World War Six – A Reminder

Niall Ferguson, who has written stupid things before, has opined again in the LA Times. The headline reads “It’s Not World War III, but It Could Be Almost As Bad”. Interesting. The article makes some historical comparisons to World Wars I and II without really looking below the surface, as is apparently the method in major coastal city news reporting these days, then touches on the 1973 war between Israel and one of the various leagues of Arab nations determined to wipe them off the map. As if to confirm his superficial understanding, Ferguson warns that at one point, “the White House issued DEFCON 3, putting American strategic nuclear forces on high alert”. Actually, DEFCON 3 is serious but not at all the highest level of alert, but to Ferguson this hardly matters.

Ferguson makes a few more points which seem to amuse him, although they –as happens with this guy – miss any attempt at support or serious consideration of cause, effect, or evidence. He finishes, as again is required of anyone writing from California, with a poor-mannered and unreasonable snipe at the President. But Ferguson manages to do nothing except raise an intriguing question, which he proves he cannot answer. How and why do world wars start anyway?

The conflict between Jews and the Arabs did not start with the creation of the Nation of Israel in 1948; the fact that Arabs were eager to cooperate with Nazi “Final Solution” plans, to the degree that national leaders in the Middle East expressed hope that similar programs would be put into operation in their own region shows that hatred of the Jews had very little indeed to do with national sovereignty. It is as it was, an unending desire to wipe out the Jew. When Ahmadinejad derides Europe for, in his mind, establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East to ‘push off their problems’ to someone else, he not only ignores the clearly valid historical claim Israel has, but also the reason for the Diaspora in the first place – the Jews have spent almost two thousand years trying to find homes where they wouldn’t be hunted down like animals, or treated as if they held no rights. The one thing the United Nations got right, was in understanding that re-creating the Jewish homeland would give them a chance to defend themselves.

With that fact in mind, we move to the nature of World Wars. I have mentioned before that we have actually had more than two World Wars by now. The present conflict, the War on Terrorism, is actually the Sixth World War by my reckoning.

If you click my link – shameless, I know – you may see certain characteristics of World Wars, which include economic and cultural conflict on the intercontinental scale. The reason we are in WW6, therefore, comes not only from the economic impact of a war which will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, but also the fact that this war is necessary to eradicate the threat of Global Terrorism – again, integrally connected with Fascist Jihadism. Ferguson is clueless to the events of more than a decade, or he would not have missed that fact.

Israel is more than just a single nation taking on a single, if particularly repulsive, terrorist group in Hezbollah. Hezbollah is trying to make the key evolutionary move from terrorist group as non-government organization (NGO) to sovereign power, which is why they are receiving such support from Iran and Syria. If the proxy war against Israel is at all successful, this pact of Jihadists can and will be directed at other targets of opportunity, which at some point would include acts of terror against American targets perceived to be soft. Accordingly, it is very much in the National Security interests of the United States to stand with Israel. The same, perhaps even more so, for Britain, Spain, Australia, and other nations which have already felt the cost of allowing the Jihadists to play their game inside those nations’ borders.

We are at war against legions of terrorists, by their choice and provocation. Lebanon is just one more front. There is no place to run, no excuse to hide, no way that ignoring the danger will make it go away. It’s well past time for people like Ferguson to wake up to that truth.