It sounds harsh however if the War on Terrorism is continued to be fought with namby pamby rules of engagement it will last for decades until someone figures out the obvious to win. Just as the Allies figured it out to win WWII against Axis Authoritarian regimes of Germany, Japan and Hitler military puppet Italy.
Norman Podhertz biography (with a mention of a few other Neocons) from International Relations Center – Right Web:
JRH 7/25/07
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(This is really an anti-neocon website; however their exposition is concise and non-vindictive.)
Aside from Irving Kristol, few of the writers and ideologues associated with neoconservatism can claim as lasting an influence on the political faction as Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary magazine and an adjunct fellow at the rightist Hudson Institute. Under his editorship, which lasted from 1960 to 1995 (he is now editor at large), Commentary became the quintessential mouthpiece of the neoconservatives, serving as a soapbox from which Podhoretz and like-minded writers shaped the contours of what he called the neoconservative "tendency" as it began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From that platform, Podhoretz and others lambasted the anti-war movement, extolled the virtues of military power, attacked "appeasers" like George McGovern, and condemned the supposed amorality of the counterculture and of liberal social policies. Podhoretz also cofounded the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in the mid-1970s to serve as a pressure group aimed at fighting back the politics of détente with the Soviet Union and championing a fierce anti-communism that became the central theme of the early presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Discussing Podhoretz's influence, Andrew Bacevich writes in his 2005 book The New American Militarism: "Once his own fling with sixties radicalism ended, Podhoretz launched a 'scorched-earth campaign against the New Left and counterculture.' From his editorial command post at Commentary ... Podhoretz did much to create and refine the fiercely combative neoconservative style. That style emphasized not balance (viewed as evidence of timidity) or the careful sifting of evidence (suggesting scholasticism) but the ruthless demolition of any point of view inconsistent with the neoconservative version of truth, typically portrayed as self-evident and beyond dispute" (p. 72).
In his writings, Podhoretz commonly explicated themes associated with neoconservatism, including its constant preoccupation with weakness, the centrality of the Holocaust, the belief in U.S. exceptionalism, and the view that U.S. military force is a unique arbiter of good in global affairs. For Podhoretz, the Vietnam War was the new "Munich"—"the self-evident symbol of a policy that must never be followed again." (Munich is the classic symbol of appeasement because it is where Neville Chamberlain of Britain and other leaders agreed in 1938 to allow Adolf Hitler to take control of land in Czechoslovakia, thus fostering Nazi expansion.) The debacle in Vietnam had resulted in the lessening of the possibility of the United States wielding its military power, a result that Podhoretz considered potentially catastrophic. As he wrote in 1982: "The survival not only of the United States but of free institutions everywhere in the world depends on a resurgence of American power." Thus, he and other neocons in the 1970s, including his wife Midge Decter, struggled to overcome the post-Vietnam "malaise" in U.S. culture, which they thought was expressed in the counterculture and the "appeasement" polices of both the Nixon and Carter presidencies (quotes in this paragraph cited in Bacevich, pp. 74-75).
Podhoretz gained a reputation while at Commentary for overusing Holocaust imagery to describe contemporary events. Remarking on Podhoretz's work, Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, writes: "Once one starts using imagery from that most extreme of events, it becomes impossible to say anything moderate, balanced, or nuanced; the very language carries you along to hyperbole ... Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society had not learned 'the lessons of the Holocaust.'" This preoccupation also found expression in neoconservatives' views on Israel. As Decter once wrote while criticizing politicians whom she felt were not sufficiently supportive of Israel: "In a world full of ambiguities and puzzlements, one thing is absolutely easy both to define and locate: that is the Jewish interest. The continued security—and in those happy places where the term applies, well-being—of the Jews, worldwide, rests with a strong, vital, prosperous, self-confident United States" (cited in Gerson, Neoconservative Vision, p. 165).
