Japanese Tsunami anniversary and Niall Ferguson, Part 2

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,
What is it with the number eleven and catastrophes? It seems to play on the minds of al-Qaeda terrorists when they are handmade. They hijacked the eleventh day of September with diabolical irony when dating their attacks on the US Pentagon and World Trade Center towers on 9-11 (2001), using September 11 as a play on the emergency number people dial in the United States.

911 days later al-Qaeda operatives in Spain blew up parked trains teaming with crowds of people in Madrid on March 11, 2004. One year ago as of today, the eleventh day of March, random nature played its hand at catastrophe with the 9.0 magnitude Tohoku temblor and massive tsunami washing away entire towns and cities along the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu, carrying off over 20,000 people. There was no hijacked jet as such but a comet hijacked by gravity that may have been the cause.

The Comet Elenin right around the time of the quake had made a third lineup with the Earth and Sun on its way into the solar system and like the previous two times there was a major earthquake either by coincidence or by some force within gravity that humanity has yet to understand. The first lineup happened the same day of the first lineup in February 2012 that an 8.8 earthquake rocked the Chilean coastline sending a tsunami inland splintering fishing towns whilst sending another wave across the Pacific Ocean. The second lineup happened in September 2010 and on that same day Christchurch New Zealand was shattered by the first of several powerful quakes to come.

Elenin was scheduled for another lineup with the Sun and Earth in late September and late November of 2011 after being slingshot around the Sun back into deep space, but powerful solar gravitational forces crushed the comet, grinding it into stellar ice cubes and dust. Was it a coincidence once Elenin was pulverized that no quakes transpired on the next two lineups? On the other hand, could there be a force far subtler than currently measurable by astronomical instruments that emanates out of seemingly small or distant cosmic bodies with some influence upon the Earth’s seismic activity?

I have often explained in articles about the Japanese Tsunami how great quakes seem to fall around or exactly on the date of Full or New Moons, especially when there is a 90 degree square of Uranus with other planets.

Uranus in Aries (the cosmic forces of fires, wars, revolution) is square Pluto in Capricorn (the definer of generational ages, status quo establishments of power, the economy) starting in May, intensifying through June until October before the square ends in November, shortly after the US presidential elections. Saturn (ruler of karma, forces of limitation and hard reality checks) enters Scorpio during the final months of the Uranus-Pluto Square for its two-year transit.

Very powerful astrological stuff!

These planets will define the year’s intense theme of collisions of overlording power with popular rebellion as well as the sudden release of tectonic plates in earthquakes, new tsunami episodes and volcanic eruptions. The Uranus-Pluto-Saturn effect is the main theme of my book Predictions for 2012. More than any year for which I have made forecasts, the volatile stars in 2012 will drive global politics, economics, the weather and other natural disasters. While there is time between now and May to prepare for these oncoming blows of the year 2012, I invite you to read this most important almanac of prophecies I have yet composed.

***

Here is the second half of my critique of Niall Ferguson’s hawkish arguments in favor of the US and Israel starting a war in the Middle East against Iran.

I resume my answer to the last four of five arguments against waging war with Iran that Newsweek contributor and Oxford Historian, Niall Ferguson, attempted to debunk.

You can read my rebuttal to the first argument by clicking on Niall Ferguson.

Here are the four remaining arguments in detail. I show them once again to reveal how Ferguson does not, in my view, adequately debunk each point after he has defined them before taking them on later in his article one at a time:

FERGUSON
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.

He frames argument 2 as a region-wide explosion of Muslims across the Middle East but does not confront the ire of millions of Muslims. He hops over that and talks about a handful of Sunni “powers” i.e., monarchs and presidential dictators who would obviously shed no tear for Iranian nuclear ambitions whether proven or unproven, but that is not the argument he framed above.

I find the opening of his rebuttal cavalier:

[ARGUMENT 2]
Eruption of the entire Muslim world. All the crocodiles of Africa could not equal the fake tears that will be shed by the Sunni powers of the region if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are checked.

