So it's my great pleasure to introduce our final speaker of this retreat. He is an extremely distinguished person, author, editor, Norman Podhoretz. His area of expertise include american culture, religion and foreign policy. I have known Norman and his family, particularly I've known his wife for some 27 years, Midge Decter, who is just a fabulous, fabulous person in my own experience. Moreover Norman also has, Norman and Midge also have a son. At least the son I know is John Podhoretz and who is an established journalist very much in his own right and there's a wrinkle to that I'll explained in just a minute. Norman is the recipient of the presidential medal of freedom, which is the nation's highest civilian honor. At Hoover we actually were exposed again to this honor because on of our fellows Gary Becker, about a month ago received the same medal. It's an extraordinary achievement. Norman served as Editor-in-Chief of Commentary Magazine for 35 years and is now it's Editor-at-large. The wrinkle is that his son John, is taking over the Editor-in-Chief position at this very influential journal. Norman has written hundreds of articles for most of the major U.S. Periodicals and has also written 11 books. The most recent of which is World War Four, The long struggle against Islamo- Facism. I trust you found a copy of his book in your book bags. His comments this morning will draw very much on his book. So would you please give a warm welcome to Norman Podhoretz. Thank you. Well I was delighted to discover that all of you received a copy of my book and I bring to you the thanks of my publisher for these extra aded income. I don't see many tired faces and giving signs of having stayed out up all night to read the book. So I will give you a bit of a taste of what is in store for you when you do read it and you are absolutely duty bound to do so. It is mercifully short to put that way. So far as I know, World War Four, The long struggle against Islamo-Facism, is the first serious attempt to placed what happened on 9/11 2001. The military campaigns that have followed it in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the war of ideas it has provoked at home placed into these all the context of the role the United States has played in the world since 1940. In doing these my purpose is to show that the war into which we were plunged six years ago cannot be understood, let alone won, unless we faced up to the hard truth that it is a direct successor to the two world wars that immediately preceded it. That Afghanistan and Iraq are not wars In their own right but fronts with theaters in the larger struggle. And that like the cold war which in retrospect can now be seen more clearly as world war three. This new war world war four will in all probability go on for some three or four decades. For today in the monster with two heads, one religious and one secular that is accordingly best described as Islamo-Facism. And the states breeding, sheltering and financing its terrorist armory. We are for the third time in some sixty years up against an aggressive, totalitarian force, murderous in respect to the liberal democratic world of which we were in still are the leading part. Of course the first of these challenges came at us from the right in the form of Nazism and its Facist allies. And we took it on and defeated it in world war two. The second came from the left in the form of communism as embodied most dangerously in the Soviet Empire and that one we took on and defeated in world war three. Now we are confronted with a new totalitarian challenge that comes at us from a religious force that was born in the 7th century but that is the greatest story of Bernard Louis has demonstrated, refashioned itself in the 20th century by taking lessons in how to organize and operate politically first from the Nazis who moved in to the Middle East in the 1940's and then from the Soviets who replaced them in the 1950's. It then went on to equiped itself with the technologies of the 21st century and it's now striving mightily to add weapons of mass destruction to it's terrorist armory. Now there are those who claimed that the Islamo-Facist are so much less powerful than their totalitarian predecessors of world war two, world war three. That treating them as enemies in a great war actually dignifies them and wildy exaggerates the true dimensions of the threat they pose. But the parodoxical truth is that is the Islamo-Facist are even more dangerous and more difficult to defeat than the nazis or the communist were. They have as Daniel Pipes has pointed out, an ideology capable of appealing to muslims of every size and shape, from limping proletariat to privilaged, from illiterates to Phds, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians and even Pipes adds that if we assumed that the Islamo-Facists constitute only ten to fifteen percent of the muslim population worldwide, they still number some 125 to 200 million persons or a greater total than all the dedicated facists and communists combined who ever lived. Not to mention that they have a possible access to nuclear weapons that they are only too ready to use against us. But the objective of the Islamo-Facists isn't merely to deploy these resources in order to murder as many of us possible. Like the nazis and the communists before them, they are by their own account dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherished and for which America stands. It is these then that we in our turn no less than the greatest generation of the 1940's and its spiritual progeny the 1950's and after have a responsibility to uphold. Can we discharge that responsibility? Will we? The answer I argue in my book will depend at least upon the war being waged in what in world war two was called the home front, as on the bloody battles being fought by our armed forces in the middle east. Unlike world war two which just about everyone in America whole heartedly supported, but like world war three, when the domestic political scene seeth with angry conflicts, world war four has given rise to a fierce battle of ideas on the home front. One side consist of those of us who see Islamo-Facism as the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization and who insist on the correlative necessity of meeting and defeating it by military means where necessary a nd by non-military instruments of power where possible. On