Barrett Kalellis
Thursday, Dec. 4, 2003

Against the daily media drumbeat of war zone violence, Democrat presidential candidates have become bolder in their anti-Bush rhetoric, with the most strident insinuating that the administration “lied” in its invasion of Iraq, and that the U.S. has no “exit strategy.”

Unfortunately, none of these candidates has a satisfactory exit strategy either: Most of them glibly recommend “internationalizing” the conflict. This translates to withdrawing U.S. forces and getting more of our erstwhile allies to take up the slack some way or other, most likely by groveling to the feckless French and the Germans.

What these politicos don’t seem to understand is the nature of the war we are now fighting. The War on Terrorism is really World War III from a different perspective. I don’t know how conflicts come to be called “world wars,” but surely just as World Wars I and II were multinational conflicts fought in several “theaters,” worldwide terrorism uses insurgent forces from many countries to instigate acts of violence all across the globe, mostly against non-combatants.

Unlike the previous world wars, waged largely for expansionist and political gains, World War III is being fought by foot soldiers trained and sent into battle as surrogates, sponsored by ruling parties in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Libya and other Islamic countries.

These adversaries are ideologically driven zealots, either sectarian religious jihadists or secular anti-Western, anti-Israel, nationalist fanatics, and are united by their common Arabic and Muslim culture. With no experience of democratic rule, they have been quite content to remain subject to the tender mercies of theocratic mullahs, monarchic royal families, one-party strongmen or the Taliban.

A handful of anti-democratic Islamic regimes want to maintain the status quo, neither succumbing to secularism as Egypt and Turkey have done, nor reaping the fundamentalist whirlwind that is now threatening Saudi Arabia.

Sophisticated, extremist networks finance these murderers as they plot and carry out their violent and often suicidal missions. Like a demented worldwide franchise operation, terrorist cells are supplied with explosives for car and truck bombs, small arms, grenades, shoulder-firing missiles, mortars and other war materiel to wreak havoc on innocent civilians or coalition forces.

And they are egged on by widely distributed audio and video tapes made by criminal masterminds like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or rabid, hate-spewing Islamic clerics. Their theater of deadly business is not restricted to the Mideast, but includes places as far away as Malaysia and the United States, and their targets are now expanding to include Turks, Saudis, Spaniards and Italians, in addition to Americans, Britons, Poles and Israelis.

If one believes representative government to be the highest good, then our ultimate mission in the Mideast is to see the forces of good and freedom prevail over the forces of evil and tyranny. Whether this can be achieved depends on U.S. staying power and whether we still believe anything is worth fighting for.

Sadly, American society at the beginning of the 21st century has little stomach for protracted conflicts, let alone ideological ones. We are a self-absorbed people, and our psychological metabolism urges us to get even faster from point A to point B, without knowing what to do with the time we save.

In the land of the 10-minute oil change, the 20-minute fast food meal, the Pentium IV processor and citizens with the attention span of a hummingbird, overseas wars have to be resolved quickly, lest disillusionment and remorse set in.

The “mission accomplished” banner for the routing of Saddam’s army in three weeks has now given way to dark rumblings about quagmires, warmongers in the White House and no-exit exit strategies. One wonders if Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman ever needed to consider an exit strategy in their day?

In his waning years, Richard Nixon wrote that the reason the Vietnam War was lost was because the American people lost their confidence in the rightness of the cause. The result of this failure of nerve was the deaths of millions of innocent Vietnamese and Cambodians at the hands of their cruel Communist overlords.

People opposed to the Bush administration’s mission in Iraq are sounding more and more like the events of 9/11 were only a distant bad dream. They offer the illusion that deep-rooted conflicts can be resolved on the cheap, and that we can then go back to business as usual.

To prevail in any war, you first must know your enemy. Americans must understand that the worldwide network of terrorists is not going away until we stamp it out. World War III has already begun. You heard it here first.

Barrett Kalellis is a Michigan-based columnist and writer whose articles appear regularly in various local and national print and online publications.

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