CON GAMES: World War III

July 31st, 2006 at 01:49pm Michael Conniff 2

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

Or is it?

The recent troubles between Israel and the terrorist organizations Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas on the Gaza Strip have left the dutiful Righty pontificators salivating with the conviction that this really is the big one. From Bill O’Reilly to Newt Gingrich, one can detect more than a little glee at the prospect that the conflagration in the Middle East might just be a whopper.

The chances that the war would remain limited to the parties directly involved is viewed by these apocalypse-now types as borderline ludicrous. Anyone can see that our invasion of Iraq, combined with Israel’s unrelenting wipeout of Hizbollah, and the violence in the Gaza Strip, represents a pre-Armageddon confrontation between the forces of good and evil. And yet, in the very near term at least, no one is calling for an expanded war. No one is calling for anything much beyond a cease-fire enforced by a multinational force.

That doesn’t quite sound like Armageddon.

But any kind of breakout conflict will do for the World War III bunch because constant and unrelenting war (pre-Armageddon) suits their purposes fabulously. World War III allows for the usurpation of civil liberties and other inconveniences. It allows for the open-ended detention of anyone we don’t like the look of. It requires the extension and expansion of Presidential power right down to not enforcing laws through the back door of so-called signing statements loaded with hectoring caveats.

World War III is also a war to make sure we keep ramping up defense spending even as our weapons procurement programs have virtually nothing to do with the urban guerilla war being waged in Iraq. Armageddon is all-inclusive and cash-intensive, you see, and the notion also works wonderfully with our need to be good in the war between good and evil.

Let’s face it: when it comes time for Armageddon, nobody believes they might be on the dark side of things and everyone believes their cause is just—and not everybody can be right about that.

World War III also allows us to ride to the rescue just like we did in World War I and World War II—and in the Cold War, for that matter. You can’t possibly have a real catastrophic world war without the United States of America smack in the middle of things. The whole notion of the American Century coined by Henry Luce of Time implies that the world revolves around our interests and not theirs. The idea of World War III is inherently aggrandizing for our sense of national self-worth: it must be World War III because we’re in it.
In earlier wars, we the people were asked to sacrifice in a plethora of ways: hoarding gasoline and rubbing, blanketing our windows for blackouts, reaching deep into our pockets for war bonds, and sacrificing the blood of our youth in combat. The nice thing about World War III is that it has no real impact on American life worth noticing. Sure, gas might ratchet up a bit, but we are assured in short order that gasoline pricing is very complicated and only obliquely related to war(s). And combat casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, should they come up at all, are casually dismissed by the Righteous as too small for concern, a pittance that must be paid.

Perhaps most important of all, the idea of World War III requires that we be very, very afraid for our future. This is very important to the radicals of the Right. Without fear, there can be no mobilization of the base—or exponential defense spending. Without fear, rhetoric becomes merely rhetorical.

The problem with all this pandering about World War III is that it puts the notion of a third massive conflict in the air in a way that makes it sound inevitable, and that’s the biggest danger of all. Maybe World War III just a catchphrase, shorthand for those too concerned with the end of days to spit out the phrase: Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. One can hope so, even as one reminds the Right to be careful what they wish for.

Entry Filed under: Politics, Con Games, Foreign Policy