A Review from a former top CIA official and an interview in Frontpage Magazine
Herbert E. Meyer, the Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council under Reagan’s DCI Bill Casey, was one of a handful of Reagan Revolutionaries who believed that the days of the Evil Empire were numbered. In the 1980s, the overwhelming academic consensus held that the Soviet economy was doing well and that Communism was a permanent part of the world landscape. Meyer and his team at CIA argued that Russia was heading towards economic collapse. That was the kind of bold thinking that won the Cold War. I was a young fellow carrying a spear in those days (for Norman A. Bailey, the head of plans at NSC), able to catch an occasional glimpse of the great project that people like Herb Meyer had set in motion. It was an enormous honor to find Herb Meyer’s review of my two just-published books today in The American Thinker. The Reaganauts were my teachers, and a passing grade from an authority like Herb Meyer is a great encouragement.
Like most readers of PJMedia, I’m a steady reader of Frontpage Magazine. Founder David Horowitz is a former leftist who saw the light, something I can identify with, having wandered in the fever-swamps of fringe politics in my youth. Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov interviewed me this week about How Civilizations Die–a great honor to appear in an online publication of its standing. Here’s the conclusion of the interview:
The United States must act like a superpower, rather than an NGO with a humanitarian agenda. That means standing by friends like Israel, preempting real threats like Iran, and punishing wayward allies like Turkey. We’ve been talking about a lot of unpleasant things, but it’s important to remember that two-thirds of the world population lives in countries where things are getting better–China, East Asia, India, South America. Tens of millions of people each year move from rural poverty to urban prosperity. In the great scheme of things the Muslim world is of minor importance to America, and its disintegration will make that plain over time. Far more important are our relationships with India and China. And these depend on the perception that America is the undisputed world hyperpower, such that it is pointless to test our patience. That means more military spending, not less, but also less dissipation of our resources on well-meaning but futile exercises in nation-building. China will be more willing to accommodate American security requirements, for example in Pakistan, if it perceives that American strength is past all possible challenge for the foreseeable future.
Americans have not begun to absorb how much the world has changed. We are likely to have humanitarian disasters on a gigantic scale in Egypt and elsewhere, about which we can do no more than we could in Somalia during the Clinton administration. We like to think of ourselves like the Lone Ranger, fixing everybody’s troubles. There will be occasions when our national security interests require us to stir up troubles rather than mitigate them. I wrote “How Civilizations Die” to harden American hearts, to horrify readers in order to inoculate them against the horrors to come.
“I wrote “How Civilizations Die” to harden American hearts, to horrify readers in order to inoculate them against the horrors to come.”
Sound like Poe, I’m not talking Richard, I’m talking Edgar Allan. Thanks for your work, the proverbial heads up so we might keep ours.
“I wrote “How Civilizations Die” to harden American hearts, to horrify readers in order to inoculate them against the horrors to come.”
The bad news is, Americans are already excessively hardened. Demographics and studies of the prospects of refugees already point to millions of excess deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, in excess of what the Taliban and Saddam were doing. Only a small minority of Americans are willing to go out and vote for Ron Paul to end the wars. Obama and Hillary Clinton lied about ending the wars and no one seems to care. All of the mainstream Republican candidates favor more wars. The anti war movement has collapsed.
This soulless attitude always leads to ruin. America isn’t going to go down in a boring demographic slide. Its ending will resemble Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, unless Ron Paul gets a lot of support in the very little time left to turn the country around.
“soulless attitude” – a good definition of that would be supporting a bigoted little twerp who is too gutless to take responsibility for the nasty opinions he published (http://reason.com/archives/2008/01/16/who-wrote-ron-pauls-newsletter, http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/angry-white-man, http://articles.cnn.com/2008-01-10/politics/paul.newsletters_1_newsletters-blacks-whites?_s=PM:POLITICS, http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/214321/20110915/ron-paul-president-congressman-libertarian-racism-texas-blacks-jews.htm).
Here’s my favorite account (from IBT) of Paul dodging responsibility for the racist rants he published in his newsletters: ‘However, it isn’t clear if Paul himself wrote any of these inflammatory segments (the newsletters apparently lacked by-lines). Paul himself has reportedly said many of these passages were taken out of context. When confronted by CNN, Paul insisted that he was not the author of the racialist pieces and that he had “no idea” who did’.
What a guy! He’s a real profile in courage, up there with Lincoln and Reagan.
