IV. Weltkrieg oder nicht?

Herbert Meyer war einer der wenigen, die das Ende der Sovietunion richtig vorhergesehen haben. In seinem Artikel
The War About the War schreibt er, dass die Ereignisse weisen werden, womit wir es zu tun haben:

Perception One: We’re at War

For the third time in history Islam - or, more precisely, its most radical element - has launched a war whose objective is the destruction of Western civilization. Our survival is at stake, and despite its imperfections we believe that Western civilization is worth defending to the death. Moreover, in the modern world - where a small number of people can so easily kill a large number of people - we cannot just play defense; sooner or later that strategy would bring another 9-11. This conflict really is a clash of civilizations whose root cause is Islam’s incompatibility with the modern world. So we must fight with everything we’ve got against the terrorist groups and against those governments on whose support they rely. If the Cold War was “World War III,” this is World War IV. We must win it, at whatever cost.

oder

Perception Two: We’re Reaping What We’ve Sowed

There are quite a few people in the world who just don’t like the United States and some of our allies because of how we live and, more precisely, because of the policies we pursue in the Mideast and elsewhere in the world. Alas, a small percentage of these people express their opposition through acts of violence. While we sometimes share their opinion of our values and our policies, we cannot condone their methods. Our objective must be to bring the level of political violence down to an acceptable level. The only way to accomplish this will be to simultaneously adjust our values and our policies while protecting ourselves from these intermittent acts of violence; in doing so we must be careful never to allow the need for security to override our civil liberties.

Er geht davon aus, dass die Erkenntnis nicht zu spaet kommen wird.

The pessimists among us will argue that by this time we’ll be too far gone to save; that years of merely playing defense and of making concessions to the sensitivities of our enemy will have eroded our military power, and sapped our will, to the point where de facto surrender will be the only option.

We optimists see things differently: For better or worse, it’s part of the American character to wait until the last possible moment - even to wait a bit beyond the last possible moment - before kicking into high gear and getting the job done. It’s in our genes; just think of how many times you’ve ground enamel off your teeth watching your own kid waste an entire weekend, only to start writing a book report at 10:30 Sunday night that, when you find it on the breakfast table Monday morning is by some miracle a minor masterpiece.

However horrific it may be, the knockout punch won’t knock us out. (…)

Ich gebe ihm Recht, was die USA und “den Westen” angeht. Gleichzeitig kann ich mir aber leicht ausmalen, dass der “knockout punch” gegen Israel gerichtet sein wird und uns tatsaechlich erledigt.