World War?

Are we in World War III, as Newt suggested?

The former Speaker of the House and possible Republican candidate for president explained on NBC's "Meet the Press" what he described as the theaters of this war, North Korea's test missile, terrorist bombs in India, continued war in Afghanistan and the threats against Israel from the alliance of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah.

There are two ways to respond to this:

1. Huh?
2. Duh!

On the one hand, this is not, as of yet, an all-out war between two major superpowers. For that matter, "World Wars" as we came to understand them in the last century aren't even that - they're wars between all-encompassing ideologies. World War I was a battle (largely) between empire and liberal democracy (although there were exceptions on both sides; Russia was no liberal democracy, Turkey was harldy much of an empire anymore); World War II, as Paul Johnson put it, was a war between the eastern, authoritarian notion of "Culture" and the Western, liberal notion of "Civilization".

And there's been a notion among geopolitics wonks that the next World War is going to have a different alignment - between the liberal/secular/Judeochristian/industrial "North" and the millenarian/Islamic/totalitarian "South" (and again, exceptions exist on all sides; Russia isn't "liberal", Australia is southern but part of the "Anglosphere"). The first time I read this in popular literature was in 1982, in General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War - The Untold Story, and it was hardly a new idea even then.

Now, when I say "duh", I don't mean to impugn anyone's intelligence; Joe Gandelman is no dummy. And he notes:

The problem with all of this is that it's suggesting that foreign crises would be dealt with in a way to extract maximum political advantage by using events and a blanket definition of them as a bludgeon against Democrats. And if it's done in a way that it's suggested above it would be so blatantly political that even some folks who agree with the term World War III would be turned off by it.

This could re-attract wavering members of the GOP's political base but it would totally turn off Democrats (who probably won't vote for the GOP anyway) and would probably be the final nail in the coffin for GOP hopes of getting a decent chunk of the independent voters or even some moderate Democrats who might be turned off by a such a transparent political ploy more than they are by World War II 1/2 (the war against Joe Lieberman).

We talked about this on Race To The Right yesterday. I think it goes a lot deeper than that.

The war - more, the approach to the war - is going to be the biggest issue on the ballot for the next several elections, whether the American people know it or not. Like the Civil War, many of the "domestic" issues facing the US will be offshoots of the war; energy prices, the state of the economy, immigration, federal and SCOTUS judge confirmations, all will have a toe dipped into the war issue.

It's going to be a long slog for conservatives; embracing conservative concepts takes a lot more brain power than most liberal ideals [*]. The great gift of, say, Ronald Reagan, was to take the thought of the likes of Hayek and Goldwater - stuff that made Joe Sixpack's eyes glaze over - and put it forward in terms that Mr. Sixpack to glom onto.

It's also been a gift of Gingrich's; he took a raft of wonkisms and political inside baseball and whipped it into a simple catchphrase, "Contract With America", that caught fire with the electorate (and helped reinforce the "Clinton Economy").

I think we are going to face a choice in this nation; take the war seriously now, or wait until the war gets serious for us again - the next 9/11. On my pessimistic days, I agree with Tony Garcia - this nation won't take the war on terrorism seriously until the next attack.

But if the American people were to connect the dots on the notion that the war we're in is not a bunch of disconnected regional squabbles, but in fact different metastasizations of the same cancer, maybe, just maybe, they'll have the common sense to keep the un-serious party out of power long enough to get the job done.

Gandelman calls it "extract[ing] maximum political advantage by using events...". I call it "explaining the problem as it really is".

[*] I said "takes brain power", not "takes a smarter person". Certain Twin Cities liberal bloggers notwithstanding, conservatives and liberals have about the same innate intelligence. But digging a ditch takes more energy than coding a website; if The Rock codes a website and Clay Aiken digs a ditch, Mr. Aiken has expended more energy, differences in innate strength notwithstanding.

Posted by Mitch at July 17, 2006 12:07 PM | TrackBack