The problem is not Paul. It’s those who elected him to Congress and the fact that he runs for President.
Ron Paul voters tend to be the best quality people. Ron Paul isn’t perfect, and neither is his record, but he’s the best candidate running now. A few racist remarks from the Rodney King era aren’t even in the same order of magnitude as the PATRIOT Act or Obamacare when it comes to harming this country.
Aw, c’mon, pls, don’t make it worse for yourself. He’s a kook.
I would suspect that our evaluation of quality is worlds apart.
David,
There is nothing I would like to see more than the US acting on your advice, but I very much doubt it can happen.
When the USSR fell, America was triumphal. But capitalism has, just like communism, embedded in it the seeds of its own destruction. In the US case it is its corruption into the kleptocratic alliance between the corporate and political systems called the corporate welfare state, also underlied by crony capitalism. Conservatives tend to dismiss and badmouth the street protests, and they are indeed initiated by fringe elements from both left and right, but I predicted them quite early and they are much more significant than may be apparent.
Whatever the decline mechanism, all dominant powers have reached peaks and collapsed and it’s US’s turn. It now operates on the illusion of power, increasingly irrelevant to events and issuing declarations of what others should and should not do, without the ability and will to back that up with actions or, at the very least, to even create the impression that it will act. The entire West is deterred by Iran and impotent with China (that practically owns it, Europe practically begs it to own it) and Russia. It’s pathetic.
It is clueless about the ME and it fails to learn from its frequesnt mistakes. It rewards and supports its enemies (wasting resources it no longer can afford) and undermines/abandons its friends.
It suffers from a lethal leadership crisis (usually accompanying such irreversible declines), where a dozen of republican candidates make an utter failure like Obama look good (Ron Paul is the worst example). Congress’s behavior bears a striking resemblance to the senate of Rome on her last days.
Economic crises in the “spring” states can be handled by Islamists in several ways: it’s the will of Allah in whose name they rule, jizziya from the West, spillings into a Europe that still provides an illusion of prosperity (at least relative to starvation) and jihad.
Germany, France join opposition to attack on Iran nuclear program
U.S., Turkey also do not seem to support military option against Iranian facilities; EU, U.S. want to impose sanctions, but China, Russia, some Gulf states have trading ties with Iran.
See what I mean?
Who’s deterring whom, would you say?
Khamenei probably can’t believe the cowardice and stupidity.
BTW, if 9/11 has not sufficiently horrified Americans to get its act together, I doubt that your book will (part. when they don’t read that much). The US has been affluent and dominant too long, it’ll take much more to shock them and I’m afraid that by then it’ll be too late. There are powerful forces at work here which are, to put it politely, hard to overcome.
I agree that Islam is of little importance to American. The problem is that our political correctness magnifies failure and marginalizes success. That means a lot of attention is given to countries that play no real part on the world stage unless you want to count oil in the ground the people on top of it can’t access or refine themselves.
The other problem is immigration which again gives failure a greater voice but from within America itself in the case of Islam.
Mr. Goldman:
I have much confidence in your analysis of the demise of the Muslim world, based on their demographic collapse, as this was the basis for Peter Drucker’s early insight, during the 1970s, regarding the USSR, and its weakness, overlooked by the intelligence community at that time. He identifed the declining life expectancy of Russian men, noting that this was an indicator of a society in decline. No other developed country had a comparable experience. H e was among the first to make the call about the true state of the USSR.
The USSR had much more serious problems which caused it to implode much before demographics.
I was not clear in my comments. It wasn’t that the demographics caused its demise; it was that the demographics told the true state of the USSR. At a time when the view was that it was a formidable foe, Drucker identified the cracks in the ediface that indicated otherwise.
One challenge HerbM had was that the larger intelligence community had a hard time believing that the Soviets were lying to themselves in their own economic data, data that they held very close and we spent huge amounts to steal. In hindsight it should have been obvious there was every incentive for the bureaucracy to be less than truthful – and hide any bad news until after an apparatchik had moved up (or on).
It’s humbling to reflect on our current condition where we know that the public numbers are nonsense and it appears even private sector numbers are little better. When I asked a friend at Commerce about this a few years ago he said “… we don’t do statistics, we follow the law!”
There is a terrible time of troubles directly ahead in MENA.
Our NGOs — especially Oxfam — have created problems/ dilemmas far larger than natural events would’ve.
Excessively cheap food supplies trigger run-away population blooms — while destroying the economics of local farming.
