Walsh: Review and Comment

Walsh: Review and Comment

Have babies; it's all about economic survival

Tell your children to have babies.

Not one. Not two. At least three.

The survival of Western Civilization depends on this. So does your standard of living when you're old and when your kids are old.

Right now, the trends are not in our favor.

Herb Meyer has a fascinating message. It will rock you, shake you and scare you.

A former special assistant to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, Meyer was the guest recently of the CEO Council of Tampa Bay. For two hours one morning, the man who has been credited with being the first in the Reagan Administration to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union delivered a startling talk, one that you could imagine being similar to a top-level, secret CIA briefing.

Meyer had no handouts, no Powerpoints and allowed no video recordings - otherwise, probably, he would have had to kill all of us.

Here's an eerie sampling of his content: When the radical Islamicists attacked us on 9-11-2001, that was the date in 1683 when the Muslims suffered a crushing defeat at the gates of Vienna in their quest to conquer Europe.

Another: "Pakistan is coming unglued fast," Meyer says. Al-Queda and the Taliban have targeted Pakistan for one simple reason - to get control of its nukes. The United States has "snatch" teams on the border; if anything goes wrong, our troops have orders to snatch and secure the nukes.

And another: In India and China, males outnumber females so much "there are 100 million boys growing up who won't find wives." Meyer says. "That is the most destabilizing thing in the world."

Oh, and he's got more.

Meyer's specialty is gathering global information, sorting and analyzing it into trends and figuring out what it means for you and me.

For the past few years he has focused on what he calls three dominating trends: 1) the war with Islam; 2) the collapse of Western Civilization birth rates; and 3) America's culture war. The latter he calls "a second Civil War."

"It's a question of whether the family or the government will be the center of our lives." Meyer says. "Who will raise the kids?"

The Islamic War

In the din of the political campaigns, Americans have lost focus of what the war is about, Meyer says. The trend, he says, is to argue before we understand.

We should understand, then, the war with Islam is a clash of "competing operating systems" - Western Civilization versus radical Islam, the modern world versus a culture still rooted in the eighth century.

Radical Islam wants Western Civilization to convert or be dead, just as it did in 732 AD and 1683. The Islamacists have never forgotten that Europeans defeated the Muslims on both occasions in the Muslims' quests to conquer Europe. Today's jihad is their third attempt.

The difference in the operating systems is stark. In ours, the individual is the center. "Church and state are sacred," Meyer says. "In Western Civilization, we unleash the entrepreneurial talents of our population. We encourage intellectual curiosity."

In the Islamic operating system, the individual is subservient to the state. It "crushes" intellectual curiosity, he says. "It treats women as property, not as people."

While war constitutes one operating system trying to impose itself on another, the objective of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from our standpoint is not to impose our system on Islam but to give moderate Islamics the chance to dislodge the small number of radicals who hold power - "so they can reconcile their operating system with ours. It's trying to shift a billion people from the eighth century to the 21st century," Meyer says.

Unfortunately, he says, "The whole objective of the war has dropped out of (our) national conversation."

What's more, Americans don't realize that victory in Iraq is within reach. "We are so close to victory," Meyer says. In Northern Iraq, the shopping malls are jammed. There's a housing boom in Iraq. The Baghdad zoo has reopened. "Normal life has returned.

"For the first time there is a global Moslem reform movement - how to reconcile their faith with the modern world," he says. "For the first time, the conversation in the Mideast is 'Where did we go wrong?' and 'How do we fix it?'

"It's like a race horse. Either (Barack) Obama is going to push the horse over the finish line or not."

Collapse of birth rates

World population is exploding out of control. That's the dogma that American schools have brainwashed into our children for two generations.

"That is totally untrue," Meyer says.

To the contrary, he says: "Europe is dying." This is the first time in history the average age of humans is increasing, not decreasing.

To replace and maintain a country's population, the birth rate must be 2.1% - two children, one each to take care of a mother and father and 0.1 children to keep a nation's population stable.

A birth rate of 1.3%, Meyer says, "is suicidal." In 17 European countries, the birth rate is below 1.3%.

"In 30 years, there will be 70 million to 80 million fewer Europeans alive than there are today," says Meyer. "That's shut down."

