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LaRouche On the Current Mideast Situation March 5, 2002 Hussein al-Nadeem of EIR submitted questions to Lyndon LaRouche on March 26--on the eve of the Arab League summit meeting--on developments in the Middle East, the new war threats in the region, and the possibility of a solution. EIR: U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney has just concluded an 11-nation tour in the Middle East. In each of these states, leaders gave him a clear "No" signal on the U.S. plans to launch a new military strike against Iraq. On the other hand, they expressed their deep concerns about the Israeli Army's brutal practices against the Palestinian people and its leadership. However, upon returning to Washington, Cheney stressed that he got a message contrary to this, from the Arab leaders, concerning Iraq. What is your assessment of such behavior? LaRouche: Since Vice-President Cheney has permitted no disclosure of the content of these privileged exchanges, we must assess the situation in light of both our knowledge of the situation and the high degree of unreliability of most official U.S. statements on these and related matters. Mr. Cheney must be appreciated as speaking publicly for effect, just as the usual practice of his administration has been on virtually every other topical area, and increasingly so, over the course of recent months. We must continue to view such matters in light of the persisting absence of any truthful representation of the actual conduct of Israel's government and military forces, from the U.S. government during recent months. In addition to other considerations, knowledgeable U.S. political observers will continue to take into account the impact of the scheduled November U.S. elections, on the current behavior of the administration on all topics, concerning all areas of the world, especially the Middle East. EIR: In view of your insight into the American political and economic-financial situation, is the United States capable of launching a new major war, either individually or together with Britain and Israel, against Iraq or any of the so-called "rogue states," and what is the time frame for such an operation, if it really exists? LaRouche: From a military standpoint, any U.S. attack upon Iraq, excepting a preemptive nuclear strike against a non-nuclear state, is currently estimated, among relevant military and related circles, to require between 200,000 and 300,000 troops. It is estimated that this could not be put into place earlier than the Autumn, and, politically, not before the November 2002 Federal and state elections. However, under present circumstances, all normal sorts of estimates and related forecasts are put into doubt. Anything is possible, at any time. The fact that some option is insane, on logistical or other premises, does not mean that the governments involved in the threatened attack are sane, or realistic in any other sense. To illustrate that point, look at the current situation in Afghanistan, which the United States claims to have virtually won, at precisely the moment the expected long-range phase of the war has just recently only begun. All rational military expectations, including studies of both British Nineteenth-Century experience there, and the Soviet experience during the 1980s, implied that no sane power would ever make so foolish a mistake, as to repeat the Soviet experience in mountain warfare in that area. To strike a posture of a wider, "hundred years-long" war in many parts of the world, including Iraq, while suppressing reports of the embarrassing recent developments in Afghanistan, is not the behavior of a realistic strategic power, but a government made desperate by the combinations of an impossible global economic-financial and strategic situation. One thinks of England's fabled Richard III crying out in desperation for a horse. EIR: What is the role of Israel's Prime Minister Sharon and the commanders of the Israeli Defense Forces in creating a pretext for an enlarged Arab-Israeli conflict, and probably a worldwide religious war? LaRouche: The assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Rabin, and the refusal of the currently reigning Israeli institutions to punish the institutions behind that killing, shows us an Israel gripped ideologically by the suicidal lunacy of an "Eretz Israel/Masada" complex. The rising rivalry of Sharon and Netanyahu accentuates the growing sense of desperation in those Israeli circles. This situation inside Israel is aggravated by the impulses from the utopian Clash of Civilizations faction around Brzezinski, Huntington, Kissinger, the Smith Richardson Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, et al., inside the U.S. policy establishment. The very intimate interlinks between those fascist circles in Israel, associated with both Sharon and Netanyahu, and the universal fascist circles of Brzezinski et al. among the U.S. utopians, are, for the present moment, the principal threat to global civilization. In this connection, Iraq is not really the issue; the use of an attack on Iraq as a detonator for a global