Barnett Transcript - 2

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We’ve briefed it throughout OSD, throughout the Defense Department.  I’ve given almost 200 times to about 5-6,000 people. I’ve briefed Secretary Rumsfeld’s senior people.   Art takes care of people above that.  Briefed Secretary Powell’s senior people.  Art takes care of the stuff above that. Briefed Congress, briefed the House of Commons in England.  Getting a lot of good purchase in the Information Technology and Banking communities which tend to get this material even better than we do… even better than I do.   It becomes an article, March 2003, Esquire.  It gets passed around a lot.  I get an agent.  That agent gets me a book.  28 today Amazon.  I’ve got to give it to Brian Lamb.  Wall Street Journal got me to 40.  Brian Lamb got me to 6 in 24-hours on a Memorial Day weekend too.   So he impresses me to no end. 

 

Ok.  The purpose of the brief, in many ways is to try to find the interface between war and peace.  [11] I was asked by the Singaporean version of Art Cebrowski, what’s the difference between your work and Andy Marshall’s work, Director of the Office of Net Assessment?  I said what Mr. Marshall does and what his office does is that it thinks about the future of war within the context of war - which I think is very important.  I say, what I do, and I think what this office does, this Office of Force Transformation needs to do is to think about the future of warfare within the context of everything else.  And I think ‘the everything else’ becomes more and more important as we understand this global war on terrorism within the larger context of the spreading of globalization.   So here we go...

 

I’m going to give you my quick history of the 20th Century.  I’m going to talk about globalization I, I’m going to date from 1870, I’ll take it up to 1929 to keep it simple.  It was the first great coming together of the global economy.  I’ll say somewhat facetiously, we screw the pooch one afternoon on Wall Street.  We create a systemic stress, we later call the Great Depression.   From that, as an economic determinist, I’ll argue we get WWII.  Because it wasn’t just Nazi shenanigans, it wasn’t just the harshness of Versailles, it was the economy stupid that destroyed this beautifully designed Weimar Republic.  People in my field, political science will tell you that it began in its modern form with the question,” Why did the Weimar Republic fail?” 

 

At the end of the second world war, America decides we’re going to firewall ourselves off from this horrible experience - not just the holocaust never again; but the economic nationalism of the 1930’s which killed this first great coming together of the global economy, sent all those indices of integration, quite literally back to zero.  We institute what we like to call a new Rule Set. Resource flows, strategic alliances, the biggest reorganization of the U.S. government up until that point in history. The international organizations we create. So I’m talking Defense Act of 1947, creation of DOD - Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, creation of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Marshall Plan, the strategy of containment.  A massive new collection of rules.  It took us about a decade to figure out.   Ostensibly this package was put together to contain the Soviet threat - sub rosa, the real goal was to recreate globalization quite explicitly on 3 key pillars:  North America, Japan, and Western Europe.  Now if you listen to the World Bank around 1980, you begin to see the so-called new Globalizers.  We call them emerging markets after the '87 Crash because all that boomer money is looking for higher outcome.  These emerging markets, these two dozen new Globalizers, doesn’t sound like a lot in a world population of almost 200 states except that it is half the world’s population and a new era of globalization is born.  So Deng really turns history, really pivots it in China.  Now the Berlin Wall comes down, seemingly everybody on the same rule set page - end of history, maybe a clash of civilizations and then we see a spiking of ethic conflict and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But seemingly everybody on the same rule set page as we proceed into the 90’s.   Massive expansion of the global economy.  The question we began asking, Do we encounter new stresses across the 90’s that call into question what was the new rule set for the late 1940’s and  early 1950’s now starts to look a little long in the tooth because that rule set was put together to prevent the collapse of Globalization I, not necessarily to further the advance Globalization II which I will argue that qualitatively, quantitatively different.

 

In Globalization I for example, labor was much more fluid across borders, money not nearly as much as it is today and no global integrated production.  First big hint for me, Mexican peso crisis, 1994.  It seemed like a lot more than just financial panic. Other examples, rapid climate change, computer viruses with global impact, the rise of catastrophic terrorism.  So this rule set put together to prevent this sort of great power war (WWII).  Clearest example, permanent members, veto-wielding members UN Security Council, the winning coalition from WWII, WHY?  We were concerned they might go back to war with one another. We had been through two world wars at that point - killed 10’s of millions.  Not exactly the problem set we face today.   So what we were interesting in thinking about when we first drew this slide back with the Y2k work in the summer of 1998, was to ask what could be a catalytic event coming down the pike that would crystallize a sense of rule sets out of control?  Were we talking the same level of destruction as World War II?  No, but the same level of disruption on some points meaning lots of new rules would come in its aftermath - tremendous rules.  

