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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 increasingly 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

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

Today there is no shortage of people who think that those who believe the Bible offers a reliable guide to coming events are lunatics.

In his 2000 book The End of Days, Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg called belief in biblical prophecies of the end times a “fantasy” and “dangerous.”80

Bill Moyers, the longtime PBS journalist, marveled in a 2004 speech that there are actually “people who believe the Bible is literally true,” and specifically called the end-times beliefs of Americans “bizarre.” Christians, said Moyers, believe that “once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. . . . True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow. I’m not making this up. . . . I’ve read it in the literature.”81

In his best-selling 2006 book, American Theocracy, former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips echoed such sentiments. He warned that Americans who believe in biblical prophecy are “overimaginative” at best and “radical” at worst, asserting that “the rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs.”82

What really stuns and infuriates such skeptics is the enormous number of Americans who believe that world events are unfolding just as the Bible foretold.

In February 2006, curious to see just how many there were, I commissioned a national survey of American adults to better understand contemporary attitudes toward Bible prophecy. The poll was conducted by the respected firm of McLaughlin & Associates, founded by John McLaughlin, who works with some of the world’s leading business and political leaders, including Steve Forbes, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.83

We asked people if they agreed with the following statement:

Events such as the rebirth of the State of Israel, wars and instability in the Middle East, recent earthquakes, and the tsunami in Asia are evidence that we are living in what the Bible calls the last days.

Remarkably, more than four out of ten Americans (42 percent) said they agreed. And common stereotypes notwithstanding, it was not just white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or rural, Bible Belt, southern men who said they agreed.

The numbers were even more surprising when we narrowed the question.

The rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948 and the return of millions of Jews to the Holy Land after centuries in exile represent the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.

This time, a remarkable 52 percent of all Americans said they agreed. Only 22 percent said they disagreed, while 26 percent either did not know or chose not to answer the question. And again, belief was not limited to the “usual suspects.”

THE ROAD AHEAD

Just because tens of millions of Americans say they believe that Bible prophecy is coming true before their eyes or that they are living in the last days does not, of course, mean they are aware of the specific events the Bible says are right around the corner. In the chapters ahead, therefore, I will lay out ten future headlines we will read, the scriptural basis of such predictions, and the latest events and trends that suggest such headlines may be closer than previously thought.