Thoughts on What's Coming

Economic Chaos. Potential War with Iran. Energy Prices. Recession. Russia. Pakistan. Iraq.

What do these all have in common? A pretty grim picture.

Let’s examine the links between these things. You may want a scorecard for this.

Consider the following facts:

1. Oil had peaked at $147 (7-11-08), and now is at $71 (as of 10-21-08). That’s a 52% drop in three months.

2. World stock markets have tanked in the past four weeks, with trillions of equity and investments being lost.

3. Iceland faced default on its national debt. (Iceland???)

4. Iran is still enriching uranium, and the West still claims they are working towards a nuclear bomb. IAEA says otherwise.

5. Israel is bleating the war drums loudly.

6. The now multi-trillion-dollar bailout did nothing to help the market or the consumer.

7. Russia is on the rise from being flush with petroleum money and is revamping their army, navy, air force, and infrastructure.

8. The Pakistani people are getting agitated against U.S. efforts to track down and kill al-Qaeda in Waziristan.

9. Iraq is supposedly winding down, but troops aren’t coming home yet.

10. Afghanistan is heating up, and there is little chance of improvement there.

11. Unemployment and foreclosures are still on the rise in the U.S. as the recession continues and takes its deepest dive yet.

What does this all mean?

In a word, war.

Yikes!

The effects will be immediate: World War III, which really started on 9/11, will turn very hot very fast.

So here’s the situation: With the markets in meltdown and unemployment and home foreclosures still rising, the American people are getting angrier and angrier. They feel they were ignored by the trillion-dollar bailout and have let the elected government know it. However, the meltdown, which has its foundations in the utter mistake of relying on credit to move an economy, will only get worse, because the American government is either unwilling or unable to see the real root problem, let alone do anything about it. Frantic, the government will search for a means to kick-start the economy, get people working again, and get things under control. Martial law could be useful here, according to some people.

Enter Israel stage left, with their own angry concerns over Iran. They want Iran’s nuclear research eliminated so they can remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East, which allows them to retain a tactical superiority. If Iran has its own nukes as a MAD deterrent, that creates the option for an all-out conventional attack on Israel, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 1967. Yes, Israel has the technological and defensive advantage there, but a nuclear element makes Tel Aviv nervous and uncertain. So they want that element taken out. They did it before in 1981 on Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iran has its own problems. It is unable to refine its own oil resources into the gasoline it needs to run its nation, so it imports gasoline while exporting oil it doesn’t use for power. It wants to develop nuclear power so it can export more oil to afford the cost of improving its refining capabilities and stop importing gasoline. In DC, they view this effort is to give them a nuclear weapon, or alternatively, as a means to funnel more money to terrorists. Sure, it could funnel a nuke to terrorists, but that option nobody takes seriously, since the number of nuclear states is few (nine) and such an activity is easily traceable back to its source by the fallout elements. Their biggest buffer against an attack, a huge spike in oil prices, has evaporated as the price has dropped. Now the market and consumer can better absorb an oil spike if Iran is attacked, even with a recession.

Of course, that’s all based on the lie of Iran developing a nuclear weapon. They aren’t. Enrichment for nuclear power is a 5% level, and for a bomb, 70-90%. Iran is right at 5%, according to the IAEA.

Russia has indicated that it would stand with Iran if they are attacked. They have been using their own oil resources to rebuild their military and national infrastructure, and last month they sent a message to Washington when they sent a fleet into the Caribbean to Venezuela, including using strategic Tu-160 White Swan (“Blackjack” as the West calls them) bombers, that can carry supersonic nuclear cruise missiles. Washington either didn’t get or ignored the message, and very few Americans were even aware of what was going on. Now Russia and Venezuela are engaging in war games, making Colombia nervous.

An attack on a Muslim country AGAIN by America will not be seen well in the Middle East, and would give Muslims the reason they need to engage both the U.S. and Israel in an all-out war, including more terrorist 9/11-style attacks here. There are only two reasons why that hasn’t happened so far: their patience and our dumb luck. Neither can last forever.

