WORLD WAR III: Three? That Was So Cold War. It’s Four, Ace.

Wow, that was quick. A catty cadre have decided that World War III has come and gone. Nobody—that is, historians, perhaps?—said as much, but the War on Terror is apparently World War IV.

Way back in February 2002, neoconservative Norman Podhoretz penned “How to Win World War IV” for his own Commentary magazine. Besides the fact that he asserts unconditionally that Saddam “already possesses large stores of chemical and biological weapons,” he makes the claim that the Cold War was World War III (who knew!?) and that the time was nigh for a full-on offensive: World War IV.

Only a few months later, James Woolsey backed up Podhoretz’s claim in a speech to college students. World War IV was on, it would be long, and there were three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the “fascists” of Iraq and Syria and extremists like al-Qaeda. He threatened democracy, which would “make a lot of people very nervous.”

Yet wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. November, 2001, Wall Street Journal editorial: “World War IV, Let’s call this conflict what it is,” by another John’s Hopkins neoconservative, Eliot A. Cohen. “The 9/11 War, perhaps?” he wrote. “A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV.”

And to top off these incisive revisions of history, let it close with Fox News host Sean Hannity. In July, he said, “We are loaded up today, as the Middle East on the brink of World War V.”

Pick a number, get in line.