	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 8-Oct-06
Learning-disabled journalists and politicians continue to predict Iraq civil war

Web Log - October, 2006

Learning-disabled journalists and politicians continue to predict Iraq civil war

Occasionally journalists take a break from their heavy-breathing over Congressional pages, and when they do, they go back to predicting a civil war in Iraq.

Panelist Fareed Zakaria on Sunday's This Week With George Stephanopoulos (Source: ABC)

Panelist Fareed Zakaria on Sunday's This Week With George Stephanopoulos (Source: ABC)

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek International editor appearing on ABC, said that the Iraqi government has failed and the American mission has failed.

"If you look at the last 3-4 months, it's absolutely clear that a civil war dynamic has set in," said Zakaria on Sunday. "This is happening. ... The trend is moving in the wrong direction on every issue that relates to a building civil war."

If I'm not mistaken, Zakaria has been saying almost exactly the same thing for several years. If he predicts a civil war week after week, and a civil war never materializes, you'd think that he'd learn.

Zakaria is a "Generation-Xer," born in Mumbai (Bombay), India, in 1964. Most Indians I've known have been extremely intelligent, and I recall from my days as a mathematician studying at MIT that Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan is considered by many to be the greatest and most brilliant number theorist in the history of mathematics. But that brilliance hasn't rubbed off on Zakaria.

Obviously he must be learning-impaired. When a two-year-old baby fails to balance one ball on top of another a few times, sooner or later he realizes it isn't going to happen. But this guy keeps trying to balance the ball week after week, repeating his civil war theory, and just can't seem to learn, a fairly frequent problem among Boomers and Generation Xers that I've known.

The learning impairment includes an inability to connect closely related events. If he'd read his own magazine this week, he would have found an interview with Jimmy Carter saying, "I would say that in the last 30 years or so one of my main commitments in life has been to bring peace to Israel. But I am frustrated when terrorist activities cause a serious setback as they have among the Palestinians, and by Hizbullah and the reluctance of Israel to withdraw from occupied territories."

Or, if he'd read the competing Time Magazine, he would have found an article saying, "dreams of peace are fading fast" in Gaza. It says,

Here's how a civil war could start. Islamic preachers under Hamas' influence begin denouncing Abbas in mosques as a stooge of the U.S. and Israel, undercutting his credibility. Hamas would then use its majority in the legislative body to try to oust Abbas as President.

If that were to fail, Hamas' fighters would take to the streets in Gaza and the West Bank territories. Such an internecine conflict would devastate the Palestinians, since many families have fathers who support Abbas and sons who belong to Hamas. And the consequences for Israel could be just as dire."

Mideast, showing Israel/Palestine, Muslim countries, and Orthodox Christian countries

Mideast, showing Israel/Palestine, Muslim countries, and Orthodox Christian countries

Now for some reason, Fareed Zakaria, editor at Newsweek International, is so learning-impaired that he can't make the connection between what's happening in Iraq and what's happening in Gaza. You'd think that a Newsweek international editor would be able to do that, but apparently not, even though funding from al-Qaeda and Iran are major factors in the violence in both places. I mean, all it takes is connecting two dots. When my son was two years old, he was able to connect a lot more than two dots, but apparently this guy can't.

Well, I'm being nasty, huh? I shouldn't pick on Fareed Zakaria. I'm sure he's a nice guy, and very intelligent, and that he's no more learning-impaired than the rest of the Washington journalists and politicians. And what I mean is that all of them are more stupid than the average two-year-old: they can't learn from their mistakes, and they can't connect two dots right in front of them.

What's going on in the Mideast is exactly what I predicted in 2003.

Based on Generational Dynamics, and the fact that Iraq is in a "generational awakening" era while the Palestine/Israel region is in a "generational crisis" era, I made the following predictions:

On May 1, 2003, when the "Mideast Roadmap to Peace" was announced, I predicted: The Roadmap would fail, and the disappearance of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat would signal a major generational change that would lead the region into massive regional war, probably within a couple of years after Arafat's death.

