Global Terrorism; The simmering war
By Miguel Guanipa (08/21/06)
There are many kinds of wars. There are long wars and there are short wars. There are guerrilla wars, nuclear wars, civil wars, chemical wars; the list is long.
But there are three types of war that succinctly encapsulate the nature of a conflict between nations.
First there are cold wars. Wars that do not require the virtual encounter of military force between the countries involved, in lieu of an ideological divide which pits leaders against each other while citizens suffer the consequences of political, economic and social disengagement that often proves damaging to the basic subsistence of whole nations. The cold war between the United States and Russia, which ended in the tearing down of the iron curtain and the collapse of what used to be known as the Soviet Union, was such a war.
There are hot wars.
These are wars of maximum military engagement resulting often in great loss of life. Common to these wars is also the indefinite but minimal occupation of what were once considered to be enemy countries while the occupying country undertakes the rebuilding of their government along with its socio-economic infrastructures. The first and second world wars were such wars. These wars are often relatively short in duration but massive in their political and social consequences, not to mention the tragic human loss component.
One thing that cold and hot wars have in common is that they are both waged positionally; that is, both wars contain the element of certainty as to what, where and who the opposing force is.
Then there are the simmering wars.
These are wars that do not enjoy the full benefit of being waged positionally yet suffer from the same malignancies attributed earlier to both cold and hot wars; hence they are not winnable in the traditional sense.
The War in Iraq is such a war.
A simmering war is one that has an ideological front and a military front, both compounded by what could be called an international front. It cannot be waged positionally because the opposition spans the breath of the entire planet. Furthermore, each front represents subdivisions that are alternatively engaged, such as foreign combatants or potentates philosophically and militarily invested in one side or the other.
Take for instance the territorial boundaries breached in the coalescence between the goals of insurgents in Iraq, the international media’s unapologetically partial portrayal of one side of the ideological battlefield, and the fluctuating opinions on the conflict from countries like France, Venezuela and Lebanon.
Iraqi insurgents can no longer be assumed to be the only military front in this war. Not unless we blissfully ignore the fact that terrorism is an evil, which had been spreading around the world even before President George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein a 48-hour ultimatum.
Thus the military front has been necessarily redefined as that in which the enemies roam the streets of Baghdad, as well as the British and American airports, the Israeli border, and even the schoolyards in Chechnya .
The ideological front is not only present in the hearts and minds of Iraqi citizens, but in the news rooms of virtually every Arab news agency, the political institutions of most European countries, and a significant portion of the left-leaning punditry in this country.
The international front is supplemented by the aforementioned military and ideological fronts, in that it is not (and really never was) only the problem of one country to fight against the forces of terrorism. It will only become clearer as time goes by that this is a war that will take the significant involvement of a solid international coalition and the sacrificial devotion of many generations.
This reality is ignored at great peril, because unlike a hot or a cold war, a simmering war has the power to lull many into the illusion that they are really not at war after all.
And like a frog that sits in a pan of simmering water is not compelled to jump away from imminent death as the water slowly rises to a boiling point, entire nations are slowly lulled into slumber by the geographical chasm and monotonous pace of trickling casualties, only to be awakened by the sudden shock of monumental tragedies which carry the death of thousands in their wake.
We have already seen this; and it is only the beginning.
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