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Younghusband
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Younghusband

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July 18th, 2006

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GWOT as WWIII

Roger of The Duck talks Hermann Kahn, the Ladder of Escalation, Israel, Hizballah, the future of American politics and Newt Gingrich which had this to say:

Look what you’ve been covering: North Korea firing missiles. We say there’ll be consequences, there are none. The North Koreans fire seven missiles on our Fourth of July; bombs going off in Mumbai, India; a war in Afghanistan with sanctuaries in Pakistan. As I said a minute ago, the, the Iran/Syria/Hamas/Hezbollah alliance. A war in Iraq funded largely from Saudi Arabia and supplied largely from Syria and Iran. The British home secretary saying that there are 20 terrorist groups with 1200 terrorists in Britain…. I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you’ve been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you’d have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III.

Comments to this entry

Richardson
July 18, 2006
6:52 pm
I'd say the Cold War was WWIII and GWOT is WWIV.
Bill
July 18, 2006
7:16 pm
I'd say the Cold War was not WWIII and we are curently not in WWIII or IV or V.

Everyone seems so obsessed with naming things these days--is it WWIII, the long war, the war against Islamofacism, etc.

I think we should leave the naming to the historians, since applying neat labels to these sorts of things tends to restrict our thinking on the matters at hand in an unnecessary and unhelpful way.
Curzon
July 18, 2006
7:52 pm
Yeah, Bill said it one way. To put it another way, to call the GWOT another World War is missing the very important concept of scale.

Casualties from World War I: 16 million dead
Casualties from World War II: 62 million dead

The world wars were just that -- world wars, seeing thousands die daily. Put aside the fact that the world population has tripled over the past century, changing the issue of proportion, and then consider that these sporadic terrorist attacks and skirmishes in teh Middle East result in a few hundred people dead here and there, and you can imagine that conflict of equal scale a century ago would barely rise to the level of "insurgency" (compare the Philippines, Tibet, Tashkent, Arabia, South Africa, or a handful of other rebellious provinces or colonies in the early 20th century).

And those are just casualty rates, the easiest quantifiable factor in a brief comment. The world wars changed the entire economies of nations, upset trade pattersn, ending international travel, etc etc etc etc.

So world war? I think not.
Sgt. Slaughter
July 18, 2006
9:02 pm
Wow I didn't know Newt was a Trotskite!!!

As if the entire planet has ever once been in a state of peace all over at any one time history.
Richardson
July 18, 2006
10:22 pm
I don't think such labeling, "restrict[s] our thinking," at least not mine; the task is still the same no matter what it's called.

Casualties are only one type of scale. "World" war implies a "global" confrontation, which I believe both the Cold War and GWOT conform to. A definition of "World War" is, "a war in which the major nations of the world are involved," which also applies. Numbers of dead or wounded are not intrinsic to that definition.
Consul-At-Arms
July 18, 2006
10:56 pm
Curzon,
I hadn't noticed the current conflict being over, perhaps the final casualty totals along with economic disruption &tc. will be more to the scale you suggest by the time it's concluded.
There is some merit to suggestions that this is merely a resumption of the wars of Islamic conquests interrupted by the crusades, colonialism and modernity; if true then the scale of casualties and disruption already surpass that of WW1 & 2 combined.
Cheers!
bp32
July 19, 2006
2:13 am
@Richardson: The task changes depending on how people conceptualize what it is. The world doesn't present itself to us objectively. We muster up all manner of models, analogies, metaphors, etc to make sense of it. Depending upon which one's we choose certain ways of fighting it become more or less reasonable, conceivable, etc. That is how policy is constructed, just take a look at the Cold War (or is it WWIII) for proof of that.

@Curzon: I would agree with you with the caveat that the conflict--however we finally come to see it--is not over (as Consul notes). I certainly agree that further actions would have to create the kind of societal and system change on par with both World Wars before we could even consider the current conflict as the logical successor--but we are a long ways away from that yet.
Younghusband
July 19, 2006
2:34 am
@Consul: Remember in the Three Musketeers where the messenger comes in to Richileau's chamber to say "Cardinal have you heard the news? The 30 Years War has just broken out!"
Richardson
July 19, 2006
11:22 pm
bp32: Yes, I saw what you're getting at, but I think it's way overblown and not really relevant to either the terms GWOT or WWIV. A good example where an academic theory sounds good to some, but in fact the world doesn't work that way. But I've only been "attending to the matters at hand."Â?
bp32
July 19, 2006
11:28 pm
I wasn't referencing an 'academic theory', but merely pointing out a fact--one that practitioners have long recognized. Glad that you are attending to the matters at hand, but that doesn't make your point any more convincing.
Richardson
July 19, 2006
11:51 pm
I - and those I work with - don't care if it's called GWOT, WWIV, Armageddon, or Sunday School; we're still going to do the same thing. The public approves, the public disapproves, still doing it. With all the "neat labels" out there, haven't noticed any that, "restrict our thinking on the matters at hand." PR matters, but there are limits.
bp32
July 20, 2006
12:31 am
You are missing my point. We are talking past each other it seems. I am not talking about PR. What you do is--one would hope--the result of strategic thinking and planning and I assume a smaller part of a larger strategy. That is not to demean it in any way, merely to point out that what I am talking about has to do with the strategic planning phase which cannot help but be affected by how decision-makers think about and label the problem at hand.
RichL
July 20, 2006
2:23 am
What absurd thinking. The US is a sideshow on inter-Muslim violence in Iraq. In the 1920's, there were anarcho-syndicalists, like Sacco and Vanzetti, raising hell. The only reason it's a "war" is PR to keep voters afraid. Even Bloomberg got into the act a few weeks ago when he asked for a larger allocation of Homeland Defense funds becuase of a terror plot to flood the financial district by bombing the Holland Tunnel. What moron of a terrorist thought that one up? It's all about domestic power and money here in the US.

All that's going on over there is the demographics of the middle east are skewed to youth, which means more testosterone flows through less educated minds. That's why that area is violent.

As for North Korea, who knows?
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