morning of September 11, 2001, he was serving jury duty on Centre Street and was out on the street as the second tower collapsed. His great skill, though, is as a reporter of the war of ideas, one of the hottest fronts in the conflict described by Mr. Podhoretz with the title of his latest book, "World War IV" (Doubleday, 224 pages, $24.95).

It's a slim volume built to a large degree on his essays about the war in Commentary, but even those of us who are readers of the magazine and followers of the war will find in it new insights. Mr. Podhoretz has a clear idea of our enemies in Al Qaeda and the other Islamofascist forces and of their goals, but where he really shines is in his assessments of their sympathizers in the West.

He quotes the wonderful descriptions by Nick Cohen of the London Observer of the antiwar marches throughout Europe in 2003: "About a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. … In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime." All told, throughout Europe, "millions, maybe tens of millions, had marched to keep a fascist regime in power."

Mr. Podhoretz quotes the Italian playwright Dario Fo, a Nobel laureate, as minimizing the attacks of September 11 by writing, "The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty — so what is 20,000 [sic] dead in New York?" Mr. Podhoretz quotes a professor of classics at Cambridge University, Mary Beard, as saying of September 11, "the United States had it coming."

It may be that one has to be a grandfather who has served in the war of ideas his whole life, as Mr. Podhoretz has, to appreciate fully the ghastliness of these sentiments and the echoes of pre-World War II England. Mr. Podhoretz is, in any event, merciless in laying out this strand in the current conflict.

He is similarly tough-minded in assessing the run-up to September 11, sparing not even Ronald Reagan for flinching in the face of the terrorists. "Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December when the American Embassy in Kuwait was bombed," Mr. Podhoretz writes. "Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the Marines from Beruit, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hezbollah and then murdered."

The American president that Mr. Podhoretz does offer a vigorous defense of is President Bush. Mr. Podhoretz defends him not, as might be expected, only against leftists and Patrick Buchanan types who think Mr. Bush has been too aggressive in the war, but also, more surprisingly, against fellow neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Max Boot, and Joshua Muravchik, who have complained that the Bush administration has fallen short of the president's ideals and has failed to do enough to support freedom in places such as Iran and Egypt. Mr. Podhoretz allows that while his heart was with "those neoconservatives who were pressing for a more aggressive implementation of the Bush doctrine," he nevertheless "thought they were wrong." Mr. Podhoretz criticizes them for utopianism and for overlooking the constraints Mr. Bush was under as a politician, and he interprets Mr. Bush's actions in respect of Iran as "walking the last diplomatic mile," as he did before the battle of Iraq, "to expose the futility of diplomacy where the likes of Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullocracy were concerned and to show that the only alternative to accepting the threats they posed was military action."

Mr. Podhoretz seems at times afflicted by pessimism, predicting that winning the war against "the Islamofascist terrorists" "will almost certainly take three or four decades," and complaining both that the "mainstream media" was "in favor of an American defeat in Iraq" and that nonstop television news and the Internet "magnify everything that goes wrong, or only appears to have gone wrong."

In the end, though, like the patriotic American he is, Mr. Podhoretz comes out on the side of thinking that "the American people of this generation" do have it in us to defeat the Islamofascists as previous generations of Americans defeated the Nazis in World War II and the Communists in World War III. My own prediction is that it will happen quicker than Mr. Podhoretz thinks it will, though I can understand the reasoning behind wanting to prepare the American public for a long struggle.

Part of the reason a victory may come quicker than many expect is that the same Internet and televisions that beam images of defeat into American living rooms and propaganda into enemy tents and caves are able too to spread images of voting in Iraq and anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon and the words of pro-democracy dissidents in Iran and of the abuses of the ruling mullahs. If every American would read "World War IV," President Bush's approval rating would soar; when it is translated and published in Arabic and Farsi, it will be a sign that victory is drawing near.