World War IV is the first serious effort to set the events of September 11 into a broad historical context. Debunking the revolutionary thesis – that the Bush administration has acted unlike any before, waging pre-emptive war, alienating allies, acting outside the remit of international law - by highlighting the tradition formed by the declared aims of the presidents who led America into the three world wars – is rather revolutionary in itself.
Norman Podhoretz very much subscribes to the Rumsfeldian thesis of weakness being provocative. Indeed, he argues, American passivity – opening the door to 9/11 – dates back as far as Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and pre-9/11 George W. Bush.
A Podhoretzian history reads:
World War I: 1914 – 1918
World War II: 1939 – 1945
World War III: 1947 – 1989
World War IV: c.1970 –
Aside from re-naming the Cold War and introducing the reader to World War III – fundamental to the labelling of the next – what is particularly striking is the date attributed to World War IV. Podhoretz explains:
“To examine this history is to realise that even while World War III was still going on, World War IV had already begun, and that 9/11, far from being the first salvo fired by an enemy as implacable as any we had ever faced, actually represented the culmination of a long series of attacks that we had insisted on treating not as deliberate acts of war demanding a military response but as common crimes of the work of rogue groups operating on their own that could best be handled by the cops and the courts”.
The language of the subtitle – controversial in itself – is a flaw comparable to the re-branding of the Cold War: too great a feat to become common lexicon. Even so, World War IV - unlike the plethora of post-9/11 works - is not a straight narrative leading from 9/11/2001 to 9/11/2006, or beyond. Ultimately, what Podhoretz provides – albeit less welcome in some quarters than others – is an original interpretation of what exactly 9/11 means.
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