HOGUE:
Nice metaphor, but it is a “croc” full of something else other than reptilian tears when the anger of 70 million Shia Muslims of Iran are de-Niall-ed, brushed off.

Ferguson avoids the point: anger arising in the Muslim streets teaming with one out of six human beings.

Let us say, for argument’s sake that Sunni “powers” and even the vast Sunni majority in the streets is Islamic dominant countries are relieved that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are checked, even if only temporarily.

What about the Muslim Shia minority in and outside of Iran?

Could they not erupt?

They number in the tens of millions and though they crowd together for security in a Middle Eastern sea of Sunnis, they happen to live atop a majority of the Middle Eastern oil. Take for instance 70 million Shia Iranians and Shia Arab Iranians under whose feet lurk the third largest oil reserve in Western Iran.

Iraq, with the second largest reserve is 60 percent Shia Arab. The Shia currently controls the central Iraqi government. The al-Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr coalition are openly sympathetic and even beholden to the Shia Iranian theocracy next door.

Now to Saudi Arabia with the number one oil reserve. What will happen in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia where most of that oil reserve is sunk under the sands topped by an unruly majority Shia population that Sunni Saudi Arabian military police have frequently had to suppress?

Now let us fly to the Gulf oil-rich Sheikdom of Bahrain. It has a Sunni monarchy suppressing a Shia majority. It has the base of the US Fifth Fleet watching Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.

Move beyond the oil regions.

You have other strategically dire consequences if Shia’s explode with rage. The beleaguered Alawite clan still controls Syria with its sizable regional ballistic missile arsenal.

Then there are Iran’s allies and proxies, the Lebanese Shia, governed by Hezbullah, bristling with 20,000 Iranian built rockets pointed at Northern Israel – many of which have an increased range that can strike heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods in Tel Aviv.

Can one ignore the ire of Shias of Hezbullah in southern Lebanon?

What about Sunni radical groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip?

Reword the old Mideast aphorism, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” What the Sunni Palestinians of Hamas say, “The Shia enemy of my Jewish enemies is my friend.”

What if these proxies of Iran answer an Israeli preemptive Pearl Harbor attack on Teheran with rocket barrages on Israel from the north and the south?

As we said in Part One (click on Ferguson), the Israeli Army during the last Lebanese War in 2006 crossed their northern border and where checked in fierce fighting on the ground by well dug in and fortified forces of Hezbullah. Israeli forces moved into Gaza but only fought in the suburbs of the sprawling well defended labyrinth of multi-storied city slums lest soldiers of Zion got bogged down in a Middle Eastern version of the street, cellar and sewer combat of Stalingrad where they would suffer very high casualties.

It only takes the ire of the Shias to erupt if Israel strikes Iran. They alone, without Sunni support could draw Israel into two urban wars on two fronts whilst being bombarded. Could Shia clansman Bashar al-Assad bring Syria into the conflict, scud missiles and all?

Ferguson sidesteps all of the above under the mantle of addressing what Sunni kings and dictators might do if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are destroyed. Indeed, he does not address something even more urgent, that these Israeli air strikes will at best postpone Iran from having atomic weapons only by a few years. More than this, Ferguson does not address those in Mossad and the CIA who are publicly declaring Iran is not even pursuing nukes.

That is a lot for a senior fellow of Jesus College in Oxford to avoid!

Ferguson is not confronting Muslim fallout of another kind. Nuclear fallout from Iranian reactors bombed by Israeli jets will cast their pall of death over large areas of Iran, Afghanistan and far more dangerous and unstable Muslim states with 100 nuclear weapons, such as Pakistan. Shias “and” Sunnis alike will be angered, poisoned and killed by these radioactive clouds.

Do you not think that might arouse one out of six human beings on Earth of Muslim faith to lobby for economic if not military action against the West and Israel?

Perhaps even a second OPEC oil embargo on the West?

