Free Republic

ISN'T IT GREAT to know that the Republican candidates for president are all hopped up about moral values? In presentations to conservative voters in Florida at the "Value Voter Summit," major presidential hopefuls Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani each sought to outscore their opponents on those matters that so exercise the hearts and minds of the evangelicals. It's intriguing to see how these anxious social conservatives (and their candidates on that day) define values. Their big four issues are abortion, gay rights, religious liberalism and gun control. These "no, no, no, no" positions that stress the...

As part of her job at an influential national security think tank, Julianne Smith brings politicians and senior policy-makers from all over Europe to Washington for candid closed-door meetings with the policy advisers to the candidates vying to replace President George W. Bush. The Europeans usually arrive eager to discuss the coming era that some are dubbing "AB" — "After Bush." That is the highly anticipated period beginning on Jan. 20, 2009, in which a newly sworn-in American president, chastened by the troubles in Iraq and by the scorn of allies who say the Bush White House flouted international law,...

The Giuliani candidacy has polarized politically conservative Christians and Jews — perhaps less over Rudy’s position on abortion than, more subtly, over a question of emphasis. Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s star foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who would not rule out supporting a third party candidate if Giuliani gets the nomination? To adjudicate the dispute, I propose an appeal to the part of the Bible on whose authority Jews (like myself) and Christians...

Today, Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism becomes available at bookstores everywhere. Drawing on Podhoretz’s seminal essays in COMMENTARY, World War IV addresses the most serious topic of our time—the battle against global Islamist terror—with its author’s customary force, wit, clarity, and courage. See below for our interview with Podhoretz about his book. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/contentions/index.php/peach/909

Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child's death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth. In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a...

“You don’t roll out a new product in August,” said President Bush’s aide, Andrew Card, apropos Iraq in the summer of 2002. But in this seventh September of a no longer new war a somewhat battered product is in need of a rebranding. It was launched in the days after 9/11 as a “war on terror,” an artful evasion deemed necessary on the grounds that a war on any enemy beginning with “Islamist,” “Islamo-,” or “Islamic” might give the impression we had some, ah, issues with Islam itself and only complicate things further with various “friends” like Mubarak and the...

Some set the matter aside as being nothing more than verbal play for the benefit of word-men. What term properly designates what we are doing, and what we are enduring, in many parts of the world, the symbolic center of which is the Twin Towers site in Manhattan? Sometimes the words chosen can mean the justification of an additional measure of military power. Always they calibrate the public mood and the public perception of what is going on. I am informed that French pacifists, ensconced in the French Academy in 1939 and determined to understate Nazi military exercises (even...

Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani is packing his campaign staff with Middle East Hawks – including one who urges a U.S. military strike on Iran. Giuliani recently announced he had assembled a "team of foreign policy advisers featuring several prominent neoconservatives, including one of the movement’s founders, Norman Podhoretz,” the Jewish publication Forward reported. Giuliani’s advisory panel also includes several figures with experience in Israeli affairs, Forward noted. His chief foreign policy adviser is Charles Hill, who once served as political counselor to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. On the panel as well is Martin Kramer, an expert on Islam...

I got a press release the other day from Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani. He was announcing a photo opportunity. It seems a UFO will be landing soon to take him back to his home planet. Photographers are invited. Actually the press release didn't say that. What it really said is that Giuliani has appointed Norman Podhoretz as a foreign policy advisor. But the effect is the same. Only a visitor from another planet could think that the way to win the presidency of the United States is by taking foreign policy advice from the nuttiest man on Earth. That's...

Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani announced the line-up of his foreign policy team, addressing a key area of concern of many voters going into November 2008, a brief analysis might lend some insight into Rudy's perspective regarding the challenges ahead and how he would plan to deal with them as President. Giuliani's campaign has been buffeted by worries that his less conservative views on social issues (abortion, gun control, gay rights) and his own marital history might cost him the support of the more conservative members of the Republican Party. While the early GOP primaries are occurring in delegate-rich states that are...

In recent months, we have been bombarded with reports of the death of the Bush Doctrine. Of course, there have been many such reports since the doctrine was first promulgated at the start of what I persist in calling World War IV (the cold war being World War III). Almost all of them were written by the realists and liberal internationalists within the old foreign-policy establishment, and they all turned out to resemble the reports of Mark Twain’s death—which, he famously said, had been “greatly exaggerated.” Nothing daunted by this, the critics and enemies of Bush are now at it...

Jerusalem: Monday, January 31, 2005 “Who are you?” my daughter Ruthie Blum demands as she greets me in the lobby of the King David hotel, “and what have you done with my father?” I laugh appreciatively at this newest twist on her antic idea that I have been invaded by aliens—an idea that first began taking shape about fourteen months ago, during my last visit to Israel, where she has been living for about 27 years now. And thereby hangs a long and complicated tale.

George W. Bush is the center of attention this week, and properly so. On Monday, the networks each showcased an exclusive interview with the president done in the White House Library. Flicking from ABC to CBS to NBC it seemed possible to catch them all, and not surprising that all pondered similar questions. They bore on the tactical question of Iraq (How are we doing?) and the strategic implications of Iraq (Where else are we likely to do the same thing?). One questioner was pretty blunt: Since Iraq was not in fact deploying weapons of mass destruction, what reason do...

Commentary February 2005 The War Against World War IV Norman Podhoretz --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Second-Term Retreat? Will George W. Bush spend the next few years backing down from the ambitious strategy he outlined in the Bush Doctrine for fighting and winning World War IV? To be sure, Bush himself still calls it the "war on terrorism," and has shied away from giving the name World War IV to the great conflict into which we were plunged by 9/11. (World War III, in this accounting, was the cold war.) Yet he has never hesitated to compare the fight against radical Islamism, and...

Will George W. Bush spend the next few years backing down from the ambitious strategy he outlined in the Bush Doctrine for fighting and winning World War IV? To be sure, Bush himself still calls it the "war on terrorism," and has shied away from giving the name World War IV to the great conflict into which we were plunged by 9/11. (World War III, in this accounting, was the cold war.) Yet he has never hesitated to compare the fight against radical Islamism, and the forces nurturing and arming it, with those earlier struggles against Nazism and Communism. Nor...

...[T]he policy that Mr. Bush is now arguing before the voters... [is] his Sept. 20, 2001, address to Congress.... [T]his speech ... marked the emergence of the Bush Doctrine." ...Mr. Bush made clear that he believed the world had entered a phase unlike any before: "The United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past.... We cannot let our enemies strike first." It is not merely Iraq that John Kerry is running against as a "colossal mistake," but the whole sweep of global policy laid out in the Bush national security strategy...

Enter the Bush Doctrine The four pillars of the president's strategy for winning World War IV. BY NORMAN PODHORETZ Thursday, September 2, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT In "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947), the theoretical defense he constructed of the strategy President Truman adopted for fighting the war ahead, George F. Kennan (then the director of the State Department's policy planning staff, and writing under the pseudonym "X") described that strategy as "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies . . . by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly...

In the old days, traditionalists and libertarians supposedly divided the American Right between them. Then along came the neoconservatives. Not only did the neocons assert that something new could be conservative, but they implied that the new species was an advance over the old. For a movement that had never held Darwin in high esteem, American conservatism suddenly seemed poised to evolve. It was political art, not natural selection, however, that produced the vigorous hybrid of Reaganite conservatism. Rather than supplanting everyone else, the neocons contributed their distinctive, and manifold, virtues to the blend. And among the chief contributors was...