by hilzoy
Just to add to Publius’ last post: to judge by the reviews of his book, and by the passages quoted in them, Norman Podhoretz is certifiably crazy. From the Peter Beinart’s NYT review:
“What really interests Podhoretz, who now advises Rudolph Giuliani, isn’t the Islamic world; it’s the home front. The news media, he explains, are in favor of “an American defeat in Iraq.” So are the former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Why do these ostensibly patriotic Americans want to see their nation humiliated and its troops killed? Because it will help their careers. Many “Realists … along with most liberal internationalists,” he writes, “were rooting for an American defeat as the only way to save their worldview from winding up on the ash heap of history.” And thus, Podhoretz lays the foundation for claiming — if America loses in Iraq — that we were stabbed in the back. Which, as Theodore Draper noted 25 years ago in a review of Podhoretz’s book “Why We Were in Vietnam,” is exactly what he did the last time America lost a major war.”
To suggest that Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski want America to be defeated in Iraq is calumny. Moreover, it’s insane on its face. Besides all the obvious reasons, consider that Scowcroft and Brzezinski are supposed to want America to be defeated in order to help their careers. But Scowcroft is 82 years old, and Brzezinski is 79. While I wish them long life and good health, they’d have to be idiots to bank on having extensive future careers, and neither Scowcroft nor Brzezinski is an idiot.
Moving right along, here’s a passage from a review by Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books:
“It would be absurd to claim that those who doubt the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine fail to recognize the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime, or the desire among Arabs and Muslims, no less than other people, to live prosperous lives free of tyranny. Equally nonsensical is the notion that only the supporters of Bush’s war are serious about fighting Islamist terrorism. Or that anyone who sees merit in attempts by some European Muslims to reconcile their religious orthodoxy with Western democracy is a dupe who defends extremism, or a coward who has been intimidated by acts of terror. Yet these claims are being made in World War IV, as well as other places.
Here is how Podhoretz describes Bush’s critics:
…They seem to take it for granted that Arabs and/or Muslims are so different from most of their fellow human beings that they actually like being pushed around and repressed and beaten and killed by thugs, whether dressed in military uniforms or wearing clerical garb. For our part, we wonder whether Muslims really do prefer being poor and hungry and ill housed to enjoying the comforts and conveniences that we in the West take so totally for granted….”
Gosh: I think that? Who knew? Not me. It would be interesting to see exactly who Podhoretz could cite as thinking that Muslims do “like being pushed around and repressed and beaten and killed by thugs.” Personally, I’m not aware of anyone. Likewise, I do not minimize the awfulness of Saddam’s regime, and so on and so forth. If Podhoretz suggests otherwise, that’s probably because he would rather debate caricatures than actual human beings. Either that, or he has no more imagination than a limpet. And that’s probably deeply unfair to limpets.
But wait! There’s more! Buruma again:
“Podhoretz is convinced that the savage murders and daily atrocities in Iraq are actually “a tribute to the enormous strides that had been made in democratizing and unifying the country under a workable federal system.” He wonders why men in the “so-called ‘insurgency'” would be shedding so much blood if they didn’t think the US mission in Iraq was working.”
Wow. Just wow. That defies comment.
I’ve been saving the worst for last. Buruma yet again:
“He describes the dispute between opponents of Bush’s war and its defenders as “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East,” indeed as “nothing less than a kind of civil war.” I myself was opposed to the war, and do not always hold tender feelings for my intellectual opponents, but I hardly think of our differences as comparable to the burning of Atlanta or the battle of Fallujah. By the same token, Bush critics in academe are called “guerrillas-with-tenure,” which seems a grandiose description of what are on the whole rather harmless professors.”
Beinart adds more in the same vein:
“Critics of the Iraq war represent a “domestic insurgency” with a “life-and-death stake” in America’s defeat. And their dispute with the president’s supporters represents “a war of ideas on the home front.””
Um: no. Leaving aside the fact that I do not favor an American defeat at all (though I do favor admitting one once it occurs), I do not have a life or death stake in any outcome of the Iraq war, any more than Podhoretz does. Nor am I a guerilla of any kind, though I do have tenure. And if he seriously thinks that the disputes between supporters and opponents of the war is “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East”, then he is — how to put this diplomatically? — completely and totally insane.
This is serious. According to the Washington Post (which puts these figures at the bottom of Iraq stories like this one), 3,748 American troops have been killed in Iraq, and 27,767 have been injured. 298 Allied troops have been killed, as have 159 civilian contractors. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, God alone knows how many have been injured, and millions have been driven from their homes. Soldiers and civilians in Iraq face death every day. Meanwhile, I am sitting on my bed with my computer in my lap, in my nice safe house in a nice safe neighborhood, listening to Purcell. There is a striking absence of mortars and gunfire, just as, tomorrow, there will be no IEDs on my route to work.
The very idea of saying that any dispute I am currently engaged in is “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East” is obscene, and anyone who says this sort of thing should never be taken seriously again. Ever.
But of course we have to take him seriously, because he is one of Rudy Giuliani’s main foreign policy advisors. Think about it. Giuliani actually chose this lunatic to advise him. As Publius said, be very, very afraid.
PS: I’ve put some You-Tube clips on Giuliani’s 9/11 record below the fold. They’re worth watching.