Michael Lind, Rebuttal To Podhoretz's "World War IV"

After the death of Osama bin Laden, this is an article at Salon by Michael Lind: Why this won't end World War IV.

Will neocons abandon their rhetoric now? No, because Osama was never the enemy.

As late as 2007, after American public opinion had turned against the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, the flagship neoconservative magazine, published "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism." Podhoretz argued that the U.S. probably should be fighting even more wars on even more fronts at the same time.

There are a few people on the American right who are interested in foreign policy for its own sake. But the majority of conservative pundits who write or talk about foreign policy, like Irving Kristol, are mainly interested in smearing Americans who disagree them with them as Fifth Columnists, traitors who are undermining America or Western Civilization or Democracy or whatever from within. Liberals are Enemies Within, in conscious or unconscious alliance with the Enemies Without.

That’s where World War IV came in, after 9/11. In order for the neocons and other conservatives to accuse American liberals of being fifth columnists, there had to be an external enemy outside America’s borders with four other columns. Unfortunately for the right, Gorbachev had, to use his phrase, deprived America of an enemy.

The end of the Cold War deprived the American right of an external enemy that it could use in guilt-by-association campaigns to smear fellow citizens who disagree with it on a variety of issues, foreign and domestic.