Must Read: Why We are in Iraq

In 1983, Norman Podhoretz published "Why We Were in Vietnam" -- a review of the arguments surrounding a war that had by then become a symbol of strategic overreach and moral failure.

In the conventional wisdom, our defeat had been well-deserved: we had acted as imperialists and counter-revolutionaries, had engaged in an ideological foreign policy (an anti-Communist "crusade"), and had an "inordinate fear" of Communism.

The elite consensus was thus that the Vietnam War had been both strategically unnecessary and morally degrading -- reflecting American arrogance and an abuse of power typified by the war crime at My Lai, with a military that had allegedly regularly acted in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Kahn.

Podhoretz wrote his 1983 book to reopen the debate, to investigate whether the Vietnam War had in fact reflected "the intellectual and moral poverty" charged by Jimmy Carter, or had been the "noble cause" that Ronald Reagan had called it (in a comment widely reported in the media as a "gaffe") -- an effort to protect millions of people from a totalitarian society and to maintain America's strategy of containing Communist expansion.

The book was written with the courage and clarity that has always been Podhoretz's literary trademark, and it contributed to a restored confidence in America's national purpose and a renewed belief in the morality of its cause -- two essential elements in the ultimate victory in the Cold War.

Podhoretz now refers to the Cold War as "World War III," because it was a global ideological conflict, with hot wars in Korea and Vietnam and a nuclear confrontation in Cuba, proxy contests in Angola and elsewhere, and continuous tests of will from Berlin to Taiwan -- all pitting the forces of freedom against an armed totalitarian ideology whose global intentions had been made clear.

The current conflict, in Podhoretz's view, is thus "World War IV" -- a similar worldwide conflict with ideological roots that, like World War III, will take three or four decades to win, and which likewise cannot be won absent domestic confidence in America's purpose and the morality of its cause. He defends the Iraq War against all comers (and there are a lot of comers -- Democrats, realists, paleoconservatives, former liberal hawks, and others), but the goal of his book is not simply a defense of that battle. Instead, it is a more ambitious attempt to place that conflict in the framework of what he believes will be a multi-decade world war.