This dynamic is in fulsome display in Somalia.
The population crash will be brutal — and cannot be solved by importing vast numbers of muslims into alien lands.
That rising food prices — due to Federal Reserve money printing — would trigger food riots and revolution was obvious to me a year ago — and duly posted at the Belmont Club.
I expect the unrest to flow on to Pakistan which is a failed state owned by its army.
As for Iran — I expect its revolution to be by far the bloodiest.
Fracking is ruining the game-plans for all of the energy exporters. Exponential growth in food imports is going to run into steady, even declining export incomes.
KSA saw that dynamic in the 1980s. For Iran, it must mean crisis.
—–
The reason that Europe is against hot action to thwart Iran is street warfare such as Car-B-Ques.
Beyond that, the wheels are coming off the Euro – -and Brussels is overwhelmed by a decision-tree/ forest.
http://www.aoiusa.org/blog/2011/11/church-that-held-the-7th-ecumenical-council-at-nicea-to-be-turned-into-mosque/
A link to another story on one of David’s recurring topics: Turkey’s turn towards Islamism. While the fact they allowed construction of a Russian Orthodox church for the tourists in Antalya is a positive sign, the Ecumenical Patriarch is still being very limited by the Turkish authorities in his ability to train future Orthodox Christian priests in Turkey (most of his Greek speaking aides are now in their 70s and were raised by Greek parents who were expelled from Symrna and other places of Greek Orthodox suffering when the Turkish Republic came into existence).
It’s hard to escape the symbolism here even if most of the Turkish Muslims likely to attend this mosque are unaware of the site’s history as a host of one of the great Ecumenical Councils of the Church. To be fair, the decision is also being criticized by some Turkish art historians and local authorities who suggest it could lead to protests from the outside world and be bad for tourism:
Actually, the first ones to predict the doom of Bolshevism in Russia were those Orthodox priests and laity who foresaw its rise, starting with Dostoyevsky in his book The Possessed:
http://www.sfaturiortodoxe.ro/orthodox/orthodox_advices_seraphim_rose_the_end_of_the_world.htm
Fr. Seraphim Rose in the early 1980s — The Future of Russia and the End of the World
The link at the end is Romanian, not russian. Are you by chance Romanian?
Great Britain and it’s empire fell apart because, in their stupidity, they got involved in WWI AND their educated ruling elites succumbed to socialism and / or communism, and they became, if you will, a self-hating nation. Also, the education system went totally to hell.
And, it is happening here in the USA.
Our media, our universities, our intellectuals (who hold sway over much of govt. policy at all levels) are frankly, socialists or communists. Our high schools produce ignorant graduates (they know zero history , even less science or math) and college students simply do not study engineering or the sciences. Our graduate schools in the sciences and engineering are overflowing with FOREIGN students; where the hell are the American students ??
The american students are majoring in puppetry, communications, education (what a joke that is !!!), queer studies , feminism, english, etc. And what can you do with these majors. Well, you can get a job as a laborer or an admin assistant, or a teacher (maybe), or hang out at Zuccoti Park !!
In China, science and engineering and business is what they all study there.
Do the math folks.
Which nation will dominate?? One that produces puppetry majors, or one that produces engineers and scientists.
In one or two generations – within 10 to 20 years, China will surpass the USA because they will have the intellectual horsepower where it counts – in engineering and science – and the USA will not.
I didn’t see the Romanian language bit at the link I provided.
And as for the anti-Ron Paul trolling, I hope this is not the start of a systematic trend at PJM. Are you guys getting scared he might actually win Iowa? Pat Buchanan won either Iowa or New Hampshire back in 1992 if my memory serves, so I’m sure our gracious host can say it doesn’t mean much. But what if he wins both early primary states? It would be an especially humiliating thing for Romney to lose in his back yard with vast fundraising and mainstream media coverage advantages.
At any rate, I do believe Paul will win Iowa and give Republicans and crossing over Democrats there a chance to flip the bird to the Establishment GOP and pro-status quo, pro-war Dems.
Mr. X: “I do believe Paul will win Iowa and give Republicans and crossing over Democrats there a chance to flip the bird to the Establishment GOP and pro-status quo, pro-war Dems”.
Of course nothing quite says: “flip-the bird” like voting for a crank known for being an isolationist and peddler of a racist and Jew-hating newsletters.
It’s not like this is an important election or anything …
How do I get my hands on an Autographed copy.
I will check this posting for this info.
Thx