Then, on August 19, 2003, after the terrorist attacks had begun and the terrorists blew up the United Nations building in Baghdad, I predicted: There would not be massive uprisings against the Americans or a civil war. If the terrorist attacks continue and get worse, it won't be because of civil war; it will be because of funding by Palestinian groups or other external groups, and that large numbers of Palestinian and "mujahadeen" terrorists are moving into Iraq, making it a theatre of war for the larger regional war involving the Palestinian Arabs and the al Qaeda against Americans in Iraq.

Basically, a civil war in Iraq is impossible, one generation past the genocidal Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s. The worst that could happen is a brief struggle that would fizzle out quickly. Iraq is centrally located in the Mideast, as the map above shows, and any regional war will include Iraq as a theatre of war, but not as a civil war.

But the Palestinians, in a generational crisis era, are quite susceptible to a civil war, and the threat of a civil war is quite real in Gaza, as is the threat of a major war between Arabs and Jews. This war will affect the entire region, and has already created a rising tide of violence throughout the region, including Iraq.

I've repeated these predictions many times, and I've made numerous other predictions along the way, involving things like Iran, the Lebanon war, and Darfur, and all of these predictions have come true or are heavily trending in that direction. And no Generational Dynamics predictions have turned out false.

That's why I keep saying: If you want to know what's going on in the world, this is the only web site on the entire internet that tells you. Generational Dynamics is not ideological or religious in any way; predictions are based on generational patterns that have recurred over and over throughout all times and places in history. There have been other "predictive" or "early warning" web sites in the last few years, but they've all closed down because they keep getting things wrong. This web site has not gotten things wrong. It doesn't make any money (sigh!), but it does serve a public service by telling the few thousand people who regularly read it what's actually happening in the world, so that they can prepare for it.

And so, returning to the main subject, we have journalists and politicians talk about Iraq as if it were on an island somewhere, unaffected by events around it.

The problem is that these people are mostly Boomers (members of the Baby Boomer generation, born after WW II), and they have no skills except the ability to argue. They can't solve problems; all they can do is criticize other people who try to solve problems.

They all think that the Iraq war is like the Vietnam war, but as I've explained many times, America is in a very different place now than it was in the 1960s, and the Iraq war is the opposite of the Vietnam war in many ways.

You don't see college students protesting against the Iraq war, because they care less about the war than about the fact that their parents can't stop screaming at each other. The only people who protest the war are grandmothers carrying around 'Stop the War' signs. The signs are leftovers from the 1960s, when these same grandmothers were college girls, burning their bras. They're reliving their childhoods, but today's college students aren't reliving it with them.

Journalists and politicians don't understand this at all. They all think that they understand the lessons of Vietnam better than anyone else, and they keep getting shocked and surprised whenever things don't work out the same way.

The worst recent example I've seen of this is Bob Woodward, with his new book "State of Denial." This guy actually believes -- get this -- that dozens, perhaps hundreds of people in the administration are all lying to each other about Iraq, and that he, Bob Woodward, sees the truth that they don't. They're all in a "state of denial," but Bob Woodward isn't, because he's smarter than everyone.

He particularly accuses them of re-fighting the Vietnam war. This is a particularly ironic accusation, since Woodward is guiltiest of everyone of reliving the Vietnam War. Woodward was one of the journalists who played the biggest part in bringing down Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War era, and like the anti-war grannies who are trying to relive their exciting, erotic, childhood bra-burning days, Woodward is trying to relive the most exciting and erotic time of his childhood, hoping to bring down another President as he did the last one.

His book title, "State of Denial" is so ironic because it's the title of the entire current era. In Gaza or Darfur or China, people are completely oblivious to what's going on in the world, denying what's going on.

And not just in geopolitics. Let's talk about the stock market. The Dow index hit a new high this week, and the champagne corks were a-popping.

