Now the ZOG conspirators basically have control of the Pentagon, with the Jews Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith running the show as Deputy Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, respectively. Rumsfeld? Strictly a front man, because he seems so . . . non-Jewish, I guess. Anyway, this is when I really go into action. After the Y2K plot falls apart, I get into bed big-time with Cantor Fitzgerald, and we hold even more secret workshops atop the World Trade Center, planning the 9/11 terrorist strikes. Here I got obvious, what with all the WTC images on my project’s logo. Duh! Like I wasn’t trying to leave a clue here or there!
So I spend all of the new millennium shuttling back and forth between the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, working out the details of the strikes, which, to totally throw everybody off our trail, would involve blowing up those two very same buildings! Brilliant! So boom! On 9/11 it all goes down real scary-like, but as we know (because it’s all over the Internet), all the Jews running Wall Street conveniently weren’t in the towers that morning. Anyway, at this point, the next stage of the plot goes into effect and I start my new job working for the Secretary of Defense, but not too close, mind you, so they make me an Assistant for Strategic Futures in this obscure “transformation” office (remember that word!). Now it all really comes together: Ashcroft is putting together his personal Gestapo, the White House is rewriting the Constitution. All we have yet to do in the Pentagon is get ready to take over the Middle East’s oil fields.
Here is where all my workshops with Cantor about investments, energy, and so on start to be revealed for what they really were: Star Chamber summits of key heavyweights in the conspiracy, ginning up blueprints for an American empire in the Middle East, with the Jews running everything both here and there. With America so stoked about 9/11, the Pentagon now has a free hand to start eliminating obstacles in the way of an Israel über alles in the Middle East. First, we have to take down the Taliban and erase all our loose ends with bin Laden, because that guy would have spilled the beans if the wrong people captured him alive. But that’s what those bunker-busting bombs are for. Then it’s Saddam’s turn so we can get our hands on all that oil. At that point, we want to leave the world guessing for a while, plus Bush has another election to steal before launching the ZOG for real. The key indicator? Watch for Colin Powell to be pushed out of State right after the election, clearing the way for Wolfowitz. At that point, we start taking down regime after regime across the Middle East (Condi Rice calls it “transformation,” get it?), and by the time 2008 rolls around, it’s all a fait accompli. Then we stick another Clinton back in the White House (Hillary, from the great state of New York, of course!), and our work continues.
My job in all of this? Same as always: seemingly innocuous academic explaining the world from Newport, covering tracks like crazy. You need an explanation for 9/11? I’ve got one. You need a rationale for Iraq? I’ve got one. You need a map for decoding all the rest of the wars to come? Hell, I published a beauty for you in Esquire. I mean, we’re not even trying to hide things anymore! Powell may say there’s no list. Rumsfeld may say there’s no list. But Barnett, finally out of the closet, has got a list! It’s right there with the map, for crying out loud!
Notice, how, right after the war, I quit my job in the Pentagon and went back to being just a lowly college professor? That was all part of the cover-up, including my teaching for the first time in my career. What’s up with that? Merely to divert attention from my writing the book that will sanitize the conspiracy for public consumption, coming out in the spring of 2004 in order to help get Bush reelected (though you can count on me to vote Democrat again, just to be sneaky).
Whew! It was good to get that all off my chest. I had been fighting to hide my true identity my whole career, but all those e-mails I have received over the past two years finally convinced me that the jig was up. It just feels so right to finally admit it all in public. Then again, maybe I signed my own death warrant, not that that wouldn’t be a clever way to divert attention from. . . .
Either the suspense is killing me or I am having a midlife crisis. But you have to admit, it all lines up neatly to a twisted mind, and one of the great joys of the Internet is, these people can send you e-mails pretty much around the clock, demanding you finally come clean, threatening to rat you out, or simply begging you to stop this war, Agent Mulder!