[ARGUMENT 3]
The double-dip recession. Oil prices are on the way down thanks to concerted efforts of Europe’s leaders to reenact the Great Depression. An Israel-Iran war would push them up, but the Saudis stand ready to pump out additional supplies to limit the size of the spike.

HOGUE
Again, Ferguson strays from responding to what he first framed as the argument against war with Iran. His hyperbolic threat of a “death dealing blow” to the global economy is watered down into a “double-dip recession.” Then he plays with the idea of oil consumption in Europe collapsing because of the euro bank crisis. How can he, a usually good economic forecaster be so myopic to the data coming out of China and Asia that guarantees oil demand will be well offset by Asian economic growth this year.

Oil prices “on the way down”???

I think Ferguson should leave the forecasting to others because February closed with oil prices per barrel not going down. Americans are looking at $4 a gallon gas prices soon and $5 by Memorial Day Weekend in late May. Europeans will see petrol prices rise $8 and $10.

He says the Saudis will come to the rescue, flooding the market with oil. Will that happen if a nuclear reactor containment dome in Brushehr, Iran, torn wide open by Israeli bunker buster bombs, spews Saudi Arabia with fallout? Moreover, how will that Saudi oil get to market with the Strait of Hormuz becoming an anti-shipping missile shooting gallery, or if the Iranians start firing Shahab medium ballistic missiles at Saudi refineries and pipelines, or the Shia majority populating that oil region revolts against the Sunni Saudi king?

[ARGUMENT 4]
The theocracy’s new legitimacy. Please send me a list of all the regimes of the past 60 years that have survived such military humiliation. Saddam Hussein’s survival of Gulf War I is the only case I can think of—and we got him the second time around.

HOGUE
This is not the argument first established by Ferguson in his own words. The issue is, will the Iranian regime be strengthened? Will Iranians drop their differences with their government and rally around the Ayatollahs when their country is attacked by Israel?

Many abusive, dictatorial regimes when attacked see their people rally around the flag. Even a mass murderer of his own people – Saddam Hussein times ten – like Joseph Stalin will have his people rally around his dictatorship when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

Ferguson should not flippantly dismiss the power of Iranian racial “and” national pride here. Instead, he makes a flimsy comparison of Iran to Iraq as if Arabs and Persian Muslims would react the same, even though a historian hailing from ivory towers of Oxford should know his Middle Eastern history better.

A fatal flaw of Western thinking is to compare a war with Iraq to a war with the Iranians. Iran is mountainous, and spread out over 500,000 square miles with a population of 70 million. Iraq is mostly flat with most of the people (a population the size of the Netherlands) living in a string of cities in oases strung along the Tigris and Euphrates river flood plain in a country a less than a third the size of Iran. Targets of opportunity abounded in Iraq once its outdated and rusting Soviet-cold war air defense system was easily obliterated. Iran’s air defenses are modern and the targets are far harder to find in that mountainous, vast landscape. Israel would fly missions inside Iran at the limit of its range.

During the later half of the 1980s I frequently flew over Iraq and Iran on my way to be with Osho in India. Iraq’s pancake flat and exposed terrain zips past one’s window quickly. Iran, however, takes several hours to pass over its row upon row of great mountain ranges and deep desert valleys. You can hide many nuclear and military assets deep beneath those mountains and that bedrock terrain.

Moreover, Iraq is a fleeting and artificial political creation of Niall Ferguson’s grandfathers’ day during the waning British Imperium. White men, not Arabs who lived there, imposed it. It could just as easily vanish in the desert sandstorms of history.

Iraq did not exist before 1918 as one nation.

Iran, however, has consistently survived as a nation of Persians, created and sustained by Persians for 3,000 years!

It survived Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. This 3,000-year-old nation may survive baby countries like the United States (founded in 1776) and Israel (founded in 1948).

