World War III?

American Thinker 

By Fay Voshell

Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and regular commentator at Fox news, has said the closing of U.S. embassies in 21 countries is a sign of weakness on the part of the U.S. and suggests capitulation to al-Qaeda.

He may be partly right, but chances are that the closing of the embassies auger something far more ominous.  The shutdowns may be a sign of an increased conflagration in the Middle East and Northern Africa.  We may be looking at the onset of World War III.

For some time, the power-struggles of the listed nations have been largely characterized as civil wars among various Muslim factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood.  But civil wars are confined within national boundaries.  Once the boundary lines have bled into one another, as is presently the case with Syria, the wars become a generalized struggle, with various factions joining with the likeminded of surrounding nations.  As World Wars I and II demonstrated, when war escapes national boundaries or aggressive entities invade other national boundaries, nations with a vested interest in maintaining or extending their power bases begin to team up with one another according to ideological empathies.  The fighting then spreads as more and more nations get sucked into a black hole of conflict.

As the West has gradually abandoned its former role in the area, the national lines the Allied Powers drew in the Versailles Treaty, which basically carved up the ancient Ottoman Empire, have been under incessant pressure.  The pressure increased exponentially since 1979, when extremist Islamists attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran, capturing 60 American hostages, whom these Islamists held for 444 days.

The Islamist movement spread from nation to nation, placing the area in constant chaos.  Those nations had been carved into supposedly manageable European-sized entities with the probable hope that each nation would gradually take on democratic form, with the League of Nations as a calm and judicious mentor.  But the creators of the Versailles Treaty were oblivious to the intransigently authoritarian nature of Islamism, as the Middle Eastern and North African countries were at the time relatively subdued.

Now, however, the national boundaries established in 1919 are becoming increasingly meaningless, as the Islamist movement is more about empire-building than nation-building.  The West, with its long tradition of democracy, has never fully grasped the Islamist preference for authoritarianism and empire, and so it has believed that the national lines it drew would encourage the growth of democracy.  What the Islamist impulse for empire means, however, is that war among the Middle East and North African nations is inevitable, as national boundaries mean nothing to those determined to re-establish the equivalent of a caliphate.

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