Of course, there are always plenty of conspiracy theorists who come out of the woodwork every time there’s a 9/11, and it’s tempting to ascribe such nutty views to only the fringe types.◈ But then you get the Prime Minister of Malaysia speaking at an international forum of Muslim countries, decrying how “the Jews rule the world by proxy,” and you realize that this sort of nonsense is being used by some very powerful people for very cynical purposes.◈
Now let me begin the serious apology, or the story I think really does explain why we went to war in Iraq.
The Bush Administration came into power committed to defense transformation, which it defined primarily in terms of technology, as in, “We need to ‘skip a generation’ of technology and move toward the military we know we really can build in this information age.” Their preferred rationale for that transformation was a near-peer competitor, or the “rising” Chinese security threat. Were they largely cynical in this? I believe so, but no more than anyone else talking up a “revolution in military affairs,” or “network-centric warfare.” Simply put, all these transformation advocates saw a future military there for the taking, and worried that if America did not grab that future first, someone else would. In reality, no country out there is making any serious effort at that “transformational military”—not the Chinese, not the Europeans, no one. Our lead on the rest of the world is getting bigger, not smaller, and so the stories the transformation gurus resorted to telling were getting all the more fantastic with time. They needed an enemy worth fighting and did not have one, so they made one up.
Did the Bush Administration come into power with a chip on its shoulder about Iraq? You bet. Were they on a line toward making something happen? Not really. Their commitment to transformation kept their focus firmly on China—witness the P-3 spy plane brouhaha with Beijing in the spring of 2001. This Administration had no stomach for nation building, no interest whatsoever in the Gap, and particularly no desire to start building peace in the Middle East. They said all these things quite openly; they were going to focus on the big pieces. They were going to focus on security issues across the Core: targeting China, Russia, and India for their undesirable behavior and whipping NATO and the Europeans into shape. Absent 9/11, this Administration would have done nothing for Africa, nothing for the Middle East, nothing for the Gap as a whole. They simply did not care. Their future worth creating was limited to the Core; they were virtual know-nothings about the Gap. Plus they really wanted to pull back from overseas military commitments in order to finance the fabulous technological transformation of the military they wanted more than anything else. This group had absolutely no interest in “empire”—just the opposite. If they had had their druthers, America would have let the Gap burn unceasingly while they plotted brilliant future wars with China. That “plot” was not facilitated by 9/11, it was destroyed by 9/11. Nonetheless, conspiracy theories abound that the U.S. Government actually staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks.◈
The terrorist attacks spared us a pointless and dangerous pathway of confrontation with the Chinese, and to a lesser extent with Russia and India. It put the Middle East back on the map, along with Central/South Asia and Africa, although Southeast Asia and Latin America still seem largely forgotten. September 11 killed the search for a near-peer competitor by elevating al Qaeda and the Axis of Evil to that function for the time being, thanks to the global war on terror. But most important, 9/11 gave this Administration a genuine rationale for defense transformation, although it is going to end up shaping that transformation in ways they never could have imagined.
In the end, 9/11 is going to consummate a sp
lit that has been building within the U.S. military since the end of the Cold War: between the “big stick” warrior force and the “baton stick” constabulary force. Both will end up being transformed, meaning the Defense Department as we now know it will cease to exist, and it is the war against Saddam Hussein that set all this in motion.
Where I take my hat off to this Administration is its willingness to finally see the strategic security environment for what it really is: one world that works just fine (the Core) and one that does not work much at all (the Gap). In a heartbeat, they effectively abandoned their previous effort to recast the Core’s security order and now have largely embraced the goal of reducing the Gap’s security disorder. I say “largely” because it is unclear what sort of real follow-through on security this Administration will pursue anywhere in the Gap besides the Middle East, but since I believe that region is the logical place to start, I think patience is in order.