 

Now we were interested in Y2k, and we were interested in the tech crash because we could see new rules coming in the financial sector but if you talk to people on Wall Street, they will tell you that there is a financial panic roughly every 13-14 years in the United States, a crash. Why?  Because if you get far enough away from the last crash, pretty soon you only have stock brokers - which is a young person’s game, who can’t remember what that last crash looked like and the further they get from that last crash, they start talking about new rules, new ways of doing things, new realities, which we typically discover after the crash involve lying, cheating, stealing and you get a rule set reset.  So we could see that with the tech crash but that was only going to impact the financial sector and again it was regular [11a].  We were looking for really unprecedented that would impact the political and security fields.  I think we get it with 9-11. And I can draw a line, I’ve been thinking about it for 5 years - lots of new rule sets since 9-11.  I can still pick up a New York Times, a Wall Street Journal, a Washington Post and in every single day, find you a story about an some amazing new rule set that redefines the nature of privacy, how we handle information, definitions of criminal behavior, definitions of un-American behavior, new definitions of war. [12]  

 

How can I tell we are in a rule set reset?  We can’t even decide what to call the enemy, or where we can try them. [13] I was having breakfast this morning, I thought how hard would it be to find, Page 1, Business Section, on-going story, database on U.S. visitors set for huge expansion. The creation of a virtual border price tag they are guessing 15 billion over 10 years.  Did we need this before 9-11?  Apparently. But 9-11 crystallized the sense of a rule set gap so we have been filling rule set gaps with great abandon ever since.   Patriot Act is a rule set reset. Pre-emption strategy is a serious rule set change.  The biggest rule set we’ve created in, national security since we invented the concept of mutual assured destruction and spent about a decade selling it to the Soviets. But it is not just a matter of closing the door on the hazy crazy 1990’s, which I believe along with Cantor will go down very similar historically in descriptions as the 1920’s.  I say if that was Globalization I, and this is II and III, what this country needs to ask is what do we want in Globalization IV.  We are the world’s biggest economy, either we seek to define this as much as possible or we let it define us by default. 

 

 
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[11] Interface between war and peace

This paragraph contains the primary message - 'to find the interface between war and peace'.  This is the veiled threat.  Barnett laid out the 'grand strategy' which is Wall Street's strategy for making money and controlling markets.  And it is the strategy for destroying the United States.  He is telling everybody that this war on our country is 'war in the context of everything else' - meaning economic, psychological, terrorism, etc.  It is war sub rosa and he is the mouthpiece communicating the plans and strategies.  This is why a police state is being implemented in our country - because to these traitors, we are the terrorists because we are the only ones who can stop them - so they must control our population because the 'new rules' they are implementing are aligning with COMMUNIST China - their partner.  

[11a  Note on transcription]

In the original transcript, I typed the following  “So we could see that with the tech crash but that was only going to impact the financial sector and again it was ripe for it.  We were looking for really unprecedented that would impact the political and security fields.  I think we get it with 9-11.”     Because typing the transcript from the video took me about a month and a half in 2004-2005 whenever I did it originally, I was sick of working on it – and didn’t get the final proof read finished before the video was no longer available.  When it became available again recently – although filed under a different name, “Pentagon’s New Map” as opposed to “Military in the 21st Century”, and I was able to do the final proofread, I believe the word was changed to “regular”.   It’s garbled in this version; I had to have the sound up high to hear it. Why am I making an issue of it?   I’m making an issue of it because it’s not an insignificant difference.  It’s highly significant.   ‘it was ripe for it’ implies a setup – a plan to crash the economy and history reveals that’s exactly what happened.  

[12] "It was the economy stupid" History Lesson

Restated simply, WWII was caused by the manipulation (i.e. draining) of the German economy.  The aftermath was that the institutions he names were established to prevent WWIII.  The same thing that happened to the Weimar Republic is what is happening to our country now.  This time, they are using the WWII institutions and a phony war on terrorism to prevent globalization (and the draining of our economy) from being stopped. To justify the phony war on terrorism, they bombed the World Trade Center in a controlled demolition.  The airplanes (and missiles) part of the scam were a perfectly executed military exercise (See Barnett's paper, "Globalization gets a Bodyguard).  The cover story for 9-11 is in large part self-sychronization which didn't work out too well because the operation was too big.  The media and Congressional leaders were hushed by the anthrax attacks. 

Excerpt from "Globalization Gets A Bodyguard"

"To the vast majority of the world, the United States represents the leading edge of globalization—a harbinger of a future where efficient markets, political pluralism, and individual choice reign supreme. Moreover, as the new rules of this new era emerge and governments step in to regulate the markets, the United States (especially its Treasury Department) plays chief rule-maker. In the meantime, the U.S. military has remained strong, saving most countries the trouble of having to finance big or expeditionary militaries, leading the coalitions that tidy up those conflicts on the edges of globalization, and containing the trouble-makers who threaten to disrupt it.

Think about what an unprecedented combination that is: the world’s most open society, most vibrant economy, and strongest military power. And the United States had maintained a careful, stable balance among those elements.

Then consider how much has changed as a result of 11 September:"

[13] We can't decide who the enemy is

Al Qaeda is a symbolic name for the enemy.  The enemy isn't Muslim terrorists - the enemy is within - Wall Street and the traitorous thread in our military.  The war on terrorism is shadowing boxing with an enemy that doesn't exist in the form we are told. 

"All war is deception.  Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness.  Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness.  Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate." ~ Sun Tzu