WW4
"When opposite ends of the political spectrum agree on an initially improbable proposition, there is often something to it. Since the end of World War II and concomitant dawn of the nuclear age in 1945, the planet has been anticipating a conflict worthy of the name "World War III,"with all its apocalyptic connotations. Two days after 9-11, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman announced that it had finally arrived: "Does my country really understand that this is World War III?" Similarly, the day after the horrific Sept. 3, 2004 schoolhouse massacre in Beslan, North Ossetia, the Times quoted Moscow's Orthodox Rev. Aleksandr Borisov warning his parishioners of pro-Chechen terror attacks throughout Russia, and declaring: "World War III has begun." Meanwhile, former CIA director James Woolsey--a top advocate of the attack on Iraq as a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--proffers a different historical configuration. In April 2003, just after the invasion, he wrote that the Iraq campaign was "part of World War IV." By Woolsey's math, the Cold War itself was World War III. He warned that the new world conflict, like its immediate predecessor, "is going to be measured, I'm afraid, in decades." Woolsey's concept has started to catch on among the neo-conservatives. In the September 2004 issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz published an essay entitled "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win." Finding that "the great struggle into which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World War IV," Podhoretz drew on the work of Eliot A. Cohen, another Defense Policy Board member, Project for the New American Century co-founder and Iraq war advocate. Wrote Podhoretz: "I agree with one of our leading contemporary students of military strategy, Eliot A. Cohen, who thinks that what is generally called the 'cold war' (a term, incidentally, coined by Soviet propagandists) should be given a new name. 'The cold war,' Cohen writes, was actually '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.' I also agree that the nature of the conflict in which we are now engaged can only be fully appreciated if we look upon it as World War IV. To justify giving it this name--rather than, say, the 'war on terrorism'--Cohen lists 'some key features' that it shares with World War III: '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.' There is one more feature that World War IV shares with World War III and that Cohen does not mention: both were declared through the enunciation of a presidential doctrine." For Podhoretz, just as the Truman Doctrine of global interventions against the spread of Communism in 1947 heralded the opening of the Cold War, the Bush Doctrine of a proactive global campaign against terrorism marks the opening of World War IV." An extract from an article by Bill Weinberg on World War 4 Report. Full article here.