Anyway, the mess America will find itself managing in the Middle East alone will effectively transform our military into what it needs to become to play Leviathan to the Gap as a whole. I do not cite this as a possibility; I mean it as a virtual certainty. The only question is how long it will take our leadership to discern the coming changes, embrace them fully, and describe them completely to the American public and our allies so we can debate their meaning openly. Until then, the conspiracy types will rule the grand strategy roost, which is pathetic in the extreme.
Let me tell you how 9/11 begat the Iraq War, how that war constitutes the strategic pursuit of a System Perturbation, and how I see this Big Bang unfolding across the Middle East in coming years. This, I believe, is the real backstory of the coming transformation of U.S. national security.
September 11 was a vertical shock of immense proportions, setting off a vast array of horizontal scenarios that continue to this day to recast our society, national security, and America’s relationship with the outside world. Most of these changes have been long needed and—by and large—are much appreciated by the American public, but they have raised serious questions not just about “who’s next?” but “where is this all leading?” Where this all leads to is extending our security rule sets around the planet, shrinking the Gap by integrating it with the Core, thus making globalization truly global. The main struggle of our age is over how best to achieve connectivity that is just and ordered, and the main threat we face are those forces determined to pursue disconnectedness as a means for power and control.
Until 9/11 awoke us to the reality that globalization, the greatest horizontal scenario of them all, was not going to proceed uninterrupted or unchallenged by war, national security strategists were fundamentally oblivious to the connections between the world of security and the world of economic integration, other than their myopic focus on the proliferation of dangerous military technologies. Now we know that to solve the major security questions of our age, we must extend globalization’s reach in a deeply connected, broadband manner. This is not a task we face in China, where connectivity is growing by leaps and bounds each year. It is a task we face throughout the Gap, but first and foremost in the Middle East, because of the clustering of endemic deficits there: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of economic development, and a deficit of security.◈ The security deficit is what drives the lack of connectivity between that region and the rest of the world, which, frankly, would prefer no connectivity to the region absent the energy ties—other than U.S. support for Israel.
As a 2002 UN report noted, “The Arab region has the lowest level of access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of all regions of the world, even lower than Sub-Saharan Africa.”◈ Thanks to that stunted connectivity with the outside world, the Middle East’s deficits of freedom and economic development have only gotten worse in recent decades. They come together to diminish expectations of entire generations. Recent opinion polls in the region suggest that roughly half the young people wish to emigrate to other countries—half!◈ How can you build a future when half of your young people would prefer living elsewhere? This is a region desperate to connect to the rest of the world.
Those diminished expectations generated the hatred that expressed itself on 9/11. Strip away the religion and the rhetoric, and 9/11 was nothing more than an act of desperation: the Middle East simply does not work for the vast bulk of the people who live there. The bin Ladens of that region blame the ruling elites there and the West for this sad state of affairs, and are convinced that greater disconnectedness is the answer, allowing these societies to go their own way, which they define as moving away from all that Westoxification.◈
These seemingly disparate realities all come together in the following simple conclusion: The only way America can truly achieve strategic security in the age of globalization is to destroy disconnectedness. We fight fire with fire. Al Qaeda, whose true grievances lie wholly within the Persian Gulf, tries to destroy the Core’s connectedness on 9/11 by triggering a System Perturbation that throws our rule sets into flux. Their hope is to shock America and the West into abandoning their region first militarily, then politically, and finally economically. They hope to detoxify through disconnectedness. America decides correctly to fight back by trying to destroy disconnectedness in the Gulf region. We seek to do unto al Qaeda what they did unto us: trigger a System Perturbation that will send all the region’s rule sets into flux. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world—from our rule sets, our norms, and all the ties that bind the Core together in mutually assured dependence. He was the Demon of Disconnectedness, and he deserves death for all his sins against humanity over the years.