the other side, stand those who think that the threat is a mere criminal nuisance. Nuisance is actually a word that was used by John Kerry. The nuisance that can be managed by the police and does not in case rise to the level of requiring a military response. In my judgement the question of whether and to what extent the american people of these generation and the next can or will shoulder the burden that 9/11 has imposed on us, will ultimately be answered less by the fortunes of our troops in the field than by the outcome of these ferocious war of ideas at home. To be sure the burden of fighting world war four differs from the ones Americans were asked to shoulder in world war two and world war three in some ways, we today have it easier than the Americans who lived through those two wars. Rightly or wrongly and for better or worse, this time there is no draft, there are no shortages or rationings and taxes haven't been raised but on the other hand we have more cause to be anxious over the safety and security of our continental homeland which it cannot be said to often, neither Hitler or Stalin ever managed to strike, let alone with the weapons of mass destruction that the Islamo-Facist terrorists may well get their hands on before this war is over. Furthermore, because winning world war four will almost certainly take as long as winning world war three did. Americans of these generation and the next are called upon to be far more patient than the greatest generation needed to be in world war two,in which the United States was involved for only four years. Then there's the area of morale, in the run up to our entry into world war two, a good deal of anti-war sentiment came from isolationist and pacifist but hardly any of this survived the attack on Pearl harbor nor once we were in the war was there any visible or openly expressed defeatism not even in response to actual defeats and we suffered many, especially in the early years. This happens when you get too old to remember your script. In world war three by contrast, great bouts of defeatist sentiment did get arouse by critics both on the left, who thought we were being too aggressive and on the right who thought we were not being aggressive enough. Defeatism was also reinforced by angry recriminations over whether and or how this or that battle should have been fought. And the battles in dispute were not only military as in Korea and to a much larger extent Vietnam, but also political as in the passionate debates over arms control and detente. In addition there were ideological as over the question of whether the enemy was soviet expansionism in particular or communism in general or our own paranoid delusions. The first six years of world war four have been marked by versions of all these features. But today thanks to cable tv and the internet, the forces promoting defeatism have achieved far more power than they ever commanded in the past. We who believed in the absolute necessity of fighting and winning world war four can complained all we like about the conditions that have bred so much defeatism but these are the conditions under which world war four will have to be fought if it's to be fought at all. And if it is to be fought at all, it will also have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are. Before the United States entered world war two, serious doubts were raised as to whether wa are a match for such disciplined and fanatical enemies as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And in world war three leading anti-communists like Wittiker Chambers and James Barnum were sure that we lacked the stomach, the heart, the will and the wit to stand effectively against the true believers of the Soviet Union and it's allies and sympathizers. To Chambers we were the losing side. And to Barnum we were very suicidal in our liberalweakness and folly. They turned out to be wrong because they and not they alone failed to anticipate as Charles Horner of the Hudson Institute has put it, "Failed to anticipate the resiliency of the American citizenry and its leadership". Today as we all know similar doubts and fears are once again flying all over the place with even some who would like to believed otherwise, murmuring that we have all grown so soft, too self-indulgent and too self absorbed to meet an even more daunting challenge from an enemy who is so much ready to die for his beliefs than most of us are. It's also being said that we've grown so complacent since 9/11 of 2001, that nothing, nothing short of another terrorist attack here at home will shake us back into the realization that we are actually at war. Now it will be foolish to deny that there are some basis for such doubts and fears and yet it would surely be just as foolish to repeat the mistake of Chambers and Barnum in failing to anticipate the resiliency of the American citizenry and its leadership. As to the citizenry we only need to point to the young Americans in uniform all volunteers who have been bearing the heaviest burden of world war four. That their determination, their courage and their love of country, they are by all accounts a match and more than a match for their forebearers of world war two and world war three. And who is to say that these young people are less representative of America than such of their elders and contemporaries who conspiciously lacked the same virtues. When however we turned to leadership the other factor was resiliency Chambers and Barnum underestimated. That's like harder to avoid, not that I contrary to most people if you can believe the polls have any doubts about the leadership of George W. Bush. In fact I believe that in significant respects in my book, he bears a strong resemblance to Harry Truman whose ratings at this point in world war three were even lower than Bush's but whose now universally regarded as a great president. The reason is that Truman recognized the soviet threat when many were blind to it. And he enunciated through the Truman doctrine a strategy known as containment for meeting that threat. This is precisely what George W. Bush has done through the Bush doctrine with regards to Islamo-Facism that is why I think that he too like Truman will someday be recognized as a great president. I analyzed the Bush doctrine in great detail in my book but I can summarized it here without too much distortion as a long range strategy designed to make the