The Internet makes available extraordinary materials for learning something of the mind-set, to use that contemporary term, of those who find themselves directing the affairs of nations.
A website published an interview conducted in 1998 by Le Nouvel Observateur. The site had evidently posted it (in translation by Bill Blum) after the Sept. 11 attack on New York and Washington. I downloaded it on October 8. The site's title for the interview was "Afghan Islamism Was Made in Washington." (The link seems to be no longer active.)
The main burden of the interview, as demonstrated by the remarks of interviewee Zbignew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, was that Osama bin Laden was our construct, a genuine US baby. He got his training under our CIA when they were conducting covert operations against the USSR via the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan.
This was fairly old news even as soon as October 8, since it was repeatedly referred to in various background stories that appeared on the net following the attack; but that is not why I am bringing up the interview here.
My reason has to do with a paragraph in which Brzezinski answers a challenge given by the interviewer, who asked if he (Brzezinski) did not now regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism and given arms and advice to future terrorists. (Keep in mind that this was more than two years before the Sept. 11 attacks). The quote is now featured in any number of stories that come up on Google when you search "Zbignew Brzezinski."
Brzezinski answered, "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets crossed the border [into Afghanistan] I wrote to President Carter: u2018We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.' Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."
The interviewer responded: "And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Interviewer: "Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today."
Brzezinski: "Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian centralism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries."
I am inclined to say that there speaks a breathtakingly arrogant and morally obtuse man, but at the very least you have to see that his crystal ball was clouded. He rushes to take credit for a program which, he thinks, brought down the Soviet Union but, as of 1998, he wasn't in the least concerned there might be "unintended consequences," such as the murderous Islamic terrorism that brought down the World Trade towers.
He blithely takes full credit for toppling the USSR, a self-aggrandizing opinion that leaves people like Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II out in the cold, and he takes no cognizance of the internal economic contradictions that led Misesians in general, and Murray Rothbard in particular, to view the Soviet Union, for decades before the end, as a balloon ready to pop.
But set that aside. Brzezinski (let's go to "B" for short) gives us a superb portrait of our contemptuous, presumptuous power elite, ever convinced they know better and willing to play God all over the place, never thinking what their machinations may produce when the real and very just universe gets through dealing with their hubris. No one can foresee the results that are yet to come from the chain of causation set off by the meddling of our "global thinkers".
Can we not somehow induce these inflated egomaniacs to leave the scene before they do more harm? Oh, how one yearns for them to GO, to pack their Vuitton bags, Armani suits, and Gucci loafers, and go go anywhere, but just leave here, vamoose, pronto, cop-chop; and this means the lot of them, all the war planners, geopolitical experts, warmongering pundits, media moguls and their lackeys, all the empty-headed, opinionated celebrities; all of you, go, please go NOW. And don't look back, who knows what may be gaining on you.
(I know; it won't happen, but it should.)
Incidentally, notice in Brother B's remarks, the contempt for Christians as well as Muslims. Muslims aren't "global, "they are just a bunch of squabblers of no account; Christians ditto.
It, as they say, gives one pause to realize that this man of high position is such a creep and arrogant bully. He is, in addition, a toady of the Rockefellers and was at one time chairman of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission, that mysterious High Council that never has its meetings reported in the press, even though some of the biggest media people attend it. Plain people need not apply and needn't be nosey. It gives this plain person a deep chill to think of a mind like B's influencing deliberations by the mighty on the fate of the world.
There is a reality that our marvelous "leaders" are still struggling not to face six months after the hideous attack on New York and Washington. (C.S. Lewis wrote once that we ought to stop the ridiculous pretense of calling these toplofty politicians our "leaders"; they are in fact our rulers.) I submit that our rulers have yet to realize that we indeed have met the enemy, and the enemy, as Pogo pointed out years ago and many others have said since, is us. Or, more precisely, them.
Our rulers are now telling us, in what seems to me a truly insane development, that they have in view the possibility of a worldwide war World War IV perhaps even nuclear war, between the Muslims, who are increasingly unified, and the formerly Christian nations, now called "the West" and now ruled (bullied, rather) by the United States.
Meanwhile our rulers, acting against the known sentiment of the people, go on pretending that they can continue their "multiculturalism" and anything-goes immigration policies. Their notion is that everybody coming here really wants to be an "American," even though more and more of those who get here cluster together, set up their own counter-nations, and demand to hear the rulers' orders and receive their government hand-outs in their own languages.
I remember an old priest telling me back in the early 1940s that he believed Al Smith was right when he said, in effect, this country would never be ruined or captured by a foreign nation but it might be torn apart in a contest of organized minorities within. Not bad as crystal balls go.
Whatever we get now really isn't going to be a world war of Christian and Muslim, because there are no Christians as such willing to take arms, and there certainly is no Christian "crusade." On one side there is a gaggle of nations (the 2001 World Almanac says there are 189 in the UN), virtually all of them without love for us (I speak as gently as I know how). I realize many of them say they are with is, but I believe it is out of dread, not love. On the other side there is ourselves, a secular, officially godless nation with an enormously powerful, evidently invincible military force.
The U.S. now rather resembles the Carthage that Flaubert brought to life in his Salammbo: we are luxurious, soft, rich, proud, cruel, and utterly devoted to Baal, the god who required the sacrifice of newborns (in our case pre-borns) in his greedy furnace. Rome was the sworn enemy of Carthage, and Rome was then a younger, more vigorous and martial nation determined to do Carthage in. Cartago delenda est, Cato said. Osama bin Laden & Co. simply substituted "America" for "Carthage" in the formula.
The vaunted power of America, which derives from its eminence in capitalist wealth creation over more than two centuries, has now been perverted to the cause of empire. We are destined to be confronted by who knows which of that gaggle of 189 nations or in what combinations. To name nuclear powers which clearly dread us and are preparing for us to do our worst: China, Russia, Pakistan, India, and even Israel. That amorphous and negligible Islam that B. so despises presumably has but one nuclear power among its group, but that, plus some ambitious arms suppliers among the other non-Islamic powers, may prove quite enough for nuclear night.
The crystal ball again: in the future, if there is to be a future, one sees that people like George W. Bush will no longer come to the presidency, instead we shall have "maximum leaders" of the primped-up caudillo type, appealing (as even poor Dubya is doing already) to a heavily Latino population for whom the names Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and even Roosevelt are empty or inimical. Sound and true American patriots will be fewer and farther between in politics than they are now. The Council of Foreign Relations will be recruiting like mad among the "leaders" of the "minority nations" in America, but by then the good old CFR will probably be operating out of Brussels and be staffed by Muslims.
Oh, brave new world.
March 23, 2002