Epicenter 2.0

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  The second country conspicuously absent from Ezekiel’s list was Iraq, and that made absolutely no sense to me. The rulers of the lands known throughout Scripture as Babylon and Mesopotamia had been enemies of the Jewish people nearly as long as the rulers of Egypt. It was the Babylonians who had conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC, destroyed its Holy Temple, and carried off its people and Temple treasures back to Babylon, where the Jews remained in captivity for seventy years. More recently, Iraq had also been heavily involved in the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars against Israel, and unlike Egypt, Saddam Hussein had never signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state. To the contrary, during the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam had fired thirty-nine Scud missiles at Israel. He had vowed to destroy Israel with chemical weapons, and he had repeated his murderous threats just a few weeks earlier. How, then, could I possibly write a political thriller in 2001 that didn’t include Saddam Hussein as part of the coalition attacking Israel?

  This conundrum left me with only two alternatives, as I saw it. I could ignore Ezekiel’s list and add Iraq into the coalition on the premise that I was, after all, simply writing fiction, so what did it really matter? Or I could treat Ezekiel’s list as an intercept from the mind of an all-knowing God, just as a CIA analyst might treat an intercept from the cell phone of a world leader—as a piece of credible, actionable intelligence that I might not initially understand but that was true nonetheless.

  As an aspiring thriller writer, I was naturally tempted by the former approach. But as a Bible-believing Christian, I felt compelled to adopt the latter. In other words, I had to rule Iraq out as a coalition partner. Which could only mean that Saddam Hussein was no longer ruling Iraq. Which meant that I was going to have to back up my story by several years and start with a novel about how Saddam might disappear from the world stage before I could write The Ezekiel Option.

  How might Saddam go? I wondered. There were a number of possibilities. He could die of natural causes, be assassinated, be overthrown in a coup, or be toppled by the invasion of a foreign power. Death by natural causes was not exactly the stuff of a riveting best seller, so I ruled that out. Assassination and coups had been attempted numerous times during Saddam’s reign of terror, yet none of them had been successful, and I doubted they would be successful in the future given Saddam’s renowned paranoia, multiple layers of security, and many body doubles.

  In the end I concluded that the most likely way the Butcher of Baghdad would be taken down was by foreign invasion. Of course, in January 2001, the only country truly capable of launching such an invasion was the United States, but why would we? President George Herbert Walker Bush (“Bush 41”) had not invaded Iraq in 1991 when there was the clear provocation of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. What would move his son, or any future U.S. president, to take such a risk?

  I thought about the warnings Netanyahu had given over the past several months—and over the past several decades—that state-sponsored Middle Eastern terrorists were not content to simply target Israel but would target the West as well, and particularly the United States, known throughout the Muslim world as the Great Satan. In his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism, for example, Netanyahu wrote, “It can only be a matter of time before this terror is turned inward against the United States, the leader of the hated West and the country responsible in the eyes of militant Muslims for having created Israel and for maintaining the supposedly heretical Arab regimes.”61

  Netanyahu noted that “the rapidly increasing use of suicide bombings by Islamic terrorists . . . suggests that at least some of the people involved have no qualms about blowing themselves up at the service of their ideology (a phenomenon Americans will remember from the Japanese kamikazes of World War II).”62 But he also warned that conventionally armed suicide bombers and kamikazes were not the most serious threat facing the West. “In the worst of such scenarios, the consequences could be not a car bomb but a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.”63

  In his 1993 book A Place among the Nations,64 Netanyahu warned against the West’s “tendency to see the end of the Cold War as the ‘end of history.’” He argued that Middle Eastern bloodshed is a “perpetual-motion machine that requires no outside assistance to maintain itself or to threaten the peace and stability of other nations.”65 Remarkably, he also described Saddam’s Iraq as “a menace of the sort that has previously been the stuff only of suspense novels: a terrorist state with a leader seeking to graduate from car bombs to nuclear bombs.”66

  As I chewed over such things, the dots began to connect.

  What if radical Islamic terrorists pulled off a major attack inside the U.S., such as hijacking a plane and flying it into an American city?

  Wouldn’t an American president have to declare a war on terror that would target both the terrorists themselves and the states that sponsored them?

  Wouldn’t that lead the president’s attention to Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein not only harbored notorious international terrorists and paid Palestinian families more than $25,000 to send their sons and daughters to become homicide bombers against innocent Israeli women and children, but where Saddam also had a long and sordid record of developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons?67

  Wouldn’t the president have to conclude that he could no longer in good conscience leave Saddam Hussein in power with the motive, means, and opportunity to equip anti-American terrorists with weapons of mass destruction?

  And couldn’t that lead to an American war to topple Saddam, thus bringing ancient biblical prophecies that much closer to fulfillment?