middle east safe for America by making it safe for democracy. With pre-emption as it's named military instrument and democratization as it's main long range political instrument. So far as resiliency goes a good measure of it is the buoyancy President Bush has exhibited even during the darkest days of his presidency. At this moment with about 14 months left to him, he shows in his conduct of the war none of the usual symptoms of lameduckerry and all the signs of energy and resolve. But he does have only 14 months to go and in speculating on who might succeed him, that my own doubts begin to arise. Rudy Gulliani and Fred Thompson and Mit Romney are this point the republican front runners and if any of them but especially Gulliani should win in 2008, chances are that the Bush doctrine will remained their guiding strategy. But supposed that a democrat should become president in 2008, what then? Here too in my book I looked back at Truman this time to see how his doctrine fared while he was still in office and what happened to it after he left. For the moment it was first enunciated in 1947, the strategy of containment was flowed through the Truman doctrine exactly like the Bush doctrine of today was attacked from the right as well as from the left and if that was not enough from the center as well. In the election of 1948, Truman did the seemingly impossible task of confronting all these challenges and a few others as well. When against what every poll had predicted he succeeded in warding them all off and defeating the republican candidate, Thomas Dewey. He could reasonably claimed that the American people were behind the main principles of his foreign policy. Even so enough bitter oppostion remain within and around the republican party to leave it uncertain on whether containment was an American policy or only the policy of the democrats. This uncertainy was exacerbated by the presidential election of 1952. When the republicans choose Dwight D. Eisenhower as their candidate and the democrats went with Adley Stevenson because Truman had become so unpopular that he choose not to run. It was a campaign featuring strident attacks on the Truman doctrine by Eisenhower's running mate, Richard Nixon and his future secretary of state John Foster Dulles. Nixon for example mocks Stevenson who promised to continue on the course set by the Truman doctrine as a graduate of the cowardly college of communist containment presided over by Truman's secretary of state Dean Atcheson. While Dulles repeatedly called for ditching containment in favor of a policy or rollback and liberation. Yet when Eisenhower came into office he hardly touched the hair on the head of the Truman doctrine. Far from adapting a bolder and more aggressive strategy, the new president ended the by then extremely unpopular Korean war on the basis of the status quo ante. In other words precisely on the terms of containment. Even more telling was Eisenhower's refusal three years later to intervened when the Hungarians apparently encouraged by the rhetoric of liberation still being employed in the broadcast of Radio Free Europe. When Hungarians rose up in revolt against their soviet masters, for better or worse this finally dispelled any lingering doubt as to whether containment was the policy just for the democratic party. With full bipartisan support behind it, the Truman doctrine had become the official policy of the United States of America. If in January 2009 a democratic should be sworn in as President of the United States, will he or she as for once reality in the shape of Hillary Clinton rather than political correctness demands that we add, will he or she like Eisenhower with respect to republican derision of the Truman doctrine in 1952 quietly shelved the attacks of the democrats on the Bush doctrine. Will he or she then tacitly acknowledged that there is no serious alternative to the strategy it prescribes other than returning to the law and order approach through which we dealt so ineffectively with terrorism before 9/11. And or submitting to the craven will of the Europeans and the corrupts administrations of the United nations. Will he or she realized that no matter how such a shift might be dressed up and spun, it would and rightly be interpreted by our enemies as cowardly retreat. Will he or she understand that the despotisms of the middle east would once again feel free to offer sanctuary and launching pads to Islamo-Fascist terrorists? Will he or she realized that these terrorists would be emboldened to attack us again and infinitely greater scale than before? And on the home front, will he or she cease and desist from raising false alarms about the treaths to civil liberties posed by programs essential to protect us from just such terrorist attacks. Programs such as like the surveillance of certain international phone calls or the tracking of bank accounts. Will he or she stop defining tortured down to the point where it becomes impossible to conduct any interrogation at all of captured terrorists. Thereby depriving us of the intelligence also necessary if future attacks are to be prevented. From the way the democrats have been acting and speaking especially since Bush's reelection in 2004, all the answers to the above the questions would seem to be no. But is it too much to hope that these denials are only the luxurious indulgencies of opposition. And that a democratic president like the republicans after 1952, will be forced by awesome responsibility of power to forego them all and to take up where Bush have left off. Not that if this were to happen a perfect bipartisan harmony would descend upon the nation. After all contrary to the rosy reminiscences on how it was then, not even the bipartisan consensus that was reached after 1952 eliminated all discord, plenty of it remained as I have the scars to proved that it was periodically exacerbated by such reverses like the bay of pigs under Kennedy, Vietnam under Johnson, Nixon and Ford, Iran under Carter and Iran Contra under Reagan. There was also a long stretch during which it looks as though our enemies were so strong and we so debilitated that many among us republicans no less than the democrats thought the best we could do was in effect to sue for negotiated peace. But God be thanked. But it would be ridiculous to contend that nothing change for the better when communism landed on the very ash shape of history