So where does that leave the Bush Administration: plunging straight ahead towards the cliff.

If a 9/11-style attack happens first, be it either real or a false-flag, the Bush regime will immediately try to blame Iran. They may try to blame al-Qaeda again and tie them to Iran, but that gambit was tried with Iraq and the American people aren’t buying that again. In any case, the Bush regime will use it as an excuse to declare martial law, suspend the elections, and try to resurrect the economy by going to war, dragging a very unhappy and reluctant population with him. How the population reacts is anybody’s guess, and it depends on how much the American people have been wussified to simply go along with it so they can get back to playing their Nintendo Wiis or playing music on their iPods.

If Israel strikes Iran, with or without American assistance, then we would be facing a theater war with Russia and Iran and who-knows what Muslim nations on one side, America and Israel on the other side, and a whole lot of troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq stuck at the front lines. The battle of Armageddon may well begin. The reason the troops have not left Iraq will be made quite clear: Iraq is the preposition point to invade Iran. It is far easier to invade Iran from the west than from the east, from Afghanistan. Just look at a map.

Can this go nuclear? Easily, because you have three nuclear powers in the equation (United States, Russia, Israel) and possibly a fourth in Pakistan, whose role has always been tedious and on edge, and following them would be a fifth in India, with their own nukes, and possibly a sixth in China unless they exercise the good sense to stay out of it. So not only could it go nuclear with between three and six of the nine world nuclear powers (Britain, North Korea, and France are the other three), it could go beyond theater into a continental or even global war. Russia is thinking that way and so are the BMD folks in the Pentagon, which why there is a big brouhaha over the missile defense units in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Naturally, such a war, if it stays conventional (might we be so lucky!) would be seen in Washington as a means to get the economy going through a war machine as we did in World War II. But this is not 1939, and the reasons for and the rules of war have changed. It used to be over land and resources. Now it’s over money and energy.

In Main Street America, however, two factors will come into play. One is the current anger over the situation. It is very conceivable that Americans, already angry over losing their homes to foreclosures and retirement accounts to the corporatist American zaibatsu on Wall Street, may simply refuse to go along, defying all federal efforts to federalize the economy the way they did in 1941-42. But that’s not very likely, because of the other part of the equation, which is the newest front in warfare, which in cyberspace. A full conventional war will be accompanied by a full cyberwar, and the American government’s attempts to limit information to their official sources ala 1984 will just aid their opponents. How much the American people buy into the propaganda remains to be seen and goes back to the wussification mentioned above. The average American is not ready for and does not understand what a cyberwar is, what it does, or how it affects them. Nor are they informed enough to look outside the corporate media sources of the United States. If the war goes nuclear and Russia were to do an EMP attack over America, the power and information loss would be devastating from a survival, informational, and psychological perspectives. The American people are slaves to their electricity, even as this is typed on an electricity-powered computer.

So, what has to be done prevent this mess? Well, for one, Israel must calm down. Second, nations must continue to use diplomacy to keep Iran at the negotiating table to get their nuclear program under inspection and supervision. At the very least those two things must be tried to keep things calm until Bush leaves office and takes his corrupt cronies with him in January. The American elections MUST go forward cleanly and properly; if not then the anger increases and the results may be a foregone conclusion. Americans cannot do anything about another attack except increase their own local vigilance for any odd activity. They must also get off of the credit cards and get back to living within their means on cash.

But above all, there must be an organized and concerted effort to pressure our leaders to exercise proper leadership, not to just beat the drums of war because of campaign dollars or market profits for cronies, but instead to work with the world to forge peace as a means to develop prosperity, to turn around the negative attitudes and get nations to work on peaceful mutual interests and trade.

That effort starts with the grassroots of the world, from the bottom up, to get the leaders, elected or not, to do the right thing, not only for their own people, but for all people.

It starts with US.