To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s “The Panic Over Iraq” [January] strikes me as a curious piece. He calls for patience in the face of daily reports of more and more American and Iraqi casualties—three years after President George W. Bush declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”—but ultimately says little in defense of the administration’s policy.

Mr. Podhoretz devotes most of his article to attacking his enemies, including such unlikely targets as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who supported Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, Brent Scowcroft, who served as President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative academic, and Congressman John Murtha, a hero of the Vietnam war. These policymakers he lumps together with the usual Podhoretz suspects: “op-ed writers” and other members of the “mainstream press,” the “radical Left,” “think tanks,” familiar punching bags like Howard Dean and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and just about everybody else in America who does not believe the war in Iraq is a nifty thing.

In an effort to excuse the administration’s foul-ups in Iraq, Mr. Podhoretz mentions that “mistakes” were also made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II. Never mind that neither of those leaders elected to go to war or that both responded to one that was thrust upon them. President Bush, by contrast, initiated the war in Iraq, and his Pentagon began planning for it a year before he gave the order to strike. And although Mr. Podhoretz never details exactly what mistakes Roosevelt and Churchill made, or when, it is safe to assume that they did not make them three years after declaring the end of major combat operations.

The administration has dealt its apologists an awfully weak hand to play in defending its Iraq policy. Thus, to counter the charge that “no thought was given to what would happen once we got to Baghdad,” Mr. Podhoretz can only write that much of what the administration did plan for did not occur. He does not answer—or even ask—the relevant question, which is why no one planned for the predictable collapse of governmental authority, widespread looting, the breakdown of infrastructure, the random killing of civilians, tribal conflicts, and power-grabbing by local militias.

Three years after the American invasion, the lights are still out in Baghdad, people line up to buy gasoline, and the trial of Saddam Hussein has been postponed because of the assassination of prosecutors and judges. More than 2,000 American troops and over 23,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, and many more have been wounded. If all this were not bad enough, a draft government report on the administration’s much-ballyhooed reconstruction effort describes it as having been hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, and constantly rising security costs.

Undaunted, Mr. Podhoretz claims that per-capita income in Iraq is now 30-percent higher than it was before the war. He fails to mention that the cost of living has gone up, too. Moreover, most of the money that has flowed through the Iraqi economy is simply a byproduct of the billions of dollars the U.S. has poured into the country—most of it going to American contractors on no-bid contracts, such as with Halliburton and other companies with close ties to the administration. When Mr. Podhoretz tells us what has been built in Iraq since the war, he fails to mention all that was destroyed during the war and has yet to be replaced. In any case, increasing the per-capita income of Iraqis who dare to work for Americans and replacing infrastructure destroyed by the war are not why we went to Iraq.

Once it was determined that Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have chemical and biological weapons, had not sought to purchase significant quantities of uranium from Africa, and had not cooperated with al-Qaeda terrorists, the administration came up with democracy-building as its post-hoc justification for the war. Who can be against democracy? But Mr. Podhoretz’s claim that the Bush administration is making the Middle East safe for America by “making it safe for democracy” is sadly delusional.

He points to what he terms the “first seriously contested elections in Egypt” as an example of progress in this regard. But what really happened? The only effective opposition to President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was the radical-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, an illegal organization barred from fielding a presidential candidate. The candidate of the secular-liberal Ghad party took 8 percent of the vote, only to be met with what American officials have described as false criminal charges and a sentence to five years of forced labor. Meanwhile, Mubarak has begun his sixth six-year term as president.

It goes downhill from there. The cedar revolution in Lebanon, which Mr. Podhoretz also trumpets, has little to do with Western-style democracy, but was a reaction to the Syrian-planned assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. If democracy were truly on the march in the Middle East, who would be the likely election winners: the liberal/democratic/secular parties, or the likes of Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood? The recent victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections is instructive on this point.

Thanks to the Bush administration’s war, Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists and would-be terrorists. Many of them are Sunni Arabs from other countries who have flocked to Iraq to fight the “infidels.” President Bush’s response, “better there than here,” misses the point. The number of terrorists is not fixed; our actions in Iraq have materially swelled the ranks of those willing to die for jihad. Yet Mr. Podhoretz tells us we are winning the war politically. I and most Americans wish this were true, but the reality is that (to quote Donald Rumsfeld) “the harder we work, the behinder we get.”

