07-21-2007, 04:56 PM
THE GUNS OF AUGUST OR A NEW TYPE OF FDR-IMF
July 20, 2007 (LPAC)
http://larouchepac.com/news/2007/07/19/l...r-imf.html
Lyndon LaRouche held a closed-door discussion July 19 with 25 Washington-based diplomats representing 18 countries from Eurasia, Africa, and Ibero-America. As per tradition, LaRouche's opening remarks were recorded and transcribed, but the discussion following was strictly off-the-record.
"This is not yet August, but as I think back to Augusts in the past, I think of August 1914, August 1939." This is how Lyn began his address yesterday to a private gathering of some 25 diplomats in Washington D.C. from eighteen different countries. Lyn spoke of the "virtual state of war" between Russia and Great Britain. He told of the signs of the onrushing economic crisis, the New York Times today noting that a can of soda in Heidelberg now costs $5.52, and the collapse of Bear-Stearns. "Under these economic conditions, war becomes likely," Lyn said, noting particularly Dick Cheney's drive to start a war with Iran. "It wouldn't be war in the simple sense of World War I and World War II, but something comparable," he said. And unfortunately, it occurs in a situation where you have very poor leadership in the United States, he said. Cheney and the British typify the situation. "It's very dangerous. Anything can happen." "And governments are on vacation," he warned.
After that introduction, Lyn continued: "The world can blow up. Now the alternative is also on the table. It was put on the table in a curious fashion this past spring. A series of events. It happened at the time that I was making a visit to Moscow for the birthday anniversary of a friend of mine, a distinguished figure in the Russian system. I had some meetings there.
"But at the same time, you had the death of Yeltsin in that period, and the events that went along with that. President Clinton was there, former President Bush was there. Other figures were there. And during this interval of this spring, concluding with the meeting at Kennebunkport in Maine, with the Bush family and with President Putin of Russia, there were certain negotiations behind the scenes in which former President Clinton played a key role, and others played a key role.
"We have on the table the option, the opening of the door, so to speak, with the Kennebunkport proceedings, in which we could induce what has to happen. What has to happen is a process under which the United States government engages with the Russian government, the government of China and the government of India, to sponsor emergency action to save the world from a general financial collapse, which is what's oncoming now.
"Let me explain what that means. If the U.S. dollar collapses, as it is collapsing now, the entire world could go into something worse than a depression. If you look at the effect of the collapse of the dollar on world markets, and look at the financial condition of countries throughout Asia as well as elsewhere, a collapse of the dollar would mean a chain-reaction collapse worse than any depression of the last century.
"Now, that could be prevented. We have in United States history, in our Constitution, we have the means to do that. Roosevelt is an example of that, Franklin Roosevelt. But if the government of the United States were to engage Russia, the government of China, and India, as the four major nations who are going to co-sponsor something on behalf of the world as a whole, and say, we're going to freeze the values of currencies among these governments, and other governments, and we're going to go back to a Franklin Roosevelt approach, to organize a general world recovery.
"In other words, we're going to take over in effect, have the nations of the world, take over the IMF system, and put it under a Roosevelt-style administration. Under those conditions, we could manage this crisis and we could work our way, gradually, out of many of the financial and related problems. If we could unite nations around this issue, which has to be addressed now, the economic issue, then their interest would be in preserving that agreement. Every nation on the world would have a substantial interest in maintaining that agreement and making it effective.
"Our problem is we've been moving in part away from -- Western Europe is a junkpile. It is no longer a technological center. The United States has no high technology, except in the military sector which produces weapons. We are exporting production from Europe and from North America, into countries we're exploiting on the basis of their cheap labor. So therefore, we are not really helping these countries--though they may get SOME benefit, as the case of China, for example, illustrates--but the benefit of the people as a whole, the entire population, that does not occur, because the income is not sufficient, the rate of growth is not sufficient, to raise the standard of living around the world. What we're doing is exploiting cheap labor in these countries, or exploiting the population in order to exploit the labor. We're not developing them.