Describing the sharp neoconservative reaction to perceived anti-Semitism in the United Nations following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke argue that a consensus gradually emerged among key neoconservatives like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, and Podhoretz that "America and Israel ... shared a common ideological struggle against common enemies. The 1970s saw the vague consensus of neoconservatism ... wrap itself tightly around the belief that America must have a self-assured and robust elite, which must be willing to employ U.S. power promptly and resolutely, if need be, and prepared to stand up to the USSR along with its anti-American and anti-Semitic allies at the UN and beyond" (Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 60).
For Podhoretz and his cohorts, the world is in a constant state of crisis. Living under this constant threat demands a stark choice between "surrender or war," as Podhoretz once wrote when criticizing the Carter administration (cited in Bacevich, p. 77). Near the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to crumble, Podhoretz's Commentary continued to warn of impending doom from the Soviets. In 1987, he published an article by Eugene Rostow, which argued: "The Soviet program of indefinite expansion achieved by the aggressive use of force ... [is still] the central problem ... of world politics and American national security." A year later, the French writer Jean-Francois Revel wrote in Commentary that glasnost was a ruse: "It is an instrument through which [Gorbachev] can consolidate his own power by using the press to indict and, little by little, eliminate his predecessors' men" (quotes from Ehrman, p. 175).
With the end of the Cold War, Podhoretz quickly joined forces with a second generation of neoconservatives who began championing a new U.S. interventionist policy, a notion that found preeminent expression in Charles Krauthammer's 1990 Foreign Affairs article, "The Unipolar Moment," which argued that the United States should take advantage of its position as the unique global superpower to impose its priorities across the world. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as Robert Tucker and Irving Kristol, Podhoretz fully embraced this new campaign, which eventually coalesced around the many ideologues who created the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. Podhoretz signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, which called for a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" that would ensure "American global leadership." It added: "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."
After 9/11, Podhoretz became one of the most prominent supporters of the view, initially dreamed up by neoconservative academic Eliot Cohen, that the United States was fighting World War IV. In a 2004 Commentary article, Podhoretz opined: "We are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and then in World War III [the Cold War], we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for as long as it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been called upon to do today in World War IV."
He added, employing that old standby of Holocaust imagery: "For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts, we are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and in the states breeding, sheltering, or financing its terrorist armory. This new enemy has already attacked us on our own soil—a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to pull off—and openly announces his intention to hit us again, only this time with weapons of infinitely greater and deadlier power than those used on 9/11. His objective is not merely to murder as many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America stands."
In a 2002 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Podhoretz borrowed a line from George Kennan's famous 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which argued for a policy of containing and rolling back the Soviet Union, to describe the war on terror. Replacing the words "Russian-American relations" in the original with "Islamic terrorism," Podhoretz said: " The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will ... experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear."
Podhoretz is the author of several books, including The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of his Writings from the 1950's through the 1990's (2003); The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are (2002); My Love Affair with America (2000); Ex-Friends (1999); The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (1986); Why We Were in Vietnam (1982); Making It (1980); The Present Danger; Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (1979); and Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (1966).
Last Updated: March 27, 2007
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Hudson Institute, Staff Bio: Norman Podhoretz, http://www.hudson.org/learn/index.cfm?fuseaction=staff_bio&eid=PodhNorm.
Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997).
Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/1991.
John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Norman Podhoretz, "World War IV," Commentary, August 17, 2004.
Norman Podhoretz, "America at War," speech at the American Enterprise Institute, February 13, 2002.
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Published by the International Relations Center (IRC, online at http://www.irc-online.org/). Copyright © 2007, International Relations Center. All rights reserved.
Recommended citation:"Norman Podhoretz," Right Web Profile (Silver City, NM: International Relations Center, March 27, 2007).
Web location: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1320
Production Information:
Author(s): Right Web
Editor(s): Right Web
Production: Chellee Chase-Saiz, IRC
Copyright © 2007, International Relations Center. All rights reserved.
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The IRC is obviously hostile to Neoconservativism however I got to tell you everything this website means as a scathing expose is a course of realism if America wishes to maintain a dominant place in the globe. Once America quits being a hegemon, America will cease to be the Home of Brave and the Land of the Free.
Even the YouTube link/video is meant to expose how the Neocons are designing to take over the world, but again that is a misperception. The Neocon goal is to maintain American hegemony to maintain the American Way of Life.
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