This same week, as in every week, I listened to analysts on CNBC, CNN, Fox News, etc., and read financial news on the internet. And they all out and out lie about price/earnings (P/E) ratios, also called "valuations" of stocks. I won't go into the details, since I've gone through it many times before. But basically they all use today's stock prices and divide by inflated future earnings earnings estimates, rather than dividing by last year's earnings, which is the correct computation. They must know this, because it's their job to know it. But either they're stupid or they're in a "state of denial."

So, when you hear a financial analyst on television use the word "valuation," referring to the stock market, you'll know that he's simply lying. Or stupid. It doesn't really matter which.

The state of denial of financial analysts and journalists is based on the fact that they can't face up to how the stock market is 200%+ overpriced, P/E ratios (valuations) have been astronomical for 12 years, and that a major stock market correction to Dow 4500 or so is way overdue. By lying about current valuations, they deny the reality of what's going on.

The thing that I really can't get over is new Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. As I explained in "Ben S. Bernanke: The man without agony," former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was very concerned about a major financial crisis, but Bernanke doesn't even believe in bubbles.

When speaking about America's astronomical and exponential growing debt to other countries in March, 2005, Bernanke blamed debt on "global savings glut" in other countries.

Now I know that people in (my) Boomer generation are arrogant and narcissistic, but to actually stand up before the world and blame America's wild credit spree on other nations requires brass balls of a hardness that any other Boomer (or Xer) could only imagine. This is what a "state of denial" brings people to.

Several people have remarked recently that I should be happy or gratified now that all the predictions I've been making are now coming true, and that the validity of Generational Dynamics is getting more and more firmly established.

That may be true in some intellectual way, such as when you solve a math puzzle or a chess problem, but I have a very strong and increasing sense of foreboding about what's going to happen -- and by this I mean to me personally as well as the consequences to the world of the various predictions.

This isn't my only experience of this type. I've been a systems computer (IT) consultant since 1978, and I've worked on dozens of projects for dozens of clients. (Incidentally, I'm currently available, if anyone needs something.) On five occasions since that time, I've realized that a development project was in trouble when no one else did, or at least when no one else was admitting it. (Computer projects typically are months or years late, so you'd think people would learn.) On those five occasions I reported this fact to my management, along with available evidence. On four of those five occasions I was fired within a month. On all five occasions, my predictions turned out to be 100% correct.

The Trojan Horse in the Brad Pitt movie Troy

The Trojan Horse in the Brad Pitt movie Troy

So this "gift" or "superpower" or "curse" or whatever you want to call it has never brought me happiness or pleasure, only grief. The Cassandra of Greek mythology had the ability to predict the future, including Troy's destruction (via the Trojan Horse), but nobody believed her predictions. Her family locked her up, believing she was mad. When her predictions came true, she was reviled, beaten and raped.

The "state of denial" of Woodward, Zakaria, Bernanke, and so many other people today reminds me of the Jacques Brel song "La Valse � Mille Temps" or "Carousel" in the English version. Part of it goes:

    We're on a ferris wheel
    A crazy ferris wheel
    A wheel within a wheel
    That suddenly reveals
    The stars begin to reel
    And down again around
    And up again around
    And up again around
    So high above the ground
    We feel we gotta yell
    We're on a carousel
    A crazy carousel.

(Here's a link to an MP3 version of the song. Grab it quick, because the copyright gods may make me remove the link. To assuage the anger of the copyright gods, let me say that if you download the MP3, please consider purchasing the entire album. Brel's music (even in translation) is brilliant and deeply incisive in a way that no one else has ever matched.)

Having worked on this web site for four years, and written hundreds of articles, I feel that I'm in the center of Brel's Carousel, and that it's spinning all around me, with people like Woodward, Zakaria and Bernanke doing one crazy thing after another to make it spin faster, in "a state of denial," for fear that if the Carousel stops or slows down then everything crashes. That should explain the sense of foreboding. (8-Oct-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 8-Oct-06 Learning-disabled journalists and politicians continue to predict Iraq civil war

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 8-Oct-06
Learning-disabled journalists and politicians continue to predict Iraq civil war