Why is it that the United States, which has not suffered a major terrorist attack at home for more than four years, thinks it's at war, while the United Kingdom, which was hit by a major terrorist attack just a year ago, does not?

The evocation of war is omnipresent in the US. Turn on Fox News and you find a war veteran recounting his experiences on Hill 805 in Vietnam. At one point he says: "I had the privilege of storming the machine gun". The privilege. Walk into the Stanford University bookstore and you find a special display marked "Salute Our Heroes. 20% Off Select Patriotic Titles". Imagine that in your local Waterstone's.

On Tuesday, to mark the 230th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 1776, President George Bush addressed troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Insisting that the US would "never accept anything less than complete victory" in Iraq, he informed them "you're winning this war". Telling the story of Captain Chip Eldridge, who lost part of his left leg in Afghanistan but came back to run a mile in less than seven minutes and jump out of planes, he declared: "The spirit of '76 lives on in the courage that you show each day". On Fox News his speech was followed by comments from the neo-conservative editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, who observed that you can't have freedom without fighting for it and that the Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of war.

For the Bush administration and its conservative supporters, there's no question about it: America is at war.

- from The Guardian

- in related news a video of London bomber is aired on al-Jazeera

We use the terms WWI and WWII as though the 'World' their name encompasses is all we ever need acknowledge. Could we be now locked in the beginnings of WWIV (with The Cold War being III)? As civilisation has grown in complexity so the way in which wars manifest themselves has changed. A hands-on war between Western powers, such as those carried out in WWI and II, is surely unthinkable with today's devastating technology and modern population sizes. The internal battle we now fight is symbolic of a planet of shifting identities. Where one expresses oneself not by the colours of a national flag but by the ideologies and rhetoric used by one's peers. Living in a society where boundaries become drawn by modern global communications as easily as ancient global religions, we must realise that the greatest juxta positions of our time are also its greatest threat.

Is the distinction between US and UK viewpoints an innate one or one spun by media, policies and rhetoric? Is humanity destined to lock itself into permanent, self perpetuated states of ever evolving war? How do you see the 'War on Terror' ending?

(Mirrored in The Huge Entity Forum)

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