Mr. Podhoretz rests his assertion on two achievements: the adoption of the Iraqi constitution and three rounds of elections. I wish I could be as sanguine. The Iraqi constitution is just a piece of paper, one that incidentally adopts shari’a as the supreme law in the land. Prime Minister Ibraham al-Jaafari has ties to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia thugs battled U.S. Marines in late 2004 for control of Falluja. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani pulls the political strings in the Shiite-led government, a fact that does not inspire confidence in a democratic future for Iraq—throughout history, the Shiites have been intolerant of others, including fellow Muslims who are Sunni—and makes the prospect of a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran no longer remote.

The question is not just who is winning the war, as Mr. Podhoretz poses it, but whether we are safer, more secure, and better able to defend ourselves today than before we invaded Iraq. Most Americans say no, and for good reason. Faced with such burdensome challenges in Iraq, the administration has abandoned the field elsewhere in the world, leaving the growing nuclear threat in Iran to be solved by our European allies, turning over North Korea’s nuclear threat for China to work out, and ignoring Vladimir Putin’s anti-democratic power grab in Russia. Meanwhile, the administration’s policies in Iraq have strained relations with America’s traditional allies.

As for the larger war on terror, Osama bin Laden is alive and taunting the American public on al-Jazeera, despite Bush’s vow to capture him, “dead or alive.” In filling homeland-security jobs, political loyalty has meant more to the administration than loyalty to country. The administration has trampled on the civil rights of the American people by illegally eavesdropping on the conversations of ordinary citizens without any reasonable suspicion that they could be related to terrorism. We have been learning about detention centers operated by the CIA in foreign countries, of atrocities in Abu Ghraib—carried out, it now seems, on orders from on high—and of the use of military commissions, not courts, to determine the guilt or innocence of detained suspects.

Human rights were once high on the list of priorities for neoconservatives, when the Soviet Union was Enemy Number One. But now Mr. Podhoretz tells us that it is okay to ignore the human rights of those we oppose in Iraq (and at home) and in the larger war on terror. There is no other explanation for his suggestion that our interrogation of suspected terrorists has been limited to “accepted methods.” Torture is outside the limits set by the Geneva Convention, to which the U.S. is a party. Human rights apply across the board—even when we deal with the enemy. They are what we fight for when we fight for American values.

Following President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Mr. Podhoretz suggests that people are “either with us or against us,” patriots or traitors. This rhetoric may be effective politically in the short term, as it was in the 2004 presidential election, but in the long run Iraq is likely to be the death knell for the ideologues bent on using American military power to bring down regimes that do not pose a serious security threat to our country.

Ambassador Alfred H. Moses

Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

I do not know why Norman Podhoretz lumps me in with liberal intellectuals who, having once supported the war in Iraq, are now running for the exits. Liberal intellectual I doubtless am, “sunshine soldier” I am most emphatically not. To the contrary, I opposed the Iraq war before it began (“a war too far” was what I called it in a piece by George Packer profiling liberals who had been hawks over Bosnia), just as I oppose it now.

David Rieff

New York City

To the Editor:

In a series of articles in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz has defended the Bush Doctrine and the President’s actions in Iraq. In his latest installment, Mr. Podhoretz presents areas of alleged progress in Iraq and asks: “Why is there so little public awareness of these things?” He does not consider that the American public might have concluded, on its own, that it no longer accepts any of the numerous rationales for the invasion of Iraq, including the need to bring democracy to the region. Instead, Mr. Podhoretz creates the scapegoat of the “mainstream media” (MSM), with its enormous negative influence in shaping public attitudes.

Specifically, Mr. Podhoretz cites the MSM’s penchant for negative views of the situation on the ground in Iraq. Such behavior, which fuels the “frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces,” is motivated, he says, by a desire to pull off “the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory.” But Mr. Podhoretz seems to be attributing more influence to the MSM than can be justified. I find it difficult to believe that its influence equals or exceeds that of the many conservative media outlets across the country.

Despite the efforts of Mr. Podhoretz and others, President Bush has one of the lowest approval ratings of any President in recent years—primarily due to the situation in Iraq. The “panic,” if there is one, must be among his supporters as well as his detractors.

