Posted by
Ali K on Monday, July 10, 2006 11:14:22 AM
Michael Goodwin said in his NY Post article today what Bill O'Reilly first said years ago http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/oreilly091503.asp and I myself was just thinking the other day:
World War III has begun.
It's not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in the full-scale combat phase that marked World Wars I and II, we seem to be heading there. The expanding hostilities mean it's time to give this conflict a name, one that focuses the mind and clarifies the big picture.
The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that reach much of the globe. It is a world war.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/433519p-365242c.html
From NYC to the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran) to Africa (Mogadishu) to North Korea to Europe (London and Madrid) to Toronto, back to the states in Miami (aside from the communist nature of the North Korean threat) Muslim extremists are popping up everywhere, loyal not to a nation state, but to an idealogy of jihad, of holy war.
The only problem with Goodwin is that he goes on to say that the U.S. is out of answers but I think he's wrong. This is a new day, a new kind of war, a new kind of enemy, and it takes creative thought and strategies to win in a whole new world. It may be a new World War, but it's also a New World we live in. This time the enemy has no borders or nation-state to align itself with. The enemy appeals not to rules of convention (Geneva), yet we are required by our own Supreme Court to treat them as such (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld).
The landscape is constantly changing, and so must our responses, but that doesn't mean we are throwing things up on the wall to see what sticks. We are being resourceful and using every possible tool in our arsenal to be at peace.