I find your lack of faith disturbing

by John Holbo on November 2, 2007

Commentary hosts a symposium on Podhoretz’ World War IV. Their question: “What Kind of War Are We Fighting, And Can We Win It?” I like this bit from Max Boot:

By publishing World War IV, Norman Podhoretz has performed yet another important public service, showing once again why he was such a worthy recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At a time when our political leaders are split over whether we are actually at war with terrorists, when opposition to the war effort in Iraq is growing, and when apathy and complacency appear to be settling in among the public, he lucidly and compellingly explains why we are fighting, how we can prevail, and why we must do so.

My major disagreement with him is pretty minor. It concerns what to call this conflict. Labeling it World War IV assumes that the cold war was World War III, but almost nobody calls it that. Maybe they should, but they don’t. As a matter of purely historical accuracy, moreover, the cold war should be called World War V, since the first world war was really the Seven Years’ War, known in North America as the French and Indian War, while the second was the Napoleonic War. If we follow this logic, we would relabel the 1914-18 conflict World War III and the 1939-45 conflict World War IV, in the same way that George Lucas relabeled his first Star Wars film “Episode IV” after producing three “prequels.”

But merely to advance this argument is to reveal its impracticality.

I think the way to deal with this is to renumber W.W. I as 10 and W.W. II as 20. This will allow for the retroactive insertion of new World Wars, before and between the old ones, if necessary.

Please feel free to discuss the various contributions by the participants.

{ 57 comments }

1

Keith 11.02.07 at 2:49 pm

We could further subcategorizing large, significant battles with decimals. The Battle of Ardenes would be WW 3.36, while D-Day would be WW 4.759. It’s just like cataloging books at the library! We could even add cutter numbers for significant generals; McArthur would M38; Napoleon, N3; etc.

2

SomeCallMeTim 11.02.07 at 3:00 pm

Agree with Keith. We need versioning. We might also might want to switch names when there’s a major change in the nature of thing. Perhaps “World War” becomes “Earth Battle. Or “Jaguar.”

3

P O'Neill 11.02.07 at 3:04 pm

Boot gets into some actual sliming with this bit

And while we sometimes have to contend with nation-state foes, in many cases our enemies are semi-autonomous guerrilla groups or political organizations.

During the latter stages of the cold war, for instance, the U.S. had to deal with organized protests like the nuclear-freeze movement as well as with terrorist groups like the Red Brigades. Both had links to Moscow and its satellites, but were more than merely Russian puppets. Today, we face a wide variety of Islamofascist groups, many of which have only the most tenuous connections with “al Qaeda Central.”

Can anyone recall when the US had to deal with the Red Brigades? He’s also dancing around an equivalence of CND-type groups with extreme left-wing terrorism and in turn with al-Qaeda without actually having the guts to say that’s what he doing.

4

JP Stormcrow 11.02.07 at 3:16 pm

Keith semi-beat me to it. I envisaged using software numbering schemes So you have WW 4.0 (invasion of Poland) D-Day might be WW 4.4.3.
And then the Spanish Civil War & Japan in China were WW 4 (Beta 1.0 & 2.0). Or we could go to the Microsoft scheme so you this newest “war” is WW 2001 (Oh, I forgot it is actually WW 1979).

Or maybe really use the Star Wars model
WW I A Whole New World
WW II Napoleon Blues
WW III Trenches, Machine Guns and Gas Attacks, Oh My!
WW IV A Tale of Two Empires
WW V No, Wait This is the Real Evil Empire
WW VI The Dispossessed Strike Back

5

soru 11.02.07 at 3:25 pm

Surely WW VI : the Return of the Jihadi?

6

anmik 11.02.07 at 3:31 pm

Y’know, even joking around about this stuff makes us all Nazis. Or jihadis. It’s so hard to tell the difference these days. Which is why I just refer to everyone who disagrees with me, even a little bit, as Nazis. I just find it easier to keep track of my enemies when they’re all labeled neatly. I used to use post-its, but they’d fall off during especially rigorous verbal combat. And then I’d get confused.

7

Rich Puchalsky 11.02.07 at 3:34 pm

This joke on the wingnuts is evergreen, dude. In the comment thread about what to call the Spanish-American War here, I wrote:

“I think that in typical wingnut “every conflict in which the USA participates is a world war” style, you should call it World War N. (N for nullae). Then all previous wars could have negative numbers, meaning the French and Indian War would be written as World War -X or something. That should mean that the Iraq War can be something funny, like World War XII.”

