Niall Ferguson in deep de-Niall about Iran War 2012, Part 1

LIKE FACEBOOK PAGE * Join Free Newsletter
RSS Links * Hogue’s Author Page
Support HogueProphecy

GET AN ONLINE READING WITH JOHN HOGUE
Email him at hoguebulletin@hogueprophecy.com
Put “Hogue Reading” in Subject line
He’ll send you times, prices and information.

Friends,
The month of March in ancient times began the war season. War may be likely, coming with the spring of 2012. Netanyahu recently announced that Israel would not warn the US administration and military when it will strike, if it strikes Iran, so that the US will not be held responsible for aiding the attack. Next week high level meetings between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will commence in Washington DC. Ah, to be a fly on the wall of those secret meetings.

This Israeli “Pearl Harbor” attack on Iran’s nuclear installations will be more than one day of infamy. It will not be over in a day, six days or six weeks. If Israel strikes Iran I see this only as a prelude to a region-wide war to be waged three years from now, if my interpretations of the astrology of Nostradamus are correct. Moreover, I find it interesting that the Western mainstream media beating the dumb loudest for war these days consistently overlooks an Israeli option to fire their Jericho medium range ballistic missiles at Iranian installations rather than risk flying one jet over Iranian airspace. Well, you heard it here. Now to the article.

I have had respect for Niall Ferguson’s writings. I read his articles at Newsweek and look forward to his regular appearances on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show – that last outpost of real international news on CNN stuffed away in TV ratings Siberia, Sunday morning. He is professor of history at Harvard University and senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Niall is quite a fellow. I have quoted him often and I believe his take on future economic trends are most accurate. However, as I explained as a sub-plot to my prescient almanac for this new year Predictions for 2012, the irrational and mass emotive forces unleashed with the onset of Neptune’s 13-year transit through its home ruler, Pisces, sometimes makes us all prey to hidden and programmed enemies of mindset. Even the brightest among us, without a meditative witnessing consciousness can see soul serve monkey mindedness that identifies with lock-step habit the mechanical upholding of superior cultural and religious biases.

Our knowledge should be a tool in life, but the way we are taught makes us too often hammer and lock our divine birthright of soul with the tool of our knowledge. Our birthright of enlightenment is like a mold passed down the ego assembly line, upon which a coating of conditioning and personality is poured by society. By the time we enter our twenties this coating is reinforced and hardened by degrees of BS (bullshit) MS (more shit) and PhD (piled high and deep) through the process of our misnamed “education.”

The manufacturing of mental mediocrity is actually an intellectual bling industrial complex that conforms us from kindergarten to college to repeat the past and call it the future with all past-history absurdities and stupidities seeded and sustained.

History repeats itself because our educational systems make us serial repeat offenders of historic tragedy. By these degrees of dogma the degreed college graduates of qualified ignorance are adorned with the smart looking jewelry of the intellectual that has not the wisdom to understand the predictability of history and its trends.

Intellect is a fool’s golden enlightenment. Knowledge suppresses rather than nourishes one’s birthright of enlightenment.

Ego rules.

Wisdom therefore is constrained in the name of personality-education and cannot easily reawaken and become the conscious witness and master of knowledge rather than its slave. Thus we cannot easily break the industrial complex product of our mechanical mindedness that fuels history’s tragic pattern.

Even the most intelligent among us have these hidden Pavlovian habits seeded in the subconscious, ready to bite when the right emotional button is pushed or the right intellectual identity triggered.

Niall Ferguson’s potential for wisdom is cloaked with the clean-cut personality-ego of a Caucasian, post-imperialist British historian with a Western supremacist mindset. If birth had placed him in a maternity ward in Teheran in 1964 rather than Glasgow, he might be a bearded Iranian, exulting in Ayatollahs and theocratic borrowed identities as a writer for Press TV, Iran’s media propaganda organ. He might today be a respected senior fellow at some Muhammad madrasa college in Qom. Instead, an accident of birth gave him a brain filtered and skewered a different way: to write for the Western media organ that is Newsweek as a senior fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

It would seem that Niall Ferguson in his article The Eve of Destruction: There are plenty of arguments against an Israeli attack on Iran. And all of them are bad (Newsweek, 13 February 2012), has caught the westward spreading flu of war fever. Western governments and military industrial complexes are already coughing up the idea, quite loudly of late. Even in Israel, what Ferguson calls “the most easterly outpost of Western civilization” now has “Iran in its sights” for imminent, preemptive attack.

My many Australian readers would beg to dispute a pommie’s postulate about whose outpost is farther east. There are also Israeli scholars I could cite that would say Jews wandering around and colonizing the West for millennia are cultural emissaries of an ancient and biblical Near Eastern civilization, with strong Persian (Iranian) mystical overtones. The Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great liberated the Hebrews from Babylon. He helped them rebuild their kingdom in Palestine and a lot of cultural cross pollinating took place.

Nevertheless, Niall Ferguson in his article defines in succinct detail the following five reasons for dismantling what many world watchers give as reasons why descendants of the Hebrews in a modern Jewish State should not pull a Pearl Harbor surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.

