A bunch of people out there, mostly from the right wing, have started referring to the collection of Middle East conflicts as “World War III.” That’s nonsense. Not because this couldn’t be the start of another world war—who can tell?—but because we’ve already had World War III.
We called it the Cold War. Sure, it didn’t result in a world-wide eruption of total warfare (thank God) but almost every country was involved in some way or another. The United States was involved in two major conflicts during this war, suffering 54,000 war-dead in the Korean War and and 58,000 in the Vietnam War. Our allies suffered additional casualties in the thousands, including thousands dead or injured by left-over land mines. Our enemies got the worst of it though, with a combined death toll of 2 to 4 million.
(But do we count the Khmer Rouge? They took over Cambodia as we pulled out of the area and promptly decimated it. I mean that in the ancient literal Roman sense: They executed about 10% of the Cambodian population of 7 million and then they killed another million through policies that lead to starvation and disease.)
The U.S. wasn’t much involved in fighting the communist insurgency that became the Greek Cival War, but about 50,000 people died in that war. The list of people killed in side conflicts goes on and on, 75,000 in the El Salvador civil war, a half million in the Angolan civil war…
We may not have called it World War III as we lived through it, but with everybody in the world picking sides and millions dead, that’s what it was.
I don’t know if we’re at the start of another World War now, but if we are, it’s World War IV.
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