War has been defined in various ways. For present purposes, we may define was as sustained intergruop violence in which state military forces participate on at least one side or on both sides in the case of interstate war and generally on only one side is the case of civil war. In a world of standing military forces it is hard to say exactly where peace ends and war begins. A military battle that is not sustained over time may or may not be considered a war. The brief Chinese-Soviet border clashes in March and July 1969, for example, entailed several small battles at a few points along the border, in which some hundreds of people were killed. Similarly ambigous is a long term violent struggle involving irregular forces, such as in Northern Ireland. There, uniformed British military forces waged a sustained violent struggle with a non state army, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), until a cease-fire that has held on and off since 1995.

Thus, many different activities are covered by the general term war. Consequently, it is not easy to say how many wars are going on in the world at the moment. Wars are very diverse. Several types of war tend to arise from different situations and play different sorts of roles in bargaining over conflicts. Starting from the largest wars, we may distinguish the following main categories.

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War in Iraq Games

There are quite a lot of games which focus on the war in Iraq, and this is unusual as the war in Iraq is still being fought. Most online games do not have as their focus an ongoing situation. The problems surrounding these particular games may not be obvious at first sight, but one father of a US soldier who lost his life in Iraq has slammed the games as insensitive and crass. That there is controversy surrounding these games was clearly expected by the makers, but any kind of publicity is good for them. They rightly point out that war in Iraq games are just that: – games.

There are different types of War in Iraq games, one actually tries to simulate the battle for Falludah in detail and used journals of Marines who fought there to help recreate their games so that they are as true to life as a game can be. In fact a lot of the “War in Iraq” games have been made with the help of soldiers who fought there. The cynical may think that these soldiers were just out to make a fast buck, but they are on record as saying that the games show the situation as it was in Iraq and might help people to realize what was and is happening to American troops who are still fighting in Iraq.

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Whether you’re headed to Haiti as a volunteer helping to restore the earthquake-ravaged country, or to Iraq as an employee rebuilding its infrastructure, or even off the shores of Somalia as ship crewmember and scuba diving adventurist, you or your boss will most likely be looking at higher premiums – if you can get life insurance at all.

All three countries are included on the U.S. State Department’s travel warning list, which is updated constantly, and which insurance brokers say is used to determine how much you will be charged for a new or updated life policy – or if you will be offered a policy altogether.

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