US writer, Jeff Nyquist, is one of the best (and scariest) geo-political commentators around. He is a realist, in a world where evasion and euphemism are the norm.
Here are some excerpts from his latest column. Read the whole article here.
The Destruction of the United States
History teaches that all nations, like all individuals, have a beginning and an end. No country is immortal. No nation is invincible. To make the point less delicately, America will one day cease to exist.
And it may be useful, especially given the multiple crises now developing, to contemplate the mortality of the world’s most powerful country. What would the world be like without the United States? Would it be more violent or less violent? Would it be richer or poorer? Would there be more dictatorships in the world, or fewer, more freedom or more tyranny? The answers you give on these questions, if you are liable to have any answers, are ideologically defining.
There are those who claim that America’s destruction would be a good thing. The destroyers of America, by this reasoning, would be liberators and heroes. If we attempt to look at the case objectively, it is hard to think of America’s chief rivals for power as “liberators” in any sense of the word. China is a communist dictatorship and Russia is governed by thugs.
It is not nice to say that major powers like China or Russia seek the destruction of the United States. It is not nice to say that Russia and China are governed by thugs. But anyone who studies the foreign policies, chicanery, secret maneuvers and war preparations of Beijing and Moscow cannot honestly conclude otherwise.
The fact that Russia and China are both assisting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons is more than suggestive. It is no accident that in America’s struggle against radical Islam, the Russian president has declared that Russia is Islam’s “best friend.”
Before the fall of the Communist Party Soviet Union the central goal of Soviet foreign policy was to foster the downfall of the United States and the communization of the entire world.
On China
China, on the other hand, is a great country that suffered eclipse during the period of Western imperialism and colonialism. So China has reason to predicate its policy on the notion that “one good turn deserves another.”
The reason for China’s opening to the West was not to enrich the Chinese bourgeoisie, or to adopt Western democratic values. The Chinese Communists sought an opening to the West so that they could get the investment capital and technology they needed for a modern military machine. Developing their economy is merely a necessary step in developing China’s new superpower status.
Some days ago China successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon. This remarkable capability didn’t develop overnight. As Washington Times correspondent Bill Gertz pointed out in his January 24 column, American defense officials concede that China’s Jan. 11 test is part of a “covert space-weapons program designed to cripple the U.S. military in a conflict.”
The Chinese, to be sure, are publicly lying about the peacefulness of their intentions. “This test was not directed at any country and does not constitute a threat to any country,” said the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Oh yes, we all know that China couldn’t possibly want to shoot down American satellites. Beijing merely enjoys the challenge of shooting down its own satellites for meaningless target practice.
In that case, it was a also a “practice” exercise when Chinese hackers attacked U.S. Naval War College computers in November. As one U.S. official told Bill Gertz: “The Naval War College is where the Navy’s Strategic Study Group is planning and practicing cyber-war techniques, and now they don’t even have e-mail access.”
In a 1999 book titled Red Dragon Rising, researchers Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett wrote: “We are deeply disturbed that senior PLA [People’s Liberation Army] officers have begun to talk among themselves about a preemptive strike using information warfare. In 1996, for example, a writer in the PLA’s main newspaper pointed out that ‘the enemy’ has ‘reconnaissance positioning satellites, AWACs, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, long-range precision weapons’ but the PLA does not.
A surprise attack, therefore, is not only justified but ‘is the only way to steer the course of the war in a direction favorable to China.’” Two years before 9/11, Temperlake and Triplett warned that a Chinese surprise attack on the United States “would be aimed at the American people – that is, the home front.”
On Russia
What about the Russians? All the leading intelligence defectors and dissidents from Russia seem to agree that the Kremlin ordered the death of KGB/FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. Nearly all of them think that the Soviet system is back in power. And the United States, with its ties to Europe weakened, with its global image in tatters, with its army stuck in Iraq, finds itself unable to oppose Russia’s policy in Europe and the Middle East.
Under present circumstances, no American politician would suggest a return to the Cold War. And so, the Kremlin advances on every front, in broad daylight, unchallenged and unfettered – nationalizing industries, muzzling independent newspapers and silencing opposition voices with bullets and radioactive poison. What do we suppose the Russian leadership is up to?
When Nikita Khrushchev bragged of Moscow’s future victory almost fifty years ago, he said to his Western listeners, “Your grandchildren will live under Communism.” If we think the time of reckoning is a long way off, we ought to remember that we are the grandchildren Khrushchev was talking about.
Soviet Russia’s long-range strategy didn’t expect quick results. It was predicated on patience, on decades of deception. America is now in a weakened economic and military position. The Great Crisis cannot be passed along to yet another generation, because things are coming to a head. The position of the United States is approaching a low point, and America’s enemies know it.
On Tuesday Iranian President Ahmadinejad told Syria’s foreign minister: “the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives.” The end is near, he says. The time to strike is approaching.
On Nuclear Terror
The number one security concern of the United States is the prospect of a massive terror assault against the American homeland using nuclear weapons. This is not a mythical threat. A successful assault against one city, killing five to fifty thousand people, would almost certainly trigger an unprecedented economic and political crisis in America.
First, the dollar would lose its value. Second, cities would shut down and people would flee to the countryside. National paralysis and the collapse of entire industries could follow. A terrorist attack with nuclear weapons need only destroy a single city. The rest is accomplished by suggestion, by the psychological aftermath of history’s most profound failure. What government, what Constitution, could survive such a failure?
We already know from defector testimony that Russia’s war plan incorporates the use of false flag terrorist diversionary operations in the early stages of the next world war. GRU defector Viktor Suvorov explained long ago that such operations were referred to as “gray terror.”
The fact that Ayman al-Zawahri (Al Qaeda Number 2, New Zeal) was named as a longtime agent of the KGB is the icing on the nuclear cake (as it were). The fact that Alexander Litvinenko – the man who fingered Zawahri – was recently poisoned by polonium-210, underscores the hardscrabble reality of the nuclear terror game.
The United States government and President Bush aren’t looking at the problem squarely. They are looking away from the main threat, toward a tertiary threat. This is a fatal error, because the war we are in isn’t simply a war against Muslim extremists. It is a much broader, more deceptive conflict.
I would personally bet the world would be in a worse off shape if this scenario did indeed happen. I am doing profiles of linking Muslim radicals and Communist fronts together on my blog, particularly I am concentrating on Communist fronts linked to George Galloway and radical Muslim fronts like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain.
You may also want to look into the Undercover Mosque documentary of radicalism going mainstream among the British Muslim populations.