Political Realities, Personal Solutions

Even limited wars in history require total focus, commitment and national mobilization. The expected failure of Iraqi politicians to meet the political benchmarks, or fail to unify beyond them, will seal the doom of Iraq as political entity. In the end, a political deal of the greatest scope and impact is required. Even barring success of the Iraqis, the clock on US capability to sustain the effort is over without severe national moral and material damage.

The responsibility for the war in Iraq and the political/military problems of the Persian Gulf region (nuclear proliferation in Iran, conventional arms sales, Salafi ideology and transnational terrorism) has been abandoned by the Bush Administration. There have been clear White House and Congressional statements and flagrant hints that resolution of these matters will be up to the next president after January 2009. Even more disturbing, leading presidential candidates, spin pundits, and respected strategic forecasters believe the “contradictions in reality” between war and peace will last for decades, not excluding a US military presence for possibly 50 or 100 years.

Can the American people find any of this acceptable? National leaders admit their moral defeat and then try removing a verdict of their guilt from the historical record. That is not statesmanship.

A fully-informed American public needs to start seeing that the US national political system has personal political profit and class division as a higher aim than a satisfied public interest; that the politics of war and peace have been abused and manipulated by partisanship and profit; that America’s men and women have measured their fatal patriotism against the abuses of national interest by the fears and greed of the political class. The next 5 years might be a time of opportunity to settle some accounts and reorganize the entire international and domestic political and economic system. If as Richard Nixon said in his last book in the early 1990s, if we “seize the moment,” the future can belong to the people, not leaders, of the world, for liberty, freedom, justice, and equality.

The American public holds the key. US citizens deny their own the moral shortcomings of ignorance and apathy in politics and economics, especially international politics and US foreign policy. Citizens disconnect themselves from their ultimate responsibility for choosing poorly and not holding their political leaders fully-accountable. The ignorance and apathy must end. The solutions to all of America’s foreign issues, and looming domestic social and economic challenges, are all found in local communities, through the awareness and activism of normal people with jobs and families. What this implies involves the public’s contribution to solving not only Iraq but domestic and world itself. The solution, however, requires a peaceful revolution in American education and culture to bring positive, peaceful change.

Reason and wisdom must come back to forefront of the US national security policy. When wars have no grand political strategy as an aim toward which wars are waged, and when the cost of lives and financial investment have unlimited blank checks, political leaders of poor ability and limited vision escalate small wars easily fought and won and expand them beyond the means of
a nation’s capability to win the peace. Those poor leaders abandon a political grand strategy of calculated risk of limited and achievable goals and replace it with a policy of total war and extermination. This course leads inevitably to legal political and paramilitary terrorism, against the innocent and one’s own law-abiding fellow citizesn.

To avoid an unending war in the Middle East a way must be sought to end it on a semi-permanent basis, no matter how difficult, unfair, unjust, or unpopular to others and ourselves. This requires the sacrifice of pleasure and advantages of everyone, including Americans. If people do work together along this path to peace, America and the world are doomed to fascism. The course of escalation and extermination is almost always chosen by enraged party partisan demagogues. They use “Big Lies,” accusations, personal attacks, propaganda disguised as public relations, political push polls, scapegoats, and the lives of other people’s children to hide their moral crimes, those crimes almost always involving fear and greed of the political class.

Victory in war and a peace that lasts afterwards require a type of political animal almost extinct in America: The unselfish statesmen who uses “brute moral clarity” to lead his or her country’s citizens in the struggle to serve the national interest AND international stability. The truly effective leaders, like Washington, Disraeli, Bismarck, FDR, Churchill, Eisenhower, and de Gaulle, all clearly understood the political goals toward which they aimed their policies in war and the peace at home and abroad which followed. They were not afraid to fight for the future of liberty and freedom in order to triumph over the enemies of peace and humanity.

They succeeded in seeing clearly what was at stake for their nation’s, sacrificing party or selfish goals, and uniting people behind a crisp vision of the real issues. Because great leaders understood the problems, their strategies in war ultimately followed a line of logic to the peaceful order that would satisfy the national interests, but also make reasonable friends of enemies. It is only a failure of morals and intelligence, and the grip of fear and greed, that compels a country to use conflict, violence, and war as ends in themselves. Democracy cannot be lasting when the child of war of aggression to create it. Like a revolution, “war liberty” will eat its children in fear, terror and paranoia.