Clash of Civilizations war, is the crucial element of motive for both Israel and its U.S. utopian co-thinkers. The latter are as deeply embedded in the Democratic Party circles of former Vice-President Gore and Senator Lieberman, as they are among Senator McCain's Republicans. The problem is, that the world situation is such, that the U.S. utopians can not accept any course of action which does not lead directly toward global spread of total warfare. There exist alternatives for the present global economic collapse, but no alternatives which are acceptable to the leading, entrenched desperadoes in Israel and the U.S.A. Only if they are forced to accept alternatives they would not willingly tolerate, is there any hope of avoidance of the very worst outcome from this present period of global crises. We are therefore gripped by a world situation, in which no usual sort of forecast can be made with any degree of reliability. Whenever a civilization has entered a similar predicament in the past, the result has been ultimately awful for most of the parts of humanity involved. Like the collapse of two Roman Empires of the past, when survival of a culture requires its acceptance of alternatives which it can not, as a culture, accept, the likely result is a plunge of that culture into a self-inflicted, mass-homicidal form of new dark age. EIR: Is the leaking of the Pentagon's "Nuclear Posture Review" to the press--on possible preemptive nuclear targetting of non-nuclear nations--a case of the "inmates taking over the asylum" in U.S. military policy-making? Or, is it part of the psychological warfare being practiced by what you called the "utopian" empire faction in the United States and Britain? LaRouche: Since the 1789 adoption of the draft U.S. Federal Constitution of 1787, the world has been dominated by the radiating effects of the fact that that Constitution represented a mortal threat, to both the British monarchy's system and the Habsburg-typified relics of continental European feudalism. Thus, we had the world's first fascist state, that of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte; and the emergence of the post-1814 cooperation of the mortal rivals--the British monarchy and Holy Alliance--both of which were united, as Henry A. Kissinger has described this, by a common desire to cut one another's throats, but an overwhelming desire to crush the United States out of existence first; a view which Henry Kissinger has shared, and publicly stated, for about fifty years to date. For example, when the British monarchy put Adolf Hitler into power, beginning January 1933, that monarchy's original intention was to keep the U.S.A. out of the new war which Britain intended for Europe. However, when London discovered that the Hitler regime's intended strategy was to strike against Britain and France first, London dumped the now-embarrassing King Edward VIII, and sought Franklin Roosevelt's commitment to build up for a war against Hitler. In the meantime, with the successful 1901 assassination of U.S. President William McKinley, by terrorist circles associated with New York City's Emma Goldmann, the Presidencies of pro-Confederacy Theodore Roosevelt, Ku Klux Klan fanatic Woodrow Wilson, and the Coolidge-Mellon clique of the 1920s, transformed the United States into a virtual member of the British monarchy's Commonwealth. Only President Franklin Roosevelt and, while he lived, President Kennedy, have been notable exceptions to the dominant role of a financier clique which regards itself as both a virtual member and rival of the British monarchy's Commonwealth, as Sir Henry A. Kissinger merely typifies this. After that war, and the ouster of General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur, a radical shift in military policy was introduced. With the close of the Eisenhower Presidency, this new policy, which both Eisenhower and MacArthur denounced, modelled on both the ancient imperial legions of Rome and the Nazi Waffen-SS, grabbed for power, in partnership with co-thinkers in Spain, France, and elsewhere. The attempted assassination of France's President Charles de Gaulle was typical of this change. With the 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the utopian faction of Brzezinski et al. launched its long-range effort to eradicate the existence of the sovereign nation-state in all parts of this planet. "Globalization" is one typical expression of this. Their policy is what Kissinger crony Michael Ledeen has aptly described as "universal fascism": a revival, in principle, of the goals of the Nazi Waffen-SS, as Sharon's policies toward the Palestinians copy exactly the SS practices against the Warsaw Ghetto. Their strategic policies are parodies of those of the ancient Roman Empire and its legions; that is the meaning of the attack on Afghanistan and the threat to Iraq. EIR: What do you think the Arab leaders and their states should do in this situation, in order to prevent Sharon's "final solution" against the Palestinians and a war against Iraq? LaRouche: The strategic key to any durable solution is to be found only in a kind of reform of the world's