The cold hand of the cosmic clock has now moved well past one minute to midnight. We are spiraling downwards in an unstoppable vortex impelled by the winds of war.

Humanity’s implacable will to war has filled the cup with blood that now runneth over staining the Psalms of David. A brutal warrior and rhapsodic poet of war, David danced in triumphant jubilation after consigning his many victims to defeat, death and horrific desecrations. David decapitated the corpses of his victims and drank deeply in celebration of their utter devastation in his ghastly Bronze Age rituals of conquest.

Reeling on the edge of environmental catastrophe and teetering on the brink of world war, our aging planet is seized by an attack of vertigo. We are now experiencing a moment of panic before the inevitable plunge into the yawning abyss of World War III. The shade of King David rises from his grave, his murderous character intact after thirty centuries in the underworld.

At this critical moment in history, many nations are headed by weak, spineless and sniveling political leaders. A quartet of cowardly men command and control the agendas of major nations. These men are themselves bullied and beaten and battered by malignant powers intent on wreaking carnage, calamity and catastrophe upon the world in pursuit of capital, power and influence as well as the cruel Davidic satisfactions of mass murder, genocide and torture.

The chthonic ritual of war is uncoiling ineluctably before us. Right before our very eyes we are witnessing the disintegration of our collective psyche that yearns for peace. The serpent is sloughing its skin. A new age is being born from the death throes of an older era, an epoch dominated by hatred, fear, power, greed, dizzying hierarchies of madness and the limitless scandals of religious orthodoxies gone totally insane to the point of deliberate and premeditated Apocalyptic statecraft.

Humanity enters a vortex so powerful, so irresistible, so unsustainable that the consequences are nothing less than the suicide of our species and a holocaust for millions of other hapless species that populate our severely damaged planet.

In the United States, George Bush presides over the decline of his own presidency. Every day, more popular support slips away from his enfeebled grasp. Every week sees the decline of the numbers of American citizens who approve of Bush’s calamitous presidency. Bush is now the most unpopular president in American history – and he is trending lower. In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair is the least popular Prime Minister in that nation’s history, and he is dropping lower. In Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presides over a regime deeply unpopular with his own people, making him the weakest head of government since the fall of the Shah three decades ago. In Israel, Ehud Olmert’s popular support has now slipped to the nearly unbelievable level of precisely two percent – and he is trending lower still now bound for a darkening gehenna of political mortification, tribulation and ultimately death as his approval rating drifts down to absolute zero.

While Bush, Blair, Olmert and Ahmadinejad all claim to be legitimate leaders of their people, the opinions of the peoples they govern deny them and their policies any right to the mantle of democracy. The people of America, Britain, Iran and Israel yearn for peace, while their weak and unpopular leaders yearn for war that might miraculously resuscitate their terminal regimes. These weakened leaders are separated from the will of the people, because they have strenuously exerted themselves in pursuit of the opposite path to the popular will.

Bush ordered his armies into foreign lands; ignited waves of terrorism; inflamed tides of violence and unleashed the forces of theocratic madness in his own nation as well as launched theocratic violence across our planet. Tony Blair swiftly acquiesced to Bush’s madness for theocratic war, and he has paid the political price with the crushing disintegration of his career as Prime Minister. A man of myopic vision, Ehud Olmert led his nation into a war that they could not win, yet he forced his military to perform atrocities in pursuit of an implausible victory against a shimmering chimaera, a private security force armed with peashooters who stood in the gateway to Lebanon. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote theocratic screeds to his sworn enemies and denied the proportions of the Holocaust while launching financial warfare against the richest and most powerful nations on earth.

When Bush and Blair baited Ahmadinejad through their control of the UN Security Council, the Iranian president and his minions swiftly seized fifteen British sailors from two inflatable boats in the disputed twilight zone of the Shatt Al-Arab waterway to use them as human shields and bargaining chips in their game with the great powers. This act of phenomenal stupidity and cowardice will now serve nicely as the casus belli, a necessary trigger for Bush and Blair and their collaborator, Olmert, to launch Armageddonite warfare against the Islamic Republic in pursuit of their heretical theocratic Judaeo-Christian Apocalypse.

