POST: What If? An Alternative History of the War since 9/11

If WWIV is your gig, then Newt is your man. My problems with his approach are 2-fold: 1) adding all the first, second and third-generation efforts to a fourth-generation war will bankrupt us, first and foremost morally because of the high violence quotient associated with it, and 2) we'd go from tackling problems sequentially to accumulatively,and that would get you blowback from Muslims in general and much of the rest of the world--all of whom feel under some serious onslaught already from globalization (loss of identity) and then would have to suffer our jingoistic efforts at rapid assimilation. Newt wants his Long War to be a shorter, Big War, but the reality is that the integration processed cannot be magically sped up. Globalization's spread and impact is way beyond our control at this point in history. We will deal with many small wars that it unleashes, but we can't bundle them all up into a single notion. We're no longer in that unitary state world, but a networked one that gets built one node at a time. Petraeus effort is seminal and does show the way. There's just no shortcutting history with a rousing call to arms. In short, we should be exploring what 5GW means, not adding 1GW + 2GW + 3GW = 4GW. (Thanks: Terence Hill)