Sheldon F. Gottlieb

Boynton Beach, Florida

To the Editor:

In mapping the domestic forces of the “Vietnam syndrome” that have undermined American leadership in the global war against Islamofascism, Norman Podhoretz recalls for me the thought of the great military historian Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz characterized the essence of war as a protracted contest of wills, from which it follows that whatever weakens one’s own will strengthens the foe’s. That President Bush and his senior military have absorbed Clausewitz’s axiom is evident in their repeated assertions that, given the strength of our military and the soundness of our political strategy, a failure of national will is the only factor that could lead to an American defeat in Iraq.

Mr. Podhoretz’s comparison with the Vietnam experience is indeed apposite, for among the many factors that enabled a determined Hanoi to prevail against the powerful American military, arguably the most decisive was the stunning success of the radical Left in dividing the American house against itself. Today, despite the many successes in Iraq that Mr. Podhoretz enumerates, America’s noxious self-hating weed has clearly reemerged.

The Vietnam syndrome will likely die hard among policy elites vested in the flawed paradigms and assumptions in which they were schooled, even following a victory in Iraq. Israel will always be the “core problem” of the Middle East for a realist like Brent Scowcroft or an internationalist like Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Mr. Podhoretz observes. More generally, realism, conceived as “politics among nation-states,” cannot see why a trans-state Islamist ideology poses a mortal threat to the free world. Nor can liberal internationalism comprehend that a security policy required to pass John Kerry’s “global test” of unanimous approval is hopelessly paralyzed in a world of radically disparate interests.

Iraq is not the last of the Clausewitzian challenges American leadership will need to meet. Iran is looming.

Michael Balch

Iowa City, Iowa

To the Editor:

Thank you for Norman Podhoretz’s excellent article. I happened to read it the day after 11 million Iraqi voters, including a great many Sunnis, showed up at the polls to vote in parliamentary elections. It was typical that my edition of the New York Times gave this story no attention on the front page and only a slightly positive appreciation in the international section. What is wrong with this picture?

J.M. Batteau

The Hague, The Netherlands

To the Editor:

I came to Australia from Poland when I was seventeen, two years before the Berlin Wall came down. When I started getting seriously interested in politics, Norman Podhoretz’s writings helped convince me that neoconservatism came closest to my personal sentiments. Thus, as a very humble intellectual disciple, I was honored to be mentioned in his article for my blog tracking the good news from Iraq as well as the distortions perpetrated by mainstream media coverage of events in that country. It is good to know that good people are continuing the fight for victory in Iraq, and I am glad that some of my past work has provided them with useful ammunition.

Arthur Chrenkoff

Canberra, Australia

Norman Podhoretz writes:

Let me begin by correcting a few of Alfred H. Moses’ egregious misrepresentations of what I actually wrote in “The Panic Over Iraq.”

First of all, while I most certainly did attack Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and John Murtha, I just as certainly did not attack Eliot A. Cohen. All I did was to take respectful issue with him on a couple of points. Ambassador Moses’ inability to perceive—or perhaps his unwillingness to acknowledge—this distinction is of a piece with his generally sloppy account of my article. If, for example, he had bothered to read it a little more carefully, he could not possibly have called Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and Murtha “unlikely targets” of an article whose purpose was to take on the whole spectrum of opposition to the battle of Iraq. The same carelessness is evident in his allegation that I never spelled out the mistakes made by Roosevelt and Churchill in World War II, when in fact I cited a long list of them. And he is guilty not only of carelessness but also of something worse when—on the basis of my incontrovertible statement that there is a campaign to “define torture down to the point where it would become illegal to subject even a captured terrorist to generally accepted methods of interrogation”—he accuses me of believing that “it is okay to ignore the human rights of those we oppose.”

For the rest, I could hardly have hoped for a better illustration than Ambassador Moses’ letter of the kind of syndrome I was describing. Like his fellow opponents of what we are trying to do in Iraq and in the broader Middle East, he paints an insistently negative picture, disregarding or dismissing or denigrating any and all of the signs of progress to which I pointed and which have become evident even to a formerly anti-American Arab radical like Walid Jumblatt (“It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq”). Like virtually all of his fellow Democrats, Ambassador Moses places the Bush Doctrine in the blackest possible light, accusing its author of every imaginable sin both of conception and of execution, and sparing not a single talking point in the endlessly reiterated and wildly exaggerated Democratic litany of evils both real and imagined (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Halliburton, “illegal eavesdropping,” etc., etc., etc.). Like most other Democrats, too, he will not grasp how Iraq fits into the larger war against Islamofascism, or trouble himself to consider the role it plays in the strategy to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy.

