Ian Buruma Gets it Right
Ian Buruma reviews Norman Podhoretz’s screed, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” in this month’s NYRB. The first part of the essay is very satisfying, he ruthlessly catalogs the errors, deceptions and manifest extremism at the heart of Poedhortz’s world view — here’s an example.
Podhoretz is convinced that the savage murders and daily atrocities in Iraq are actually “a tribute to the enormous strides that had been made in democratizing and unifying the country under a workable federal system.” He wonders why men in the “so-called ‘insurgency’” would be shedding so much blood if they didn’t think the US mission in Iraq was working. Might it be that in a broken-down state, where power is up for grabs, violence and mayhem are the inevitable results? Only a man suffering from severe ideological blindness could be so obtuse as to not even consider this.
But doing that is easy, what makes Buruma’s essay exceptional is that he shifts his focus away from the thuggish and easily mockable N-Pod and moves instead to those soi disant liberals and leftists who have made common cause with the likes of Podhoretz. This would, of course, be the “anti-totalitarian” left. Buruma shows how their obsession with “courage”, the desire to be wannabe Orwells has poisoned their liberalism and, like Podhoretz worships American power, they similarly worship stark, binary, “courageous” decisions and judgments — at the expense of any sort of nuance or pragmatism. Buruma sums it up thusly:
Norman Podhoretz is not [a liberal]. Ever since he turned against the left, he has detested liberals. His support of Bush’s war is of a piece with his obsession with US power and the enemies without and within who seek to undermine it. His judgments are those of a right-wing ideologue. The fact that neoleftists share his judgments is, in my view, foolish. The fact that some of them do so in the name of liberalism betrays the very principles they claim to be defending.
Sad, yet true.
