Incoming! "Kahwump!" Few Americans have
connected the collapse of Enron with the
collapse of the World Trade Center and with the
collapse of Argentina's currency. However, they
are all opening salvos in the first war of the
21st century, which may well be recorded as
World War III when the dust settles and the dead
are tallied.
Into the Abysmal
Abyss
The new war has been a while in fermentation
and much as Chamberlain's efforts to restrain
Hitler in 1939 Munich failed, so "War 21C-1"
will not be denied its day by peace movements;
it already has hideous momentum and too much
stands at risk for the stakeholders, comprised
of everyone in the world.
At the end of the Cold War, marked most
notably by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a
series of global rules dissolved. After World
War II there were two global superpowers, and
everything that happened was cast in the light
of those two powers. Even "skirmishes" like
Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan
were small power imbalances in an otherwise
stable tug-of-war between the two giants.
However, when the Berlin Wall came down on
November 9, 1989, it became a collapsed dam,
releasing long-pent-up tensions, and while
politicians chanted peace mantras during the
transition period of the 1990s, numerous smaller
powers jockeyed for position. Those reading the
real pressure gauges knew that sooner or later,
something had to blow.
Guerre Sans
Frontières
The global paradigm has radically changed and
overcoming the human tendency of trying to "get
back to normal" is essential for survival. The
meaning of "normal" will not be a 20th century
definition and when the war ends, much will have
changed forever: a point of no return has been
passed in the night as the global passengers
slept on. The new war will most likely be
perceived as a series of incoming "kahwumps" as
breakdowns or attacks take place. This will be
followed by a period of recoil, retaliation and
retrenchment, only to be followed by another
"kahwump."
The new war involves a dance of combatants,
where the sides are unsure, and switching sides
may become commonplace depending on the day or
skirmish in question: terrorists carrying out a
political or religious agenda, governments
defending themselves from terrorists, or other
governments helping terrorists; speculators
attacking governments in the money markets; or
governments defending themselves from their
citizens as the governments' own schemes
collapse under their own insupportable economic
weight. Internal dissent and clashings of
minority groups will be frequent.
Old ideologies - particular the rose-colored
leftist ones - will receive a sound thrashing as
reality breaks through, no longer sustainable by
world events and economic realities. Even
radical environmentalism is on its way to
becoming unsustainable in the new war.
1) War 21C-1 will be a war without national
borders, involving numerous players for whom
national boundaries have no significance save
for a place to hide. Al-Qaida, for example, is
not a country but several thousand warriors
scattered in unknown locations around the world,
all intent on bringing damage to their
opponents' homelands. Some are "sleepers" in the
very lands they intend attacking. They achieve
their goals not by an armed frontal attack but
by stealth. Some attacks may be merely
electronic. They can hide in a host of different
countries. Thus eradicating the enemy will
necessitate preemptory or retaliatory military
action within the borders of sovereign nations,
which may trigger other actions and
consequences.
2) This blurring of boundaries and
jurisdictions will provide the United Nations
with much fodder for pressing to its goal of
global governance in the name of preventing all
future wars, which is surprising considering its
track record of 100% failure to accomplish this
during the last 50 years of its existence.
Already the UN is pushing hard to becoming self
funding, hiring its own peacekeeping force (read
"army"), and claiming legal jurisdiction over
much of the "global commons" and parts of
sovereign nations themselves. Applying the duck
test, it is a global government in the making,
even while it denies such a thing.
3) The new war uses both conventional weapons
and unconventional ones. The physical aspect of
this war is primarily infrastructure disruption:
psychological, physical and political. Terrorism
is designed to intimidate a civilian population
into surrender by unexpectedly killing a small
group of their number or disrupting their
infrastructure. There may be squaring off of
armies occasionally but much of this war will be
hidden from view, especially in the electronic
and economic sectors.