8

Bernard Yomtov 11.02.07 at 3:34 pm

I recall seeing an old “Show of Shows” sketch where Sid Caesar plays a WWI American soldier in a trench, complete with saucer-shaped helmet. He hears about the armistice and jumps up joyously, shouting “Hooray, World War I is over.”

9

abb1 11.02.07 at 3:37 pm

For maximum comic effect this symposium should be together with this one at the AEI.

10

abb1 11.02.07 at 3:38 pm

should be considered together, that is.

11

Plotinus 11.02.07 at 3:41 pm

Mitt Romney thinks we ought to double the number of World Wars.

12

JP Stormcrow 11.02.07 at 3:58 pm

Surely WW VI : the Return of the Jihadi?

pwned!!

shouting “Hooray, World War I is over.”
I recall an Encyclopedia Brown case that revolved around a similar trope: A Civil War sword proved fake by having inscribed on it something like “for heroism in the 1st Battle of Bull Run”** with a date before the 2nd battle.

**AKA Civil War 2347.2.1.1 “It’s Not Just a Picnic”

13

Hidari 11.02.07 at 4:07 pm

Look if we are really going to make this war sexy, even World War 4.0 won’t cut it.

We need something that’s twenty first century… that’s kinda cool yet kinda stylish, classical, yet with a soupcon of the contemporary.

Ladies and Gentlemen…I give you….the iWar!

14

Toady 11.02.07 at 4:08 pm

For me, Boot’s gravest sin is that he has apparently never bothered to watch Star Wars. If he had, he would have noticed that the very first image in the movie is the words, “Episode IV: A New Hope”. Lucas never “relabeled” it. He always intended for there to be prequels.

How can one claim to be a freedom-loving white male American without having seen Star Wars?

15

richard 11.02.07 at 4:16 pm

So you can’t have a World War if the US isn’t invited? I guess that’s why we don’t consider the Mongol conquests, the Seljuks, or Atilla the Hun. Or, for that matter, the Luso-Hispanic-American/Asian war (aka “the Age of Discovery”).
Or, now I come to think of it, Napoleon’s campaigns.

16

RSA 11.02.07 at 4:25 pm

“George Lucas relabeled his first Star Wars film “Episode IV” after producing three “prequels.”

Boot’s credibility is completely undermined by the fact that Star Wars was relabeled Episode IV in 1981, long before the prequels were produced.

17

Scott Swank 11.02.07 at 4:27 pm

Your new numbering system (10, 20, etc.) is really pretty BASIC. [Sorry, couldn’t help myself there.]

18

Keith 11.02.07 at 4:27 pm

And the Trojan War is just a beta version; WW 0.1.5.

19

hetherjw 11.02.07 at 4:33 pm

Lucas did not relabel the Star Wars movies after releasing 3 prequels. They were always episodes 4, 5 and 6 even though 1, 2 and 3 were released later.

In any case… the current “War on Terror” is not a World War much the same way “A New Hope” was never “Episode 1.”

20

bob mcmanus 11.02.07 at 4:35 pm

Hell, Joe Haldeman did it best:

The Forever War

21

brooksfoe 11.02.07 at 4:37 pm

Star Wars was relabeled Episode IV in 1981, long before the prequels were produced.

Yeah, just like they’re doing the renumbering now even though the Iran War (working title — WW episode number not yet determined) hasn’t yet been greenlighted. Same deal.

22

rea 11.02.07 at 4:37 pm

So you can’t have a World War if the US isn’t invited? . . . Napoleon’s campaigns.

But of course, the US was a participant in those wars, fighting the British more or less on Napoleon’s side 1812-1815, and earlier, fighting the revolutionary French 1798-1800.

23

DAS 11.02.07 at 4:38 pm

Re: “World War I is over”, “heroism in the first battle of Bull Run”, etc.

I have had the pleasure of knowing people who, if they were alive in WWI, would have called it WWI and who would have referred to it as “the first battle of Bull Run”. E.g. the editor at my school newspaper who insisted that an event, meant to be held once, was a “first annual [X]” because any event, if not otherwise specified, is an “annual event”.

Funny … come to think of it, all the people who would have done this sort of thing are journalism types … maybe all those stupid pseudo-journalistic tropes to which we are continually subjected are more true than we liberal moonbats give them credit for being?

