Bird's-eye view of WW IV

2003-09-10 08:34

Brian Murphy

Athens - The main battle lines zigzag around the world, from the Middle East to Africa and Asia as far as the Philippine jungles and teeming Jakarta streets. The fallout: - patriotism, paranoia, propaganda and plotting - spreads much farther afield.

Does that sound like a world war?

From the outset, with the September 11 attacks and instant comparisons to Pearl Harbour, the theme of "world war" has been prominent, and a growing number of scholars and military experts believe this is precisely the description that fits the US-led fights and forays against Islamic extremists that have followed.

The US-British alliance, with help from lesser allies on the key fronts, reinforces the surface parallels to 1939-45, especially now that the Pentagon's forces are stretched so thin around the world that combat-novice National Guard brigades are being called up for Iraq.

At home, Americans follow colour-coded security alerts and display yellow ribbons for faraway troops. President George W Bush tells a veterans' convention: "No nation can be neutral in the struggle between civilisation and chaos."

World War IV

Former CIA Director James Woolsey even has bestowed a name: World War IV - III being the Cold War.

"This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I and II," he told students in April at the University of California, Los Angeles.

World War III, or IV, or the War on Terror - or whatever name finally makes it into the dictionary - has already catapulted military and political planners into a new age. Campaigns can no longer be measured by territory seized or ended by armistice.

Here's a bird's-eye view:

In Iraq there are nearly 140 000 US soldiers, 11 000 British and 9 500 others under Polish command from 21 countries.

In Afghanistan, NATO leads 5 000 peacekeepers from 30 nations in the alliance's first operation outside Europe, while US and Afghan forces hunt al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

About 2 000 US troops are stationed in Qatar, the Persian Gulf emirate that hosted the command centre for the Iraq war. The US Navy's 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain.

Nearly 8 000km eastward, the Philippine military is getting US training in counter-terrorism and aid in fighting Muslim extremists whom officials say are loosely linked to al-Qaeda.

About 1 800km southwest of the Persian Gulf, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, more than 1 800 US troops are attached to an anti-terrorism task force. Just across the Red Sea lie Saudi Arabia, oil giant and lately a target of al-Qaeda type bombings, and Yemen, the staging ground for the USS Cole bombers in October 2000. Last year, a missile from a US Predator drone killed a suspected top al-Qaeda lieutenant in Yemen.

To the south, the US 5th Fleet has expanded patrols off East Africa, and 11 nations have joined a US-led terrorism response force. In that region, Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania have all been drawn into the battle in one form or another.

And in the Caucasus, the mainly Muslim mountain region between Russia and Asia, the Pentagon provides military aid to Azerbaijan and troops to train Georgia's military in anti-terrorist operations.

Even where the United States isn't physically engaged, battles smoulder between Islamic hard-liners and secular governments: in Kashmir, the Indian territory claimed by Pakistan; in Indonesia, where bombings have killed hundreds; in the Middle East, where Islamic militants threaten to bring down US-directed efforts to end the Palestinian-Israeli war.

Serious firepower

Much of the new warfare is "asymmetrical" - state armies versus small hit-and-run bands of guerrillas and bombers. It still requires serious firepower, which the US military uncorked in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet it also demands a huge effort to win hearts and minds among Muslim populations that regard America as a godless monster and still have trouble believing that September 11 was not an American-Jewish plot to discredit them.

"We used to think of war only as an overt military conflict between states," said Jonathan Stevenson, a terrorism analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "What we have here is comprehensive, global mobilisation of counter-terrorism assets. It's all very new."

Some critics accuse the White House of encouraging the "world war" tag to justify even more military muscle and pressure on others to help.

"Equating the war on terrorism to a kind of world war is simply one way of rationalising the need to carry out the conflict," said Hiroshi Momose, a professor of international relations at Hiroshima City University in Japan.

But Semih Idiz, a political commentator for the Aksam newspaper in Turkey, thinks the comparison is apt. "The United States is conducting a war on fundamentalism on a worldwide basis from countries like Indonesia to Kenya," he says. "So, yes, we can speak of a world war."

Like most major conflicts, skirmishes preceded the main fight.

Turned the tables

Saudi-born Osama bin Laden and other avowed enemies of the United States once backed Washington for aiding Islamic guerrillas fighting Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The 1991 Gulf War turned the tables. Many Muslim extremists - boosted by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan - were outraged at the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam's holiest sites. America became a huge target for militants seeking revenge for many perceived injustices against the Islamic world.

The path to September 11 is littered with increasingly bold strikes: the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the 1996 car bomb that killed 19 US military personnel at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the twin blasts at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that claimed 231 lives and the Cole attack in 2000 that killed 17 sailors.

"The feelings of humiliation and loss of any hope feed violence," said Ali El Samman, a scholar at Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, the most respected theological institution for Sunni Muslims. "We cannot shut our eyes to this."

The realignment of global forces is striking.

During the Cold War, the lines in Asia were clear: Washington supported Pakistan while the Soviet Union backed Pakistan's arch-enemy, India. Now both are US allies. India, which lately has suffered terrorist bombings reminiscent of those in Israel, has gone from being a bitter foe of the Jewish state to welcoming Ariel Sharon on the first visit there by an Israeli prime minister.

Washington is also trying to cajole and cultivate a sweeping collection of strategic allies across the map.

Some are old friends - including Egypt and Saudi Arabia - with rising importance as front-line al-Qaeda hunters. Egyptian authorities in August reportedly arrested 23 suspected al-Qaeda sympathisers accused of plotting to join anti-US operations around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The American government has to work with others," said Maria Nzomo, director of the Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. "It has to respond to the perceptions and visions of others on how terrorism should be combatted."

Massive investment

One of the hallmarks of the Allied victory in World War II was a massive US investment to rebuild shattered Europe and Japan.

Now Nato and other Western alliances must make an effort to transform the Muslim world into societies that "no longer produce ideologies and people who want to destroy the West and increasingly have the ability to do so," Ronald Asmus, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.

Call for jihad

But that's a tall order in today's super-polarised climate, where globalised media transmit the call for jihad at the speed of light.

Experts see a growing cohesion among Islamic militants from cultures as diverse as North Africa and Southeast Asia. Common points of reference are found in hot spots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

"You are beginning to see a common idiom developing among those who see the West as a threat," said David Little, a professor of religion and international affairs at Harvard Divinity School.

The battle against al-Qaeda and its backers is winnable, but not without a "serious approach" to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, "clearly the hottest spot," said Clive Williams, head of terrorism studies at the Australian National University.

Turkey's Idiz also sees a purely military approach as doomed: "The United States is not going to win it this way. It's going after the mosquitoes and not draining the swamp."

Brian Murphy, AP bureau chief in Athens, covered the Iraq war and has worked extensively in Central Asia.

- AP