World War

The confrontation between America and Iran in the summer of 2006 was reminiscent of the summer of 1914. Then, the assassination of the Austrian archduke by a Serbian nationalist terrorist provided the senescent Austro-Hungarian Empire the excuse it had been looking for to wipe out the Serbian nationalists, which provoked the pan-Slavic nationalists at work for the Russian czar to threaten the Austro-Hungarians with destruction, which led Germany’s Kaiser to pledge retaliatory war against Russia, which prompted the French, who had an anti-German alliance with Russia, to begin mobilization. “Nobody, wanted a global conflagration, yet nobody knew how to stop it, and American President Woodrow Wilson, did nothing to help avert the coming war. Within a month, the war came and took the remainder of the 20th century for the world to fully recover,” wrote Harold Meyerson, the editor-at-large of American Prospect and the LA Weekly.

The killing of eight Israeli soldiers, and kidnapping of three by Hezbollah, that escalated in less than a week to a bloody 34 day war with ghoulish regional and global implications, felt eerily similar to what happened in 1914 and what happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The chief effect of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is the further destabilization of an already nuclear armed region with a nuclear umbrella. To make matters worse, within Iraq, the Shi’ite-Sunni conflict that many scholars, diplomats and intelligence experts warned of before the U.S. invasion has depopuled Baghdad, Iraq ─ and ignited the Middle East. The battle for the restoration of the Caliphate and elimination of Israel, has pulverized Lebanon, destroyed its democracy, and antagonized the populace of the least anti-American Arab country in the Arab world.

Real security, starting with border security in Lebanon, requires the kind of Global Security Force that can spare the world from another global conflagration, because this time it will be nuclear ─ with ugly Armaggedoneon consequences. Remember the bitter Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88? More than a million people were killed or wounded. With a nuclear repeat, you do the math.