With public protests against more armed conflict mounting in London and Tehran, both sides in the sailor crisis have softened their positions. There is now a glimmer of hope that these hapless pawns might be returned safely prior to the launch of the Iran War that will eventually known as WWIII.

While the sailors may now be returned safely, Bush’s stupendous threat of pre-emptive war against Iran is still in force, and a new commander who supports the neoconservative vision of global military hegemony has been appointed to head US Central Command, CENTCOM, the command and control nerve center for the Gulf theater of war that includes Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Iran. Admiral William J. Fallon, is a stalwart loyalist of Vice President Dick Cheney and his militant neoconservative ideology as well as the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war. Admiral Fallon replaces the less malleable General John Abizaid who was forced to retire after a long series of disagreements with the Pentagon. Another neoconservative Cheney loyalist, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, has been quietly moved into position as head of US Pacific Command, the position just vacated by Fallon when he was ordered to direct CENTCOM. Quietly and subtly, while the American public wish for a winding down of the costly, damaging and counter-productive neocon wars, new ideological warriors have taken control of the US forces arrayed in the Persian Gulf and the Pacific in further preparation for the expansion of pre-emptive military aggression targeting Iran and the Middle East.

Admiral William J. Fallon

Tons of depleted uranium will be hurled into our atmosphere in the onslaught against Iran. This radioactive metal will disintegrate into minute particles that will be swept up into the winds and deposited over virtually every square centimeter of the surface of our sickened planet contaminating plants, animals and humans in a macabre plague of genetic warfare. Twisted chromosomes will produce monstrosities in the wombs of mothers giving birth to a generation of victims of the madness of 2007. Cancer rates will escalate, and diabetes will soar tormenting the lives of people isolated from power.

In the UN Security Council, another actor played a deadly hand. Vladimir Putin failed to veto the sanctions against Iran. Abandoning Iran whom he sees as his competitor for the oil, petroleum and energy market, Putin has recently outlawed political opposition to his ruling party. Under Putin, the Russian economy has been reoriented to compete with the west for the global energy market. Under Putin, the Russian state wrenched control of capital from the privateers who first seized the prizes of oil, gas and energy latent under the soil of Russia and its allies in the former provinces of the late USSR. Today, Putin is poised to lord it over many of his erstwhile competitors in their crumbling western empires: Bush and Blair. Never deeply committed to the western model of democracy, Russia is returning to its oligarchical roots in the Czarist autocracy of the Romanovs.

The diplomacy of the Bush and Blair regimes has failed to resolve international disputes and to fit recalcitrant Islamic nations into their prescribed neoconservative molds. Desperate for a diplomatic breakthrough, Dick Cheney personally descended from his Olmpian chambers in the West Wing to negotiate face-to-face with the heads of Islamic nations. Cheney went away empty handed. After meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Cheney went away assured within his own beautiful mind that he had the support of the most powerful head of state in the Middle East. Indeed, King Abdullah has worked miracles. His first miracle was to bridge the gap between Fatah and Hamas, the two Palestinian parties who were at war with one another, by arranging for them to talk and to reconcile their differences in Mecca. After the historic Meccan pacification of the parties in Palestine, the King turned his vast attention to bringing all 22 Arab nations into a grand peace formation behind a fair and rational settlement with the state of Israel – one that eradicates a perennial point of contention – the diplomatic recognition of the state of Israel. In return, the Arabic proposal grants the Palestinians the right to return to the homes that they were forced to leave behind during the harsh ethnic-cleansing of Palestine that began in 1948.

