Lebanon and World War III

by Richard B. Simon
July 20, 2006

If the U.S. response to the escalating conflict in Israel and Lebanon seems a bit reserved, maybe it’s because the Bush Administration sees everything unfolding according to plan.

Since September 11, 2001, President Bush has made it clear that he sees the War on Terror as a generational war, the end of which is off in some far-distant future. We’ll never know whether the experiment in Iraq has worked, he famously said, because “we’ll all be dead.” Let’s assume he didn’t mean that the invasion Iraq would hasten the apocalypse (even though that is what many of the President’s few remaining supporters are hoping, because the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will follow the battle between Jews and Muslims on the plain of Armageddon) and the end of life on earth.

In that case, the President is telling us that his foreign policy has as its focus a war that, from the perspective of those of us alive on earth now, will never end – because it will not end in our lifetimes.

The Administration has frequently compared the War in Iraq to the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, both of which transformed hostile Axis powers into economic titans and staunch U.S. allies that anchored their respective continents in stability and democracy. Sixty years after V-J Day, the U.S. maintains a heavy military presence in both Germany and Japan. And President Bush has told us that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be left for “future presidents.” Note the plural.

The Bush Administration has also often compared the greater War on Terror, of which it holds Iraq to be an integral part, to the Cold War – a sometimes quite hot conflict between diametrically opposed ideologies in the form of two superpowers, which lasted fifty years, from the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Far from cold, the war tore up much of the world as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (and sometimes China) duked it out through proxy armies that manifested as ideologically opposed sides of civil wars in Vietnam and Korea, in Afghanistan and Nicaragua and Cuba and across Latin America.

Today, the United States is lined up against Islamic fundamentalism, another ideology that has risen up in opposition to what is now the earth’s sole megapower. To some degree, this ideology has risen in a region that was an Islamic empire as few as eighty years ago, until World War One spelled the end of the Ottomans and the European Powers carved the middle east into European-style nation states.

World War Two rolled through that nexus of Arabs and Islam as well, with the Axis and Allied powers taking and retaking parts of North Africa and the Middle East. And during the Cold War, the U.S. pitted the autocratic Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomenei. The Reagan Administration sold weapons to both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, sowing a chaos that effectively kept the Russians out of the region.

Faced with a shadowy enemy of terrorist networks, the Bush Administration seems to have decided on a foreign policy that would force Arab-Islamic alliances to the surface and turn the terror networks into armies aligned with nations – a la Hezbollah – that the U.S. could fight the old-fashioned way, with its impressive battlefield machinery, rather than with special forces operations and CIA agents.

Faced in the runup to the Iraq War with warnings that terror and violence could spill across the Middle East and into the west, the Administration exhibited few worries.

That’s a pattern that continues in the summer of 2006, as bombs rip through Indian trains, Palestinian refugee camps, Israeli cities, and Lebanese suburbs.

On Meet the Press last weekend, Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker whose 1994 Republican Revolution has culminated in a disastrous period of one-party Republican Rule, declared that we are witnessing the opening salvos of World War III. It’s a position President Bush shared even before the recent conflagrations in the Middle East – such as, in May, when he called the passenger takeover of Flight 93 “the first counter-attack to World War III.” (James Woolsey, President Clinton’s first CIA Director, calls the War on Terror “World War IV”, because he considers the Cold War to have been World War III.)

It is true that the kidnappings of Israeli soldiers into Gaza and Lebanon have had a sort of assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary feel to them – small events that trigger a cataclysm that feels very much like history in the offing.

And with the U.S. perpetually backing Israel and rattling its sabers at Syria and Iran, the battle between the Israelis and Hezbollah does seem to be a proxy war between the U.S. and the Iran-and-Syria-backed militia.

It has also been interesting to watch the Arab states that are either modern, secular, or to any degree aligned with the west – Saudia Arabia and Jordan, for example – criticizing Hezbollah and lining up against Iran’s growing (and Islamist-ruled) influence in the region.

The war that Osama bin Laden dragged us into is, after all, a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world, one that pits those who would align with the promise and fortunes of the West and modernity against those who would prefer a world run by narrowly-interpreted Islamist principles, whether it spans the globe or just a Middle East free of Western influence – especially Jews of European descent and their “Zionist Entity”.

The Bush Administration seems to have little interest in helping negotiate a cease-fire in Lebanon, or in mediating at all, as has been the U.S.’s traditional role in the cyclical mideast wars.

That’s likely because the Bush Administration (again discounting Bush’s own messianic Christian leanings as the basis for his foreign policy) sees the foreseeable future as one that forces Arab and Muslim nations to take sides in a World War III that is only just beginning. The end result, assuming the Americans win again, would be an Arab-Muslim world that has been transmogrified by the fires of war into a peaceful and productive part of the modern economy that can provide both freedom and prosperity for its people and light sweet crude for the U.S. (in lieu of flowers and candies).

Ignoring for a minute that World Wars tend to send humans to their deaths in the millions and millions, it’s not necessarily a bad plan. That assumes, of course, that you can start a World War on purpose and achieve the same effect that you would have if you had been dragged into it, kicking and screaming, as in I and II.

It’s hard to say whether or not Americans knew that they were signing up for World War III for the rest of their lives when they voiced support for the Invasion of Iraq in 2002 and re-elected George W. Bush in 2004. After all, it’s often hard to tell whether this Administration is comprised of evil geniuses or damned fools (I suspect one of each at the very top) – and their policy seems to be to keep us all guessing.

But anyone who is surprised that the President of the United States seems not too concerned about the growing conflagration in the Middle East has not been paying attention – either to world events or to the warmaking rhetoric of the Bush Administration.