Not content with losing one war, William F. Buckley says the U.S. is already involved in a massive global conflict -- we just haven't realized it yet. World War III, you see, was the Cold War, which ended in 1989. And now Buckley cites a new book by Norman Podhoretz. Its title: World War IV. I am reminded of a childhood neighbor, Hans, who lived up my Seattle hill in the early 1980's. Hans had a vast collection of giant Tinkertoys, which he enjoyed throwing around, breaking apart, and melting if necessary, and it was his ardent claim that with such instruments "THE KIDS ARE GOING TO START WORLD WAR III." "How?" the other children of 17th Avenue would ask, amazed by the notion of kids having control over anything. "They're just going to run out in the streets one day and yell, 'War!'" Hans would answer. Which is about what we have now -- on the cable shoutfests, in the Oval Office, and in the form of an essay by William F. Buckley, quoted below:

The Islamists have:

A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success. An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians.”

Add to the above “a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.”

Recognition, then, of the scale of the pretensions of the Islamist enemy has to precede substantial measures against it. In the matter of Iraq, for instance, the ambiguity of our engagement and the enlarging political cry against it would alter dramatically if one accepted the premises of the Fourth World War so ineluctably spelled out in Podhoretz’s little volume, which takes time here and there to demolish such arguments as were mounted in protest against President Bush’s mention in his 2003 State of the Union address of yellowcake hunting in Niger.

Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning.

Guy Trebay of the New York Times weighs in on New York Fashion Week with a fantastic essay on why fashion does, in fact, matter...

"While the seasonal shows in the tents in Bryant Park, with their enforced passivity and aura of feminine spectatorship, lend themselves to derision, enforcing the sense that all those fops and dandies and flibbertigibbets, all the socialite geishas and second-rate celebrities and editorial priestesses are little more than idlers and dupes, big business goes on. Odds are that the same journals whose critics score easy points off fashion are economically propped up by the life-support provided by advertising for dresses and bags and shoes."

So President Bush makes "Dr. Evil" impersonations. Here's how Michiko Kakutani describes it, in her review of Robert Draper's Dead Certain ...

"Apparently Mr. Bush loves doing imitations of Dr. Evil from the “Austin Powers” movies. He keeps meticulous count of all the books he’s read. (At one point he tells Mr. Draper he’s up to 87 for the year.) And he’s wildly competitive about his bike riding, eager to show his younger Secret Service companions “who’s The Man” and insistent on burning at least 1,000 calories during each workout.

This is a president who says he cries easily and often about dead and wounded soldiers, a president who Mr. Draper says doesn’t defer, as widely believed, to Vice President Cheney and Mr. Rove (who apparently recommended that Mr. Cheney not be put on the 2000 ticket, arguing, in Mr. Draper’s words, that picking “Daddy’s top foreign-policy guy ran counter to message.”)"

Read the full review here.

This week's Time carries a stunning old-timey cover that looks like a portrait by Chaliapin, or a visual quotation of the World War II posters of Rosie the Riveter. The cover piece, by Rick Stengel, makes an important statement. Noting the revival of volunteerism that has paralleled the slow death of government in this country over the last twenty-five years, Time's managing editor makes the case for a national service program made up of thousands of volunteers. A civilian army of high-school grads plus some bored old baby boomers would teach kids to read, dispense health care in rural clinics, even respond to the coming spate of national disasters that everyone just sort of assumes is coming our way. (And what about obese pets ... and addiction ... and bipolar disorder ... can we solve those, too?) So the National Service Program would be like a shadow government—only it would work, and nobody would have to get paid anything! And the reality is that the government has shriveled away to such an extreme degree, (or scurried off to Alexandria) that almost any liberal would jump at the chance for a program like this, unions be damned. There is something oddly quaint if not fiendishly charming about such an optimistic, idea-driven cover piece at this particular moment. ("So we made a mistake in Iraq, but, on the bright side...") But it's a serious cover for serious times. Time still carries weight in this country, and it reflects the prevailing winds. When the editor of Time calls for a service program, it's a sign of renewed hope for vigor in public life.