America at War: "The One Thing Needful"   Renowned author and editor Norman Podhoretz delivered the 2002 Francis Boyer Lecture on February 13 at the Institute's annual dinner. His remarks are excerpted below; the full text of the lecture is available HERE

The confidence in America, and American virtue, that became nearly universal during the Second World War had enough momentum to carry us into the very different war that we waged against Soviet totalitarianism. But it was not strong enough to withstand the assault upon it from left-wing radicals in the 1960s.

Will the consensus that spontaneously materialized on September 11 succeed in resisting the similar assault that began being mounted against it within hours by the guerrillas-with-tenure in the universities, along with their spiritual and political disciples scattered throughout other quarters of our culture?

The answer no doubt depends primarily both on whether-God forbid-we are hit again by terrorists and on how well the military side of the war will go. Thus, antiwar activity on some campuses was dampened by our mind-boggling success in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the mopping-up operation there created an opportunity for more subtle forms of opposition to gain traction. Complaints arose about alleged tramplings of civil liberties here at home, and then about the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

Though those concerns were soon shown to be almost entirely baseless and even preposterous, I suppose some people raised them in good faith. But it is also true that such issues could and did serve as a respectable cover for opposition to further military action. This is how it worked during Vietnam, when demonstrably false accusations of war crimes were lodged against certain lawful American military tactics, were uncritically accepted as proved, and were then used as a potent weapon by the antiwar movement.

Be that as it may, of one thing we can be sure: As the war widens, opposition will widen along with it. We could already see this happening after President Bush spoke of an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union speech. This wonderfully bold declaration aroused anger and contempt throughout the world. Even the Europeans, after offering us their condolences over September 11, could scarcely let a decent interval pass before going back into the ancient family business of trying to prove how vastly superior in wisdom and finesse they were to us.

At home, much the same position was expressed by the New York Times and other publications ranging from the Center to the hard Left. In these precincts the president was hit for recklessness and overreaching, while terms redolent of Vietnam like "slippery slope" and "quagmire" were resurrected. Yet unlike the antiwar movement during Vietnam, which was almost completely made up of leftists and liberals, today's developing opposition resembles the one we had during the run-up to the Gulf War: It is forging a coalition of the hard Left, elements of the soft Left, and sectors of the American Right.

As this kind of thing metastasizes, a great responsibility will fall upon those of us who stand in awe of the moral courage and the strategic clarity President Bush has increasingly shown since September 11. We will need to mobilize all our intellectual firepower to fight off the arguments against the Bush Doctrine and to expose them for what they really are: appeasement and defeatism traveling under other names.

For the time being, if-in a phrase I am borrowing from Matthew Arnold, who borrowed it from the Gospel of Luke-"the one thing needful" is to be done, we old soldiers and our younger colleagues will have to do it pretty much on our own.

What are the demands of this "one thing needful"? They are, first, to remind ourselves, and then to teach our woefully miseducated children, that this country enjoys more freedom and more prosperity more widely shared than any nation in the history of the world. We need, after dwelling for so long on what may be wrong with us, to remember, and to celebrate, how much more is right and good and noble. We need to realize that the answer to the plaintively asked question "Why do they hate us?" is not for whatever crimes we may have committed, but for our accomplishments and our virtues.

Correlatively, we need to understand more clearly that these accomplishments and virtues have their source in the institutions designed by our founding fathers-institutions that have, just as they hoped, conduced to "the preservation of the blessings of liberty" for their posterity. Which is to say, us.