John Loeffler -- Kahwump!

Additional Titles

KAHWUMP!

By John Loeffler
April 15, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
Incoming! Kahwump! Few Americans have connected the collapse of Enron with the collapse of the World Trade Center with the collapse of Argentina's currency. However, they are all opening salvos in the first war of the 21st Century, which may well be recorded as World War III when the dust settles, and the dead are tallied.
Global War 21C-1

The new war has been a while in fermentation and much as Chamberlain's efforts to restrain Hitler in 1939 Munich failed, so War 21C-1 will not be denied its day by peace movements; it already has hideous momentum and too much stands at risk for the stakeholders, comprised of everyone in the world.
At the end of the cold war, marked notably by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the cold war rules dissolved. After World War II there were two global superpowers and everything that happened was cast in the light of those two powers. Even "skirmishes" like Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Afghanistan were small power imbalances between the two giants in an otherwise global stability. However, when the Berlin toppled on November 9, 1989, it released long pent up tensions and while politicians chanted peace mantras during the transitional 1990s, numerous smaller powers previously held in check jockeyed for position. Furthermore the globalist crowd, always lurking behind the scenes, continued the pressure for “global governance,” which had to displace the old order before the new order could come into place. Like a volcanic eruption, the underground pressure kept mounting and those reading the pressure gauges knew that sooner or later, something had to blow.
Guerre sans frontières

The global paradigm has radically changed and overcoming the human tendency of trying to "get back to normal" is essential for the 21st Century. The meaning of 21st Century "normal" will not follow 20th Century definitions. At war's end, much will have changed forever; a point of no return was passed in the night as the global passengers slept on.
The new war will most likely exist as a series of "kahwumps," followed by a period of recoil, retaliation and retrenchment, only to be followed by another kahwump.
The new war is largely a guerilla war among a dance of combatants, where the sides are unsure and switching sides may become commonplace depending on the day, skirmish or location in question: terrorists carrying out a political or religious agenda, governments defending themselves from terrorists or other governments helping terrorists; speculators or terrorists attacking governments in the money markets and the internet, governments defending themselves from their citizens as their schemes collapse of their own insupportable economic weight. Internal dissent, small group rivalry and background chaos will most likely mark the first ten years of the new century. We will be constantly surprised at a stream of emerging facts as we learn who did who to whom and what.

Paradigm Lost

Old ideologies -- particular the rose-colored leftist ones -- will receive a sound thrashing as reality breaks through, no longer able to maintain their position when confronted by world events and economic realities. Even radical environmentalism is on its way to becoming unsustainable (sic) in the new environment.
War 21C-1 will be an open-ended war without national borders involving numerous players for whom national boundaries have no significance save for a place to hide. Americans will sooner or later wake up to the fact that they lost the war in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, for example, is not a country but thousands of trained warriors scattered in unknown locations around the world, all intent on bringing damage to their opponents' homelands. The ones captured in Afghanistan are few compared to the whole number of terrorists trained there.
Some are "sleepers" in the very lands they intend attacking. They achieve their goals not by an armed frontal attack but by stealth. Some attacks may be merely electronic. They can hide in a host of different countries. Thus eradicating the enemy will necessitate pre-emptory or retaliatory military action within the borders of sovereign nations. Already a back swell of resentment is growing against the US, creating enemies where none were before. This will trigger unforeseen actions and consequences.
The blurring of boundaries and jurisdictions will provide the United Nations with fanfare music for trumpeting its goal of global governance in the name of preventing all future wars. That anyone should be listening is surprising considering its track record of 100% failure to accomplish this during the last 50 years of its existence. Already the UN is planning on becoming self-funding by means of a global tax with which it can hire its own peacekeeping force (read "army"). It is claiming legal jurisdiction over much of the "global commons" and parts of sovereign nations themselves, and shucky-doo, they’re thrilled the International Criminal Court will now be in session, ready to prosecute anyone who is not on their side of Global War 21C-1 but don’t look for equality under the law. It doesn’t exist in UN eyes.
The new war uses both conventional weapons and unconventional ones. There may be squaring off armies on battlefields occasionally but much of this war will be hidden from view, especially in the electronic and economic sectors. The physical aspect of this war is primarily infrastructure disruption: psychological, physical and political.

