WORLD WAR THREE

WORLD WAR III Yesterday, only slightly tongue in cheek Wolf Blitzer asked Jack Cafferty if he thought World War III had started. Today it looks like Wolf had a crystal ball. It's hard to know whether the Israelis and the Bush administration put their heads together to heat things up in Gaza and Lebanon, to provide an excuse for the United States to engage in regime change in Damascus and Teheran, spiritual homes of Hezbollah, or whether Hamas, sensing support from Iran's outspoken president, decided it has nothing to lose by putting its chips on all-out war with Israel. One thing is certain: there is a distinct feeling of come what may across the Middle East and Central Asia, all the way to India. As though we had definitively lost the opportunity for dialogue over the various ways in which peoples and civilizations experience the less noble aspects of modernity. Update on Thursday, July 13, 2006 at 04:23PM by Registered CommenterDeena Stryker Thursday: Kofi Anna says show restraint and respect civilians. He might as well order tea and crumpets! Until the U.N. calls a conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nothing can stop it from escalating. Once a system begins to accelerate further and further from equilibrium, it has to continue accelerating until it reaches a bifurcation point, when it can either crash or dissipate to a higher form of order. Systems can only be steered, and processes, as Bill Clinton once said, tend to have their own momentum. Admonitions are fruitless. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better and once again, one can only suspect there exists a tacit agreement to let things get so bad that all-out war ensues. The administration has plans for regime change in Syria and Iran. The media would have us lose sight of that fact by detailing daily events as though there were nothing behind them.