24

John Holbo 11.02.07 at 4:44 pm

BASIC was just what I had in mind.

25

stostosto 11.02.07 at 5:06 pm

What a bunch of mindboggling crackpots. Did the Podhoretz clown seriously receive a medal from President Bush? That just goes to illustrate how deeply warped the current administration really is.

Ludicrity aside, I can’t help but think that it’s both counterproductive and dangerous to advance and obsessively belabour the idea that various disparate events all tie together in the same over-arching conflict of good and evil. At the moment Podhoretz and his fellow WWIV masturbators — including the Current Occupants — are the strongest glue that binds The Islamofascist World Khalifat Jihadist Movement together.

Instead, divide and rule should be the motto. Deal with each terrorist incident as a localised, isolated event. Stop handing Osama bin Laden his narrative on a silver plate. It’s so idiotic I don’t know what.

26

Thomas Allen 11.02.07 at 5:33 pm

I think World War I was when the Ugh camp of homo sapiens surprised the Gnrr camp of neanderthals with a barrage of thrown rocks.

This, of course, happened just short of 6,000 years ago.

27

Ugh 11.02.07 at 5:40 pm

And we kicked their damn asses too.

28

alkali 11.02.07 at 6:16 pm

If it weren’t for Ugh we’d all be speaking Gnrr today.

29

Matt Kuzma 11.02.07 at 6:31 pm

Um. I’m no historian, but how were the Australians involved in the French and Indian war? How about the Norwegians? How about the Chinese? How about the non-colonial residents (we might call them natives) of South America or Africa? Same goes for all the other “world wars”.

We’ve never had a true world war and any use of the term is just a mix of ethnocentrism and melodrama.

On the other hand, if we’re using some loose definition of the term that involves merely a great many people being affected, I’m pretty sure the unification of China, and the Roman Empire, and the conquests of Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun and Ghengis Kahn are contenders.

30

Backword Dave 11.02.07 at 7:08 pm

Will no one mention the Crusades?

(Suggested by 29 and Tuesday’s episode of ‘Spooks’.)

31

Ross Smith 11.02.07 at 7:35 pm

Version numbers are, like, sooo Web 1.0.

Obviously, the Cold War was World War XP, and the disaster currently in beta testing is World War Vista.

32

bi 11.02.07 at 7:43 pm

Hidari:

“Ladies and Gentlemen…I give you….the iWar!”

Which is being fought on the streets of Iraq and Eurabia even as we speak, alongside the μWar which is being fought with computer keyboards(*).

Both as part of the Asynchronous War on Librulizm (AWoL) paradigm.

= = =

(*) think Neo-Tech’s “micro-terrorists”… holy cow I like this term

33

Kieran Healy 11.02.07 at 8:05 pm

Ladies and Gentlemen…I give you….the iWar

No, the iWar would be cleanly designed and work right out of the box. You are thinking of Wardows Vista.

34

magistra 11.02.07 at 8:06 pm

I’m afraid this all brings back the old joke (British I think, but I’m not sure), that having been late for both World War I and World War II, the US was going to make sure they were on time for World War III by starting it themselves.

35

An Outhouse 11.02.07 at 8:14 pm

Symposia of the Commentariot. For some reason I keep picturing the toga party from Animal House.

36

Timothy Burke 11.02.07 at 8:21 pm

World War I: Gracile australopithecines vs. robust australopithecines.

37

JP Stormcrow 11.02.07 at 8:28 pm

World War 0: Eukaryotes pwn prokaryotes and establish the 2 Billion Year Reich.

38

John 11.02.07 at 8:34 pm

Um. I’m no historian, but how were the Australians involved in the French and Indian war? How about the Norwegians? How about the Chinese? How about the non-colonial residents (we might call them natives) of South America or Africa? Same goes for all the other “world wars”.

Australia barely existed at the time of the French and Indian War. Containing campaigns in North America, the Caribbean, central Europe, India, and the Philippines, the Seven Years War, the Seven Years War was a conflict that had considerable relevance to large parts of the world. To be a “World War” does every part of the world have to participate?

