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The Podhoretz Method
New York Sun Editorial
February 11, 2008Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative sage, will be honored tonight at a dinner in Manhattan, where his "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," will be given the "Book of the Year" award by Powerline. The award carries the largest financial component of any major book award, though the Powerline Prize is given to charity in the name of the honoree; the charity is "Soldiers Angels," which sends care packages and moral support to our GIs overseas. Powerline's Scott Johnson, in announcing the Powerline Prize, quoted Mr. Podhoretz's description of his book — which, incidentally, was also one of the Sun's best books of 2007 — as "the first serious attempt to set 9/11 itself, the campaigns that have followed it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war of ideas it has provoked at home, into the context of the role the United States has played in the world since 1941. Seen in this light, the struggle against the forces of Islamofascism into which 9/11 plunged us reveals itself as the direct successor to the wars against the totalitarian challenges to our civilization posed by Nazism in World War II and Communism in World War III (as the cold war becomes in this scheme of things)."
As if to underline the point, a kerfuffle has been sputtering on the World Wide Web over a question Mr. Podhoretz asked in respect of the Kurds. Mr. Podhoretz asked the question five years ago at a banquet in New York honoring Robert L. Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, Bernard Lewis of Princeton, and Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker. Mr. Goldberg, a marvelous reporter, was being saluted for a dispatch from Kurdistan that had helped light the way for American entry into the Battle of Iraq. Mr. Goldberg had just come in from Northern Iraq and spoke about Kurdistan. In a tour d'horizon of the Middle East in the January/February number of the Atlantic, Mr. Goldberg related that after the event, Mr. Podhoretz asked him, "What's a Kurd, anyway?" Mr. Podhoretz, in Mr. Goldberg's account, "seemed authentically bewildered." As it happens, we were either in the same or a similar conversation with Mr. Podhoretz at the same banquet, and we took him not as being ignorant of the Kurdish question; after all, Commentary during his years as editor in chief contained plenty of references to Kurdistan. We took him to be curious as to how Mr. Goldberg would answer a question of ethnography that has never been resolved.
Basic questions are what one might call the Podhoretz Method, and we predict that generations from now, journalists will study his knack for — his insistence on — pressing the simplest seeming, most basic questions as if each were fresh and open to new implications. The Podhoretz Method is one for our moment, too, what with our country at a crossroads and in the midst of a presidential election that for the first time in decades appears it will involve neither a presidential nor vice presidential incumbent. It may well shape up as a contest between, on the one hand, the Republican who, in Senator McCain, has been most determined to stick with the fight and most outspoken in warning of the consequences of retreat and, on the other hand, a Democratic nominee, in Senators Clinton or Obama, who either regrets going into the Battle of Iraq or opposed it from the start. It is a time when, more than ever, we need sages like Norman Podhoretz to ask basic questions, and deliver basic answers, which no doubt explains why so many — including Secretary of State Kissinger and Mark Steyn — will be crowding into the Four Seasons as Mr. Podhoretz is honored this evening.
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