Fearless Forecast for 2012

It’s 2012 and there are a few things that will happen this year with almost perfect certainty. The European Union will continue to dissolve; not all at once but in parts and pieces. It was predictable. Forget the headlines referring to emergency meetings of heads of state. Look for “root causes” as they say when referring to cultural rot. Germans, Greeks, Italians and Spanish have never been a great team and forcing them into a political and economic union only made sense to people who believed that humans, like mechanical parts, are interchangeable. They are not, and the differences are nowhere more starkly illustrated by this comment:

When I give a small bag of garbage to my hotel owner’s 14 year old son and he simply drops it out a window into the high rise window well from 8 floors up I ask “Why?” and his answer word-for-word is “Anything is possible in Egypt.”

When I am in Varanasi, India (possibly the filthiest place I’ve ever been) and constantly ask what to do with my garbage by way of a wrapper or paper the answer 100% of the time is “Throw it in the river.”

When I see building construction crews I go by every day in Rio de Janeiro sitting around on their asses I am amazed – the first 5 times.

The second thing that will happen is that Iraq will quickly revert to a one-party state. Saddam is still dead, but the country is Arab with no history of democratic government. Once the American military presence evaporated, it reverted very, very rapidly to the natural condition of Arab states. The dust had not settled on the parade ground after the last American troops left before an arrest warrant was issued by the Iraqi President for his Vice President and rival. This happened as suicide bombings resumed in the capital and elsewhere.   Religious and tribal hatred does not die in a brief year or two, it takes a generation or more.  We will now see the rapid unraveling of the gains made at great cost by the military under the direction of the previous administration.

To cover the failure of Obama’s policy, not just in Iraq but the entire Middle East, the blame will be placed on the Bush administration for starting the war in the first place. The roots of 9/11 and other attacks on Americans globally by the agents of resurgent Islam are airbrushed from current events. The history of Middle Eastern violence will begin with Bush; Obama’s decision to place politics over policy, destroying the fragile equilibrium in that unhappy country will not be allowed to enter conventional thinking. As we enter the fourth year of the Obama regime, it’s still and always will be Bush’s fault, world without end, Amen.