  It was this analysis from which the Last Jihad series was conceived in January 2001, and, tragically, it was this scenario that was born nine months later.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE THIRD LENS

  When The Last Jihad was published, I was constantly asked how I could have anticipated radical Islamic terrorists flying a kamikaze mission into an American city when so many in Washington had not. I replied that the September 11 attacks, in my view, were not so much a failure of intelligence as they were a failure of imagination. It was a line the 9/11 Commission would later echo in their final report.

  BLINDSIDED

  The FBI and CIA, the nation would later learn, actually had a remarkable amount of information at their fingertips prior to 9/11 that suggested both the nature and even the specific targets of the coming attacks. But in the end, none of it mattered. Too few in our law enforcement and intelligence communities actually believed that such evil was possible. The nature of the attacks that would be carried out against the United States was beyond their ability to imagine. They had the dots. They simply could not connect them, at least not in time.

  As President Bush put it, “Nobody in our government . . . and I don’t think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.”68

  Condoleezza Rice, then the national security advisor, concurred. “No one could have imagined them . . . using planes as a missile,” she told the 9/11 Commission. “I could not have imagined [it].”69

  Richard Armitage, who was serving as deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell on 9/11, testified, “I know that the director of Central Intelligence had, on at least one occasion to my knowledge, talked about hijacking of aircraft. I just don’t think we had the imagination required to consider a tragedy of this magnitude.”70

  Major General Paul Weaver, head of the Air National Guard on 9/11, admitted, “We never considered this threat. Who could have ever imagined that our own airlines would be used against us?”71

  In its final report, the 9/11 Commission concluded, “The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”72

  Unfortunately, it was not the first time.

  A similar failure of imagination at the highest levels of government took place in 1990.

  When I first moved to Washington in January 1990 to work for the Heritage Foundation, it seemed increa
singly clear to me that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, attack Israel, and draw the world into a bloody new Middle East war. I had no access to classified intelligence and knew no one in the CIA or Mossad at the time. I simply listened to Saddam Hussein’s threats and took him at his word. Amazingly, however, many so-called Middle East experts did not.

  In April of 1990, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a page-one story on Saddam’s new threat to destroy “half of Israel” with chemical weapons. Yet the Times cited an expert from London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies who dismissed the threat as “good propaganda, saber-rattling stuff.”73

  The June 11 issue of Time magazine also dismissed the prospects of an Iraq-led war, chalking up Saddam’s increasingly hostile rhetoric to “saber rattling,” a term that practically became a mantra of the “experts” who told us we had nothing to worry about.74

  On July 2—precisely one month to the day before Iraq invaded Kuwait—a front-page headline in the Washington Post read “New Middle East War Seen Unlikely: Threats, Saber-Rattling Abound, But Deterrents Curb Both Sides.”

  On July 26, just days before the actual invasion, a headline in the influential Times of London read “Experts Believe Iraq Will Stop Short of Invasion.” The article twice used the term saber rattling and reported that “the consensus among Middle East experts yesterday was that Iraq would not invade Kuwait, but could succeed in forcing it to cut oil production.”75

  As the summer progressed, I kept asking experts throughout Washington, “Doesn’t all the evidence add up to invasion, not just bluster?” Most of them said no. And it was not only what they said, it was how they said it, as if the only sophisticated, intellectually defensible answer was “Of course not, you uneducated moron.”

  I was certainly new to Washington and as green as they came. I had no master’s or PhD in the history or politics of the Middle East. I had lived but a semester in the Middle East, and Israel at that, not in an Arab or Islamic country. And my job at the time was essentially to serve up coffee, not political analysis. But I could not shake the overwhelming feeling that the experts were about to be blindsided.

  On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces began moving across the Kuwaiti border. Official Washington was stunned. The New York Times reported that President Bush (41) and his administration were “surprised by the invasion this week and largely unprepared to respond quickly.” 76 The U.S. ambassador to Iraq had actually left the country for a vacation.77 The Washington Times reported that “the attack surprised most Defense Department officials.”78

  Recently declassified documents from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) paint an even more detailed and troubling portrait of how badly our government was blindsided by the Iraqi invasion.79

  In November 1989, a DIA assessment concluded, “Iraq is unlikely to launch military operations against any of its Arab neighbors over the next three years. . . . To protect its image of moderation, Iraq is unlikely to take military action against Kuwait.” (emphasis added)

  On July 20, 1990, the DIA advised top Pentagon officials that “Iraq is unlikely to use significant force against Kuwait,” though it conceded that “small-scale incursions are possible.” (emphasis added)

  On July 25, a Defense Special Assessment stated, “Iraq is using rhetoric, diplomatic pressure, and significant military posturing to force Kuwait to comply with recent oil and economic demands. Although unlikely to use military pressure, Iraq is marshaling forces sufficient to invade Kuwait.” (emphasis added)

