November 24, 2006 – Lately there has been much buzz surrounding authors of political books that have predicted the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the Iraq War and other major political events. The books are controversial and make great water cooler discussion topics. However, I maintain that these predictions really aren’t as much a matter of foresight as much as they are a matter of understanding history.
Just as I’ve been able to call the exact bottom of gold (of course with a small amount of luck) back in June and am still holding out on gold’s bottom now, predicting things of this nature only requires three steps: 
(1) Understanding history where precedents exist; (2) Knowing where to look for information that are strong predicators of future behavior; and (3) Understanding how to interpret such information. Follow these three steps and you too can become the next Nostradamus.
As you know by now, my casual Friday blog is usually reserved for non-investment topics. So today I’m playing Nostradamus. History has shown that when the U.S.’s sovereignty and military power has been challenged in the world that the U.S. will engage in an act of war to re-establish the status as a feared power. In fact, many U.S. Presidents, including our current one, George W. Bush, who stated, “I am a war President”, have turned to war as a means to turn the political machine and global economic tides to American favor.
During a time of peace, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt confided to a close friend, “I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.” These political strategies have come to be known as the Fog of War. Yes I know that was over a century ago, but the reasons why countries look for excuses to declare war during times of peace are exactly the same today as they were when Roosevelt made his statement over 100 years ago. When you look at the many parallels between the Vietnam War and the current Iraq War, it’s not to difficult to foresee the real possibility of an incursion into another country that is short, quick, and overwhelming to re-establish U.S. dominance after, or even during the latter stages of the U.S. exfiltration from Iraq.
Regarding the Vietnam War, on February 19, 1963, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated “Victory is in sight”. Four years later, the hard-liners maintained the status quo stance. U.S. General William Westmoreland stated on November 15, 1967, “I have never been more encouraged by my four years in Vietnam.” In retrospect, these comments seem ridiculous but no more far-fetched than President Bush’s comments of U.S. victory on May 1, 2003 with a “Mission accomplished” catch-phrase and a statement that all major combat operations in Iraq were over.
Since Bush’s “mission accomplished” statement on the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, 94% of all coalition deaths in battle have occurred. Furthermore, in remarkable parallels to the Vietnam War, the current administration has made multiple attempts to combat reality and negative public sentiment with statements of victory and progress in Iraq, just as the past administration did during particularly bleak times in Vietnam. And the parallels continue.
In 1975, a national survey revealed that 83% of Americans believed that “the people running this country don’t tell us the truth” and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger stated “the world no longer regards American military power as awesome.” On September 10, 2006, a survey of 120 Republican and Democrat foreign policy experts revealed that 84% believed the U.S. was losing the war on terror, and that 81% believed that the war in Iraq had hurt the U.S. battle against the war on terror. And just like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War has created an incredible loss of goodwill, not only in the global community but also within the domestic community. The same CBS TV/ New York Times poll conducted in September, 2006 revealed that almost half of all Americans believed that there is almost nothing that the U.S. President nor any President can do about terrorism.
Of all the remarkable parallels between the Vietnam and Iraqi wars, the one that has not yet occured is the response to the loss of faith in the global and domestic community to the U.S.’s sovereign power. A few months after the Vietnam War ended, then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stated, “The U.S. must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.” In other words, even when no conflict presented itself, one had to be fabricated if necessary, if only for the sole purpose to warn other countries of the power of the United States. Kissinger’s comment was obviously one that had no clearly defined target to any clear and present danger. But despite this, this did not prevent Kissinger’s comment from becoming reality.
In May, 1975, the U.S. cargo ship, the Mayaguez, in route from Vietnam to Thailand, was seized in Cambodia. The next day, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that a Chinese diplomat had filed a report stating that China was using its favorable diplomatic relationship with Cambodia to negotiate on behalf of the U.S. and that all American crewmen were “expected to be released soon.” In fact, the following day, the Cambodians released all 39 American crewmen, and their release was spotted and reported by a U.S. reconnaissance plane. Despite these developments, then U.S. President Gerald Ford ordered a U.S. marine assault on the Cambodian island that had been holding the American crewmen, and the assault began after the U.S. crewmen had already been released.
41 American soldiers died during this attack to “rescue” 39 crewmen that had already been released, and countless Cambodians were killed. At the time, many U.S. casualties were hidden from the public, and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger praised the Cambodian operative as a “very successful operation”. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stated that the U.S. was “forced into this” and that the operative “ought to make clear that there are limits beyond which the United States cannot be pushed, that the United States is prepared to defend those interests, and that it can get public support and Congressional support for those actions.”
