In The Mind of Norman Podhoretz

There's always another world war lurking just around the corner.

Norman Podhoretz, a senior foreign policy adviser in Rudolph Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, held a non-publicized meeting with George Bush late last spring at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.

Karl Rove, who was still serving in the White House as Bush’s deputy chief of staff, took notes. But the meeting, which lasted 45 minutes, was not logged on the president’s schedule. But Podhoretz is providing current history with his side of it. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he told Bush:

You have the awesome responsibility to prevent another holocaust. You’re the only one with the guts to do it.

I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative. . . I laid out the worst-case scenario – bombing Iran – versus the worst-case consequences of allowing the Iranians to get the bomb.

The president looked very solemn. . . He gave not the slightest indication of whether he agreed with me, but he listened very intently. . . The president has said several times that he will be in the historical dock if he allows Iran to get the bomb. He believes that if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we’ll have waited too long – something I agree with 100%. . . George Bush will not leave office with Iran having acquired a nuclear weapon or having passed the point of no return.

Of his current protege, Podhoretz said, Giuliani

... doesn’t call it world war four, but I know he thinks it is. . . The key to understanding what is happening is to see it as a successor to the previous totalitarian challenge to our civilisation.

During the CNN Republican Presidential Debate last June, Giuliani said he would consider using nuclear weapons to destroy Iranian nuclear power:
Thus is the torch passed on to the next generation.