It's become a (wishful) commonplace of the imperial right that we are.
Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once -- most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. For decades, the world was poised for that next world war; the two superpowers with their nuclear arsenals running to thousands of weapons (as they still do), a few hundred of which would have been civilization-busting, many hundreds of which might have been nuclear-winter inducing and life extinguishing; all of them cocked in their silos or loaded in the bomb-bays of Soviet or American planes, or stashed on the submarines that made up the unreachable third leg of the nuclear "tripod" and were primed for almost instantaneous action. World War III, which might have ended it all, could indeed have started, as the U.S. military feared for decades, with those Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany, and escalated from there to "theater," and finally intercontinental, ballistic missiles. It would have been a show. The last picture show, you might say. And, let's face it, it didn't happen.
Yes, the two superpowers, armed to the teeth and eyeing each other for half a century, oozed aggression, and fought and bled each other in a series of proxy border wars; relatively overtly in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan; more covertly or indirectly in lands ranging from Tibet to Angola. (Yes, yes, in each of those cases, other powerful forces were at work, but certainly the global Cold War was part of the mix.) Nonetheless, over those fifty-plus years -- despite mutual memories of bloody stalemate in Korea, our memories of grim defeat in Vietnam, and Russian memories of the same in Afghanistan -- the most striking aspect of the Cold War was that the emphasis remained, however barely at times, on the "cold," not the "war." It's worth saying more than once, given our present moment and the claims being made: World War III never happened -- or I wouldn't be sitting here on the Internet writing this and you wouldn't be at your computer reading it. Put another way, "the Cold War" was simply an oxymoron that we got incredibly used to; a small, bleak sigh of linguistic relief at what hadn't quite (yet) come to be.
I mention this ancient history only because, to listen to the neoconservatives and their various allies now embedded in the top ranks of the Bush administration (or in well-connected think tanks and front groups scattered inside Washington DC's Beltway), we are in fact enmeshed in nothing less than "World War IV" today. Eliot Cohen, professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University, first proclaimed us there as the Afghan War was underway, just a couple of months beyond September 11, 2001. Former CIA Director James Woolsey swore we were there as the invasion of Iraq began in 2003. The grandfather of the neocons, Norman Podhoretz, reaffirmed that World War IV was the only war in town, the only thing that mattered, last September in a gargantuan piece in Commentary magazine. Others regularly say the same. It's become a commonplace trope of the imperial right. They even have full-scale World War IV conferences (happily attended by Paul Wolfowitz among others) and arguments over the term's exact nature abound. Woolsey, who seems to be making a profession of roaming the country, preaching World War IV to the unconverted, is already dubbing it "the longest war of the 21st century," or as Steve Clemons, President of the New American Foundation, puts it, the new "Hundred Years' War." (Full Articles click URL below)
Published March 10 , 2005, Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2005/03/world_war_iv.html
