Are We in World War IV?

[leftchick]

Just a thought about the way those insane neo-cons are thinking....


http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml

~snip~

I mention this ancient history only because, to listen to the neoconservatives and their various allies now embedded in the top ranks of the Bush administration (or in well-connected think tanks and front groups scattered inside Washington DC's Beltway), we are in fact enmeshed in nothing less than "World War IV" today. Eliot Cohen, professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University, first proclaimed us there as the Afghan War was underway, just a couple of months beyond September 11, 2001. Former CIA Director James Woolsey swore we were there as the invasion of Iraq began in 2003. The grandfather of the neocons, Norman Podhoretz, reaffirmed that World War IV was the only war in town, the only thing that mattered, last September in a gargantuan piece in Commentary magazine. Others regularly say the same. It's become a commonplace trope of the imperial right. They even have full-scale World War IV conferences (happily attended by Paul Wolfowitz among others) and arguments over the term's exact nature abound. Woolsey, who seems to be making a profession of roaming the country, preaching World War IV to the unconverted, is already dubbing it "the longest war of the 21st century," or as Steve Clemons, President of the New American Foundation, puts it, the new "Hundred Years' War."

Conceptually, it underlies the slightly toned down, but still distinctly ramped up, description of our present state proclaimed from the planetary rafters by the Bush administration -- that we are, as the White House was already announcing before the end of 2001, "one hundred" days into a multi-generational "global war on terrorism," now more familiarly (and rather fondly) known among the cognoscenti by the awkward acronym GWOT. Since WWIV and GWOT are the allied rubrics under which our world is being reorganized, it's worth taking a look at them and how well or poorly they describe that world.

Back in November 2001, introducing the term World War IV -- he now says "tongue-in-cheek" -- Eliot Cohen wrote: "Political people often dislike calling things by their names. Truth, particularly in wartime, is so unpleasant that we drape it in a veil of evasions, and the right naming of things is far from a simple task."

The right naming of things. As Cohen says, it's no small matter. And since he wrote that passage, this administration of lexicographers has spent startling amounts of time, dictionaries in hand, renaming and redefining terms ranging from our country or nation (now "the homeland") to the outsourcing of torture ("extraordinary rendition") -- always, not surprisingly, to their advantage. Either in its baldest form as World War IV, or as the slightly milder GWOT, this particular renaming of our moment -- in a sense, the largest renaming of all -- has many advantages.

[Mr Rabble]

1. i would say that we are

in WW4. How else do you explain this?

Even our mid level troops-NCO, etc..- are being told that they will be in the ME for years to come.

unreal. We are going to lose an entire generation.

[Demeter]

2. Say Rather Civil War--Round 2

The South, still inflamed by the loss of their perogatives, is trying for a rematch, even though at least half of the populations in the Red States came from Blue states. Entitlement is worse than AIDS, and spreads just as easily.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

3. If we're not, I'd say that the warm-up band is on stage.

[rogerashton]

4. Dead wrong.

For two reasons. First, we are now in a war only in the 1984 sense -- "we have always been at war with Eastasia."

Second, by treating the cold war as World War III, this locution hides rather than revealing. Indeed, even to distinguish World Wars I and II is, in retrospect, a bit obfusc. So-called WWII rreally continued WWI with some changing of partners for the dance. I say that there was one big war in the 20th century: the 75 Years War, 1914-1989. Like the Hundred Years' War it had its periods of respite and some changing of sides (Italy, especially!) but it was, from start to finish, a conflict between two concepts of modern politics -- parliamentary democracy and the "more modern" totalitarian rule -- and totalitarianism lost.

[Viking12]

8. Dead On! "we have always been at war with (insert enemy dujour)."

[redirish28]

5. maybe i'm dumb but...

did I miss world war 3?

[Minstrel Boy]

6. They'd like us to think so, but it's still World War II.

The Nazis weren't finished off after all. They just changed sides.

[leftchick]

7. hadn't thought about it like that...

but you are indeed correct... :scared: