Redstate

We won WWIII.

The "Shot heard 'round the world" in WWIV was fired in 1979 when the Iranian Hostage Crisis began, too bad our fearful leader at that time, Jimma Carter didn't hear the report as he was busy convincing the American people that we were under the spell of a "National Malaise".

Anyone who believes that "Cowboy Bush" has gone under hasn't been paying attention.

Iran's Mad Mullah's and thier sock puppet AmmaJammPajamas have tipped their hand too early in the wagering and will soon suffer the consequences,unless you believe in the whole 72 virgins thingy.

The time for talk and negotiations is over,

America and her allies need to declare war on the "axis of evil" with Syria replacing Iraq and get it on.

A sustained Mother of all Shock and Awe campaigns, targeting regime leaders and military concentrations and infrastructure should do the trick without a single "boot on the ground" other than Special Forces to laze the targets.

Let the people of these countries pick up the pieces after we've done for their wayward leaders,with a friendly reminder that they should get it right or we'll be back.

We need to stop apologizing for being the most powerful nation on earth and use our might for positive change in the Middle East and elsewhere around the globe.

not nearly so clear as you posit it to be nor is there much of an analog between the world situation then and now.

Our stated position and the will of the vast majority of our citizenry was to stay out of the entanglements flowing from the imperial ambitions of the Great Powers - a status we did not pretend to nor were considered to have in either the early 1900s or the 1930s.  We were a very wealthy nation, but stayed behind our oceans and a credible but defensive fleet and tried to make money and so long as the Great Powers stayed out of our hemisphere, we were content to let them play their imperial games.

The World Wars were fought by and between nation states over the pecuniary and territorial (with a certain amount of ego thrown in) interests of nation states.  The Germans in both wars and the Japanese in the second war fought for power, territory and resources and both believed, with some justification, that their ambitions were thwarted by the British and French and, with regard to the Japanese, the Americans.  The Nazi racialism was but a sub-plot to their territorial ambitions, a justification if you will, for how the Germans were entitled to have hegemony over Europe, especially Eastern Europe where they desired what they styled "living room."

I believe that only the obvious stasis in the European front and the liklihood of a decisive German victory there combined with an increasing interference with our shipping motivated the very anti-war American public to accept intervention in the first War.  And, even though it has been subject to a lot of Leftist distortion, the fact that we were owed a whole lot of money by the Western Allies certainly entered into American thinking.

Likewise, we were more than content to sit on the sidelines through the thirties and were quite sympathetic to the Germans.  Reinstituting the draft to increase our Army from a paltry 100,000 man force in 40 or early 41 only passed the House by one vote.  Certainly those at the highest levels of government saw the threat to US interests posed by German ambition, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that that the public could have been brought to support intervention in a European war.  Only the precipitous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor awakened us from our isolationist slumber and the Government struggled mightily to get the political consensus to deal with Germany, the much greater threat, first.  December 8, 1941, must have been the worst day of Hitler's life, but held held to his committment to the Japanese and declared war on the US on 12/11/41, thus unleashing the Hell of American industrial production against his territorial ambitions.

Today's conflict is hardly about nation states and certainly does not involve the interests of Great Powers in terms of territorial and resource issues in the same terms as the World Wars.  There is really only one Great Power, the US, and no Middle Easter nation poses a threat to our territorial sovereignty and only a temporary threat to our resource markets.  Whatever else, the nation states there need to sell the oil as much as the West needs to buy it.

There is an evil Islamist cult that has control over some and influence over all of the Middle Eastern nation states.  No doubt this cult hates the West generally and us specifically and they have a special hatred for Israel on both ideological and territorial grounds.  The interests of the cult are antithetical to the interests of most of the nation states in the ME, for their agressive actions invite destruction of the wealth and power of the rulers of those nation states by Israel or the US.  Those leaders have to chose who they fear most, the cultists or the US and Israel.  My money is that they say a few nasty things about Western agression but vote to keep their private 747s, Rolls-Royces, and visits to more entertaining countries.

To the extent that one would consider France, Germany, Russia, or China to be Great Powers, and I don't, their interests are more akin to the US's interests in WWI.  They have trade and influence relationships with most of the Middle Eastern states.  Remember most of these states were Soviet clients and the Soviets made a lot of good, hard money selling weapons and training to those governments. It was a good business because the Isrealis forced them all to acquire a new inventory every few years.  Likewise, the French, Germans, and, lately, the Chinese have been making good money in the ME; they don't want to lose that trade and like the ME potentates will say bad things about us and the Israelis, but their relationships with the US are ultimately far more valuable to them.

There is a war over there and there ultimately may be something like battles all over the world, including here, but it is not a world war involving the essential interests of Great Powers that leads Great Powers into formal conflict on a world scale as did World Wars I and II.

as I argued with Joseph Farah of World Net Daily, no historian will revise their work just because James Woolsey says the Cold War was WWIII.

,,it matters little that WWIII was supposed to be the one with mushroom clouds rising over the US and the USSR.

Whichever numerical designation one wants to attach to the current World War,there should be no doubt that we are fighting a global conflict.

It's wayyyy past time that we just got down to it and showed our enemies that we will not go quietly into the night but have the will and the means to bring destruction and death upon them.

Death is what they crave,grant it to them.

What I can't understand is why we are reluctant to kill those who want us dead?