May 27, 2003

World War 3...

First Persian Campaign, or the Stabilization of South Central Asia.

At least, that's how I hope this plays out in 50 years. We've suspended relations with Iran, and I'm sure Khamenei, for all his anti-American rhetoric and bully-speak, is sweating bullets. After all, I'm sure he's perfectly aware that the US military occupies two nations bordering his own.

Not being a Republican nor even a "little L" libertarian even, my inner Liberal immediately sat up and thought, "Oh my God! Not another war! We'll just create more terrorists, etc."

Fortunately, my inner Realist stepped up and slapped my inner Liberal in the back of the head. This is the way I see it:

This is World War 3. It has been World War 3 at least since 1979, when Khamenei's personal hero, the infamous Ayatollah Khomeini, orchestrated the raid on the American Embassy in Teheran and the kidnapping of Americans there. That finally brought the already-burgeoning war on terrorism to our back door. It should have been our 9/11. It should have cast us headlong into the battle that the French, the Germans, the English, and others were already fighting.

Instead, it was mistakenly seen as a personal vendetta against Jimmy Carter, and the fact that the hostages were released shortly after Reagan was sworn in as president seemed to bear that out (as well as a bunch of inevitable conspiracy theories about Reagan, but I digress.)

It was much bigger than that. It was the opening salvo, the declaration of war against the Great Satan (that's us, you see.)

Well, the Islamic Fundamentalists have been fighting that war tooth and nail ever since, but we never took them seriously. Qadaffi, Khomeini, Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Mogadishu, the U.S.S. Cole, Dar-es-Salaam, Luxor. These have all been campaigns and enemy leaders in the war. Despite our missile reprisals and stern talk and sometimes inconsistent application of military force, the fundamentalists have been winning.

In spite of the fact that military intelligence has been saying for years that we will face two major international problems in the coming years, terrorism and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, we ignored both.

Then 9/11 happened. As had long been predicted, the US got a very rude wake-up call. Suddenly, Islamic terrorism wasn't a primarily foreign phenomenon.

The comparisons with Pearl Harbor that proliferated after 9/11 were utterly justified, except that in this case, it wasn't the first sneak attack we'd weathered from them. It wasn't even the twentieth. It was just the one that hit us where we lived.

For all Europe's whining over the past twenty years about how we weren't involved with the fight against mushrooming Islamic terrorism, and how we hid over here on the other side of the world, it really should not be a surprise that we're involved now.

Boy, are we ever involved. It's perfectly clear what's at stake here, and that is nothing less than the future of a global humanity for the next century...maybe more. Two large cultural forces are rubbing up against each other, and ultimately, the planet ain't big enough for the two of us. I'd have a lot more hope for a world full of Western-style, liberal, secular democracies where people are allowed basic human rights and freedoms than I would for one where half the world's population lies under restrictive Islamic theocracy.

Remember that the Islamic Fascists are also Imperialists. They'd love to see a worldwide Islamic state.

And you say "American Imperialism" like it's a bad thing.