Immediately, Ehud Olmert rebuked the Arab peace proposal by categorically rejecting the right of Palestinians to return to the homes and gardens they owned before the 1948 war. Olmert’s strategy of perpetual war is blatantly obvious. Now that the seemingly impossible hurdle of the Arabic recognition of Israel has been cleared by over twenty sovereign nations in one fell swoop, Olmert has erected another hurdle to peace – the right of return – to obstruct diplomatic negotiations and buy time for the continuation of the apartheid policies of his right wing government of Israel. In taking this belligerent course, Olmert did not stop to think about the history of his own people. Had he done so, he might not have chosen the path of obstruction of Palestinian property rights.

In the aftermath of WWII and the absolutely Hellish horrors of the Holocaust, Jews were granted the right of return to their homes in Germany, Austria, Poland and everywhere else in Europe. Kosovans and Bosnians have been granted the right to return to their homes and properties after the ethnic-cleansing in the Balkans. The citizens of Burundi, Cambodia, East Timor, Georgia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Ruanda, South Africa, Tajikistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan have all been permitted to return to their homes, farms and gardens – sometimes enforced by multinational forces including the United States and the UN. But, Ehud Olmert refuses to negotiate the return of the private property of Palestinians made homeless and destitute by the state of Israel. Conducting himself in such a manner may well explain Olmert’s disastrous unpopularity among the people of Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

Alas, this week while meeting with his Arabic cousins, King Abdullah stated the obvious, “In the beloved Iraq, the bloodshed is continuing under an illegal foreign occupation and detestable sectarianism.” The King’s statement dashed Dick Cheney’s dream of a limitless expanse of Arabic patience with the neoconservative hell on earth he and Bush have constructed in Iraq. Worse for them, the Arabs are more cohesive and focused that at any previous time in their recent history. The time-clock is ticking, and Cheney can hear the sounds of approaching thunder.

Under these increasingly dire circumstances, Cheney, Bush and Olmert are contemplating policies that for others would be tantamount to political suicide – the radical expansion of their war in Iraq to engulf Iran and the entire crescent from Lebanon through Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan in one explosive arc of religious warfare.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been selected as the fall-guy, the “patsy” of the plot. With his nascent nuclear program that all experts agree is years away from producing a bomb, Ahmadinejad has – by the pursuit of a suicidal statecraft of his very own – moved into position as the bete noir now that he has seized human hostages in the Shatt Al Arab.

For months, the Iranians have been engrossed in war games largely in response to the American and British presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Americans have orchestrated war games on land and sea in a coiling arc surrounding the Islamic Republic with provocative exercises from Azerbaijan and Kurdistan into the Persian Gulf all book-ended by their occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq on the eastern and western frontiers of Iran. There is little wonder why Ahmadinejad’s Iran feels targeted.

When dealing with the Islamic nations, war, coercion and intimidation are the only languages known unto Bush, Blair and Olmert. That is why in the future, the Bush Era will represent a black hole in the fabric of history – just as it does to the majority of the people alive on our planet today. War, brutality, the bestiality of torture and the technological plagues of radiation strewn around the globe by Bush, Blair, Cheney and Olmert will blight this period of time like an unwanted coda to the massive mutilations, genocides and Holocaust of the previous century.

It need not have been this way. A better grade of leader could have done things differently. In fact, only three decades ago, a better leader dealt with the Islamic Republic when they seized 53 American hostages and held them in custody refusing to release them for over one year. Jimmy Carter was besieged by all and sundry, in his own party, in the Republican Party and by his own staff in the West Wing to drop the diplomacy and to wage war on Iran. Carter chose to continue quiet diplomacy even at the cost of losing the presidency rather than launching what could have been a millenial war between the west and Islam. Quietly, certainly and safely, Carter flew to Wiesbaden, Germany to greet the hostages upon their release from Tehran. All were safe, and all returned to their homes in America. In the next presidency, the officials serving Ronald Reagan would embroil the Islamic Republic in controversy and subterfuge, the Iran Contra Conspiracy that despoiled that decade with its cynical covert operations to support death squads in Central America.