[ARGUMENT 5]
The responsible nuclear Iran. Wait. We’re supposed to believe that a revolutionary Shiite theocracy is overnight going to become a sober, calculating disciple of the realist school of diplomacy … because it has finally acquired weapons of mass destruction? Presumably this would be in the same way that, if German scientists had developed an atomic bomb as quickly as the Manhattan Project, the Second World War would have ended with a negotiated settlement brokered by the League of Nations.

HOGUE
Niall, please…don’t mix your Aryans. For those of you who may not be aware, the name “Iran” is derived from an abbreviation in Persian for the “Land of the Aryans.”

Iran is the homeland of the Aryan races. This is true. However, by Ferguson’s own projections he compares eastern Iranian Aryans with European “Western” Aryans as synonymous with Hitler’s Nazis and their scientists hypothetically making atomic weapons. For one thing Hitler saw no future warfare practicality in atomic weaponry so he withheld resources and Heisenberg’s atomic research never advanced beyond a preliminary stage.

So much for German master Aryan racial foresight, hmm?

Until recently, the Western brand of Aryan was in the collective programmed habit of nearly annihilating himself and his civilization more than once. Take for instance the Thirty Years War of the 17th century, then the second “Thirty Years War” – the period between 1914 through 1945 when Germany destroyed two empires, the Imperial and Nazi German Empires. The meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of the second under Hitler nearly destroyed German civilization altogether.

Iranian Aryans learned early on and long ago to patiently “last” and “abide” history’s epochs

Rather than wave that black swastika in a white circle on a red blood-flag herring of what Hitler could have, should have, would have done with an atomic bomb, I think a historian enjoying the privileged scholar’s allowance of Oxford annual stipend ought not to stray from hard historical facts.

Here is a hard fact.

At the time of this writing, no nuclear weapon has ever been launched or set off in a war by totalitarian regimes. Only a democracy. Only “the United States” has incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, leaving hundreds of thousands more to live with the plague of radiation disease.

Another fact.

Iran signed and ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Fact: Israel signed but HAS NOT RATIFIED the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Israel has introduced atomic weapons to the Middle East since the 1960s.

Fact: If there is to be an arms race and a regional cold war between Iran and Israel, Israel has introduced it. If we allow for historical precedent, Israel being a “democracy” should not coddle alert minds to forget that so far ONLY democracies have used the A-Bomb on others.

Israel has introduced this horror to the region. It will have to live with it, just like the US and Soviet Union had to live with their arms race – one the United States introduced. By the time the Soviets caught up with testing their first atomic bomb, the US possessed about the same number of atom bombs Israel is believed to possess: over 200.

Shall the world be let in to inspect these Israeli bombs?

Before war fever sets us marching with open eyes into a conflagration, here are a few final FACTS to digest:

The chief of the US Join Chiefs of Staff that Niall Ferguson utilized in a hypothetical dialogue with Obama earlier in his article has officially come forth, testifying before US Congress under oath, concluding that there is NO EVIDENCE that Iran is actively seeking a nuclear weapon.

FACT: The CIA has also concurred the same, before Congress.

FACT:

War fever over Iran today has a disturbing parallel with a ramp up to war with Iraq in the recent past. Momentum accelerates, fueled by flimsy evidence and hearsay to kill fellow human beings. Iraq was attacked in 2003 for possessing weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Iran could be attacked for advancing a nuclear program that may indeed be only for civilian use.

Now to Ferguson’s final thoughts:

Ferguson’s Summation. The single biggest danger in the Middle East today is not the risk of a six-day Israeli war against Iran. It is the risk that Western wishful nonthinking allows the mullahs of Tehran to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Because I am in no doubt that they would take full advantage of such a lethal lever. We would have acquiesced in the creation of an empire of extortion.

War is an evil. But sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement. The people who don’t yet know that are the ones still in denial about what a nuclear-armed Iran would end up costing us all.

It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.

Hitler in 1941 thought he could take down the Soviet behemoth in eight weeks. Ferguson presumes a war with Iran will be as short and decisive as Israel’s masterfully prosecuted, preemptive Six Day War in 1967 that caught its enemies Syria, Egypt and Jordan, completely by surprise as they amassed forces on the Israeli frontiers.