Terrorists have a widening array of arms, and
biological and nuclear weapons that hitherto
were available only to select countries. They
also now have serious electronic and economic
weapons, which can be deployed against their
enemies in the world's money and commodity
markets, as well as the world's communications
systems. Competition for increasingly scarce
resources such as oil will become fierce.1
Retaliation against terrorism is difficult
without information about the attackers, who
appeared from nowhere and disappear to nowhere
or destroy themselves in the attack, which leads
to the next phase of the war.
Truth: The First
Casualty
Truth is almost invariably the first casualty
of any war. The new war will be fought intensely
as an electronic info-war at two levels:
1) Political - as verbal claims, counter
claims, information, disinformation and
misinformation reverberate around the globe in
seconds on satellites and the Internet.
Combatants, governments and financial
organizations can be expected to emit a huge
quantity of misinformation designed to steer
entire populations to predetermined actions and
outcomes in the war, rather than to provide them
with genuine information and perspective.
Obtaining "clean" information will be an
essential skill of the new warriors.
2) Tactical - as combatants coordinate their
efforts worldwide and governments attempt to
prevent incidents within their own borders,
snooping of all kinds will become the order of
the day. Ultimately, everyone will be suspect,
even those citizens whom governments are
supposed to defend. Indeed, this is a key goal
of Islamic terrorism: destroying the freedoms
enjoyed in the West by turning Western
governments on their own people during the fight
against terrorism.
After each "kahwump," we will probably see
new, hastily ill-composed categories of
electronic and paper crimes and
regulations-violation of which may carry hefty
prison terms or fines. These will invariably
sweep up many innocent "criminals," who
inadvertently violate the constantly evolving
legal matrix, which no one can possibly know
thoroughly.
Since police cannot be everywhere, citizens
will be encouraged to spy on one another, and
the invariable abuse of system will set in.
Don't like what your neighbor or seat partner
believes politically or religiously? Just turn
him in for saying he was going to bomb
something. That will make a lot of trouble for
him and the burden of proof will be on him that
he didn't say it.
It's a continuation of child abuse "abuse,"
which is now rampant in many countries,
particularly in divorce cases. From 60-70% of
all child abuse accusations are groundless, but
keep law enforcement officials running around
tracking down false leads while muddying the
waters of real ones. The same can be expected of
the new watch-your-neighbor system that is
evolving.
As governments try to track the movements of
active terrorists, there will be unrelenting
pressure to track the movements of everyone:
cameras with facial recognition software, ID
registration of citizens, databases, and the
ever-popular chips. Private organization will be
encouraged by governments to help them know as
much as possible about the daily lives of
everyone, making privacy a thing of the past.
Databasing the detailed information of
Westerners is far more advanced than most
realize and what governments are prevented from
doing by law, they buy from private
"compu-snoop" organizations or have their allies
do it for them.
There will be almost irresistible pressure to
suspend or subvert legal protections in the name
of making people safe. In the midst of the newly
emerging legal structure, some voices like MSNBC
host Alan Keyes are already pointing out that if
a country destroys the very freedoms it purports
to defend in the process of fighting the war,
the enemy will have won.
Economic Wars
Key to the new war is economics. Fighting
economic wars on a daily basis is essential in
fighting the war as combatants electronically
jockey for control of information, resources -
especially oil - and currencies.
Few people understand the precarious state to
which the world's currencies have come, which is
a factor in and of itself. Our article next
month, "Facing the Abysmal Abyss," deals with
the state of the global monetary system, which
will be a major player in the first war of the
21st century. Indeed, the physical, political
and economic aspects of the war will invariably
combine.
One thing is certain: the era of stability,
peace and prosperity is over. The only stability
to be found in the near-term future is faith in
God, who promises to carry His own safely
through whatever may come. But that should not
be taken to mean vigilance and action may not be
required of us.
* * *
[John Loeffler hosts the weekly news program,
Steel on Steel, heard on the Information
Radio Network at www.steelonsteel.com]
