The impetus for this turnabout in Bush the Younger's regime was the mostly successful commando operation staged inside the US by al-Qaeda operatives on September 11 of 2001, now referred to as 9/11. So convenient was this for the imposition of what essentially amounted to a form of martial law in the US, including suspension of free speech rights and attacks on anyone who dared question administration decisions, that many on the right and left saw it as an inside job. For example, Alex Jones (who claims to be neither right or left, but calls himself libertarian or paleoconservative, take your choice) pushed the idea that the Bush administration was behind 9/11, interviewing experts who claimed an aircraft could not have brought down the twin towers, that some flights destroyed in the attack actually landed safely and the passengers disembarked safely, that the supposed hijackers were still alive — at one point interviewing a "government insider" and author with ties to Bob Dole named Stanley Hilton who unsuccessfully attempted to sue Bush the Younger for his role in the attacks. Conservatives have said this mania was a left-wing affliction, the term left-wing likely meaning liberals (who have taken to calling themselves progressives) if it means anything at all, but I heard an interview with Noam Chomsky, clearly an intellectual leader of the left if anyone is, saying that he was certain it was not an inside job but in fact an act of terrorism by al-Qaeda.

That the attack could be believed to have been an inside job might be the historical memory of the burning of the German Reichstag, which in popular memory was a trick of Hitler's to gain control of the state by scapegoating the communists. Perhaps much of that memory comes from the famous book by William L. Shirer on the Third Reich, but in reality historians seem to believe that Hitler and the Nazis had nothing to do with it, that it was a lucky coincidence for Hitler. However, conspiracy theorists cannot abide coincidence; nonetheless, there seems more disagreement on this point than on 9/11 being an inside job.

At any rate, the US citizenry loved the Bush regime attacking Baghdad for 9/11, despite the fact that all evidence was against such a conclusion. In typical "You start the trial, I'll get the rope" mentality, US public opinion favored lynching after White House speeches implicating Iraq obliquely. But it was clear from white papers written by so-called neoconservatives working with Cheney that Iraq was a target before Bush became President, and there is some talk that Bush and company had this on the table all the time. There would be a number of reasons for such an attack, most especially the strategic position of Iraq in the region and the false idea that Iraqis would welcome the US as saviors and allow the US to easily establish a satrapy there. They even had their man picked out: Ahmed Chalabi, who had lobbied the US to attack Iraq. The quiet downfall of Chalabi seems to have come after rumors regarding connections to Iranian agents, and some reports indicated that he was or some of his staff were Iranian agents even while schmoozing Cheney and his cohorts for an attack on Iraq. Of course, nothing regarding Iraq can be believed. The important part of the Iraq invasion for purposes of this forecast is that it showed the US had no real interest in capturing those responsible for 9/11 or for making certain that radical staging areas for future attacks were cleansed and secured.

The invasion of Iraq was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is significant because it signals a shift in language usage that Reagan had applied successfully, e.g. calling fiscal stimulus through large corporations "defense" spending and renaming the MX ICBM, the Peacekeeper. This is part of the strategy of the militarists to deflect attention from their true purposes, as in the invasion of Iraq and to demonize opposition. It exploits the human primate's weakness in confusing words for things other than what they might mean, if they mean anything at all. Human language is a two-edged sword, as humans tend to believe that words must refer to something. They are unable to understand that words without operational meaning are also without objective significance, and people accept that they understand what a word means when they have no clear idea to what the person using it refers. One must from time to time ask people where the hole in the doughnut goes when the doughnut is eaten.

This technique came into sharp focus during the campaign to reelect Bush the Younger when his rival John Kerry was attacked for his military service in Vietnam though he had been awarded a silver star, a bronze star and three purple hearts for dangerous swift boat duty. For some reason, no one discussed the self-evident fact that such an attack questioned the awards granted and dishonored the military service of all those who had served in Vietnam. In the end, Kerry was branded a coward and his opponent, Bush the Younger, a man whose family influence had gotten him out of military service by dodging the draft within the National Guard, became the war hero. Such surrealism has since become more and more common in national debate.

Bush the Younger's misguided, botched military adventures led the nation into an economic crisis in part because the monopsonistic money feeding tube was diverted abroad. The wars were vastly more expensive than expected, in part because of the difficulty in finding volunteers, which created a need for a highly paid mercenary army to perform the standard garrison and bodyguard duty usually performed by the uniformed military, while the standard soldier and Marine had the job of engaging the enemy. Bush carefully kept these costs off the budget.

But that is a distraction. The main thrust here is to provide a big-picture of the national state and to use it to sketch a forecast of the US future.