"Therefore, we need to go to a Roosevelt-type approach. We organize the world system, freeze the values of currencies, put the whole system under bankruptcy, prevent a collapse, and then unleash measures for global development over the coming 50 years. We need really a set of 50-year agreements on economic recovery. It can be done, it has to be done. It's not something that would ordinarily be considered now, but only in a time of crisis as grave as this is, are nations capable of making the kinds of sudden, sweeping changes needed to deal with a crisis of this type.
"We're at such a point, in which it's in a sense like August 1914. The British were determined to get rid of a lot of problems, and they prepared the war--it was called World War I--by starting a war of Japan against China in 1894, and Japan's war against China, launched from London, continued from 1894 to 1945. That's a big chunk of history there. We repeated World War I, in World War II. The outcome was somewhat different because of Franklin Roosevelt, but with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, we began to abandon his policies and move in a different direction. And with the assassination of President Kennedy, we began to move in the United States distinctly in that direction.
"So, we've come to a time where we have to change our ways. We also have to recognize, from looking at the month of August, and looking at the ominousness of this month, coming month of August, and compare it with 1914, compare it with 1939. We've come to a very dangerous period, but dangerous periods are times when people who recognize the danger will do things they otherwise would not do. They are willing to make changes they otherwise would not make. They'll make changes for worse, or changes for the better. This is a deadly threat; it's also an opportunity. And that's what I'm concentrating on.
"The point is very simple. My view is that we have to somehow get rid of Cheney. I think if we get rid of Cheney, with what's brewing among politicians here who are really not that courageous; they're not men of principles, they're opportunists. They're not bad people, they're just opportunists. But when an opportunity strikes in this form, where the horror hits 'em, they're capable of accepting the changes that they otherwise would never consider. And the time for those changes is now. The potential is now.
"And what I propose essentially, or have been proposing, is that the four principal nations I indicated must hopefully form a committee to sponsor a general rally of nations to reorganize the system. Because smaller nations do not have the courage or means to initiate these kinds of steps. You need to have a dominant leading power in the world, or combination of power, who opens the door to let other nations participate in this kind of reform. That's a chance. And in that case, we have to go back to a new kind of IMF system, a Roosevelt-type of IMF system, what Roosevelt had intended for the post-war period, had he lived.
"And with that kind of perspective, I think that we could organize cooperation among nations, dealing with some very obvious problems, which will lead to a solution to these problems. We also have to get rid of Cheney. That's clear. Cheney is not an American. He's nominally an American. He's British property. And he's his wife's property. She made him out of nothing, or less than nothing, and he represents the interests who want war. He represents the interests that want a war with Iran, and that could set the whole world afire. So we have to get rid of him. We invite him to go back and grow potatoes in Wyoming. That's his best opportunity.
"But this is the crisis. And the cowardice of my fellow American leaders here, in facing these kinds of issues, is a problem. But the crisis is now. More and more of America's leaders are realizing that this crisis exists. More and more people, Republicans as well as Democrats, behind the scenes, recognize that we've got to change some things here. And the effort is to, by September, or late September perhaps, to have something new in process where Cheney is no longer the landscape. The great danger is between now and September, September at Labor Day, until politicians return to Washington. The great danger is in this month of August, again as in August 1914 or August 1939. A monster could be let out, could be let loose, and maybe the world doesn't have the ability to quickly stop that monster from setting fire to the world. So we have the opportunity and great danger. We have great issues that have to be faced.
"Being a professional troublemaker as I am, I do the best I can."
THE GUNS OF AUGUST 2007 : CHENEY's FINGER IS ALREADY ON THE TRIGGER
Jeffrey Steinberg
On July 16, the London Guardian reported that President Bush, under the powerful influence of Vice President Dick Cheney, has tilted in favor of military action against Iran before he leaves office. According to the Guardian account, a series of meetings during June and July, involving top White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials, was used by the Vice President to assert that the diplomatic track, ostensibly pressed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had failed to produce any results, and that no future U.S. administration would have the courage to act militarily against Tehran. President Bush, according to the account, went along with Cheney, and once again, the prospects for a new Persian Gulf preemptive war loom large over Washington.
