Norman Podhoretz is a leading conservative or neo-conservative thinker. Can you believe this, who gives out these titles, what makes us listen to the Washington chattering class?

Norman Podhoretz, this leading conservative thinker or intellectual was on C-SPAN’s After Words Sunday night. He was discussing his latest book “World War IV” with interviewer Charles Pena:

Podhoretz: There were 18 reasons to invade Iraq.

Pena: But not connected to 9/11.

Podhoretz: Well, yeah,

Pena: Because he didn’t attack us on 9/11.

Podhoretz: I know,

Pena: Al Qaeda attacked us. Saddam wasn’t a known supporter of Al Qaeda.

Podhoretz: Hitler didn’t attack us at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did and we went to war against.

Pena: Well they were allied, they were part of an actual Axis alliance.

Podhoretz: Well, yeah, but not a very friendly one and what we did when people say how come we went to Iraq, well what we did when we went to war after Pearl Harbor was go to North Africa. We didn’t go to Japan or uh we took on, we took on the Africa Corps, Hitler’s elite force in Africa.

Pena: But again, Germany and Japan were aligned, clearly part of an alliance that was aligned against us, that was a direct connection. I’m having a hard time making any connection quite frankly between Saddam Hussein’s regime and……….. That was Al-Qaeda as an organization, who attacked us on 9/11…….We haven’t even gotten Bin Laden….We seem to have taken our eye off of the ball and given Bin Laden a pass. For all of the evil that Saddam represents isn’t Bin Laden a greater evil that we should be paying attention to.

Podhoretz: Well, it would be very good to get him and I suspect we will get him before long, the point is not Bin Laden as an individual was the guy to go after, what we were confronted with was a large totalatarianism force, call it Islamo-facism, we were not going after an organization called Al-Qaeda, Al Qaeda was one element of that force….Its as if they say Al-Qaeda hit us, we hit them back and that’s the end of it.

Is Podhoretz crazy? First off can we finish off Bin Laden and his top people and take away any Al Qaeda safe haven before we even think of going after another target. If they are an element of that force shouldn’t we kill off the main element.

Secondly beyond the stupidest reading of history I have ever seen does Podhoretz realize that Hitler declared war on America four days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 11, 1941. And what is he talking about, of course we went to the Pacific and retalliated against Japan.