Provisional
Truth |
Essays | April 2006
Apocalypse Soon
We
yet may see
Armageddon in this first century of the third common era millennium,
although there may be no happy ending for any of us left alive on this
planet, much less those who have read the recent best-selling Left
Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins or Hal
Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth
series from 30 years ago. Although some await this looming horror in
expectation they will have a cloud's eye view of the carnage, count me
among those who believe Armageddon's onset is nothing to be eagerly
awaited, nor will its conclusion yield the expectantly desired result of
a millennium of peace and happiness and prosperity.
Increasingly,
many view current events as bringing us closer to a global conflict
centered on the Mid-East and its wretched oil, an opinion that now,
regrettably, perhaps coincides with the misplaced yearning of some
readers of Revelations, and countless other books devoted to
interpreting the Bible's confoundingly incomprehensible final chapter
and what seem to be collectively known as “the end times.”
This cheery
outlook has nothing to do with a belief in the prophetic, but in the
reality of politics and economics in a post 9/11 world. In case you
missed it in the last six months, new Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad hardly has missed an opportunity to pledge to “wipe off the
map the occupying regime of Al-Quds” which we, in the West, currently
refer to as the state of Israel. (Ahmadinejad also has professed the
Holocaust never happened in World War II - that the killing of millions
of Jews by the Nazis was a “legend,” comments which so far have drawn
vigorous international condemnation.)
More Islamic
rhetoric? Perhaps, but these concepts appear to be gaining traction in
an Arab world where revisionist history perception rapidly is becoming
its preferred version of alternate reality. Ahmadinejad's vitriolic
commentary might more easily be dismissed if not for the recent
elections in Palestine.
In a chilling
example of “be careful what you wish for,” democratic elections
in Palestine last month resulted in a majority victory for Hamas, the
violent Islamic resistance movement of Palestinian “freedom fighters”
(“terrorists” according to the European Union, U.S., Canada and,
naturally, Israel) that also has pledged to hasten the
destruction of Israel. So much for exporting freedom and democracy to
the Mid-East, or anywhere for that matter, if the law of unintended
consequences results in decidedly worse outcomes. No doubt there are
those who fondly recall the days when the U.S. used to install puppet
regimes with “benevolent dictators” on our payroll, like the Shah of
Iran, and who probably wish the same could be done now in Iraq. (Instead
of a benevolent dictator, maybe we could subcontract the job to a major
corporation and a benevolent CEO, but we digress.)
Unfortunately
here's the crux of the matter. Since the United States has pledged by
treaty to protect and defend the state of Israel, any actual
Iranian/Hamas/Islamic attempt at map-wiping inevitably draws us into a
potentially humankind-threatening conflict. It will be immaterial that
such a conflagration will be geographically limited to, or may occur
anywhere near, a small, dusty plain north of Jerusalem, especially if
nuclear arms could be involved. Scarier still is the possibility that
many, including some of our leaders, see this as an inevitable
part of the “Plan.”
Any major
conflict in the Mid-East - for Israel, for oil or both – instantly and
forever will become known as Armageddon. (For those of us briefly
able to watch it unfold 24/7 on cable and network news, it will have
catchier titles like: Armageddon – The Fight For Israel or
Armageddon – World War III: The Fight For Democracy,
at least until the embedded news correspondents become embedded in
Middle-East ground or the North American electrical grid fails or is
destroyed.)
Given our
current unilateral global political policy of forceful, preemptive
regime change, perhaps even a threatened map-wiping of Israel by
Iran might trigger Armageddon, should Israel follow its previous
operating procedure for nuclear threats by bombing Iranian reactors. The
Israelis did exactly that in 1981 when they became concerned – perhaps
rightly – about Saddam Hussein's Iraq developing a nuclear
energy-nuclear arms capability. This time, a first strike by Israel may
bring immediate Islamic retribution, unlike 1981, which portends U.S.
(and other superpower) intervention.
Israel's
security in a nuclear world certainly is not the only issue
regarding the Middle-East - let's not forget oil. Americans consume
about 25% of the world's current energy output (with 5% of its
population) and import half of our daily minimum requirement, of which
more than 2.5 million barrels per day come from the Mid-East. Other
industrial and industrializing countries, China, India and Japan in
particular, have a vested interest in insuring adequate supplies of
energy for their own use.
What if China,
historically friendly to Iran and perhaps more so today as a necessary
source of oil, suggested to the United States it would not be in our
economic interest to aid Israel if attacked by its neighbors? That would
be the same China on which we now depend to buy so many of our treasury
bonds with the more than $200 billion in trade surplus it garners from
our near-insatiable appetite for imported goods.
As we now are
the world's largest debtor nation, with more than $2 Trillion of our
national debt owned by foreigners (more than half of all privately held
Treasury debt), if we ignored China's thoughtful advice, what then? The
impact on financial markets could be immediate and catastrophic. Values
of our paper assets could substantially evaporate in runaway
deflation, but I'm not sure that China, or the average Chinese
citizen, really cares about our 401(k) balances or the value of our
shares of Exxon-Mobil, Microsoft or Boeing.
We may feel
confident that China and other nations would not harm themselves by
harming us financially, an updated economic version, if you will, of the
Cold War concept governing why neither the United States nor the former
Soviet Union would be first to turn the missile launch keys because of
the likelihood of the “mutual assured destruction” of each country.
If
such
confidence is misplaced, however, the debacle of Hurricane Katrina in
2005 has
offered a glimpse of the occasionally threadbare portions of the fabric
of our mostly easy life in the United States, and how quickly
“civilized” humans will descend into a survival mode that encompasses
lawlessness and violence under the cover of unaccountability and
self-preservation.
It's been
documented that a majority of Christians in America believe in a
rapture-like event ahead of a seven-year world war – Armageddon –
that may occur in their lifetimes, the outcome of which will be the
physical return of Jesus Christ to earth to begin a thousand-year reign
of peace and happiness. But what if – just maybe - we only get the
world-war part?
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