I am writing this in late February, at a moment when things look dismal for that strategy. Iraq is said to be (though I doubt that it is) on the possible brink of civil war, and the electoral success of radical Islamist parties in Egypt and the Palestinian Authority have demonstrated that the Middle East is very far indeed from being made safe for democracy.

Not surprisingly, these developments have swollen the ranks of the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, even among neoconservatives who at first strongly supported the invasion of Iraq. The prime example is Francis Fukuyama, but a few others also seem to be on the brink of giving up. As for the more traditional conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. and George Will, who had serious doubts from the beginning but were, out of a sense of solidarity, relatively reluctant to express them too forcefully, they have now cast off all reticence and unambiguously declared that we have lost in Iraq and that the Bush Doctrine is a failure.

Although such conservatives are understandably doing so with a heavy heart, it is a good bet that Ambassador Moses and his political friends, for all of their unctuous protestations to the contrary, welcome these same developments and feel vindicated by them—just as isolationists and pacifists and appeasers did in the disastrous first phases of World War II and at critical junctures of the cold war.

Who, Ambassador Moses writes, “can be against dem-ocracy?” Well, since he asks me, I will answer him: he himself is, at least where the Middle East is concerned, and so are most (all?) opponents of the Bush Doctrine, including those on the Right. For (if I may borrow one of his own phrases) “there is no other explanation” for their attacks on it than that, all things considered, and now that (as most of them desperately hope and fondly imagine) the count appears to be in, they think we would be better off with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein still in power. Or, with these two leading faces of Islamofascism gone from the scene, the alternative favored by Bush’s opponents—though they rarely have the political courage or the intellectual honesty to come right out and say so—is a friendly dictator like Hosni Mubarak (“a sonofabitch,” as FDR once said of Nicaragua’s Anastasia Somoza, “but our sonofabitch”).

In other words, we should return to our pre-9/11 policy of supporting similar strongmen. Yet resurrecting this policy would also restore the swamps of Islamofascism to the undisturbed condition they were in before 9/11, when we discovered to our horror that they had been breeding a mortal threat to us and to everything for which we stand. Moreover, it would choke off the voices throughout the Middle East that are now calling for political and religious reform, consigning them once again to the dead silence in which they existed before George W. Bush spoke the words and took the actions he did in response to 9/11. According to the rich trove of testimony that can most conveniently be found on the MEMRI website (www. memri.org/reform.html), it is these very words and deeds, so brutally and off-handedly derided by Ambassador Moses and his political friends, that have emboldened the reformers and have put democratization, along with religious opposition to Islamist radicalism, on the agenda throughout the entire Middle East.

Given all this, I find it curious that Ambassador Moses finds it “curious” that I should “call for patience.” After all, whether he admits it or not, the plain fact is that we are only in the third scene of the first act of a five-act drama, which is to say the very early stages of a long-range effort to replace the tyrannies and despotisms of the Middle East with democratic regimes. The seeds having been planted, it will now take, yes, patience, as well as perseverance, for them to be nourished into full flower. The same virtues will be required to protect these tender plants against the inevitable bouts of bad weather and the spread of malignant infestations by which they are at this very moment being attacked and to which, if we were to follow the cynical and/or defeatist counsels of Bush’s opponents, they would soon fall prey. Thus would a bold and brave and noble American enterprise be doomed to ignominious failure. And thus too—by acting once more like the “weak horse” that Osama bin Laden thought he could attack with impunity—would we invite even more lethal terrorist assaults upon our country than we suffered on 9/11.

Which is why Michael Balch is exactly right to bring up Clausewitz and to stress the crucial role of national will. In this connection, though, I cannot for the life of me understand how Sheldon F. Gottlieb can conclude that the American public has “on its own” turned against the battle for Iraq in particular and against “the need to bring democracy to the region” in general. It is true that conservative radio and the Internet have broken the monopoly once enjoyed by the mainstream media, but unfortunately not yet to the extent of having been able to affect the tremendous imbalance in the ratio of negative to positive stories about Iraq documented definitively by Arthur Chren-koff (and another striking example of which is provided here by J.M Batteau). How could public opinion not have been swayed by this torrent of determinedly bad news?

Speaking of Arthur Chrenkoff, I was touched to learn that he has been influenced by my writings, and I thank him for paying me so great a compliment. And speaking of compliments, I apologize for having mistakenly paid one to David Rieff.