They are:

1. The Iranians would retaliate with great fury, closing the Strait of Hormuz and unleashing the dogs of terror in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq.
2. The entire region would be set ablaze by irate Muslims; the Arab Spring would turn into a frigid Islamist winter.
3. The world economy would be dealt a death blow in the form of higher oil prices.
4. The Iranian regime would be strengthened, having been attacked by the Zionists its propaganda so regularly vilifies.
5. A nuclear-armed Iran is nothing to worry about. States actually become more risk-averse once they acquire nuclear weapons.

These are great definitions; yet, I am disappointed with how he encounters them later in his article. Niall Ferguson has not come through as promised, undermining each argument defined, point for point in detail. Much of what he set up for destruction above is skipped over and avoided altogether in what comes next.

Take, for instance, Argument 1, which the bulk of his article covers. He avoids addressing the Strait of Hormuz being closed and the consequences of proxy terrorist wars waged on Israel from Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbullah across Israel’s northern border firing an arsenal of 20,000 missiles from Lebanon. Instead, Ferguson waxes Teddy Roosevelt, waving his big stick, his “great white fleet” parading Western swagger in the Strait of Hormuz. Here is what he says:

[ARGUMENT 1]
The threat of Iranian retaliation. The Iranians will very likely be facing not one, not two, but three U.S. aircraft carriers. Two are already in the Persian Gulf: CVN 72 Abraham Lincoln and CVN 70 Carl Vinson. A third, CVN 77 George H.W. Bush, is said to be on its way from Norfolk, Va.

Ferguson’s military thinking is classic, aggressive Western in its educated programming. He does not anticipate an Oriental’s passive aggressive programmed response to carriers wagging their missiles.

In my book Nostradamus: The War with Iran, I caution Western thinkers not to repeat their old colonial mistakes. And I respectfully contend that underneath Ferguson’s words is that subconscious habit of Westerners to feel racially and culturally superior to the point where intellectual conceit blocks them from thinking like their Eastern enemies.

I mean, the Iranians are little rag-head wrapped wogs, right? They are caught in the cult of Muhammad, an inferior religion to ours at Jesus College, Oxford, correct? We have our big aircraft carriers. They have their little flotillas of patrol boats. We are not going to lower ourselves to think like the wogs and respect them as equals when we go to war with them. We are too high and mighty for that.

Ferguson as a historian writing on the rise and fall of economic and military imperial empires, should remember that a one-sided and snobbish Imperial British colonial mindset sometimes led to great and unanticipated British massacres, such as the Sepoy Rebellion in their Indian Colonies in 1857.

I recall another massacre from 1879. Twenty-thousand Zulus outmaneuvered and cut down 1,300 British soldiers and auxiliaries invading the Zulu kingdom in the first round in the Anglo-Zulu War. Soldiers of the most advanced 19th-century Western military industrial complex brazenly camped out in the wide-open South African plain before the rock of Isandlwana.

What could black wogs armed with light javelins do about it.

Today Western Christian supremacy can sail supercarriers churning back and forth in a great review of force through the narrow, 23-mile wide Strait of Hormuz flaunting their superiority before Iranian woggies aboard PT boats. What can these lesser and Muslim men do about it.

Back in Isandlwana the Western supermen had artillery, Gatling guns, state-of-the-art Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles and no respect for their subhuman adversaries.

And why not.

The Zulu savages run around half naked and barefoot with iron tipped assegai spears, feathers in their nappy hair and lurk behind cowhide-covered shields. Why should we white men concern ourselves with their mindsets, their tactics? We will project upon them what we decide they will do as lesser men than us because of our superior intellect…

Disrespect the tactics of your potential lower-tech enemies at your own peril, men of the West.

What if the Iranians do not attack American naval ships?

An oriental approach would have one play Obama’s caution against him. You “don’t” do what the Western adversary expects. Throw everything you have at the West’s proxy, Israel, flying bombing missions over Iranian airspace, but do nothing to start a war with the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz keeps flowing unharassed. Oil prices, therefore, do not rise that catastrophically high once Iran makes it clear by its actions that it will not attack anyone but will defend its air space every “day of Infamy” that sees Israel without warning or declaration of war play Imperial Japan bombing “Pearl Harbor.”

The oriental mind sees the military weakness of the West’s farthest flung outpost in the Near East. Israel cannot wage for long an all out air war on Iran at the limit of its flying range. It cannot stop the rocket barrage on two fronts from Iran’s proxy forces – Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbullah entrenched in the hills of Southern Lebanon – without doing something it had not the resources or national fortitude to entertain the last time rockets fell in July 2006 from Lebanon and Gaza. The Netanyahu government cannot send its small army into a meat grinder of urban warfare. The clever wogs who can decimate the Israeli Air Force over Iranian air space might at last lure the Israeli Army into the Lebanese hill towns and Gazan urban labyrinth for bloody house-to-house fighting. Israeli ground forces would suffer crippling casualties like those suffered by the German Sixth Army against the Soviets in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

The oriental mindset in Teheran is banking on the Israeli people not having the political will to suffer such losses of soldiers and airmen, or the military capability to wage a long and drawn out war inside Gaza and Lebanon.