currently collapsing world monetary-financial system for which I have dedicated my efforts over more than thirty years. In brief, an appropriate revival of the protectionist Bretton Woods system of the 1945-1965 interval, this time including all nations as partners in a common effort by a community of respectively sovereign nation-states. This means a long-range commitment, to rebuilding the world economy in a just manner. Peaceful cooperation in large-scale infrastructure development throughout Eurasia should be the keystone of that rebuilding-process, with development of Africa occurring as a by-product of developments in Eurasia. The crucial point to be emphasized, is that the 1945-1965 monetary system worked, whereas the changes of the past thirty-five years, especially since August 1971, have been a catastrophe. To make sudden changes, it were better to begin with models which worked in the recent past, and to proceed from there to further improvements. EIR: What is the alternative to the current policies? LaRouche: A dialogue of cultures should not be approached as a negotiation among religions, but, rather, as a process of defining, not the details, but the common principles under which we should agree to be governed in our respective states. Crucial is the principle known as the "general welfare," or "common good," which should be the constitutional requirement of governments, and of the pursuit of mutually beneficial cooperation among states. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, whose principal stipulation was that the peoples which had been in thirty years of religious warfare, must love one another despite their differences, is a standard applicable to the present reality. EIR: U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and Wall Street, have been talking about an economic recovery. Is this a mere fantasy? Or, is it part of the wish for a war-time military industrial mobilization? LaRouche: It is worse than a fantasy. It is an intentional lie. There is no recovery in process, but only a gigantic swindle which attempts to deceive the foolish and credulous majority of the population for a little time longer. The recent leak of reports on the minutes of a recent Federal Open Market Committee session, points to the outright frauds being undertaken by the U.S. Federal Reserve System to deceive public opinion for a short time to come. It will never work. The so-called war-like military mobilization is, in its present form, a farce. EIR: Since Sept. 11th, the hopes for a dialogue of civilizations seem to have been fading, a dialogue of the sort which Iran's President Khatami called for in his UN General Assembly speech in 2000; or the one you called for in a Khartoum, Sudan conference in January 2001. Can such a dialogue be revived? What is the basis upon which such a dialogue can be built? LaRouche: It could work, but only if the prospective participants are brought together under conditions in which they recognize the awful penalty of failing to succeed in such a dialogue. Most people will cling tenaciously to little points of difference, until they are aware that failure to reach reasonable agreement would be an awful catastrophe for all concerned. That was the secret of the success of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, after thirty years of terrible religious warfare. EIR: How is this related to the rebuilding of the world's economic and financial system? LaRouche: This takes our attention to the fundamental issue of economic science, the fundamental issue of my specialty, the science of physical economy. There is no sustainable form of fixed social or technological model of economy. The imperative is progress or death through attrition. It is the individual's sense of participation in reliving both the great discoveries and related achievements of the past, and bringing forth the improvements needed for the future, which imparts to that individual a sense of meaningful participation, as a creature in the image of the Creator, in making the future possible. The recent decades' popularization of evil ideas, such as the notion that the planet is overpopulated. builds the form of hatred based in the desire expressed by the most evil among the Israelis, that others (the Palestinians) must die, so that the Israeli settlements may steal more land and more water on which to live. That is, in fact, Hitler's doctrine of Lebensraum, copied by the present-day followers of the avowed fascist, and one-time Hitler admirer, Vladimir Jabotinsky. Contrary to the Nazi-like ideas of the forces associated with Sharon, the development of the land and water of the Middle East is the only durable basis for peace in that region. The situation around the world, whether in the interior of China, or elsewhere, is similar. We as human beings, must do good for future generations, and must find some way in which we, as individuals, can participate in the production of that good. Once we are rid of that evil dogma of the brutal Thomas Hobbes, the Hobbes whose philosophy Kissinger has avowed he prefers, durable peace on this planet will be possible. |
