A mighty blow will soon be struck against the enemies of peace and freedom by the forces of our own U.S. military. This fight won’t be against radical Islamists, Hugo Chavez or Communist China, because we have truly seen the enemy and it is … Global Warming.

After years of denying its existence, the Pentagon has now found a reason to believe, and the reason is WAR. In a front page New York Times article (Sunday, August 9), Pentagon brass are now reported to see Global Warming as a threat to world stability that could require military action in the near future.

According to the Times, the Pentagon strategists have concluded that “climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions.”

True believers always have a touch of self-interest in their obsessions: evangelists collect revenues by proclaiming the glory of God to the masses, environmentalists fund research-oriented careers by revealing the inconvenient truths of raping the land, bankers proselytize on the religion of unfettered markets – then turn that hard-won freedom from rules into luxurious lifetime incomes and guaranteed golden parachutes.

So it took something like a series of war games encouraged by the military’s own National Defense University to provide the Pentagon with the proper motivation to flip from its “don’t ask, don’t tell” position on climate change to the new mantra that global warming is real and it’s a monumental threat to the United States. Defense contractors must be licking their chops as they design costly new technologies such as hybrid-powered fighter aircraft and bio-degradable napalm.

A new meaning for the phrase “clean kill” may emerge from this strategy as we seek to finish off an enemy without releasing a single liter of greenhouse gas.

There are, of course, political connections to the Pentagon’s new view of global warming. Then-Senator Hillary Clinton was one of the first to alert military strategists to the problem, and Senator John Kerry, Vietnam veteran and scourge of swift boat veterans everywhere, has taken the mantle of political leadership on this matter. So the fact that Democrats hold the purse strings may have been a far greater inducement to action than Al Gore’s most recent speaking tour.

But, so what? If we get it right on this issue, maybe we’ll be able to avoid the kinds of catastrophes that are the stuff of Hollywood disaster films (and that brings to mind the tremendous opportunities for profit by those liberal media elites on the Left Coast that can come out of the Pentagon’s prognostications).

So now that we’ve made the environment a source of the greatest means of economic recovery known to modern man – war – perhaps the green movement will become more popular among Republicans, and the source of another decade of prosperity.

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Alan Markow, president of AM Communications, has worked in marketing, public relations and corporate communications for more than 30 years. His experience includes senior management positions in communications and Investor Relations at companies as diverse as National Semiconductor, GTE (now Verizon), Praxair, VLSI Technology, C-Cube Microsystems and JPMorgan Chase. He is now a free-lance writer for newspapers and magazines, and a blog writer on politics and other issues. Prior to starting his corporate career, he had been a broadcaster, journalist, advertising and PR copywriter and speechwriter. He served as a Navy journalist and broadcaster during the Vietnam era, where he was television and radio news director for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service station in Keflavik, Iceland.