  On July 27—just days away from the actual invasion—the DIA actually reported to top Pentagon and Bush administration officials that “tensions between Baghdad and Kuwait are subsiding. . . . Kuwait will give Saddam most of what he wants to avoid military confrontation.” (emphasis added)

  A miscalculation of such magnitude simply boggles the mind. This was not a secret conspiracy plotted in the shadowy caves of Afghanistan. To the contrary, Saddam had broadcast his ambitions and his intentions to the whole world. He amassed tens of thousands of men and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment on Kuwait’s border in full view of U.S. spy satellites and Western news reporters. Yet so few believed him. Why? How could people so smart, so well versed in ancient and modern history, and so well informed by the best classified intelligence money can buy have so badly misread the situation?

  Again, the answer lies not in the failure of intelligence gathering per se but in the failure of imagination. The experts simply refused to believe that Saddam was so evil that he would order the rape and pillaging of an Arab neighbor. They refused to believe that he was so evil that he would launch thirty-nine Scud missiles against Israel, and more Scuds against Saudi Arabia. What’s more, they refused to believe Saddam when he described himself as a “modern Nebuchadnezzar,” one of the most evil tyrants ever described in the Bible. And therein lies the problem.

  Too many in Washington today have a modern, Western, secular mind-set that either discounts—or outright dismisses—the fact that evil is a real and active force in history. They insist on interpreting events only through the lenses of politics and economics. Yet to misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it, and that is precisely what happened on August 2, 1990, and September 11, 2001. Washington was blindsided by an evil it did not understand, just as it had been blindsided by Auschwitz, Dachau, and Pearl Harbor, and much as I believe it will be blindsided by future events.

  As an evangelical Christian whose family escaped the persecution of the Jews in czarist Russia, I have no doubt there is real evil in our world. Nor do I have any doubt that it is a powerful and pernicious force in history. I am not threatened by it, for I know there is a God and Savior who promises to defeat evil in due time. But until then, I fully expect evil to gather its forces and strike at the good. Thus, I try to anticipate how and where it might strike, and in doing so I find Scripture a useful guide.

  At the very least, the Bible helps me understand the mind-set of tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran, to put them in historic context and anticipate their future moves. At times, it even provides me specific “intelligence” of coming events.

  THE THIRD LENS

  This brings me to the central premise of this book.

  While it is fashionable in our times to analyze world events merely by looking through the lenses of politics and economics, it is also a serious mistake, for it prevents one from being able to see in three dimensions. To truly understand the significance of global events and trends, one must analyze them through a third lens as well: the lens of Scripture. Only then can the full picture become clearer.

  The Bible is not shy about describing itself as a supernatural book, written by an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful God who chooses to give his people advance warning of future events he deems of utmost importance. To the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, God said, “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3, NASB). To the Hebrew prophet Amos, he explained that “the Lord GOD does nothing unless He reveals His secret counsel to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7, NASB).

  When King Nebuchadnezzar had dreams of future events so troubling that he could not sleep, he turned to the Hebrew prophet Daniel, who told him that it is the God of heaven who “removes kings and establishes kings” and “it is He who reveals the profound and hidden things” (Daniel 2:21-22, NASB). “As for the mystery about which the king has inquired,” Daniel explained, “neither wise men, conjurers, magicians nor diviners are able to declare it to the king. However, there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and He has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will take place in the latter days” (Daniel 2:27-28, NASB). Daniel then foretold the coming rise of four great world empires—Babylonian, Media-Persian, Greek, and Roman—with startling accuracy.

  In one of the most intriguing passages to me in the New Testament,
Jesus sharply criticized his followers for not analyzing current events through the third lens of Scripture. “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and so it turns out. And when you see a south wind blowing, you say, ‘It will be a hot day,’ and it turns out that way. You hypocrites! You know how to analyze the appearance of the earth and the sky, but why do you not analyze this present time?” (Luke 12:54-56, NASB).

  Why such a strong rebuke? Because while those living in first-century Palestine certainly knew the many ancient Hebrew prophecies describing the coming Messiah (that he would be born in Bethlehem, born of a virgin, live in Galilee, teach in parables, do miracles, care for the poor, be a light to the Gentiles, etc.), they could not—or would not—connect the dots and accept that it was Jesus himself to whom the prophets were pointing.

  Yet how many today, living in the twenty-first century, are truly familiar with the many ancient biblical prophecies concerning the second coming of the Messiah and are able—much less willing—to connect the dots and see what is coming?

  Not all events are described in advance in the Bible, of course. Nor can the prophecies be used to determine the future of every country. But there are key events and trends that will occur in certain countries—epicenter countries—that the Bible does describe with surprising specificity for anyone willing to look carefully.

  AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD BIBLE PROPHECY