The New Multipolar War

Timothy Garton Ash talks, in his column in The Guardian of July 20, 2006, of what he calls "the new multipolar disorder," as distinguished from the unipolar American supremacy (which did not last long) and Jacques Chirac’s multipolarity.

Garton Ash is close, but instead of multipolar disorder, what I think we are involved in is a "multipolar war". It is a most unusual war. Instead of a simple us-versus-them war, like World War II or even Vietnam, our multipolar war is very different. It is as if there is one big war, but there are no frontlines, just battles here and there. And some of them are very different kinds of battles. Some are airplanes hitting skyscrapers in New York City. Others are suicide bombers blowing up weddings in Jordan or subway trains in Madrid.

Some of the battles are between countries. Others are between terrorist groups and a country or between two terrorist groups/militias within a country.

The weapons in this war are more than machine guns and precision-guided bombs. They also include IEDs along the road in Iraq, rocket tests in North Korea which fail but still intimidate, Katyusha rockets shot without being aimed in the hopes of killing whatever civilians they can hit, and whatever it is that is used to behead a hostage.

The participants change from battle to battle. Sometimes the two sides are armies of different countries. Sometimes it is an army and a terrorist group. Other times it is a 19-year suicide bomber "fighting" a mother and a baby on a bus.

The battlefields are all over the world, too, from Afghanistan to southern Lebanon to the World Trade Center to the London subways to perhaps the most important battlefield of all: the newspapers and TV and Internet, where the weak but savage can beat the strong but irresolute.

At times the battles seem separate and the participants seem unrelated. In one case it is the United States versus the Taliban. In another it is Israel versus Hezbollah and Hamas. You have Iraqi voters versus Shiite and Sunni militias, and you have the six-party negotiations with North Korea. In the past it was embassies being blown up in Africa and the crew and passengers of United Flight 93 against four al-Qaeda terrorists.

The weapons change and the people change and the battlefields change, and sometimes even the sides change, but it is all the same war. Right now we are in the midst of some of the thickest "fog of war" we have seen. We cannot always be sure of who we are fighting – or how or where or when we should fight them. We cannot be sure which are the most important current battles, let alone where the next ones will be – or how to prepare for them.

But we are in a war. Pretending we are not will not make it otherwise. The fighting will be hard and the battles confusing. At times it may seem easier to just quit, to hunker down and ignore what is going on in the rest of the world. But we cannot do that. We have to continue to fight because the alternative is to concede victory to the subway bombers, the airplane hijackers, the North Korean rocketeers, and those who would deny freedom to people who believe differently than them.