But disconnecting the Great Disconnector from the Gulf’s security scene is only the beginning of our effort, because now Iraq becomes the great battlefield for the soul of the whole region. If America can enable Iraq’s reconnection to the world, then we will have won a real victory in the globalization struggle, and the transformation of the Middle East will begin in earnest. Winning the war brought no security to the United States. In fact, by committing ourselves to Iraq’s eventual integration into the Core, we temporarily reduced our security. But winning the war was the necessary first step to winning the peace we wage now, and that follow-on victory will increase U.S. security in the long run quite dramatically. By that I do not simply mean regime change in other countries seeking WMD or supporting terrorist networks, I mean really “draining the swamp” of all the hatreds that fuel the violence we suffered on 9/11. I mean destroying disconnectedness across the region as a whole.
That second victory will be very difficult to achieve. Our efforts to integrate Iraq into a wider world will pit all the forces of disconnectedness in the region against us. Therefore we must enlist the aid of all the forces of connectedness across the Core—not just their troops, but their investment flows and their commercial networks. We need to demonstrate to the Middle East that there is such a thing as a future worth creating there, not just a past worth re-creating. That is all the current bin Ladens offer the population—a retreat from today’s diminished expectations. They do not promise any future whatsoever; they merely offer a return to the past. If America cannot muster the will, not to mention the Core’s aid, to win this struggle in Iraq, we will send a clear signal to the region that there is no future in the Core for any of these states, save Israel. Moreover, once an Iraq is “liberated” from American “tyranny,” Israel will go back to being the region’s full-time whipping boy, standing in for the Core as a whole.
That will constitute a tragedy not only for Israel but for the world as a whole. A Middle East that seeks to survive in the future solely on the slim connectivity offered by its energy exports to the Core will have no future whatsoever in globalization’s advance. As the Core progressively decarbonizes its energy profile, moving off oil and into hydrogen to power vehicles, the Middle East’s security deficit becomes a cross not even the United States will long be willing to bear. That clock is ti
cking right now. Once that tipping point is reached, it will be a slippery slope ride to the same sort of depths we have witnessed in Central Africa over the past decade. If we are lucky, we will end up with nothing more than a giant Taliban-like “paradise” that keeps the West out, the women down, and our narcotics flowing.
What is so amazingly courageous about what the Bush Administration has done in trying to generate a Big Bang throughout the Middle East is that it has committed our nation to shrinking a major portion of the Gap in one fell swoop. By doing so, I believe this Administration has forced America to finally come through on promises repeatedly offered during the Cold War but never delivered. In effect, America has been telling the Gap for decades that we would really love to come in there and help straighten things out security-wise, but we always seemed to have some bigger fish to fry: the Soviets, the fabled near-peer, our own self-improvement as the world’s sole military superpower . . . whatever. But by taking down Saddam Hussein and turning Iraq into a magnet for every jihadist with a one-way ticket to paradise, America has really thrown down the gauntlet in the Middle East—it has finally begun exporting security for real. In the past, we always had ulterior motives: to keep the Soviets out, to keep the oil flowing, to keep Israel safe. But reconnecting Iraq to the world is so much bigger than any of those goals. It is about creating a future worth living for a billion Muslims we could just as easily consign to the past.
That is the U.S. Government I have loved and admired. That is the America I am thrilled to call my home. That is the world I want to live in someday.
Political commentators who prattle on about how George W. Bush has “staked his entire presidency” on Iraq cannot see the forest for the trees. Bush has staked a whole lot more than his political career on Iraq: he has set a showdown between the forces of connectedness and disconnectedness in our world. I know my Core-Gap division often makes the world seem too neat, because, in reality, there are plenty of forces within the Core who favor disconnectedness over connectedness, and we will face as many battles with them in coming years as we will face with the bin Ladens of the Gap. That is because many governments in the Core still view the world system as a balance of powers, and so any rise in U.S. influence or presence in the Middle East is seen as a loss of their influence or presence there. Too many of these “great powers” are led by small minds who prefer America’s failures to the Core’s expansion, because they see their national interests enhanced by the former and diminished by the latter. They prefer the Gap’s continued suffering to their own loss of prestige, and they should be ashamed for their selfishness.
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