In Germany, 30% of all women are childless; 40% of all college-educated women in Germany are childless.

Europe's two most Catholic countries, Spain and Italy, have Europe's lowest birth rates - 1.2%, Meyer says.

The Russian population is aging so fast that by 2050 the Russian population will be smaller than Yemen's, Meyer says. The Russian government has established Sept. 12 as the official day of conception. All workers are given the afternoon off with orders "to create a patriot for Russia."

Japan is just as bad off. By 2020, one out of five Japanese will be over age 70. "How do you run a modern society where one in five people are over age 70? No one has the slightest idea," Meyer says.

The Japanese government is now encouraging its elderly citizens to move to the Philippines.

China, Meyer says, is the most rapidly aging country in the world. Its birth rate is 1.1; India's is 2.8. "India is going to surpass China," Meyer says.

But India and China have another demographic challenge. Because their cultures prefer males over females, abortions and killings of females in those two countries have created an unnatural imbalance.

Typically, the natural split in most nations is 103 boys for every 100 girls. In China and India, it's 118 boys to 100 girls. Says Meyer: "Two hundred million more men than women in China is a disaster." The government has resorted to flying charters from Shanghai to Vietnam so men can pair up with women.

"The Chinese population is about to go off a cliff," Meyer says. "It's aging, and it's all male."

Closer to home, the Canadian birth rate has dropped to 1.5%. Meyer calls Canada "the new Europe."

In the United States, the data are more sanguine. The U.S. birth rate for the first time in 30 years will climb to 2.1% from 2%, thanks to Hispanic births. Their birth rate is 3.2% versus the Anglo birth rate here of 1.8%.

Now contrast the declining birth rates in Europe, China and Japan with those of Moslem countries: Their birth rates range from 2.4% to 6.8%, second-highest in the world after those of undeveloped African nations.

Birth rate effects

The economic effects of declining birth rates are self-evident. We see it in the United States: There won't be enough working people to generate income and taxes for the state to care for an aging population. "The modern state needs more kids," Meyer says.

Low birth rates translate to declining economies.

In Europe, the continent's secularism exacerbates the low birth rates. If a nation's people don't have faith, Meyer says, they don't marry, and they don't have kids. And with no families, "Nobody's going to work very hard."

Another birth-rate trend influencing European societies: a lack of assimilating cultures. Meyer calls this multiculturalism - when "people of different cultures are allowed to settle but do not assimilate."

This has spawned one of the fastest-rising crimes in Europe - honor killings, fathers killing their daughters for interracial dating and marriages. Honor killings have spread to the United States, too. This year, Meyer says, there was one in Atlanta and two in Dallas.

"The effort to integrate is going backward," Meyer says. In the United Kingdom, where the medical profession is increasingly Moslem, Moslem doctors and nurses recently announced they would no longer scrub before surgeries.

While Europe is shutting down, Meyer says, nonetheless we are living through the largest industrial revolution in world history. Economic growth rates in 17 African nations topped 4% last year.

"Seventy million to 100 million people a year are coming out of poverty," Meyer says. "Within our lifetime and our children's lifetime the largest percentage of population in history will be middle class."

Last year alone China added energy-producing capacity that exceeds all of the energy that powers California. "The spread of economic development is staggering," Meyer says.

This emergence of the new middle class is the cause of rising energy and food prices.

Our Second Civil War

America's culture war is, in short, the traditionalists versus the secular statists.

The traditionalists, Meyer wrote for American Thinker, believe "religion should remain at the center of life," that "individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by a village." They believe in economic liberty, property rights and limited government.

The statists, he says, believe the state is the supreme power, "that groups are more important than individuals, and that one's stand on public issues is more important than one's private actions or morality."

So great is this gulf between the two sides and so irreconcilable the differences, Meyer says, "our decades-long political struggle has amounted to a kind of second Civil War. And for several years now, it's been a stalemate.

"This is why so many elections are so close, why so many Supreme Court decisions are split 5-4 and why we've been unable to act decisively on any of the issues that confront us - the war, the economy, energy, healthcare, border control, immigration and all the rest."

In long, ideological wars, Meyer says, history shows the outcome is determined not by firepower but by will. "The aggressor's objective isn't to kill the defenders, but to wear them down until they no longer have the courage and stamina to keep resisting.