The American public in elections for every national office must demand much better from candidates and those who win elections. They can and should, for the sake of survival, hold leaders accountable by informed action on the part of the average citizen to place national leaders in office of wisdom, experience, skill, toughness, shrewdness, and “realism.” The US has tried the military solution in Middle East, Horn of Africa and Central Asia for 30 years now. Disguised failure in Iraq, no matter how spun, is not a 1 year, 5 year or 17 year (Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991) crisis of foreign policy decision-making. Indeed, the problems of US policy in the arc of conflict in the Indian Ocean Area (IOA) reaches back past the time of Vietnam and even before World War II.

Leaders should be chosen along the following criteria. Whether a Presidential candidate, or Congresspersons or Senators, they must pursue a creative and radical bartering of the entire political/military-economic order of the Indian Ocean Area The most dangerous instability plaguing the the US and the great powers occurs within what is here termed the Indian Ocean Area. The 19th Century-style of Great Power diplomacy, and perhaps limited coercion, is needed to solve all these problems and the solution must start in Iraq and among its neighbors.

From Egypt in the west of the IOA, to Southern Africa, east to Australia, north to Peking and to Moscow, and back to Turkey and to Israel, no region of the world poses greater danger to the US national interest in the next 100 years than the Indian Ocean Area. This is one quarter of the globe, rich in resources and troubles. The conflicts burning in the region threaten the use of nuclear weapons that could kill hundreds of millions if not a billion of average family-loving people. A world cultural conflict out of control would also destroy the world economy. The problems must be explored with more honesty for at their root is some psychology in every nation of fear and greed. The options to create a stable peace and true unity among all powers to solve, and not foster, more war, division, death and destruction must be looked at realistically. So far, every leader in the world has failed this test of morality in the 21st Century.

It takes decisive action following informed awareness to bring about an age of liberty for all and prosperity for families. The solution lies in humanity’s instinct for survival and the real spirtual desire for fellowship and peace. These are not utopian dreams. Wars, but smaller wars, will still happen. But a US-led policy initiative based on individual liberty, economic opportunity, the common safety of all peoples (regardless of color or culture, including religion), with cooperative, community-based action, is the long-term solution.

Which Presidential candidates have the guts, the intelligence, the strength and the toughness to lead the world and America toward the future of liberty and freedom, peace and humanity? NONE OF THEM, perhaps. Somehow, someway, the American people’s ignorance and apathy is responsible for that. So what can be done? Perhaps individuals need to take more interest and responsibility to work for peace. Even after November 2008, the process of peaceful positive change in the minds and spirits, the regard and action, of average people cannot go back to the idle pleasures of a nation ignorantly teetering over the edge of a fall into unending militarism, silent dictatorship, and material and spiritual poverty.

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Bizarre Bazaar Store Grand Opening at Cepia Club

The Bizarre Bazaar, The Cepia Club’s freedom arts and wares shop, will have its Grand Opening party from 10 AM to 6 PM, Saturday, January 26, 2008, in Polk County, Wisconsin, USA.
Part of the Cepia Clubhouse building, the Bizarre Bazaar is a free-minds and free-markets consignment shop of The Cepia Club LLC, and it contains a mix of locally-or USA-produced and imported foods, fine arts, music, literature, and other unique items of interests.
The Bizarre Bazaar goods come from either seller-made and -owned, or Fair Trade sources. The Grand Opening party will have a special musical performance by the local blues-and-rockin’ grass band, The Juggernauts. The party will include free refreshments–while they last.
The Cepia Club LLC specializes in what it calls its “Four Commitments” of business, all of them based on connecting people in local communities everywhere for peace and prosperity via free-minds and free-markets. Call the Club at 715-646-9933 for info about.