The Mayaguez incident served notice to the rest of the world, that despite the failures in Vietnam, the U.S. was still very capable of dictating the order of the day when it so desired even though U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger referred to the incident in much more diplomatic tones, stating that it was only carried out “for purposes that were necessary for the well-being of this society.” However, the operative was clearly an undertaking to serve President’s Ford desire to “maintain U.S. leadership on a world-wide basis” and it served this purpose well.
This is where the parallels between the Vietnam War and the current Iraq War cease, but only because the future has not yet happened. So what does the future hold? As far as the response to the current Iraq fiasco is concerned, in all likelihood, the planning of an aggressive response to repair the U.S. image as a powerful nation is probably happening right now, especially given the current significant role of Henry Kissinger in the current U.S. administration. Certainly the take on Iran seems to indicate that Iran is being considered as a prime target. Curiously, there has been a lack of a vigorous debate regarding the many disputed interpretations of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent incendiary, antagonistic comments towards Israel.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, translated Ahmadinejad’s comment as:
“The Imam (former Ayatollah Khomeini) said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).
According to Cole, “Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian” and “He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse.”
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated Ahmadinejad’s comment as follows:
“[T]his regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.”
This past February, 2006, Iran’s foreign minister also disputed the Western world’s translation of Ahmadinejad’s comment. “Nobody can remove a country from the map,” he stated. “This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned. How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime,”
On June 15, 2006 The Guardian columnist and foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele cites several Persian speakers and translators who state that the phrase in question is more accurately translated as “eliminated” or “wiped off” or “wiped away” from “the page of time” or “the pages of history”, rather than “wiped off the map”.
These four above translations significantly deviate from the translation that is most propagated by the mass media that Israel must be “wiped off the map”. However, it should be noted that many Western translators disagree with these above translations, and firmly stand by the fact that Ahmadinejad’s comment is best translated as Israel must be “wiped off the map”.
Still, it is interesting to note that almost no serious discussion of these disputed translations has taken place in the mainstream media, with only considerable attention given to the more ominous translation. Might this dismissal of alternate translations signal a precursor to war? Only time will tell if Iran will be the mark. Obviously, a radical regime exists in Iran. But such was the case under the former Ayatollah Khomeini. The real question that has not been dissected is “How real a threat does Iran pose to global stability?” Despite the lack of answers to this question, history has told us about a coming event that is almost as certain as the fact that the sun will rise again tomorrow —
(1) another conflict is on the horizon, and that this conflict will almost undoubtedly be short, powerful and surgical, and not prolonged and under conditions that will minimize the possibilities of American causalites; and
(2) whether the conditions that trigger this conflict are fabricated or are real, is irrelevant.
Interestingly enough, as it was with the translation of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory comments, much controversy surrounds the reports regarding the state of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
In September, 2006, in a story reported by The Washington Post, the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publicly disputed U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. Here is the most substantive part of the Washington Post’s story, word for word, below:
“The agency noted five major errors in the committee’s 29-page report, which said Iran’s nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.
Among the committee’s assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that “incorrect,” noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.
“This is like prewar Iraq all over again,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. “You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors.”
The committee report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard-line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for not providing evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons.”
The above is devoid of any of my opinions. It merely spits back the article that appeared in the Washington Post. Although it appears that preparations are being made to go to war in Iran, the next conflict the U.S. engages in must necessarily be short in order to serve its purpose of quickly re-establishing the dominance of the U.S. military. Given the necessity to avoid a prolonged, drawn out affair, a strike against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or perhaps against even Lopez Obrador In Mexico are not beyond the realm of possibilities. It just does not seem possible that an engagement in Iran could be short. Therefore, even if the Iranian conflict eventually materializes, a prior short, surgical strike elsewhere seems much more likely. In fact, Venezuela, or a smaller South American country such as Bolivia or Ecuador would seem to be a prime target if this is the case.
Let’s hope that, for the sake of global stability that none of the above never happens but history seems to tell us that it will.
On tap for next week: “What does the Parallel Obrador Government in Mexico Mean for Investors?” And “Do Central Banks Ever Act in the Interests of Their Countrymen?”
______________________________
J.S. Kim is the Founder and Managing Director of maalamalama, a comprehensive online investment course that uses novel, proprietary advanced wealth planning techniques and the long tail of investing to identify low-risk, high-reward investment opportunities that seek to return high double-digit and triple-digit returns.
