In the aftermath of America’s invasion of Iraq, Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative polemicist and editor of Commentary, wrote a long essay arguing that the battle against Islamist extremism amounted to “World War IV.” Podhoretz had a flair for the apocalyptic coinage, but many commentators on both the right and left understood al Qaeda’s shocking attack on American soil as the opening round of a war between the West and “Islamofascism,” as Christopher Hitchens called it. That mood subsided as the terrorists failed to mount similarly spectacular attacks (at least in the United States) and as the grotesque failure of the war in Iraq cooled the ardor of many armchair combatants for a battle to the death between radical Islam and the West.
Suddenly, however, the metaphor of world war does not seem so hyperbolic.
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