Are We in World War IV?

[chlamor]

I tend to think we are in the last phase of colonial conquest. The earth will not tolerate much more of Mans ecocidal warring ways. For those who wish to bring about peaceful resolution to our troubled planet it is time to activate. Here are a few clips from an article by Tom (Dispatch) Engelhardt about the Neocons WW IV:

"Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once -- most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. For decades, the world was poised for that next world war; the two superpowers with their nuclear arsenals running to thousands of weapons (as they still do), a few hundred of which would have been civilization-busting, many hundreds of which might have been nuclear-winter inducing and life extinguishing; all of them cocked in their silos or loaded in the bomb-bays of Soviet or American planes, or stashed on the submarines that made up the unreachable third leg of the nuclear "tripod" and were primed for almost instantaneous action. World War III, which might have ended it all, could indeed have started, as the U.S. military feared for decades, with those Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany, and escalated from there to "theater," and finally intercontinental, ballistic missiles. It would have been a show. The last picture show, you might say. And, let's face it, it didn't happen.

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."

<snip>

With its Cold War overtones of nuclear annihilation, World War IV implies that our very existence as a nation is in immediate danger and will be for years, decades, perhaps a century or more to come; and yet it is also a familiar, even reassuring image -- another global war in the triumphant tradition of the three that preceded it. In this way, it can both scare people and help make instant sense of, and lend instant meaning to, things happening all over the world. After all, if this is a global war, then events in Afghanistan and Spain, or Central Asia and Iraq don't really have to be explained fully; they can just be subsumed in, and related to, the larger World War, using the familiar war language of "fronts," "battles," and "theaters" in a far vaster struggle. ("But as I will attempt to show," writes Podhoretz typically, "we are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play.") In fact, you can sweep anything -- Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, North Korea -- into the same war-basket of meaning, just as our President swept two bitter enemy nations (Iraq and Iran) and one completely unrelated state (North Korea) into an "axis of evil" (which drew, obviously, on the memory of World War II's Axis powers).

<snip> 

"World War IV" does many other useful things as well. It moves the goalposts into the future, way off there in an endless generational struggle. In other words, it conveniently excuses much that might otherwise seem baleful or ridiculous in the present. And of course it disarms critics -- for who wants to stand in the path of a necessary global war against your own annihilation? As an image, it (and GWOT) undergird what, in the Cold War, was called the national security state and now has morphed into an even more all-encompassing homeland security state. The two terms make sense of soaring Pentagon budgets, offshore mini-gulags, and so much else. It becomes possible to write, as Earl Tilford, former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, did: "This is World War IV. Forget the sleazy sickness of Abu Ghraib. Stop mouthing meaningless slogans like, 'Bush lied, soldiers died.' Steel yourselves for a long, bloody fight. This is a war we must not lose."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=7412
 

[Cleita]

1. If we invade Syria, or any other nation for that matter, we are. n/t