World War IV

It's already here.

An essay by Doug Saunders, which first ran in The Globe & Mail, Sep. 6; it's also at Common Dreams:

For two years, the U.S. has pursued the culprits behind the 9/11 atrocities with a vengeance that has shocked and awed ally and enemy alike. But even the devastating attacks on the Afghan and Iraqi regimes don't illustrate the true scope of the campaign, Doug Saunders reports. While everyone was preoccupied with the fireworks, Washington has quietly deployed thousands of agents in a secretive struggle that may last a lifetime....

Saunders refers to others who have called the war on terrorism, World War IV. First, Eliot Cohen in an article at OpinionJournal, Nov. 20, 2001:

.... Take the matter of this war. It is most assuredly something other than the "Afghan War," as the press sometimes calls it. After all, the biggest engagement took place on American soil, and the administration promises to wage the conflict globally, and not, primarily, against Afghans.

The "9/11 War," perhaps? But the war began well before Sept. 11, and its casualties include, at the very least, the dead and wounded in our embassies in Africa, on the USS Cole and, possibly, in Somalia and the Khobar Towers. "Osama bin Laden's War"? There are precedents for this in history (King Philip's War, Pontiac's War, or even The War of Jenkins' Ear), but the war did not begin with bin Laden and will not end with his death, which may come sooner than anyone had anticipated — including, one hopes, the man himself.

A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV. The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map. The analogy with the Cold War does, however, suggest some key features of that conflict: that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots....

Second, a speech by R. James Woolsey, Nov. 16, 2002, published by FrontPage, Nov. 22, 2002:

.... I have adopted Eliot Cohen’s formulation, distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, that we are in World War IV, World War III having been the Cold War. And I think Eliot’s formulation fits the circumstances really better than describing this as a war on terrorism....

We’re hated because of freedom of speech, because of freedom of religion, because of our economic freedom, because of our equal — or at least almost equal treatment of women — because of all the good things that we do. This is like the war against Nazism. We are hated because of what the best of what we are. But even if hated, why attacked? Well, I would suggest that we have for much of the last quarter of the century — not all, but much — have been essentially hanging a “Kick Me” sign on our back in the Middle East. We have given some evidence of being what bin Laden has actually called a paper tiger....

P.S. There's an Associated Press story this weekend about World War IV:

The main battle lines zigzag around the world, from the Middle East to Africa and Asia as far as the Philippine jungles and teeming Jakarta streets. The fallout — patriotism, paranoia, propaganda and plotting — spreads much farther afield. Does that sound like a world war?....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 09/13/03 04:34:20 PM
Categorized as International.