Psychowar

Terrorism is designed to intimidate a civilian population by unexpectedly killing a limited number or disrupting infrastructure. Even two or three curies of radioactive material spread around a downtown area without resorting to a dirty nuke device can shut the area down indefinitely. There is plenty of such material available in places from hospitals to oil rigs.
Terrorists have a widening array of arms, biological and nuclear weapons, that hitherto were available only to select countries. There are serious rumors in the intel underground about new, more compact, bigger bang bombs. Terrorpros now have serious electronic and economic weapons, which can be deployed against their enemies in the world's money and commodity markets, as well as the world's communications systems. Competition for increasingly scarce resources such as oil will become fierce.[1]

Retaliation against terrorism is difficult without information about the attackers, who appeared from nowhere and disappear to nowhere or destroy themselves in the attack, which leads to the next phase of the war.
Truth: The First Casualty

Truth is the first casualty of any war. The new war will be fought intensely as an electronic infowar at two levels:
(1) Political -- as verbal claims, counter claims, information, disinformation and misinformation reverberate around the globe in seconds on satellites and the internet. Combatants, governments and financial organizations can be expected to emit a huge quantity of misinformation designed to steer entire populations to pre-determined actions and outcomes in the war, rather than to provide them with genuine information and perspective. Obtaining "clean" information will be an essential skill of the new 21C-1 warriors. Learn one lesson before we go any further with Global War 21C-1: when reality sets in, politicians panic. Pundit and politician information during wars is designed to steer the public towards pre-determined outcomes; not provide complete information.
(2) Intelligence -- as combatants coordinate their efforts worldwide and governments attempt to prevent incidents within their own borders, snooping of all kinds will become the order of the day. Ultimately, everyone will be suspect, even those citizens whom governments are supposed to defend. Indeed, a key goal of Islamic terrorism is destroying the freedoms enjoyed in the West by turning governments on their own people during the fight against terrorism.

(3) After each kahwump, hastily ill-composed laws will emerge, creating, new categories of electronic and paper crimes, violation of which may carry hefty prison terms or fines. These will invariably sweep up many innocent "criminals," who inadvertently violate the constantly-evolving legal matrix, which no one can possibly know thoroughly.

(4) Since police cannot be everywhere, citizens will be encouraged to spy on one another, and the invariable abuse of system will set in. Don't like what your neighbor believes politically or religiously? Just turn him in for saying he was going to bomb something. That will make a lot of trouble for him and the burden of proof will be on him that he didn't say it.
(5) As governments try to track the movements of active terrorists and kahwump follows kahwump, there will be unrelenting pressure to track the movements of everyone: cameras with facial recognition software, ID registration of citizens, databases, and the ever-popular chips. Private organizations will be encouraged by governments to help them know as much as possible about the daily lives of everyone. Databasing of detailed information of westerners is far more advanced than most realize and what governments are prevented from doing by law, they buy from private "compusnoop" organizations or have their allies do it for them. Privacy was a quaint novelty of the 19th and 20th centuries.
(6) There will be almost irresistible pressure to suspend or subvert legal protections in the name of making people safe. In the midst of the newly emerging legal structure, some conservative voices like Alan Keyes, Chris Ruddy, John Whitehead and Paul Weyrich have recognized that if a country destroys the very freedoms it purports to defend in the process of fighting the war, the enemy wins by default.
Ecowars
Key to the new war is economics. Fighting economic wars on a daily basis is essential in fighting the war as combatants electronically jockey for control of information, resources -- especially oil -- and currencies.
Few people understand the precarious state to which the world's currencies have come, which is a factor in and of itself. Our next article, "Facing the Abysmal Abyss," deals with the impending debacle of the global monetary system, which will be a major factor in global war 21C-1. Think the recession is over? Foolish person, you. Indeed, the physical, political and economic aspects of the war will invariably combine. One thing is certain: the era of stability, peace and prosperity is over. But fear not: the world has been unstable before. God promises to carry His own safely through whatever may come. But remember, if he speaks to you about protecting yourself in the times to come, you would be well advised to act on his advice. God applauds vigilance

[1] For a good background on this, read James Puplava's Powershift - Oil, Money, & War at www.financialsense.com

© John Loeffler All Rights Reserved

John Loeffler is host of the nationally syndicated news program Steel on Steel, which is produced by his wife Carol Loeffler. Both are career broadcasters, who met working for a major television network. Steel on Steel can be heard anytime at www.steelonsteel.com on the internet. Tape subscriptions are available from (800) 829-5646 or (208)765-8337