Highly informed sources contacted by EIR confirmed and elaborated on the Guardian leak, which came from circles close to the White House who are adamantly opposed to the prospects of an American or Israeli preventive strike against targets inside Iran. EIR's sources confirmed that President Bush had, indeed, tilted back towards supporting Cheney's position that Iran's alleged nuclear weapons sites must be hit preemptively, and that one of the most persuasive arguments mounted by Cheney and his neo-con allies, is that unless the U.S. strikes against Tehran, Israel will launch an attack, and this will create an even bigger mess for Washington.
Speaking for some of Cheney's London patrons, Patrick Cronin, director of studies at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading Anglo-American think tank, is quoted by the Guardian: "Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact.... The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack; the US will have to take decisive action. The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself."
In fact, the consensus among American military strategists is that Israel does not have the capacity to do serious damage to Iran's now widely dispersed nuclear research program—unless it were to use nuclear weapons.
The Two Liebermans
As Cheney was making his power play inside Administration circles, he was receiving back-up from "the two Liebermans." In early July, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, traveled to Brussels to confer with top NATO officials, and on his return, he told Israeli Army Radio that he had won backing from the United States and Europe for preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear sites. Lieberman, who is known among Israeli analysts as "Israel's closest thing to a National Socialist," elaborated that, if Israel were to launch air attacks against Iran's nuclear sites, NATO would join in to defend Israel in the event of Iranian retaliation. Lieberman could not have been more blunt: "We're stuck in Afghanistan, and European and American troops are wallowing in the Iraqi quagmire, which is something that is going to prevent the leaders of countries in Europe and America from deciding on the use of force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. Therefore," he concluded, "at the end of the day, Israel is going to have to remove the nuclear threat posed by Iran with the means at its disposal, and it won't be able to count on international cooperation." But, the Israeli minister then declared, "Europe and the U.S. will support us."
The very day that Avigdor Lieberman was threatening Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran, July 11, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced an amendment to the defense spending bill, demanding that U.S. intelligence agencies report to Congress every 60 days on Iran's activities inside Iraq. Although Lieberman's amendment, which contained a string of dubious or outright false claims of Iranian combat support operations against American forces in Iraq, was clearly aimed at putting the Senate on record as supporting a warlike policy against Iran, the entire Senate sheepishly voted, 97-0, in favor of the Lieberman ploy.
Lest there be any doubt that Joe Lieberman's actions were tightly coordinated with Cheney, the text of the Lieberman amendment quoted extensively from Gen. Kevin Bergner, the former top military aide to neo-con Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council, who was dispatched to Baghdad in June 2007, to conduct White House "spin control" over the war reporting. Bergner has put out a steady stream of disinformation and/or exaggerated claims of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. Bergner's propaganda from Baghdad, according to Pentagon sources, has infuriated the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who see it as a replay of the "stovepipe" of fake intelligence, funneled from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to the Vice President's office, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. This time, there is no pretense that the war propaganda is being vetted by the Pentagon intelligence services. It is being funneled directly from Baghdad via General Bergner, directly to Cheney, Lieberman, et al., and is increasingly showing up on CNN and other news outlets.
Impeach or Remove Cheney Now
The turn toward war against Iran, coming from the "usual suspects" in Washington, must be assessed against the backdrop of the July 1-2 Kennebunkport, Maine summit meeting between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two days of discussion, hosted by former President George H.W. Bush, represented a potential strategic breakthrough in U.S.-Russian relations. President Putin proposed a long-term strategic partnership between Washington and Moscow, encompassing all of Eurasia in a security alliance, built upon Lyndon LaRouche's original strategic defense proposal, which later became President Reagan's SDI. Just days before Kennebunkport, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech in Yalta, Ukraine, had also signed on to the proposal, indicating a powerful intervention by the institution of the U.S. Presidency—along with that of the Russian Presidency—to avoid war in Eurasia for decades to come.
