Is the "war on terror" really World War IV?

That's what the American strategist Eliot Cohen argues[1] and the term is apt.[2] It captures two points: that the cold war was in fact World War III and that the war on terror is as global, as varied, and as important as prior world wars.

Militant Islam distinguishes itself from any other contemporary political movement in the magnitude of its ambitions, seeking not just to influence the adherents of one religion or control one region. Rather, it aspires to unlimited and universal power. Only Islamists have the temerity to challenge the liberal world order in a cosmic battle over the future course of the human experience. This translates into a worldwide battlefield.

Of course, a war in which so much is at stake cannot be about mere terrorism, and Cohen notes that "The enemy in this war is not 'terrorism' ... but militant Islam." As in world wars II and III, the ultimate enemy is a cohort of powerful ideas that can cause some of the most competent members of society to dedicate themselves to a vision and go so far as willingly sacrifice their lives to speed its attainment. The U.S. government, though usually reluctant to make this point, does allude to it on occasion, as when President George W. Bush states that the enemy is "a fringe form of Islamic extremism"[3] and a "new totalitarian threat."[4]

Terrorism, in other words, is just one dimension of a war that has many fronts and takes many forms. Violence is an important symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Other methods might include acts of violence by loners, smuggling, rioting, lawful street demonstrations, raising money, teaching, proselytizing, intimidating, and even running for elected office. These methods complement each other, constituting the sophistication and reach of militant Islam. The battleground includes Muslim-majority countries as well as countries like Argentina where Islam is a minor presence.

As James R. Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said back in 2002:

Let me say a few words about who our enemy is in this World War IV, why they're at war with us and (now) we with them, and how we have to think about fighting it both at home and abroad.

First of all, who are they? Well, there are at least three, but I would say principally three movements, of a sort, all coming out of the Middle East. And the interesting thing is that they've been at war with us for years. The Islamist Shia, the ruling circles, the ruling Clerics, the Mullahs of Iran, minority -- definite minority of the Iranian Shiite Clerics, but those who constitute the ruling force in Iran and sponsor and back Hezbollah, have been at war with us for nearly a quarter of a century. They seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran. They blew up our embassy and our marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. They've conducted a wide range of terrorist acts against the United States for something now close to a quarter of a century.

The second group is the fascists and I don't use that as an expletive -- the Baathist parties of Iraq and really Syria as well, are essentially fascist parties or modeled after the fascist parties of the '30s. They're totalitarian, they're anti-Semitic, they're fascist.

The Baathists in Iraq have been at war with us for over a decade. For Saddam, the Gulf War never stopped. He says it never stopped. He behaves as if it never stopped. He tried to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait. He has various ties, not amounting to direction and control, but various associations with different terrorist groups over the years, including al-Qaeda. He shoots at our aircraft, again yesterday, over the no-fly zones. He's still at war. He signed a cease fire, which he's not observing, and so it's even clearer that he is at war. And he has been so for at least 11 years. The third group, and the one that caused us finally to notice, is the Islamist Sunni. And this is the most, in some ways, I think virulent and long-term portion of these three groupings that are at war with us, and will be at war, I think, for a long time. The Wahhabi movement, the religious movement in Saudi Arabia dating back to the 18th century and with roots even well before that, was joined in the '50s and '60s by immigration into Saudi Arabia by Islamists, or a more modern strife of essentially the same ideology, many of them coming from Egypt. And the very fundamentalist -- Islamist I think is the best formulation -- groups of this sort, more or less focused on what they call the near enemy. Say the barbaric regime in Egypt, and to some extent, the Saudi royal family -- the attacks in 1979 on the great mosques in Mecca. They were focusing on what they called the "near enemy" until sometime in the mid 1990's. Around 1994, they decided to turn and focus their concentration and effort on what they call the Crusaders and Jews, mainly us. And they have been at war with us since at least about 1994, give or take a year or so, in number of well-noted terrorists incidents, including the Cole and the cast African embassy bombings and, of course, September 11th.

What is different after September 11th is not that these three groups came to be at war with us. They've been at war with us for some time. It's that we finally, finally may have noticed and have decided at least, in part, that we are at war with them. If these are the three groupings -- and by the way, I think of these more or less as analogous to three mafia families. They do hate each other and they do kill each other from time to time. But, they hate us a great deal more and they're perfectly willing and perfectly capable to assist one another in one way or another, including Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Related: Clearly the actions of the west are not the cause of the war as claimed by the Left. It is not who we are or what we do. Its all about who they are and what they believe.