World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism

The thesis of this book is that the United States and the free world are now engaged in a fourth world- war, this one against radical Islam. The 'third world war' ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and now according to Podhoretz the West faces another long- term struggle which will be decided not in a year or two but in the decades ahead. The point - man of this war at present is President Bush who Podhoretz sees as continually defamed and slandered by anti- American elements in the far - too- liberal for his taste Western media.
While I am fundamentally in sympathy with his approach and believe that he rightfully sees the insidious intentions of a radical revolutionary fundamentalist Islam , I have reservations about his approach. One reason for this is that when we think of War we tend to think of great military forces in direct collision. True, the United States and the Soviet Union did not come to the ultimate face off, as the Allies did against the Axis but there were two massive military and political empires in direct contention.
Here there is , as Podhoretz is well aware of, an assymetrical situation. Therefore he sees it as a new kind of war, a new kind of struggle which is especially demanding in the propaganda and media spheres. As I understand it he reads the intentions of Radical Islam rightly. Whether it be the Sunni Salafi Wahhabite strains or the Shiite Messianic strains there is an ideology whose ultimate goal is putting all of Mankind under the flag of Islam. The rise in this regard of a radical Iran on the verge of nuclear weapons is at this moment a key and most threatening development in the overall struggle.
In regard to Iran Podhoretz is most forthright and persuasive. He outlines the dangers of a nuclear Iran, and he rightly characterizes the regime as an Islamofascist one. He understands Gulf Oil, America's allies in the Middle East would all be put in great jeopardy by a nuclear Iran. And he strongly advocates as major step in the war the preempting of the Iranian nuclear threat.
Iran also plays a part in another aspect of the Islamic threat, the element of Muslim penetration into Europe. There is by this time a whole literature suggesting that in a few decades post- Christian Europe my well be Islamic.
But there are great weaknesses in the world of Islam, including the major failure to within their own societies confront the modern world and properly adapt to it. The Islamic world is by and large a backward world not simply in its political structure but in its command of the knowledge, and technique of modernity.
So my own understanding is that in the civilizational confrontations of the future it is not really poised for mastery and conquest. Its forces are too scattered, divided, and weak. Consider the chaos in Iraq with not simply Sunnite- Shiite conflicts but with internal Shiite conflicts. To my mind the danger of radical Islam and Islam's anti- American stand is in its power to weaken the U.S. isolate it from its allies, and generally serve as auxillary to the forces which present a greater real threat in the future, a renascent Russia, and far more importantly ,an ambitious rapidly developing China.
On the whole I believe Podhoretz rightly points to an ongoing, and increasing danger presented to the U.S. and the West by radical Islam. I believe he is right in seeing that this danger will not go away soon. And that the U.S. struggle will be a long term and global one. The historian Michael Oren in surveying two - hundred years of American involvement in the Middle East showed many of the U.S. involvement in that part of the world has been deeper and longer than we knew. It may be that the struggle of the kind Podhoretz rightly indicates the U.S. to be in will be going on in another one hundred years from now.
On the whole this is an informative and rich work which anyone who takes true interest in the present world- situation would do well to read.
[link to www.amazon.com]