I should not have to lecture a famous historian who seems to have strayed from respected degrees in history to a degree of irrationality, but here goes…

You cannot compare what Israel faced in the Six Day War with the challenges it must meet to successfully attack Iran in 2012. To do so is no better than Hitler presuming the fall of the vast Soviet Union in 1941 would be as rapid and easy to accomplish as the fall of itty-bitty France in 1940.

As it turned out Hitler’s invasion of Russia was beyond Germany’s military capabilities. Israel will face a similar over-extension crisis if it should attack Iran if its leaders and generals have the conceit to think like Ferguson that this will be another Six Day War game.

An Israeli gamble only has a chance if it can drag in the United States. If it is successful, we have, yet again nuclear democracies behaving badly, attacking other nations without evidence to support it.

One of these democracies had no qualms using the bomb and it seems that democracies like the American can crock up some cuddly mythology that the bomb and only the bomb ended their war with Japan in 1945. This fission fairy tale completely overlooks two factors far more significant in prompting Japan’s eventual surrender. Japan’s peace overtures to Stalin were answered by a sudden and overwhelming Soviet invasion overrunning Japanese forces in Manchuria and the Kurile Islands. The Soviet occupation of the Kurile Islands threaten an invasion of the Japanese home islands from the north that would divide Japan like Germany and Korea occupied by communist and non-communist sectors.

Then there is the most important factor. For six months Japan in back channel talks with the US State department sought assurances that Emperor Hirohito would remain on his throne if Japan surrendered. When nearly a month had passed after the atomic attacks, the Japanese government at last received a verbal assurance that the Emperor would remain on his throne. Japan surrendered to the “devil they knew” (the Western allies) forestalling an imminent Soviet invasion of the home islands from the direction of the Kurile archipelago just a few miles east of Hokkaido Island.

Now then, if the bomb had been so overwhelmingly a factor in Japan surrendering, why did they keep fighting for nearly a month after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated, especially when the US threatened (buffed) that they had a whole arsenal of A-Bombs ready to drop?

This is the first time I have read Niall Ferguson stray from objective historical facts into a worked up state of Western cultural chauvinism over the Muslim world. Perhaps it is a new development fostered by his marriage to Ayaan Hirsi Magan Ali. She is a Somali born, former fundamentalist Muslim who currently is a practicing Atheist. I also read and respect Ayaan courageous fight against Muslim persecution of women. I can understand her bias against Islam, her passionate hatred for that religion is authentic, but I cannot let the Oxford historian, blinded by his love for his wife perhaps, get away with misplacing and utterly forgetting his scholarly objectivity.

And I have a darker concern about Niall Ferguson.

I am beginning to wonder if he, unwittingly or openly, has become a media tool of Neoconservative and Zionist aspirations that would have the US military become their infernal tool to finish the job started with the take down of Iraq.

Iran has always been next in their crosshairs. Iran may now be under a theocratic dictatorship, but that is not why there is a pressure to make war with Iran. Perhaps the motivation is more corporate than ethical. American and British oil conglomerates once controlled Iran’s oil by placing their puppet dictator, the Shah of Iran, on the throne, even after Iranians voted for democracy in the early 1950s and demanded the dictator stand down. The CIA helped Western oil corporations get their oil business back. (I mean, how dare the wogs govern their own resources when a superior Western civilization needs and better controls it.)

The West crushed a democracy movement for Iranians, by Iranians using a ballot.

The Shah returned. His dictatorship – brutal.

In 1979, the Iranians rose up again to take his tyranny down with guns and Ayatollahs. Now we have a new tyranny of an Ayatollah theocracy over Iran. The West is responsible for it and democracy in Iran, before the tyranny of Ayatollahs, is not in their best interests.

Now British and US oil corporations want Iran back in their pocket. So they could soon let slip the F-16s of Israel to take down the Ayatollah regime. They aim to get their oil back.

