This is not World War Three — or Four

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished American journalist and neoconservative godfather, penned a series of articles describing the attacks of 11 September 2001 as the opening shots of what he called ‘World War IV’. For Podhoretz, the more commonly used construct ‘global war on terror’ is too generic. Placing 9/11 in its proper context requires fitting it into the grand narrative of contemporary history which, as Podhoretz sees it, began in 1933 in Berlin.

For Podhoretz and other neoconservatives — for large numbers of Americans generally — history is above all a morality tale. They prefer simple stories that yield simple and unambiguous truths: about the folly of ignoring, appeasing or otherwise failing to confront evil — folly that leads inevitably to Auschwitz; about the imperative of bold, charismatic leadership such as Churchill displayed after the fall of France and as Reagan did during the 1980s; about the necessity once attacked of going all out, giving the enemy no quarter and sparing nothing in the pursuit of total victory.