Oil Wars For the Next Century: The Possible Importance of Oil to Space

This month of January 2008, The Cepia Club’s Project 6 has been conducting research into the course of the future of US policy in the oil basins of the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea. Club writings on previous research in the fall of 2007 had posed some of these future policy concerns for US national security. Our current focus is called "Operation Scimitar," a simulated game and modeling of a US war in Iran. Here is one bit of complete conjecture on which we have theorized a horrendous world of conflict for oil for the next century or more.
In our gaming research, the Club encountered a huge disconnect: When humanity’s governments, scientists, and markets can construct a world in which alternative fuels to replace oil CAN be a reality in a relatively short time frame, and since enough reserves of oil exist until such time (even when projecting possible exponential growth of oil needs by globalizing Asia and Africa) why could oil be such a concern to threaten world war, and a war with nuclear weapons use a possibility now and in the future? Indeed, some stakes must be at play in this global conflict the game research clearly shows has intensified in the last 8 years. This essay may not necessarily be a great assumption for the present politics, but what of 20 years hence?
Regardless of the short-term politics of war and peace, oil needs and oil wars will be with us for the next century at least, if humanity even survives predictable or unforseen-as-yet dangers and events.
First, The Cepia Club "grand model" clearly shows that humanity has a destiny in space. US public disinterest in space, and a 40-year old space shuttle notwithstanding, any number of factors–a Noah plan for an extinction event, resource exploitation off-world, overcrowding, disappearing landmass due to global warming, a polluted atmosphere–humankind’s destiny is to rise above (and possibly descend below) the earth’s surface. The most likely reasons for space travel and colonization of the solar system, for which the Club accepts the philosophical "Strong Anthropic Principle," are as simple as the politics of war and peace, the needs for prosperity, social advancement, or cultural expansion. The fulfillment of individual liberty and freedom, or the spirit of Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, even without an apocalyptic occurrence, does not require any imagination on "Why go to space?" We have been and are already there. The only real question remains: Where do we go from the here and now into the human experience of the near cosmos? If the Club accurately sees this, how does oil fit into this theoretic model?
In looking at the either/or, (binary 0/1) options IF oil was important to the long-term political future of earth, we modeled in our qualitative process the following points:
First, the existing technology for getting craft, personnel, equipment, and cargo orbital from the earth’s surface is via ram-jets. Ram jets are both advancing in theory and used now in practice. The first civilian entrepreneur to achieve "space flight" in the Richard Branson-sponsored prize contest used essentially ram jet technology. The US non-military space program plans to replace the "ancient" shuttle fleet with craft using such technology. All one has to attain to reach orbital path is a break-away speed at a certain angle to the atmosphere. Ram jets, using the basic technology of early jet experiments (the World War II German Me-163 "Comet") is a self-contained system that does not require free-air mix combustion. In other words, ram jets are sophisticated jet engines. They can run on a super-super form of jet fuel, refined from oil. If engineers can get the new European Airbus to fly (a wingspan almost three football fields wide), and can even build and fly such a "freakish" planes as the B-2 Spirit bomber, the imagination should not be limited in the size or type of craft into space, or limit a conceivable amount of things a ram jet can put into orbit. Oil, already the most plentiful and realistically cheap transportation fuel, has a large future in space, civilian or military or other.
In current military airborne and air-mobile operations, like in 1991's Operation Desert Storm, cargo planes regularly drop large rubberized fuel "bladders" (with or without parachutes) to troops on the ground. Instead of delivering helicopter fuel for a forward base deep behind enemy lines, what stops a craft-system from delivery massive amounts of fuel to an exploration mission or remote base on earth’s own moon or Mars itself, to provide ground transport or return-to-earth fuel (where water-fueled propulsion reactor engines cannot be refilled)?
In another strain of reasoning, the Club conjectures that oil, on earth in a dire circumstance, or on the moon or other solar body, can be used for terraforming. What is terraforming? It is the process of creating a "earth-like" life-sustaining system on planetary or planetoid bodies where none exist. Oil is a hydrocrabon. Current theories believe that, no matter what effect overuse of oil burning on earth might or might not do, oil, gas, and coal are believed to be derived over eons from organic matter, once living plants and animals. Hydrocarbons are hydrogen, oxygen and carbon–more or less water and what composes our own bodies (carbon-dating can be used only on un-fossilized once-living matter). Oil creates thicker amounts of particulates in the atmosphere, and might be able to create atmosphere for life on the moon–water vapor, carbon and oxygen. It can be turned into soil fertilizer that might be able to change moon dust into dirt, growing plants for photosynthesis. Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Monsoon seasons on the moon? Weather?
Would the moons or asteroids of the solar system have atmospheres if they had oil? Can humanity create atmospheres, weather- and life-cycles with the properties of oil? We can certainly travel to space to experiment on the moon, and beyond. The moon is an entire laboratory for humanity in space. If oil can really do these things, then oil can change the local demi-verse circling the sun. Or can oil save our own planet from our overuse of it if it is needed to sustain atmosphere? What if "Martians" millions of years ago used all their oil? Is that why Mars has so little atmosphere now? But let’s not be fanciful in our own science-fiction sciences.
These theories are oil are just plausible at this point. But we here in the present spaceship Earth have a more immediate challenge, which solves any of the conflict arising from these plausible potentials: Preventing the politics of war and peace over oil (?) from stripping humanity of the liberty, freedom, justice and fellowship--the god-given natural rights--we lose by war and conflict. If oil is a problem for the next century, humankind can find a solution for the common good by peaceful means, if we try.

