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U.S. Analysts debate whether World War III is in the offing
A raging war between Israel and the radical Shiite movement Hezbollah in Lebanon; a de facto civil war in Iraq more than three years after the U.S.-led invasion; mounting conflict over Iran's nuclear program; recent reports over terrorist plans for spectacular attacks against transatlantic aviation; NATO's faltering war in Afghanistan... All of them taking place simultaneously, are these indications that the world is heading for a fresh world war? This is the talk of the day here. But intellectually, the strongest ideas on where the world is standing with respect to a global conflict, or what the United States should do, came from Richard Holbrooke, a top diplomat during former President Bill Clinton's tenure and "Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay," Holbrooke wrote in an Aug. 10 article in The Washington Post. He then went on to compare the present threat with how World War I broke out, referring to historian Barbara Tuchman's classic, 'The Guns of August,' which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to the world's first global conflict. "There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: 'The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit,'" Holbrooke said. He said preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. He called on President George W. Bush's administration to contain the ongoing violence in the first place, also urging Washington to engage in talks with Syria and even Iran. In a counter-article in The Washington Post on Aug. 11, Gingrich mostly agreed with Holbrooke's analysis on the present situation, which he called "an emerging Third World War," but the two men's solution offers diverged greatly. He rejected Holbrooke's calls for dialogue with Iran and Syria, saying the "architect of Bosnian peace" represented the diplomacy first-diplomacy always school. Needless to say, U.S. foreign policy hawks agree with Gingrich's 'go-for-it' approach, and calls by Holbrooke and other Democratic and centrist analysts to engage in talks with Iran face deaf ears from Bush's administration. And Gingrich's position is what the centrists and liberals would call a provocation for the new world war. As for Keegan, he sees the comparison between today's threats and World War I's outbreak in the eyes of a pure military historian, declining to offer any solutions. Keegan said: "If the Middle East descends into mutual aggression as a result of the present crisis, it will not be because of similarities or analogies with World War I, but because leaders of states and non-state organizations are willing to run terrible risks." Posted by: Pappy 2006-08-14 |
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