One CVN? Three CVNs?

Niall Ferguson, if you like, you can cram all 11 active duty CVN supercarriers in the US Navy with task forces in tow up the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians will do nothing.

US power and threat is nothing.

The Iranians will do as they have always done these last several years, use the power of passive aggressiveness to emasculate the threat of US military might poised off their shores. The Americans will have to shoot first and they are not inclined to do so.

Ferguson closes his rebuttal against the first argument for not attacking Iran painting a hypothetical scenario that I think reflects more the limits of his Western projections than what Obama might actually do if news is brought to him in the early morning hours of some near future day that Israel has gone ahead and struck Iran.

In his hypothetical dialogue between Obama, and the head of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs and the president’s special political advisor and head of his 2012 re-election campaign, David Axelrod. Ferguson has Obama expletive-hopping mad at the Israelis but fears of losing key electoral states such as Florida when the US recovery crashes from a $200-a-barrel spike has Obama ordering his carrier forces to support the Israelis, strike Iran before they close the Strait of Hormuz.

The whole idea falls flat on its prayer rug if the Iranians “don’t” do anything against US military assets, forcing the Americans to be the unilateral aggressors. Remember, the American president has already defined that closing the strait would be “crossing a red line” to war with the United States.

Iran will not cross that line, even if Israel’s jets hang themselves over the dry Iranian mountains and deserts.

Niall Ferguson usually is skillful in forecasting the future by being counter-intuitive. So, let me throw something Niall may be too pro-Western and too deep in Western de-Niall to anticipate.

Barack Obama will match the Eastern mind with his own experiences of the East. He, like myself, has lived in Asia. He may be able to place his Western hubris aside and anticipate the mind of his Eastern friends “and” fight his Muslim oriental enemies, if need be.

I sense Obama has privately threatened Israeli leaders not to wage war when crippling sanctions are so close to succeeding with Iran; yet, I would imagine he is allusive and vague about supporting Israel if they “did” start bombing Iran. Obama’s military industrial complex, like his predecessor in the White House, has given Israel air-tankers and hundreds of bunker buster bombs for the job.

Unlike his predecessor, I think Obama will not fall for being dragged in to win Israel’s war for them, squandering US treasure and blood by the flaming carrier full.

My counter-intuition thinks Obama will play a kind of tri-lateral military strategy and diplomacy. He will once again have America “lead from behind” as it were. US forces will be on station as Israel does all the fighting, not the other way around. They will provide Israel with Patriot anti-missile batteries. They will replace the bunker buster bombs dropped, the US built Israeli tanker jets and F-16 long-range fighter bombers shot down over Iran, but the US will not preempt attack on Iran unless Iran attacks US naval units first.

Though the US will fulfill its promise to protect Israel from annihilation, it will also let Israel’s right wing government have its hawkish head and soon discover how inadequate its military reach actually is when bombing Iran’s nuclear installations. I believe Obama will wait for the Israeli people to quickly grow tired of the conflict and pressure their leaders to stop the bombing. At present polls in Israel show support for a Pearl Harbor attack on Iran is around only 15 percent.

The Iranian people, already suffering from crippling economic sanctions, will also taste the hell and cost of war and will pressure their ever more unpopular theocratic government to negotiate a solution if they want to remain in power.

Obama may be waiting for the hot heads on either side to briefly butt heads and see how painful and unproductive war will be for their future.

I have always documented over the years my prescient hunch that real peace in the Middle East will not seriously take place because the combatant nations have stored the suppressed rage to wage one more very bloody war.

Germany could not let world wars go in 1918. They had enough fight left in them for a second world war. Now they are peaceful.

The bellicose states of the Near East only give peace lip service. The truth is, there is a whole lot of rage in reserve for one more region-wide Middle Eastern conflagration before there is any sincere desire for peace.

I believe Obama anticipates that the American people will be on his side. They do not want to fight another war in the Middle East. As long as the Strait of Hormuz stays open, oil will flow from the West’s Arab allies. Prices will suffer in the first week but if Iran does not shoot at naval ships escorting oil tankers and lay mines to close the strait, then oil prices will stabilize. The Saudis will increase production and moderate the price spike.

The United States will not be the tool of hot heads in Jerusalem. Therefore, Netanyahu, under political pressure from his own people also, will soon have to pull out of his military adventure, seek our protection and come to the negotiation table, as will the Iranians in this first round of Nostradamus’ foreseen war with Iran.

John Hogue
(01 March 2012)

POST PROPHECY STATEMENT:
Read many of the coming events in the Israeli-Iranian crisis written five years before they happened:

Nostradamus: The War with Iran

Read in detail events to come in the Middle East and the world in 2012:

Predictions for 2012

I will post part two of my critique of Niall Ferguson’s article sometime after my next blog about the future of Rick Santorum’s race to become the biggest loser in the Presidential Elections of 2012.

Find out who the Third Antichrist is:

Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named: MABUS

Join my free newsletter list.

I will freely share the meditation techniques I have been using since 1980. Contact me. Just doing and enjoying one of these techniques is more valuable than all the hundreds of articles and 19 books I have written so far in my lifetime.

Books by John Hogue