Free Republic

Herb Meyer would be commended by the intelligence community for his extraordinary 1983 memo predicting that America was going to win the Cold War — this at a time when virtually no one (other than Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey) thought winning was possible. Today his task remains the same. It should come as a revelation to those glued to the 24-hour news cycle that things aren’t as bad “out there” as we think. The evening news never reports the countless airplanes that land on time and unharmed, or the daily billions who walk through malls and shopping centers without...

Predicting the Soviet CollapseHerb Meyer deduced from solid research what Ronald Reagan had deduced by intuition. It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of the Russian Republic, with Mikhail Gorbachev clinging to power atop the precarious USSR. In August, Communist hardliners attempted a dramatic coup against Gorbachev, prompting a stunning succession of declarations of independence by Soviet republics, with seven of them breaking away in August alone, and four more following through mid-December. The writing was on the wall — not...

Do you remember that 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate which concluded -- to virtually everyone's astonishment -- that four years earlier Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program? Publication of that NIE cut the ground out from under the Bush administration's efforts to prevent Iran from getting its hands on a nuclear bomb.  After all, why pressure the mullahs in Teheran to stop a program they'd already abandoned?  And, of course, the NIE's conclusion was cited by President Bush's political enemies as (further) evidence that the President and his team were so driven by their hard-line ideology that they (as...

During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a "culture war" or even a "second Civil War." These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution. Because of our country's history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes -- quite often, actually --...

During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a "culture war" or even a "second Civil War." These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution. Because of our country's history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes -- quite often, actually --...

A generation or two of American school children have grown up without a clue about how wealth is created. If they ever think about the people who organize and create businesses, the people who actually create wealth and carry out the innovations that cause the rest of us to prosper, they think in terms of responsibility for bad things like pollution, discrimination, and other crimes. Entrepreneurs are the heroes of capitalism, the brave risk takers who see a need and fill it. Most fail, but those who succeed provide jobs, products, innovation, and tax revenues to the rest of us....

The 9-11 attacks did more than start a war; they started a war about the war. No sooner had the World Trade towers collapsed and the Pentagon burst into flames than two perceptions of the threat began competing for the public's support: Perception One: We're at War For the third time in history Islam - or, more precisely, its most radical element - has launched a war whose objective is the destruction of Western civilization. Our survival is at stake, and despite its imperfections we believe that Western civilization is worth defending to the death. Moreover, in the modern world...

  12 February 2007 A Global Intelligence Briefing for CEOs The following is an article that is being sent around the internet. I do not know the original source publication, so I will post it here until I find an original source to link to. This article is discussed in this Evolving Excellence blog post. -------------------------------------------------------------What In The World Is Going On? A Global Intelligence Briefing For CEOs by Herbert Meyer Four Major Transformations The War in IraqThe Emergence of ChinaShifting Demographics of Western CivilizationRestructuring of American Business Implications of the Four Major Transformations The War in IraqThe Emergence...

To think clearly about the looming crisis with Iran, close your eyes and imagine that you’re standing outside your children’s school. It’s 2:55pm, and you’re chatting amiably with other parents while waiting for the 3pm bell to ring.  Suddenly you see a man running toward the school, holding a hand grenade and shouting: “I hate kids.  I welcome death.” Now, what do you propose to do? One option is to engage your fellow parents in a dialogue about the serious and complex questions raised by the running man with the grenade. For instance, you might try to calculate precisely how...

The kerfuffle over Bill Bennett’s recent remarks on his radio show – like the earlier kerfuffle over Harvard President Larry Summer’s remarks at a seminar, and like a dozen other such kerfuffles I no longer can recall – all stem from the same root: Creative and intelligent people – artists, writers, scientists, sociologists, economists and other public intellectuals – play with ideas. This is how they organize their thoughts, fuse them into new forms and eventually create the “finished” products that reach the public in the form of paintings, novels, scientific papers that change our understanding of nature, or essays...

An Open Memo to the Homeland Security Secretary August 2nd, 2005 A few weeks ago, when you announced your long-awaited reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security – including creation of a new Intelligence Division – the general reaction was a great big yawn. But the deadly terrorist attack in London on July 7, followed by that second (and mercifully failed) attack on July 21, have jolted Americans awake to the very real possibility of similar or even more deadly bombings here in the US. Now they understand why a new Homeland Intelligence Division is precisely what we need. This...

Dear Mr. President, I’ve no idea what your advisers are telling you, but based on my own experience in Washington I suspect they are talking more bluntly among themselves than they are to you. So I’m writing to deliver an unpleasant message you must hear, and hear now: We are in danger of losing the war in Iraq. To understand why, think back for a moment to what happened in Vietnam. Even as our troops did better and better on the ground – as they killed more and more North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers and secured more and more...

If your objective were to place a beacon atop a mountain, would you: A: Get a beacon and place it atop the mountain, or B: Get a beacon, suspend it in mid-air near the mountain using poles, wires and helicopters, then shove the mountain under the beacon? If you chose Option A, you should consider a career in the private sector, where common sense often is rewarded.  If you chose Option B – your future lies in Washington.  For this is precisely the approach the Bush administration and Congress have taken to fix our country’s broken intelligence service and get...

If size were a measure of insight, the WMD Commission's just-released 618-page report would be an even more valuable guide to understanding the cascading series of failures that have plagued our country's intelligence service than the 9/11 Commission's 567-page best-selling opus. But there is no correlation whatever between size and insight and — alas — the most striking feature of both reports is their focus on what is obvious and their silence about what lies beneath. For example, the WMD Commission concludes that "We need an Intelligence Community that is truly integrated, far more imaginative and willing to run risks,...

— Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His new video is The Siege of Western Civilization. Not even President Bush’s biggest fans claim that he’s articulate, and the President himself cheerfully pokes fun at his inability to use the English language very well.  But when it comes to the War on Terrorism, this isn’t a laughing matter.  Every time the President gives a major speech about the War – as he did again on Monday, in New Jersey –...

— Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His new video is The Siege of Western Civilization. Hi.  Are you nuts?Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I’m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds.  One of Britain’s largest newspapers ran a headline asking “How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb?”, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word – bizarre...

Herb Meyer is calling for a holy war to save western civilization. But the former Reagan CIA official has a problem: Most people don’t know what it is he wants to save. "We’ve forgotten what Western civilization is," Meyer told NewsMax.com. "We no longer teach it in the schools. If you come to the schools where I live and ask a group of high school students ‘what is Western Civilization?’ They’ll tell you it’s slavery, the oppression of women and we don’t recycle.” But Western Civilization is not made up of our faults; all civilizations have those. Meyer contends, “It’s...

  October 07, 2003, 8:30 a.m.What This War Is AboutFacing facts. By Herb MeyerOkay, it's time to say out loud what a lot of us who support the war on terrorism have been saying among ourselves: President Bush is doing a great job fighting the war — but a lousy job explaining it. And his inability to explain this war in a convincing, persuasive way is starting to erode support among Republicans and, worse, starting to give Democrats and foreigners who want us to lose this war — yes, that really is what they want — the kind of...