So here we have the Imperials within the military move again and they have their mouthpieces, it seems, writing in Newsweek.

Will they succeed?

In Part One of this series, I cautioned Ferguson and other Western-centric scholars not to overestimate imperial reach and overvalue Western technological superiority when waging war with one’s inferior brown skinned enemies.

A British born scholar of Oxford should remember the lesson of Isandlwana where the most advanced military force of the late 19thcentury with its Gatling guns, Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles and cannons, was wiped out by black natives using iron age technology: simple cowhide shields and assegai spears. The Zulu annihilated the British because the proud Western Imperialists thought their adversaries were lesser men.

Do not “Zulu” the Iranians.

John Hogue
(11 March 2012)

Books by John Hogue

POST PROPHECY STATEMENT
I must state this for the record. Despite a very hard sell going on from the Israeli Prime minister, the Zionist-NeoCons in Jerusalem and Washington DC and the western news outlets, deep down, my “Oracle” contends that there will be no war with Iran in 2012.

There are certain factors that Niall Ferguson seems unequipped mentally these days to factor into his bully-war pulpit’s scenario. Key among these are the Israeli people. A large majority consistently poll against the war and would rather have Netanyahu’s government address skyrocketing prices for basic goods destroying Israeli quality of life. This drumbeat for war with Iran is pontificated from the top down only. A majority of the Israeli people are not for it, especially because war could only make their dire economic straits far worse.

Secondly, 2012 is not the best year to strike Iran with the elections in the Untied States taking place. They see in the Knesset what I see. Obama will be the next president. Better stay in his good graces. Attacks on Iran by Israel may not take place before the US presidential election is decided. In my forecasts for 2012 written in November of last year, I pinpointed the highest chance for an attack on Iran for a specific time in September 2012.

I find today’s reports, therefore, interesting circulating out of the British Sunday Times. Apparently a White House official leaked a revelation that Netanyahu in his private meeting with President Obama last week in Washington DC promised not to strike Iran before September and may well strike sometime shortly after the US presidential elections are finished on 6 November.

If they do strike in September, that may have unforeseen politically advantageous consequences for Obama. The American people will follow their mass-unconscious habit of rallying around their incumbent president during times of national crisis. Moreover, if Israel should wait until after the elections, they will know who is in charge in Washington and can weigh the karmic backlash of a preemptive attack on Iran. If Obama is there for a second term, the war with Iran will be delayed three years. If Mitt Romney is there, it will still be somewhat delayed until Netanyahu can get his measure of the new man in the White House.

With all of this said, my “Oracle” concurs with Nostradamus’ astrological window for war with Iran. The big war is not happening in 2012. Look to the years 2015 and 2016.

Join my newsletter list Here.

And now some words from my meditation teacher about how one can allow a “passive alertness” to happen. I cannot think of a more necessary knack for these over-mind-storming times:

Osho at 21, the year of his purported enlightenment.

Be more meditative. Whenever you have any opportunity, any space, any time, just allow things to happen around you. Look deeply, attentively, but don’t be active – because activity means thinking. Sitting quietly, allowing things to happen, you will become silent. Then you will come to know that silence is not a quality of the mind. Mind cannot be made silent. Silence is the quality of your inner soul, of your inner being. It is always there but because of the chattering, the constant chattering of the mind, you cannot hear it. Whenever you become passive, non-thinking, you become aware of it. Then you are unoccupied. In that unoccupied moment meditation happens. So whatsoever the situation – sitting in a marketplace – don’t think that the singing of the birds is a must. It is not. The humming of a marketplace is as beautiful as the humming of the birds – people carrying on their work, talking, chattering, noise all around – you just sit there passively. Remember this word passive, and another word, alert. Passive alertness is the key. Remain passive, not doing anything, just listening. Listening is not a doing. To listen to anything there is nothing to do, your ears are always open.   –OSHO

Contact me if you would like to receive more information about the Osho meditation techniques I have been using since 1980.