Leaving Fool's Paradise

No sane person looks forward to a third world war, but solely for the sake of argument, let us assume World War III is inevitable. Would you not rather embark upon the cataclysm with eyes wide open than blissfully unaware? Some might contend we are already involved in World War III with the clash of civilizations extant between the West and Islam. This is indeed a plausible contention and this type of fight might involve brush fire conflicts as we are already engaged in- Iraq which may be winding down, Afghanistan where combat is worse than ever, Yemen, where America's covert involvement has been chronicled by Wikileaks, and a greater involvement in the failed-state Somalia where the United States already had a bloody and unsuccessful adventure in what started as a humanitarian effort. This clash of civilizations will likely continue to involve sporadic terror attacks against the West that will be costly in terms of casualties and the security precautions that they will necessitate. This type of war would be tragic and enduring but life would go on unchanged for most unless the terrorists acquired and used some weapon of mass destruction in a densely populated urban center, causing the West to initiate a disproportionate response that could conceivably even involve an attack on Islam's holiest sites in Saudi Arabia which (once again confirmed in the recent Wikileak release) has sponsored and paid for so much of the terror directed against the West. The second possible scenario for global conflagration is equally plausible with Iran attempting or succeeding in an atomic attack on Israel or engaging in nuclear blackmail against the Persian Gulf states. Israel would react in the first instance with her own nuclear arsenal and obliterate Iran while in the case of atomic extortion against the Sunni states, the West would feel duty bound to protect the source of most of their petroleum. With either possibility involving Iran, the blood shed would be catastrophic but in the Sunni-Shia rift, strange bedfellows would emerge, with Western forces fighting with rather than against the Taliban and perhaps even elements of al-Qaeda who of course are Sunni Wahhabists and have destroying the Shia, who they consider to be apostate, as one of their highest objectives. The next possible global war scenario was mentioned yesterday on this forum and encompasses the Koreas. This action could drag in Red China which could also initiate a world conflict by trying to swallow Formosa. As Red China climbs to superpower status, the world must remember that the elite in power today are the perpetrators of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and still despise our openness and freedom. The two factors that militate against war with China are China's own reliance on the West as the market for the goods that they produce (that the consuming West and Japan have become Red China's economic bulwark) and the struggle they share against Islamic extremism as we have seen in China's fight against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. The unified front of the West and the Chinese Communists against world jihad might ironically make a third world war less likely. In any event, it will be better to know what to expect, to wage the conflict with full knowledge of the horrors bound to come rather than to fall blindly into World War III.