Thinking and rethinking the war in Iraq

By Rich Barlow  |  September 5, 2007

World War IV, By Norman Podhoretz, Doubleday, 224 pp., $24.95

A Time to Lead, By Wesley Clark with Tom Carhart, Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pp., $24.95

To twist a phrase, if it ducks like a quack, it's a quack. And in "World War IV" Norman Podhoretz, neoconservative and ardent supporter of the Iraq war, ducks the central criticism of the neoconservatives' fight-to-the-finish strategy on that conflict: Military victory means nothing unless the Iraq government can cut the political compromises necessary for peace, and there's scant evidence that it can.

Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary magazine, derives his title from his contention that the Cold War constituted World War III and the war on terror has forced a fourth global war upon us. Showing how democracy can work in Iraq is our only hope for shutting down the Middle East's assembly line of terrorism, he says. Podhoretz admits to having underestimated the durability of the Iraqi insurgency. "But like the president, I remained convinced that [democratization] could and would be achieved if we could 'stay the course' for (in the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) 'as long as it takes and not a day longer.' "

Well, even the White House thinks it will take Iraqi lawmakers five to 10 years to reach that point, according to author Bob Woodward. Is the loss of American life and treasure that will occur worth it, especially in a war premised on faulty intelligence? And what if the White House is wrong and the Iraqis aren't up to the job? As I said, Podhoretz ducks. He never satisfactorily answers conservative columnist George Will's observation, borne out so far in Iraq, that pluralist societies give rise to democracy, not vice versa.

In "A Time to Lead," former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark argues for a more rational but still pallid alternative. This memoir's biographical sections veer from gripping - Clark opens with his near death in a Vietnam firefight - to banal. (It's dangerous to write books about "leadership," since they uniformly succumb to mushy bromides about building consensus and making things happen.) Elsewhere, Clark adds a pinch of policy prescriptions for Iraq and the war on terror generally. He says we should abandon the neocon strategy of regime change in favor of pressuring the Iraqis to bridge their divide by demanding political benchmarks, timelines, and a schedule for troop redeployments. We'll beat terrorists by showcasing our ideology of tolerance, not by killing them, he argues, though he acknowledges (with breathtaking understatement) that we may need to do that, too.

Clark is right that we need an ideological front against reactionary Islamic radicalism. But he seems to share Podhoretz's hope that we can muscle the Iraqis into political resolution and doesn't lay out a Plan B if we can't, other than simply leaving. And leaving won't be simple. How do we ensure that jihadists don't make a sanctuary in Iraq? How do we keep the war from metastasizing throughout the region? Is a post-pullout genocide likely, and do we ignore it if it happens?

Stronger plans are out there. Contrast these arguments with that of Democratic Senator Joseph Biden. His proposal for a "soft partition" - of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish states, with a weak federal government - while fraught with obstacles, seems less perilous than either fighting to the death or a full-speed retreat. The New York Times recently quoted an anonymous Bush administration official as saying that the Biden plan ultimately could become administration policy. That would prove especially ironic for Podhoretz if, after his writing "World War IV," the president sawed off the branch on which his case perches.

Contact Rich Barlow at barlow81 @gmail.com.