The Pope Who Would Be King: The Legacy of John Paul II

In the pursuit of perpetual peace among humankind, in the 14th Century the poet Dante deli Alighieri (who also wrote The Divine Comedy), outlined a world-wide political system under the rule of a single Romish Caesar, a king whose bureaucratic power and moral influence would balance the world away from the politics of war and toward those of peace. Almost a thousand years before Dante, the peace of Rome (pax Romana) and the apostle’s church had split (Council of Niccea), dividing the known world along the fault lines of conflict between East and West. In the split of the old into the new reality–Rome and Constantinople, Roman bishop and Eastern Orthodox--new discoveries and new inventions (of lands, ideas, sciences, technologies (printing), religions [Islam] and commerce), further divisions in the people, nations, and interests of the entire world created more disunity, barbarity, severity between and among all humanity. Dante’s solution built on the foundations of old ideas, such as the good, wise, kind, enlightened philosopher kings of Plato’s republic, who could rule sternly if necessary. Dante gave an updated vision to the many utopia solutions of a single source of peace, cooperation and unity among all men and women. The void in the world peace has been always fixed around a lack of a focused idea or common purpose. Searching for of peace in any form, between all factions of politics, economics, social structures, an cultures, has been the burden of humanity.
In the age of great voyages, revolutions, violence and reforms since Dante 700 years ago, the greatest conflict became the unavoidable struggle between the civilizations of East and West. The East was dominated by absolute dictatorship and moral and economic poverty: The West moving that way, and struggling to remain free and prosperous. In our own time, the conflict gathered momentum when Europe found an easy route by sea far to its east into the lands of Asia. The greatest danger to humanity in this struggle still is the potential for an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust, the immediate threat of extinction that drove the Cold War. The world was doomed (and still is) unless humankind overthrew the use of greed and fear to rule. Our future demands that we close the gap between our understanding, and find common purpose in the survival of the entire planet. Life on earth (and anywhere it might go) must be based on the principle of universal personal liberty and freedom, of hope, faith, trust, and selflessness: On the commitments of everyone to help everyone else in dire need.
When the Soviet Union seemed poised to win by sheer weight of steel, powder and plutonium, Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II. The mysteries of the previous pope’s short reign and sudden death confused the world and probably the College of Cardinals. A church that through two millennia has revealed only a fraction of a fraction of its wealth, secrets, and power, perhaps stood on the cliff of more danger than realized. John Paul II ended up a solution to their internal political problems as well as the Church’s external problem of relevance in the world of the 1970s drifting more secular, more atheist, more material and selfish.
Little did anyone expect the meek, humble and wise priest from Poland to so influence world history, in such a profound and important way. So what can we say about the legacy of John Paul II?
John Paul II witnessed two forms of ideology that ruled and destroyed others with the same methods and basic philosophy. Both Nazism and Bolshevism (the Leninist-Stalinist form of Marxist Communism) were political, economic, and social systems that were governed by the few, for their greed, over the many, playing on mass fear. In Poland, the Pope-to-be had lived under the threat of imprisonment, persecution, and assassination. For decades, he endured himself and inspired his flock to maintain the unbeatable elements of individual love, courage, hope, and above all, faith in the future of freedom.
As the Pope, John Paul II preached these things and lived by the example: One person, small or great, can indeed change others, and change history, if humbled before the power of their beliefs, practicing tolerance, seeking truth, admitting fault, and living and working together for justice; acting not selfishly, but for the greater good. These are the true things that form the free-will of all. As the moral voice of these natures of human liberty, John Paul, in the framework of the “earthly,” spiritual king, helped conquer Bolshevism and restore human hope and faith by exposing the lies of greed and fear in the bright sunny light of the truth. By nature, it was wisdom and position that made him legend.