Of course, to take the silliness further, the War of the Austrian Succession contained more or less the same theaters as the Seven Years War – fighting in North and Latin America, in India, and in Europe, but actually had fighting in more different parts of Europe – in Italy and the Mediterranean, in Central Europe, in the Low Countries, and even, tangentially, in Finland between Sweden and Russia. The Eighty Years War between Spain and Holland, which featured largely in the Netherlands, but also in both the Americas and the East Indies, could easily be called a world war in the same way the Seven Years War was.

To get back to your initial point, which is apparently that even World War I and World War II can’t be called world wars, that’s silly.

World War saw actual fighting largely in Europe, but there was also fighting in East Asia and the Pacific and in Africa, as well as in the Atlantic Ocean. Participants included not only most of the major European powers (although not, admittedly, the Norwegians), but also, eventually, the US and most of the central American states, Brazil, Japan, and China.

World War II, being, as it was, essentially two separate wars, involved even fighting again in Europe and the Atlantic, but also in north and east Africa, in the Middle East, in China, in southeast Asia, in the pacific and in New Guinea. Participants eventually included virtually every country in the world (I think most of the south American countries and Turkey ended up declaring war on the axis in early 1945).

I don’t think the phrase “World War” is meant to imply that everyone in the world participated, but it’s not simply ethnocentric to use the term – these were wars that involved a rather large percentage of the world’s surface.

39

Chris Bertram 11.02.07 at 8:39 pm

I think the Iraq War may simply be an unsupported beta release of WW25 which the Bush adminstration downloaded at its own risk.

40

Drake 11.02.07 at 8:52 pm

Okay, but what do we call the First Interstellar War now?

41

bi 11.02.07 at 9:01 pm

Drake:

War++.

42

Munich Lion 11.02.07 at 9:38 pm

Funny stuff! But you’ve got it wrong, all of you.

In reality, there was, is and will ever be only ONE World War:

the everlasting war between
GOOD (that is us, of course)
and
EVIL (that is them, of course).

So, since Eve gave the apple to Adam, or since Kain murdered Abel, we humans are involved in the ONE EVERLASTING WORLD WAR,
and yesterday it was US (God’s chosen nation) against Communism, today it’s US against Al Qaida and Iran (the evil is always and only ONE, as Goebbels correctly put it), and tomorrow it will be US against China + the UN,

and of course in the end the GOOD (= US !!) will win the final battle, Armaggedon, thanks to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

43

John Mark Ockerbloom 11.03.07 at 12:47 am

Highway exits in the US used to be mostly in numeric sequence (first exit is 1, second is 2, etc.) but more recently most have been renumbered for mileage (so if the first exit is 5 miles from the start of the road, it’s 5, if the second is 13 miles from the start, it’s 13. etc.)

One of the reasons for doing this is that it makes it easy to add new exits without having to renumber the ones around it.

This scheme has obvious attractions for revisionist historians, who can thus insert wars where they like without messing up the numbering. Think the Spanish American War should be considered world-class? Presto! World War 1898!

44

Dan S. 11.03.07 at 12:59 am

#36 WW 0.5: The endosymbiontist insurgency – establishment of mitochondrial/chloroplast sleeper cells . . .

45

Bruce Baugh 11.03.07 at 1:04 am

The Wikipedia article on Star Wars confirms my recollection, that in 1977 it was just “Star Wars”. The Episode IV title was added for the 1981 release – and as Wikipedia notes, throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s the talk of additional movies included possibilities for 9 and even 12 total, with 9 being the most common figure.

46

nick s 11.03.07 at 5:51 am

Boor’s just pissy because none of the actual World Wars involved bits of the mainland US being blown to bits, a phenomenon that would really show people… something.

(before posting: typo uncorrected.)

47

Jon H 11.03.07 at 6:16 am

WW1: Old Ones vs. the Deep Ones

48

Adam 11.03.07 at 7:31 am

\war{World War Three}
\subwar{Domestic Front War}
\subsubwar{The Democrats}
\subsubsubwar{The savagery of left-wing blog snark}

49

Jon H 11.03.07 at 7:43 am

Someone remind me, which world war did Cliff enlist and fight in?

50

The Constructivist 11.03.07 at 8:23 am

Clearly Boot is right that the 7 Years’ War or French and Indian War or whatever it’s been called needs to be rebranded. I guess “World War” is as good as any, given it was an almost-global military showdown between the world’s superpowers England and France (cf. A Nation Among Nations for the serious version of this argument). But by this standard the Cold War was not a World War, or was a Cold World War. So obviously we need Paris Hilton here: you use hotness to label the wars. I know this introduces Fahrenheit/Celsius differences into naming conventions, but isn’t it that kind of diversity that makes the world go round? Plus, imagine the arguments over assigning temperature values.