It was in response to that initiative that Cheney made his move, and set the United States potentially back on a course towards near-term war, a war that would soon spread from Southwest Asia to other parts of Eurasia, and ultimately lead into World War IV—pitting the United States against Russia and China.
It is for this reason that LaRouche, in a dialogue in Washington with a group of diplomats on July 19 (see transcript, this issue), asserted that the only way to avoid war at this late date, is for Dick Cheney to be either impeached or removed from office now—before the guns of August are fired.
It was also in this context that LaRouche reiterated his message to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), the ostensible Democratic Party front-runner for the Presidential nomination. LaRouche called upon Clinton to take the lead in the fight to remove Cheney from office, promising that if she does so, she will be "virtually acclaimed" as the next President, by an American electorate that is overwhelmingly demanding Cheney's ouster.
LaRouche's message is also resonating among leading Republican circles, who fear a total wipeout in the 2008 general elections, if Cheney remains long on the job—and if the preemptive strikes against Iran take place. While some Republican Party voices, including former Reagan Justice Deparment official Bruce Fein, former Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and retired CIA officer and American Conservative columnist Phil Giraldi, all have demanded Cheney's immediate ouster to stop an Iran fiasco, GOP leaders have so far failed to come forward to confront President Bush and force Cheney's ouster. And Congressional Democrats have chosen to dodge the Cheney bullet and opt for impotent gestures, like the all-night Senate debate over Bush Administration Iraq policy, in which Cheney's name was not mentioned once. The ultimate cowardly act was the Democratic Senate capitulation to the "Buckleyite Damn-ocrat" Joe Lieberman's Iran war gambit. Such cowardice and opportunism, LaRouche has frequently warned, could bring about the doom of the American republic and a global "permanent war" that would engulf the planet for several generations to come.
Cheney and Bandar
While General Bergner's "wurlitzer" continues to churn out war propaganda from Baghdad, pushing the idea of military action against Iran to "save the lives of American GIs" fighting the "Iranian-backed" insurgency in Iraq, U.S. intelligence specialists have alerted EIR that there is growing worry about another aspect of the Iraq insurgency. Saudi Arabia, through Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Cheney's chief ally and the purported national security advisor to King Abdullah, has been pouring money and weapons into Sunni tribes in western Iraq, who have now emerged as what some U.S. intelligence officials brand "al-Qaeda II." These Iraqi Wahabi networks, distinct from the bin Laden/Zawaheri "al-Qaeda in Iraq" apparatus of largely foreign fighters, have emerged in recent months as a significant element within the overall insurgency. According to these sources, "al-Qaeda II" is part of Cheney's scheme—designed in London by the likes of Dr. Bernard Lewis—to promote a permanent Sunni versus Shi'ite conflict in the region.
This Cheney-Bandar effort, the sources warn, is one of the driving factors, provoking Iran, and fueling the prospects of a near-term explosion. Earlier in July 2007, an emissary of Prince Bandar delivered $750,000 to the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that formerly worked for Saddam Hussein, and which is on the U.S. State Department's international terrorist organizations (ITO) list, for having assassinated American military officers in Iran. The MEK is actively engaged in sabotage and assassination operations inside Iran—with the enthisiastic support of Washington neo-cons, typified by Daniel Pipes, who recently attended the MEK gathering outside of Paris where the Bandar money was delivered.
The U.S. Department of Justice is already investigating Prince Bandar for his role in the BAE Systems scandal, involving the $100 billion offshore covert operations fund, established under the British-Saudi "Al-Yamamah" barter deal. At least $2 billion in "Al-Yamamah" funds went directly to Bandar's bank accounts in the United States, and some of those funds went to a range of Wahabi insurgencies, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One question that Justice Department investigators should take up is whether some of those funds are now going to the MEK to fuel Dick Cheney's Iran war schemes.