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Operation Scimitar Set-up Study

January 7, 2008

[This is part of continuing blog kept on Club HQ net space on The Cepia Club LLC’s Project 6: Cepia Games and Theory. Project 6 has been ongoing since 1994. We do serious model simulation building and testing. We attempt, undermanned and with very little money, to do professional-results quality forecasting. We are not war-jolly gamers. The value of Model Simulation Games is proven by think tanks and agencies that use them. Our own modeling analyses have been a large basis of our accuracy in many of our predictions for the politics of war and peace since 1998. And we have become better with the MSGaming and our predictions as time has passed. If there are doubts, then you haven’t paid heed to our stuff. (In May 2007, I used an MSG format to predict to my nephew that the Packers would win at least 10 or 11 games this year and a playoff bye. I also used an MSG to tell my nephew in late September/first week of October that Barak Obama would win Iowa. This is among other things. However, MSG forecasting is not always 100% accurate, but 60-70 % likelihood has been Project 6's norm).If anyone is interested in learning more about Cepia Project 6, see the upcoming Cepiaglobal Futures Report (free until February 29, 2008). TJK].


I've been adjusting and studying the new “Operation Scimitar” game map I set up for a war against Iran and examining the options/ deployment logic all weekend. I imagine I will start play as soon as I learn all I can at this stage. With the Club strategy matrix (Informed/command, logistics/security, tactical/deception, and operational/surprise), the Al Qaeda command network has always been represented in the center quadrant, and was centered into Afghanistan since 1996 as the hq of Usama bin Ladin. AQ is a non-state, ethereal system of a political/ideological policy: In self-germinating"idea" growth.

Afghanistan/Pakistan, because of the nukes, the politics, and the geography, is more their security/logistics base. Afghanistan serves partly as a convenient tactical (not grand strategy) deception (a consumption of considerable effort on our part) to make us believe/waste/disperse a significant portion of our strength (material, political policy) there. It is a significant disproportion of effort on our part for rather small gain.

Iraq fits the paradigm in the larger context of deception, with the focus of oil ONLY as it relates to Iran and the entire Persian Gulf; the mashkrivoka--the grand strategic deception done by tactical means. The Islamists have used it conveniently, I believe at this point from the model simulations Club Project 6 has done since fall 2002, as the con-man “implement”-get us to fight for something we think we want, not what is important to them. In other words, it is blinding our policy toward that war.

Iraq was the bait and Iran is now the hook, and the entire gulf is a net trap.

As an indication of the operational surprise the Club forecasts, look at where most of the insurgency has been taking place for three years--Baghdad and points westerly of there in Anbar. Look at how we get there: The sea lines of communication in the gulf. As it goes, there is no oil in that part of Iraq, and a LOT of Sunnis tending toward or susceptible to the Salafist ideology. It is also the one-time caliphate. That has historical meaning for them, and why we find most of “them” there. But still, for the US and Europe, and our Asian friends, we engage them there to protect the access to oil.

The operational “surprise,” the Western geo-political/geo-strategic weak point in this whole war with the Islamists, I realized two days ago, (network manuever?) is in the Hejaz of the Arabian Peninsula/ the Horn of Africa / and the West Bank religious centers of Islam: With the focal point around Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem. Added to Islam’s traditional political capital of Baghdad, it forms a rough area where AQ and their grass roots allies could operate successfully while they try to close the net in the Gulf. They have lived in those deserts for millennia, began their religion, started the Prophet’s conquests. And Lawrence led their first revolution, successfully, in that exact place 90 years ago. The fact that very little is heard of the war in the Horn, or that we have gotten little if any mainstream news on Salafi/AQ activities in this general Mecca-Medina area for over a year since Ethiopia invaded Somalia with US military action, and until last week with the Kenya uprisings, is damned curious to me at this point.

It occurred to me that the Salafists terrorism BEGAN in Mecca with the "revolutionary" uprising around 1978/79 (?). Several thousand pilgrims–revolutionaries and those who joined up on the spot--were killed. The Saudi army dealt with it, brutally. Where poorly started and failed "revolutions" start might indicate where they eventually want to succeed, but failed at first, like many revolutions, to set proper conditions. So, perhaps the last 30 years that is what the Salafists have been attempting.

Finally, this particular area is where China has been most active politically, militarily (they have had at least 5000 troops in the Sudan for at least 4 or 5 years), and economically (oil deals with nations in East Africa for future development have been numerous but widely dispersed, reported in the mainstream US news, and widely ignored or underestimated). This is a grand strategic move on some level. It remains to be told to the American public. The results of however these connections play out will be fateful.

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