Trying to open a door for the scientists to join the fun here b/c for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a Worlds of Warcraft joke.

51

Will Roberts 11.03.07 at 10:56 am

World War I forever! It has always been WW I. It will always be WW I. Freedom versus the enemies of freedom. The Islamofascists staged the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. We have always been at war with the Islamofascists!

(I’m actually a bit surprised that Max Boot, of all people, has forgotten this.)

52

Will Roberts 11.03.07 at 11:02 am

John Mark @ 42:

I’m from out West, and we’ve numbered our Interstate exits by mileage for as long as I can remember. I’d never seen the purely sequential system–which is truly irrational–until I moved to PA in 1999. So don’t tar us all with your elitist Eastern ways!

I propose calling everything east of the Alleghenies the Old United States.

53

scott 11.03.07 at 8:08 pm

quote “Can anyone recall when the US had to deal with the Red Brigades?”

see wikipedia Red Brigades

Kidnapping of Brigadier General Dozier

On December 17, 1981, four members of the Red Brigades, posing as plumbers, invaded the Verona apartment of US Army Brigadier General James Lee Dozier, then NATO Deputy Chief of Staff at Southern European land forces. The men kidnapped General Dozier and left his wife bound and chained in their apartment. [2] He was held for 42 days until January 28, 1982, when an Italian anti-terrorist team rescued him from an apartment in Padua. Dozier was the first American general to be kidnapped by terrorists and the first foreigner kidnapped by the Red Brigades.

54

JakeB 11.04.07 at 6:51 am

contra John, I say there will be no true world war until the penguins take up arms against their oppressors!

55

bi 11.05.07 at 7:01 am

Will Roberts:

“World War I forever! It has always been WW I. It will always be WW I.”

Then the “I” will be pretty redundant, and we should just call it _The_ World War.

And of course it’s not just the “Islamofascists”, it’s _The_ Fascists, which will be an amalgamation of, well, just about everything that’s not Republican.

56

Joshua W. Burton 11.05.07 at 5:48 pm

It’s high time someone quoted Michael Flanders, in his inspired free translation of Georges Brassens:

War has had its apologians, ever since history began,
From the times of the Greeks and Trojans, when they sang of arms and the man,
But if you ask me to name the best, sir, I’ll tell you the one I mean,
Head and shoulders above the rest, sir, was the War of ’14-’18,
Head and shoulders above the rest, sir, stands the War of ’14-’18.

There were the wars against all those Louis’s, there were Caesar’s wars in Gaul,
The was Britain’s war in Suez, that wasn’t a war at all,
There was the war of the Spanish Succession, many other wars in between,
But they none of them made an impression like the war of ’14-’18,
They didn’t make the same impression as the war of ’14-’18.

The War of American Independence: that was enjoyable, by and large! —
Watching England’s free descendants busy defeating German Ge’arge,
But the Boer War was a poor war, And I’m still inclined to lean,
Though sir, it possibly isn’t your war towards the war of ’14-’18,
Though it probably isn’t your war, sir, the war of ’14-’18.

There are certainly plenty of wars to choose from, you pick whichever one you please,
Like the one we’ve had all the news from liberating the Vietnamese,
Or those wars for God and Country, be it Korean or Philippine,
Sir, if you’ll pardon my effrontery, give me the war of ’14-’18,
If you’ll pardon my effrontery, sir, the war of ’14-’18,

Every war has it’s own attraction from total war to border raid,
Call it rebellion, police action, war of containment or crusade,
I don’t underrate the late war we see so often on the screen,
But that wasn’t a really great war like the war of ’14-’18,
No, the late war wasn’t the Great War like the war of ’14-’18.

No doubt Mars, among his chattels, has got some really splendid war,
Full of bigger and bloodier battles that we’ve ever enjoyed before,
But until the time occurs, sir, when that greater war comes on the scene,
The one that I on the whole prefer, sir, is the war ’14-’18,
Yes, the one that I still prefer, sir, is the war of ’14-’18.

57

DB 11.06.07 at 12:51 pm

I agree with Will Roberts — no quantification, no boundaries! World at War, now and forever!

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