July 20, 2007 (LPAC)
http://larouchepac.com/news/2007/07/19/l...r-imf.html
Lyndon LaRouche held a closed-door discussion July 19 with 25 Washington-based diplomats representing 18 countries from Eurasia, Africa, and Ibero-America. As per tradition, LaRouche's opening remarks were recorded and transcribed, but the discussion following was strictly off-the-record.
"This is not yet August, but as I think back to Augusts in the past, I think of August 1914, August 1939." This is how Lyn began his address yesterday to a private gathering of some 25 diplomats in Washington D.C. from eighteen different countries. Lyn spoke of the "virtual state of war" between Russia and Great Britain. He told of the signs of the onrushing economic crisis, the New York Times today noting that a can of soda in Heidelberg now costs $5.52, and the collapse of Bear-Stearns. "Under these economic conditions, war becomes likely," Lyn said, noting particularly Dick Cheney's drive to start a war with Iran. "It wouldn't be war in the simple sense of World War I and World War II, but something comparable," he said. And unfortunately, it occurs in a situation where you have very poor leadership in the United States, he said. Cheney and the British typify the situation. "It's very dangerous. Anything can happen." "And governments are on vacation," he warned.
After that introduction, Lyn continued: "The world can blow up. Now the alternative is also on the table. It was put on the table in a curious fashion this past spring. A series of events. It happened at the time that I was making a visit to Moscow for the birthday anniversary of a friend of mine, a distinguished figure in the Russian system. I had some meetings there.
"But at the same time, you had the death of Yeltsin in that period, and the events that went along with that. President Clinton was there, former President Bush was there. Other figures were there. And during this interval of this spring, concluding with the meeting at Kennebunkport in Maine, with the Bush family and with President Putin of Russia, there were certain negotiations behind the scenes in which former President Clinton played a key role, and others played a key role.
"We have on the table the option, the opening of the door, so to speak, with the Kennebunkport proceedings, in which we could induce what has to happen. What has to happen is a process under which the United States government engages with the Russian government, the government of China and the government of India, to sponsor emergency action to save the world from a general financial collapse, which is what's oncoming now.
"Let me explain what that means. If the U.S. dollar collapses, as it is collapsing now, the entire world could go into something worse than a depression. If you look at the effect of the collapse of the dollar on world markets, and look at the financial condition of countries throughout Asia as well as elsewhere, a collapse of the dollar would mean a chain-reaction collapse worse than any depression of the last century.
"Now, that could be prevented. We have in United States history, in our Constitution, we have the means to do that. Roosevelt is an example of that, Franklin Roosevelt. But if the government of the United States were to engage Russia, the government of China, and India, as the four major nations who are going to co-sponsor something on behalf of the world as a whole, and say, we're going to freeze the values of currencies among these governments, and other governments, and we're going to go back to a Franklin Roosevelt approach, to organize a general world recovery.
"In other words, we're going to take over in effect, have the nations of the world, take over the IMF system, and put it under a Roosevelt-style administration. Under those conditions, we could manage this crisis and we could work our way, gradually, out of many of the financial and related problems. If we could unite nations around this issue, which has to be addressed now, the economic issue, then their interest would be in preserving that agreement. Every nation on the world would have a substantial interest in maintaining that agreement and making it effective.
"Our problem is we've been moving in part away from -- Western Europe is a junkpile. It is no longer a technological center. The United States has no high technology, except in the military sector which produces weapons. We are exporting production from Europe and from North America, into countries we're exploiting on the basis of their cheap labor. So therefore, we are not really helping these countries--though they may get SOME benefit, as the case of China, for example, illustrates--but the benefit of the people as a whole, the entire population, that does not occur, because the income is not sufficient, the rate of growth is not sufficient, to raise the standard of living around the world. What we're doing is exploiting cheap labor in these countries, or exploiting the population in order to exploit the labor. We're not developing them.
