Meeting the Challenges of 2025

The previous Clinton-Gore administrations – acting at the behest of various well-funded groups of activists in this country and the complicit Best Congress Money Can Buy – attempted to convert various regimes (Muslim and otherwise) in other nation-states to regimes more sympathetic to those activists’ beliefs.

First, by the imposition of sanctions. And if that didn’t work, by bombing them from 20,000 feet.

In particular, when Clinton-Gore came into office in 1993, the Iraqi "aggressors" had been expelled from Kuwait, and the Security Council had passed UNSC Resolution 687, which, among other things, imposed sanctions, and required, as a condition for lifting the sanctions, the destruction – under supervision of a UN Special Commission – of all stockpiles of Iraqi chemical warfare and biological warfare agents and weapons, the means for producing them, as well as ballistic missiles for delivering them.

UNSCR 687 also required the destruction – under the supervision of the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency – of the Iraqi nascent nuclear weapons program.

By 1998 the UN inspectors were reporting that Iraq no longer possessed chemical and biological weapons and delivery systems or a nuclear program, peaceful or otherwise. Therefore, most members of the Security Council wanted to lift the sanctions.

However, by then, Bill Clinton had also gotten UNSC sanctions imposed on Afghanistan’s Taliban and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and sanctions imposed by the complicit Best Congress Money Can Buy on Iraq-Iran-Libya for human-rights violations.

So, in 1998, Clinton announced he would never allow sanctions to be lifted on Iraq so long as Saddam Hussein – the "human rights abuser" – was in power.

The Best Congress Money Can Buy became complicit by passing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which declared that

"[I]t should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."

The Best Congress Money Can Buy then "Urged" the president to

"call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal for the purpose of indicting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law."

Now, the Likudniks, neo-crazies, religious-human-female-rights activists and their fellow travelers in the Clinton-Gore administrations realized that most Americans wouldn’t support an actual war of aggression to effect regime change in Iraq (or anywhere else) unless you could somehow be convinced that regime posed a direct and immediate threat to you.

So, they falsely told you Saddam Hussein had a nuclear-weapons development program hidden beneath his palaces, where the on-the-ground inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency had not been allowed to dig. Clinton then proceeded to launch Operation Desert Fox – for which he falsely claimed UN Security Council Resolution 687 provided the authority – to effect regime change in Iraq from 20,000 feet.

Then came the Bush-Cheney administrations, going even farther than Clinton-Gore – acting at the behest of the same various well-funded groups of activists and supported by a complicit Best Congress Money Can Buy – invading and occupying Iraq.

Now, understand that Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney did all these awful things (including imposition of draconian economic sanctions, bombing from 20,000 feet, and actual invasion) to sovereign nation-states, with concomitant "collateral damage" to that nation-state’s civilian population, because the Likudniks, neo-crazies, religious-human-female-rights activists and their fellow-travelers didn’t approve of the policies of that sovereign nation-state’s existing regime.

Of course, that is all about to change with the advent of the Obama-Biden administration, isn’t it?

Surely the Likudniks, neo-crazies, religious-human-female-rights activists flocking to Obama-Biden will not have anything like the influence they had in both Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney administrations, nor with the brand-new Best Congress Money Can Buy?

Surely, for example, the eco-wackos – who are convinced that the production of carbon-dioxide by you SUV-driving soccer-moms is the greatest threat to all mankind – will defang the anti-nuclear-everything crowd, concluding that a world-wide resurgence of nuclear power (which produces no carbon dioxide) is our last, best hope?

Surely Obama-Biden will realize it is vitally important to begin the rehabilitation of the IAEA (which was corrupted by both Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney administrations) whose primary objective is "to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world."

In particular, surely Obama-Biden will accept the continuing IAEA reports that – as best as can be determined after years of intrusive on-the-ground inspections – no IAEA-Safeguarded materials or activities have ever been diverted to a military purpose? Surely Obama-Biden and The Best Congress Money Can Buy will accept the reality that Iran’s Safeguarded uranium-enrichment program should be accelerated and enlarged, not bombed.

The National Intelligence Council has just issued a report, Global Trends 2025, based upon international conferences held on five continents, and upon a large-scale, long-term integrated global modeling system, incorporating the interaction of demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, socio-political and environmental subsystems of 183 nation-states.

One of its principal conclusions was that

"Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources – particularly energy, food, and water – raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply."

Did you get that? Demand for potable water – especially in the Middle East – will outstrip supply. Shouldn’t someone take the lead in producing modular barge-mounted uranium-fission desalination plants?

Shouldn’t we? Well, according to the NIC –

"We believe that U.S. interest and willingness to play a leadership role also may be more constrained as the economic, military, and opportunity costs of being the world’s leader are reassessed by American voters.”

Okay, let the Russians, Chinese and Japanese be the world leaders in solving those energy and potable water problems.

We’ve got better things on which to spend trillions of dollars. Like ballistic missile defense systems in Poland.

You see, the Likudnik media sycophants have focused in on this NIC nugget;

“The prospect of a nuclear [weapon]-armed Iran spawning a nuclear [weapon] arms race in the greater Middle East will bring new security challenges to an already conflict-prone region, particularly in conjunction with the proliferation of long-range missile systems.”

Wonder what the NIC thinks of the prospect of pigs flying? Wonder if our NATO ABM system in Poland will be capable of intercepting them?

Author: Gordon Prather

Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.