Unfortunately, one of Carter’s successors – George Walker Bush – has no capacity for diplomacy. Neither has Bush followed the well-established traditions of the American presidency. By engulfing America in a succession of foreign misadventures – and longing to increase their severity and number – Bush has repudiated the sage advice of presidents from George Washington to his immediate predecessor. Bush has displaced the platform of peace as the cornerstone of American foreign policy with a platform of pre-emptive war that he proudly proclaims as “The Bush Doctrine.” Washington, Adams and Carter would never have committed America to such a drastic course.

Another glaring distinction between Bush’s presidency and all the others that went before him has been his repudiation of the separation of church and state. By implementing an undisguised Christian prejudice in funding state programs, Bush has become the theocratic president, a notion that is troubling for the people he governs and deeply disturbing for scholars of constitutional history.

Many have noticed Tony Blair’s references to his own religious preferences as comforting him in his decision to support the theocratic shift in Bush’s America. In Israel, there are theocratic parties in the Knesset and theocratic policies in the constitution. In Occupied Iraq, the constitution has theocratic elements. In Lebanon – a nation governed by Fouad Siniora, a friend of Bush’s theocratic White House – there are numerous theocratic elements that encumber the people from expressing their will through democratic processes. The same can be said for the nations that adhere most closely to American policy throughout the Middle East, including: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and many of the Gulf States.

Seymour Hersh and Michel Chossudovsky have informed us that the goal of the Bush theocracy is to Balkanize the entire Middle East. By transforming the Middle East into a patchwork of religious enclaves, fiefdoms, satrapies and states, Bush’s neoconservative presidency hopes to dismember the region for centuries to come.

By dividing, conquering and infantilizing the Islamic nations, America and its allies will have much more leverage and political control of the oil, gas and energy reserves unique to the region. In an age of diminishing oil supplies, this power would give the American Imperium virtual dictatorial control over world civilization for centuries to come.

Twelve days ago, I visited the Hermann Hesse Museum in Montagnola. There on a clear day filled with golden sunlight and surrounded by the space, the architecture, the mementoes and artifacts of his life, the memories of Hesse’s masterpieces came flooding back into my mind.

In Demian, Hesse describes the deeply troubling premonitions of the First World War. In what is sometimes described as the world’s first psychoanalytical novel, Max Demian tells Emil Sinclair,

“I still know nothing except that something is going to happen on a vast scale, something dreadful in which I myself will be involved. Sinclair, we will take part in this event that we have discussed so often. The world wants to renew itself. There’s a smell of death in the air. Nothing can be born without first dying. But it is far more terrible than I had thought.”

Ominously, Demian informs Sinclair,

“There will be war, Sinclair – the new is coming, and it will be terrible for those who cling to the old.”

And employing symbolism, Demian explains the process in Jungian terms,

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”

The Egyptologist Wallis-Budge informs us about the identity of Abraxas.

“Abraxas represented the 365 Aeons or emanations from the First Cause, and as a Pantheus, i.e. All-God, he appears on the amulets with the head of a cock (Phoebus) or of a lion (Ra or Mithras), the body of a man, and his legs are serpents which terminate in scorpions, types of the Agathodaimon. In his right hand he grasps a club, or a flail, and in his left is a round or oval shield”

Besotted with theocratic governments driven by their peculiar religious prejudices, the world of 2007 is still hurtling headlong into the maw of All-God, the Pantheus, the unitary divinity – Abraxas.

Michael Carmichael is Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of The Planetary Movement, Oxford United Kingdom. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

References

Arab summit attempts to revive peace plan

Now is the time to call the bluff of the land of missed opportunities – The Arab League should bypass Ehud Olmert and go directly to the Israeli people with its offer for a Palestinian settlement

A monstrous war crime / With more than 650,000 civilians dead in Iraq, our government must take responsibility for its lies

Easter Surprise: Attack on Iran, New 9/11… or Worse

A sacred right

U.S. Iraq Role Is Called Illegal by Saudi King

Arab leaders offer Israel guarded peace offer

Call that humiliation? No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch

Jimmy Carter, Sunday School Teacher interview by Elizabeth Sams

The War on Iran.

Brzezinski: Avoid disaster with Iran