"Therefore, we need to go to a Roosevelt-type approach. We organize the world system, freeze the values of currencies, put the whole system under bankruptcy, prevent a collapse, and then unleash measures for global development over the coming 50 years. We need really a set of 50-year agreements on economic recovery. It can be done, it has to be done. It's not something that would ordinarily be considered now, but only in a time of crisis as grave as this is, are nations capable of making the kinds of sudden, sweeping changes needed to deal with a crisis of this type.
"We're at such a point, in which it's in a sense like August 1914. The British were determined to get rid of a lot of problems, and they prepared the war--it was called World War I--by starting a war of Japan against China in 1894, and Japan's war against China, launched from London, continued from 1894 to 1945. That's a big chunk of history there. We repeated World War I, in World War II. The outcome was somewhat different because of Franklin Roosevelt, but with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, we began to abandon his policies and move in a different direction. And with the assassination of President Kennedy, we began to move in the United States distinctly in that direction.
"So, we've come to a time where we have to change our ways. We also have to recognize, from looking at the month of August, and looking at the ominousness of this month, coming month of August, and compare it with 1914, compare it with 1939. We've come to a very dangerous period, but dangerous periods are times when people who recognize the danger will do things they otherwise would not do. They are willing to make changes they otherwise would not make. They'll make changes for worse, or changes for the better. This is a deadly threat; it's also an opportunity. And that's what I'm concentrating on.
"The point is very simple. My view is that we have to somehow get rid of Cheney. I think if we get rid of Cheney, with what's brewing among politicians here who are really not that courageous; they're not men of principles, they're opportunists. They're not bad people, they're just opportunists. But when an opportunity strikes in this form, where the horror hits 'em, they're capable of accepting the changes that they otherwise would never consider. And the time for those changes is now. The potential is now.
"And what I propose essentially, or have been proposing, is that the four principal nations I indicated must hopefully form a committee to sponsor a general rally of nations to reorganize the system. Because smaller nations do not have the courage or means to initiate these kinds of steps. You need to have a dominant leading power in the world, or combination of power, who opens the door to let other nations participate in this kind of reform. That's a chance. And in that case, we have to go back to a new kind of IMF system, a Roosevelt-type of IMF system, what Roosevelt had intended for the post-war period, had he lived.
"And with that kind of perspective, I think that we could organize cooperation among nations, dealing with some very obvious problems, which will lead to a solution to these problems. We also have to get rid of Cheney. That's clear. Cheney is not an American. He's nominally an American. He's British property. And he's his wife's property. She made him out of nothing, or less than nothing, and he represents the interests who want war. He represents the interests that want a war with Iran, and that could set the whole world afire. So we have to get rid of him. We invite him to go back and grow potatoes in Wyoming. That's his best opportunity.
"But this is the crisis. And the cowardice of my fellow American leaders here, in facing these kinds of issues, is a problem. But the crisis is now. More and more of America's leaders are realizing that this crisis exists. More and more people, Republicans as well as Democrats, behind the scenes, recognize that we've got to change some things here. And the effort is to, by September, or late September perhaps, to have something new in process where Cheney is no longer the landscape. The great danger is between now and September, September at Labor Day, until politicians return to Washington. The great danger is in this month of August, again as in August 1914 or August 1939. A monster could be let out, could be let loose, and maybe the world doesn't have the ability to quickly stop that monster from setting fire to the world. So we have the opportunity and great danger. We have great issues that have to be faced.
"Being a professional troublemaker as I am, I do the best I can."
THE GUNS OF AUGUST 2007 : CHENEY's FINGER IS ALREADY ON THE TRIGGER
Jeffrey Steinberg
On July 16, the London Guardian reported that President Bush, under the powerful influence of Vice President Dick Cheney, has tilted in favor of military action against Iran before he leaves office. According to the Guardian account, a series of meetings during June and July, involving top White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials, was used by the Vice President to assert that the diplomatic track, ostensibly pressed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had failed to produce any results, and that no future U.S. administration would have the courage to act militarily against Tehran. President Bush, according to the account, went along with Cheney, and once again, the prospects for a new Persian Gulf preemptive war loom large over Washington.
