World War IV

The Fourth World War is now been going on for 3 years and 4 months. One can argue when the WWIV got started, but I will put the begining of it on 9/11/01.

So where are we at? There is a chilling article in The Atlantic Monthly written from the perspective of 2006, after the "2nd wave" of domestic attacks. It is a bit ironic that so much of what is in this article was spelled out by Porter Goss yesterday. Far from acting to dry up the breeding grounds for terroists we are making more of them.

Even if Iraq never happened we would still be facing a grim future. Iraq has plainly made a bad situation worse. And it really doesn't matter what happens inside Iraq. Democracy, Tyranny, Civil War, it really makes no difference because our enemy is our enemy and they are not going to have a "V-8" moment over this. Bin Laden and Zarcawi are not likely to simply go away. Their apocolyptic beliefs do not contain a world that includes Satan. To them we are Satan.

If we were to change our policies, and work on behalf of the real people of Arabia and north Africa things still would not improve for a long long time. And this too would not persuade the enemy to stop. The Bush administration, though talking tough and killing people, is killing and ruining the wrong target. We should have been spending 80 billion to take out leadership, infiltrate their networks, and kill their followers.

I will serve up another analogy. In May of 1864 Grant moved south into Virginia. The confederacy evacuated Richmond. Lee layed plans to defend the capital of the South. Instead Grants movements indicated that he didn't care if Richmond fell or not. Richmond was not the target, cities were not the target, the rebel government was not the target. Lee realised that it was his army that was the target. Grant understood a fundelmental aspect of war. There can be no real war without warriors; kill the warriors and even a rebel government is defenseless.

It isn't good enough to bring democracy to Iraq. In the long run it will help, however democracy will not disuade our enemy. They have no nation, or government, but they are warriors. Kill the warriors and there is no war. And we better get busy because they will kill us if we do not kill them.