Old News

Six in 10 Americans "expect another world war in their lifetime," according to AP-Kyodo polling.

I say, been there, done that. We already fought World War III, from 1945 to 1989. A century from now, when the details have melted down and the essential things stand up uneroded from the landscape, the U.S.-Soviet conflict of 1945-1989 will seem to be a single world war in which Korea, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, and Afghanistan (1980s) were campaigns or episodes.

And we're now in the early stages of World War IV.

History doles out names and numbers to the wars, not journalism. The term "world war" was in use several years before 1914, probably originally in German, as Weltkrieg. But there was no "World War I," of course, until World War II began, in 1939 ("Great War" was the most common name for it until then).

I have no hesitation in conflating related conflicts into large wars. America gave up the fight in Vietnam. But that was one camapign in a war which America ultimately won. This is not political justification. Nor is it revisionism. It's merely a historical perspective. The long view of history sees related conflicts as long-term wars. The Peloponnesian War, the Hundred Year's War, had long intervals of truce and peace, but we rightly consider them single conflicts.

But this article also reminds me why I have so little patience with polling. When you ask people if they expect to see another world war, what exactly does that mean in their minds? Do they imagine another big multi-national war involving nuclear weapons? Another war of massive armies and navies slugging it out over broad stretches of territory? Or some sort of new and fluid warfare that yet involves many nations and peoples?

That would be three different answers, but at least one quote in the story suggests some people are seeing it the way I am.

Some question whether that war has arrived, with fighting dragging on in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism."I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y.

It's almost too common to remark upon, but the writer makes the usual defeatist choice of verbs -- "dragging on."

Then the article devolves into a critique of America's use of the atomic bomb to end World War II. It's opposed by some as inhumane. Nothing new in that. And as usual, there's no follow-up question asking such folks, "what would you have done instead?"

But one of the people quoted in the story offers up his version, unsolicited.

But military instructor Hugh "D.J." Carlen, who lives near Fort Knox, Ky., said: "I don't think we really needed to do it. We darn near had the country starved to death. We could have effected a blockade.

Brilliant! Yeah, that's it. Let hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians starve to death, slowly. Too weakened to rise up against the military class that has them by the throat, and which has the power to keep the nation's dwindling resources in the service of the ruling powers, like Saddam did under his blockade.

And at the same time let perhaps millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Indonesians die of starvation, too -- either those in the Home Islands as slave workers or those in the territories still under Japanese control -- while you starve out the Japanese.

Is that really more humane than tens of thousands of Japanese killed by two bombs and ending the war in a couple of weeks?

On other quote from the article that I can't let pass by without comment:

For 63-year-old Masashi Muroi of Tokyo, the attacks with atomic bombs "were mass, indiscriminate killings and perhaps violated international law."

Her admirable strictness about "perhaps" violations of international law is rather one-sided, considering that the Japanese were terror-bombing undefended cities and machine-gunning tens of thousands civilians in China even before the Nazis and Soviets unleashed such horrors on Europe. Even Nazi embassy officials in Nanking were shocked by what the Japanese did there in 1938.