Highly informed sources contacted by EIR confirmed and elaborated on the Guardian leak, which came from circles close to the White House who are adamantly opposed to the prospects of an American or Israeli preventive strike against targets inside Iran. EIR's sources confirmed that President Bush had, indeed, tilted back towards supporting Cheney's position that Iran's alleged nuclear weapons sites must be hit preemptively, and that one of the most persuasive arguments mounted by Cheney and his neo-con allies, is that unless the U.S. strikes against Tehran, Israel will launch an attack, and this will create an even bigger mess for Washington.
Speaking for some of Cheney's London patrons, Patrick Cronin, director of studies at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading Anglo-American think tank, is quoted by the Guardian: "Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact.... The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack; the US will have to take decisive action. The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself."
In fact, the consensus among American military strategists is that Israel does not have the capacity to do serious damage to Iran's now widely dispersed nuclear research program—unless it were to use nuclear weapons.
The Two Liebermans
As Cheney was making his power play inside Administration circles, he was receiving back-up from "the two Liebermans." In early July, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, traveled to Brussels to confer with top NATO officials, and on his return, he told Israeli Army Radio that he had won backing from the United States and Europe for preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear sites. Lieberman, who is known among Israeli analysts as "Israel's closest thing to a National Socialist," elaborated that, if Israel were to launch air attacks against Iran's nuclear sites, NATO would join in to defend Israel in the event of Iranian retaliation. Lieberman could not have been more blunt: "We're stuck in Afghanistan, and European and American troops are wallowing in the Iraqi quagmire, which is something that is going to prevent the leaders of countries in Europe and America from deciding on the use of force to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. Therefore," he concluded, "at the end of the day, Israel is going to have to remove the nuclear threat posed by Iran with the means at its disposal, and it won't be able to count on international cooperation." But, the Israeli minister then declared, "Europe and the U.S. will support us."
The very day that Avigdor Lieberman was threatening Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran, July 11, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced an amendment to the defense spending bill, demanding that U.S. intelligence agencies report to Congress every 60 days on Iran's activities inside Iraq. Although Lieberman's amendment, which contained a string of dubious or outright false claims of Iranian combat support operations against American forces in Iraq, was clearly aimed at putting the Senate on record as supporting a warlike policy against Iran, the entire Senate sheepishly voted, 97-0, in favor of the Lieberman ploy.
Lest there be any doubt that Joe Lieberman's actions were tightly coordinated with Cheney, the text of the Lieberman amendment quoted extensively from Gen. Kevin Bergner, the former top military aide to neo-con Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council, who was dispatched to Baghdad in June 2007, to conduct White House "spin control" over the war reporting. Bergner has put out a steady stream of disinformation and/or exaggerated claims of Iranian involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. Bergner's propaganda from Baghdad, according to Pentagon sources, has infuriated the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who see it as a replay of the "stovepipe" of fake intelligence, funneled from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to the Vice President's office, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. This time, there is no pretense that the war propaganda is being vetted by the Pentagon intelligence services. It is being funneled directly from Baghdad via General Bergner, directly to Cheney, Lieberman, et al., and is increasingly showing up on CNN and other news outlets.
Impeach or Remove Cheney Now
The turn toward war against Iran, coming from the "usual suspects" in Washington, must be assessed against the backdrop of the July 1-2 Kennebunkport, Maine summit meeting between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two days of discussion, hosted by former President George H.W. Bush, represented a potential strategic breakthrough in U.S.-Russian relations. President Putin proposed a long-term strategic partnership between Washington and Moscow, encompassing all of Eurasia in a security alliance, built upon Lyndon LaRouche's original strategic defense proposal, which later became President Reagan's SDI. Just days before Kennebunkport, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech in Yalta, Ukraine, had also signed on to the proposal, indicating a powerful intervention by the institution of the U.S. Presidency—along with that of the Russian Presidency—to avoid war in Eurasia for decades to come.