"The defenders win only when they stop merely resisting - in other words, trying just not to lose - and start playing offense," he says.

McCain-Palin, he says, was the traditionalists' first step of going on the offense. Says Meyer: "If you want to win, you play offense."

CIA's TOP ANALYST

Herb Meyer's analytical insights caught the attention of U.S. leaders in the 1970s when he covered the Soviet Union for Fortune magazine. He predicted a coming demographic crisis in the Soviet Union. The KGB made it required reading.

Then came Bill Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan. Casey called Meyer at home one night and said, "Let's meet." Meyer became the CIA's Number 2 under Casey, in charge of collecting data from the CIA's agents on the world's big issues and trends and analyzing it for the president.

In 2002, Meyer lost in a bid for Congress in Washington state. After audiences heard his analysis of world trends, his phone started ringing: Groups wanted to hear his message.

You can reach Meyer at [email protected].

BIRTH RATES: EUROPE IS DYING FAST

Here are the highest and lowest birth rates per 1,000 population, along with the birth rates of countries of interest in a ranking of 224 countries. When grouped, African countries obviously top the list, with Islamic countries typically showing the second-highest birth rates. European countries and Japan are at the bottom.

25 HIGHEST BIRTH RATES

1 Niger 49.62

2 Mali 49.38

3 Uganda 48.15

4 Afghanistan 45.82

5 Sierra Leone 45.08

6 Burkina Faso 44.68

7 Somalia 44.12

8 Angola 44.09

9 Ethiopia 43.97

10 Congo, Dem. Republic 43.00

11 Liberia 42.92

12 Yemen 42.42

13 Malawi 41.79

14 Congo, Republic of the 41.76

15 Burundi 41.72

16 Chad 41.61

17 Zambia 40.52

18 Mauritania 40.14

19 Rwanda 39.97

20 Western Sahara 39.95

21 Benin 39.80

22 Mayotte 39.79

23 Sao Tome/ Principe 39.12

24 Djibouti 38.61

25 Madagascar 38.38

COUNTRIES OF INTEREST

38 Haiti 35.69

49 Iraq 30.77

54 Saudi Arabia 28.85

55 Guatemala 28.55

58 Pakistan 28.35

63 Honduras 26.93

65 Syria 26.57

69 El Salvador 25.72

71 Libya 25.62

76 Nicaragua 23.70

86 India 22.22

88 Egypt 22.12

94 Morocco 21.31

97 Venezuela 20.92

104 Mexico 20.04

105 Israel 20.02

106 Colombia 19.86

107 Peru 19.77

110 Brazil 18.72

113 Argentina 18.11

117 Costa Rica 17.71

127 Iran 16.89

148 North Korea 14.61

150 Ireland 14.33

151 United States 14.18

153 New Zealand 14.09

154 China 13.71

162 France 12.73

165 Australia 12.55

174 Cuba 11.27

177 Norway 11.12

178 Russia 11.03

181 Denmark 10.71

183 United Kingdom 10.65

184 Slovakia 10.64

185 Georgia 10.62

186 Romania 10.61

188 Netherlands 10.53

189 Portugal 10.45

190 Finland 10.39

192 Canada 10.29

193 Estonia 10.28

195 Belgium 10.22

196 Sweden 10.15

197 Poland 10.01

198 Spain 9.87

25 LOWEST BIRTH RATES

200 San Marino 9.74

201 Croatia 9.64

202 Belarus 9.62

203 Switzerland 9.62

204 Latvia 9.62

205 Hungary 9.59

206 Bulgaria 9.58

207 Ukraine 9.55

208 Greece 9.54

209 South Korea 9.09

210 Monaco 9.09

211 Lithuania 9.00

212 Slovenia 8.99

213 Taiwan 8.99

214 Singapore 8.99

215 Czech Republic 8.89

216 Jersey 8.84

217 Bosnia/Herzegovina 8.82

218 Macau 8.69

219 Austria 8.66

220 Guernsey 8.57

221 Italy 8.36

222 Germany 8.18

223 Japan 7.87

224 Hong Kong 7.37

Source: The Central Intelligence Agency

World Fact Book, 2008 estimates.