The Third War

Pope Francis was right to say in September during the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the World War I that the Third War is happening right now, albeit in separate parts. At the foot of the Fogliano Redipuglia graveyard, where over 100,000 Italian soldiers dead on the Austrian front now rest — their defeat and retreat brilliantly told by Hemingway in “A Farewell to Arms” — the Pope restated the causes of human injustice behind armed conflicts and the efforts made to sustain them: “interests, geopolitical strategies, greed for money and power.” I appreciate that his call had such severity and clarity in the wake of the horror arising from the conflicts that affect Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan, conflicts that serve to reinforce the growing perception of geopolitical instability, especially taking into account the expansion of the Islamic State.

Nevertheless, the Pope’s words are more than a call for sanity and the foundations that sustain the peace. They are also a description of the historical process of the idea that after World War II, a third conflict would start. Since the Cold War — the battlefield in which the U.S. and the ex-USSR played poker with the world map until the Soviets ran out of chips — we slowly drifted into a more complex world, where yesterday’s friends are the enemies of today, twisting the idea of a “just cause” and turning it into a boomerang which, literally, hits the face of the thrower.

This is the part al-Qaida’s rise played after the Afghan-Soviet war, one of the last skirmishes of the Cold War. Hoisted up by the U.S., the Islamic extremism was victorious and was “legitimate” enough to found an extreme caliphate. The Taliban, as well as the jihadi that fought alongside them, were not content with their rudimentary Islamic state. Despite creating a terrifying “heaven on earth,” they turned their formed ally into the new enemy. The story that started on 9/11 has made its way across the world in a chain reaction of making justice with one’s own hands, which some have argued is an end in and of itself.

The next chapter of this war in issues, like those English novels of the 19th century, was characterized by endless iterations of action-reaction, the Manichaeism of good vs. bad, when in truth it was a complex intertwining of shades of gray and the shortsightedness of quick victories that turn to bite the victor back when reality is made evident. Iraq is an egregious example. The defeat of Saddam Hussein was followed by an attempt to build a Western democracy and an effort by the U.S. to ensure a stable energy supply. While this was going on in America, the pipe dream of an Iraqi democracy was dying due to the conflicts arising from age-old disputes between Shiites and Sunnites, the structural weakness that made it impossible to establish a democratic state, and the virulent expansion of the extremism of the Islamic State group.

The recent decision to return to Iraqi soil to strop the Islamic State group is still a paradox. When asked whether the bombing to the Islamic State group would reinforce the Syrian regime against its own struggles with the Islamic State group, Barack Obama confessed, “I recognize the contradiction.” That is maybe the way of the Third War: The summation of all contradictions, which keep accumulating thanks to the periodical rewriting of the chapters. The “truths” and the “just causes” stop being so because of a dynamic of shades, which in turn becomes a spider web that ultimately entangles everyone.

That idea is even older. One of the consequences of World War I in Europe was a growing distrust of the state and democratic values. That’s how fascism won seats and became the most powerful force in Italy from the 1920s on. Mussolini built the Fogliano Redipuglia mausoleum and laid the 100,000 dead soldiers to rest — not with the same papal intent of denouncing war, but rather as a way to advocate for his own expansionist and totalitarian goals. The same symbol that guards the dead created by the war can be read in two such different and irreconcilable ways, but even so they are connected by the complexities of a history full of forked roads.

The story that started on 9/11 has made its way across the world in a chain reaction of making justice with one’s own hands, which some have argued is an end in and of itself.