It was in response to that initiative that Cheney made his move, and set the United States potentially back on a course towards near-term war, a war that would soon spread from Southwest Asia to other parts of Eurasia, and ultimately lead into World War IV—pitting the United States against Russia and China.
It is for this reason that LaRouche, in a dialogue in Washington with a group of diplomats on July 19 (see transcript, this issue), asserted that the only way to avoid war at this late date, is for Dick Cheney to be either impeached or removed from office now—before the guns of August are fired.
It was also in this context that LaRouche reiterated his message to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), the ostensible Democratic Party front-runner for the Presidential nomination. LaRouche called upon Clinton to take the lead in the fight to remove Cheney from office, promising that if she does so, she will be "virtually acclaimed" as the next President, by an American electorate that is overwhelmingly demanding Cheney's ouster.
LaRouche's message is also resonating among leading Republican circles, who fear a total wipeout in the 2008 general elections, if Cheney remains long on the job—and if the preemptive strikes against Iran take place. While some Republican Party voices, including former Reagan Justice Deparment official Bruce Fein, former Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and retired CIA officer and American Conservative columnist Phil Giraldi, all have demanded Cheney's immediate ouster to stop an Iran fiasco, GOP leaders have so far failed to come forward to confront President Bush and force Cheney's ouster. And Congressional Democrats have chosen to dodge the Cheney bullet and opt for impotent gestures, like the all-night Senate debate over Bush Administration Iraq policy, in which Cheney's name was not mentioned once. The ultimate cowardly act was the Democratic Senate capitulation to the "Buckleyite Damn-ocrat" Joe Lieberman's Iran war gambit. Such cowardice and opportunism, LaRouche has frequently warned, could bring about the doom of the American republic and a global "permanent war" that would engulf the planet for several generations to come.
Cheney and Bandar
While General Bergner's "wurlitzer" continues to churn out war propaganda from Baghdad, pushing the idea of military action against Iran to "save the lives of American GIs" fighting the "Iranian-backed" insurgency in Iraq, U.S. intelligence specialists have alerted EIR that there is growing worry about another aspect of the Iraq insurgency. Saudi Arabia, through Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Cheney's chief ally and the purported national security advisor to King Abdullah, has been pouring money and weapons into Sunni tribes in western Iraq, who have now emerged as what some U.S. intelligence officials brand "al-Qaeda II." These Iraqi Wahabi networks, distinct from the bin Laden/Zawaheri "al-Qaeda in Iraq" apparatus of largely foreign fighters, have emerged in recent months as a significant element within the overall insurgency. According to these sources, "al-Qaeda II" is part of Cheney's scheme—designed in London by the likes of Dr. Bernard Lewis—to promote a permanent Sunni versus Shi'ite conflict in the region.
This Cheney-Bandar effort, the sources warn, is one of the driving factors, provoking Iran, and fueling the prospects of a near-term explosion. Earlier in July 2007, an emissary of Prince Bandar delivered $750,000 to the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that formerly worked for Saddam Hussein, and which is on the U.S. State Department's international terrorist organizations (ITO) list, for having assassinated American military officers in Iran. The MEK is actively engaged in sabotage and assassination operations inside Iran—with the enthisiastic support of Washington neo-cons, typified by Daniel Pipes, who recently attended the MEK gathering outside of Paris where the Bandar money was delivered.
The U.S. Department of Justice is already investigating Prince Bandar for his role in the BAE Systems scandal, involving the $100 billion offshore covert operations fund, established under the British-Saudi "Al-Yamamah" barter deal. At least $2 billion in "Al-Yamamah" funds went directly to Bandar's bank accounts in the United States, and some of those funds went to a range of Wahabi insurgencies, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One question that Justice Department investigators should take up is whether some of those funds are now going to the MEK to fuel Dick Cheney's Iran war schemes.