The World At War As a child of WWII I grew up with the idea, that America with its allies had saved the world for democracy and that we had a real chance for world peace. It was a great disappointment that the cold war with the communist world reversed all that. It was only a few years after the end of WWII that Winston Churchill made his famous "Iron curtain" speech to the U.S. Congress. We then lived through more than four decades of conflict which included Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and numerous smaller interventions all in the context of the cold war.
When finally the cold war ended, symbolized by the removal of the Berlin wall in 1989, I again thought we had a chance for world peace and world democracy. As with the end of WWII, it was only a few years before we learned that the world was not going to remain at peace. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. many Americans did not understand why it was our business to intervene. It was an aggression of one country against another for territory. The United Nations charter specifically requires the security council to oppose this blatant kind of aggression. Further, the oil supplies of the west were threatened. Many thought the idea of fighting for oil reprehensible. Oil does not merely represent wealth and the ability of Americans to drive SUVs. It is one of the fundamentals of the economies of the industrialized world. With a severely diminished oil supply, the collapse of those economies would surely follow. With economic collapse would come governmental collapse and violence that cannot be imagined.
Because of the loss of international discipline enforced in Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union the Balkans went insane, with local dictators and warlords attempting to expand there power though ethnic cleansing and genocide. There was a genocide in Rwanda, Africa and now another one in Darfur, the Sudan.
India and Pakistan two bitter enemies have nuclear weapons and frequently threaten each other. No one thinks a nuclear exchange between these two would leave others in peace. Pakistan has aggressively sold nuclear technology on international markets. North Korea and Iran are or about to be nuclear powers and they do not wish us well. We cannot expect them to be peaceful partners in the nuclear club. North
Korea, in particular is an unstable criminal enterprise.
I have deliberately not yet mentioned the world of Islam. We cannot prove that it is inevitable that we are at war with all of Islam. We certainly hope not. We certainly know that we have many sworn fanatical enemies among and within the Arab nations.
I have gone through this litany not to frighten or upset people. I want to dispel wishful thinking. We all wish it was a better world. We all wish human beings as individuals, groups and nations were capable of settling differences with reason. We wish we were all capable of far more tolerance. We are not.
I can't think of a single time in history when sworn enemies decided that a gentler way was the key to their salvation. In history we have war or we have containment through the threat of overwhelming force.
We must not conduct ourselves on the basis of the world we wish we had, but on the world that exists. It is our only glimmer of hope for a slightly better world in the future. Conduct based on wishful thinking is a recipe for disaster and a new dark age.
Melvyn Polatchek
10:47:28 AM 
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