Free Republic

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...