The Grand Chessboard

My undergraduate studies were in the field of political science, but I learned more by doing than I ever learned in class. From experience, I learned that politicians always try to give acceptable reasons for what they do. I also learned that they often have ulterior motives. That is, the reasons they give to the public are often not their real reasons. From these observations, I devised a simple rule of thumb: When the stated reasons make no sense to you, it’s not usually because you don’t understand. More often, it’s because the stated reasons are not the real reasons.
Our stated reasons for going to war in Iraq against a dictator that had been put in power by the CIA were that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction similar to the ones possessed by the United States and England. Supposedly, Saddam supported alQaeda, which the CIA had created in Afghanistan to lure the Russians into their own Vietnam.
All of the officially stated reasons for our being in Iraq are false, and all of our officially stated reasons for remaining in Iraq are false. One of our reasons for remaining there is that it’s our way of “supporting the troops” who don’t want to be there. Many have mutinied, singly or in groups, and most of whom are stretched nearly to the breaking point.
We’re at war in Afghanistan because a former CIA asset named Osama bin Laden was in a cave in Afghanistan when several of his followers, novice pilots all, flew large, commercial jets with such unusual skill and with such devastating effect that tens of thousands of professional pilots, engineers, demolition experts, and other experts have signed documents urging federal investigators to explain how they’d done it.
Let me digress for a moment, and pardon me for dragging Hitler into this. I assure you, it’s not gratuitous but because certain lessons of history are so well known and clear that they beg to be cited as examples.
During the 1920’s, Hitler wrote the book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to tell in detail what he would do if he gained power in Germany. Almost as soon as he gained power, American liberals such as William O. Douglas arranged for the English translation of Mein Kampf to be circulated in the United States. They wanted to use Hitler’s words to warn the American people of what Hitler would do if he were given the chance.
Hitler did get the chance. I’ve heard all the arguments against a belief that the Holocaust occurred. They all offer the Accidentalist (or Coincidentalist) Theory of history. The Holocaust deniers tell us that the nine million dead were the result of wartime shortages. Confronted with the fact that they happened to the same demographic and other groups that Hitler had earlier promised to eliminate, in direct proportion to his hatred of each group, what’s the most reasonable explanation?
The almost perfect match up between Hitler’s promises of a holocaust and the Holocaust itself can’t be chalked up to mere coincidence. It happened that way because that’s how it was planned.
Now, let’s fast forward to the year 1997, the year that Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard was published. No, I’m not comparing Brzezenski to Hitler; I wouldn’t trivialize the Holocaust doing that.
In The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski wrote that three fourths of the world’s population, physical wealth, and energy resources are on the Eurasian continent and that it was “critical” for the United States should control all of them.
In The Grand Chessboard, he laid out a plan to encircle Russia and China by taking over the Middle East, destabilizing Pakistan and India, and gaining hegemony over Southeast Asia. The eventual goal was the entire Eurasian continent.
His ambitious plan was far more detailed than I describe it here. The details closely match what we see from the Mediterranean Sea to the South China Sea.
So, who is Zbigniew Brzezinski? He’s a protégé of Henry Kissinger, one of the founding members of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, and a top foreign policy adviser to every U.S. President—including Ronald Reagan—since 1977. Brzezinski and David Rockefeller tapped then-obscure Governor Jimmy Carter to be another founding member of the Trilateral Commission and set about grooming him for the presidency. When Barack Obama was a student at Columbia University, one of his political science professors was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Today, Brzezinski is one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers.
I’m not saying that the events in Asia today are the result of Brzezinski’s book. More likely, Zbig’s book was simply a printed document revealing what had been in the planning stages for many years. The Grand Chessboard and what it means for each of us and our respective countries is well worth the read.
The Grand Chessboard is about more than manipulating countries. It’s also about manipulating people. Since America is being manipulated into military adventures and intrigues that are against the national interest—benefiting none but an elite few—doesn’t it naturally follow that the American people are also being manipulated to support those actions?
Check out this clip from the 1996 movie The Long Kiss Goodbye. Now check out this clip that was aired in March 2001, as the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen.
In that regard, I have a few words of counsel: “Seek out reliable sources of information. The truth is out there.”