that Marks has predicted would be the final resting place of capitalism. I suppose that we hang in long enough to carry World War IV to a comfortably successful conclusion. What will victory bring this time around. Well, to us it will bring the elimination of another and to say it again in some respects greater threats to our safety and security. And because that threat cannot be eliminated without the use President's Bush's image draining the swamps in which in breeds, victory will also entail the liberation of another group of countries from another species of totalitarian tyranny. As we can already see from Afghanistan and Iraq, liberation will no more result in the overnight establishment of ideal conditions in the Middle East than it has done is East Europe or Russia. But as an East Europe, better things will immediately happen and a genuine opportunity will be open up for even better things to come. Of course, many critics of the Bush doctrine question or totally reject the idea that democratization represents the best and perhaps even the only way to defeat Islamofascism and the terrorism that uses as it main weapon against us. What they asked if the Middle East is incapable of democratization and what if Islam as a religion is by it's very nature incompatible with democracy. This are hard questions that which reasonable people can and do differ. But those of us who backed the Bush doctrine have our own sets about the doubts of the doubters. Among other things, they seem to assume that Arabs and/or Moslems are so different from the rest of their fellow human beings that they actually like being pushed around and repressed and beaten and kill by thugs whether dressed in military uniforms or wearing clerical gab. And for our part we wonder where the Moslems really do prefer this kind of life to the freedoms and the comforts and the conveniences that we in the West take so totally for granted that we no longer remember to be grateful for them. In defending the political component of the doctrine, Victor David Hanson from whom we heard last night reminds us that the policies of the past did not bring stability to the Middles East and did not prevent 9/11. And he then goes on to argue that constitutional government or messy democracy is the one course that might someday and "Free Middle Easterners from kidnapping, suicide bombers, and dictators and sunglasses" while at the same time and these are my words now freeing us from the global reach of the Islamic terrorism. In any event, Bernard Louis adds, we have no choice. Either, says Louis, we bring them freedom or they destroy us. For those of us who support the Bush doctrine also takes issue with the view that democracy and capitalism can grow only in the soil that's been cultivated for centuries. We often point out that in the aftermath of World War II, the United States management in the single decade to transform both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into capitalist democracies and in the aftermath of the defeated communism in World War III a similar process got underway under it's own scheme, in Central and Eastern Europe and even before Vladimir Putin slammed on the breaks in the old heart land or evil empire itself. Why not we ask the muslim world. Listen again to Bernard Louis who says this about the common view that Islamic people are incapable of descent civilized government. Quoting Louis "It shows ignorance of the Arab past, contempt with the Arab present and unconcerned with the Arab future. As with democratization so with the reform and modernization of Islam and considering, this even more difficult question, we who believe in the Bush doctrine find ourselves asking whether Islam can really go on for all eternity resisting the kind of internal reformation and modernization that began within Christianity and Judaism in the early modern theory. Not that we are so naïve as to imagine that Islam can be reformed overnight of from the outside. There is however at least the fighting chance that the clearing of the ground and the sowing of the seeds out if which new political, economic and social conditions can grow, will gradually give rise to correlative pressures from within of a religious nature. Such pressures will take the form of an ultimately irresistible demand on theologians and clerics to define warrants in the Koran and the Shariah under which it will be possible to remain a good Moslem while enjoying the blessings of descent government and even the political and economic liberty. In this way, a course might finally be set towards the reform in modernization of the Islamic religion itself. But what about us here in America. On what course are we now set. In his first state of the union address, President Bush tried to answer that question by affirming that history and once again called America as he put it to fight freedom's fight. In this language, we can hear an echo of the concluding paragraph of George F. Kennings, SA written under the pseudonym X at the outbreak of World War III. The thoughtful observer of Russian American relations will experience a certain gratitude for providence which by providing the American people with this implacable challenge as 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 bare. Substitute Islamofascism for Russian-American relations and every other word of this magnificent statements applies to us as a nation today, but do we the American people of this generation have it in has to beat back the implacable challenge of islamofascism and as the greatest generation of World War II and taken on the Nazi and their factious allied and as his children and grandchildren ultimately manage to do in confronting the Soviet Union and it's communist empire in World War III. Well, in spite of how bleak the prospects may look as of the end of November 2007, I persist in thinking that we do and that we will but only on one condition, only if those of us who see the struggle against the islamofascism as a world war against the latest mutation of the totalitarian challenge to us civilization only if those of us who see it that way can prevail in the war of ideas here at home against those who never knew or have lost sight of or have lost heart in but we are fighting against, what we are fighting for and why we have to win. It is as a contribution to that war of ideas that I wrote this book and I commend it to you now.
