Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 2, January 10, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Urgent Call for Summit by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- PDF edition Table of Contents -- Volume 47, Number 2, January 10, 2020

- A SOLUTION IS POSSIBLE Iran, Iraq and the World in This Moment of Crisis by Hussein Askary

- LAROUCHE ON THE MIDDLE EAST The End of Sykes-Picot: Moving Beyond Colonialism (2009)

- British Creation and Control of Islamic Terror: Background to China’s Defeat of Terror in Xinjiang by Mike Billington

- SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST 2020: Will We Head Toward War, Or Put the World in Order?

- LAROUCHE PAC STATEMENT A Call for Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi to Convene an Emergency Summit to Address the Danger of War

Call for Emergency Summit

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

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Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EDITORIAL

Urgent Call for Summit

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

These are the edited remarks presented by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and President of the Schiller Institute, by live video connection from Germany, to a LaRouche economics class in New York City on January 4, 2020.

We are in a very dangerous situation and I urge all of you to take personal responsibility to work with us to change the agenda of events now unfolding. On Friday, January 3, Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, who is a national hero in Iran, was assassinated, and also assassinated at the same time was a high-ranking Iraqi military officer, who was the Deputy Commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces. They were both hit by a drone attack near the airport in Baghdad.

As a result, the world is very probably on a spiral of retaliation and counter-retaliation, which spiral could be open-ended. Now, there were many international and national reactions to this event. Some hysterical, but also some extremely thoughtful and warning. I would like to mention one of them, which comes from the VIPS—the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. [See https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/03/vips-memo-doubling-down-into-yet-another-march-of-folly-this-time-on-iran] Nineteen of them—these are former intelligence agents who all became whistleblowers—they basically made the comparison that this evokes the memory of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, which led to World War I.

Now it has been often said that the world at that time was sleepwalking into World War I. It is very clear that if people would have known what was coming, they never would have started World War I. Because it was four years in which the Germans and the French were fighting each other out of the trenches back and forth, back and forth, leading to a meaningless slaughter. Four years of carnage which destroyed the moral fiber of an entire generation, and that was actually what made Nazism and World War II possible. The VIPS then say that an escalation to World War III is no longer just a remote possibility—and I absolutely agree with that view.

The Sleep of Reason

I also want to quote to you from another extremely important source, namely Scott Ritter, who, apart from having served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, he was on the staff of General Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War, and he was the UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. So he is extremely knowledgeable of this whole region. His comments to RT on January 3 were:

The United States is unprepared for the consequences of its assassination of Qassem Soleimani, if only because it knows nothing about the reality of the man it murdered and can’t gauge the impact of his death on Iran or the Middle East.

Remember that the December 18, 2019 Washington Post documentary on Afghanistan, ‘The Afghanistan Papers’: War Revelations From the Washington Post, just had many interviews of leading military leaders of the U.S. forces who admitted that, several years into the Afghanistan war, they had no inkling of who the enemy was. I think Rumsfeld was one of them. Ritter goes on:

American political leaders of both major parties have been united in their description of Soleimani as an evil man whose death should be celebrated, even while the consequences of his demise remain unknown.

Now just to emphasize it, I think to celebrate the death of anybody is a very barbarous idea. Ritter continues:

The celebration of Soleimani’s death, however, is born of an ignorance regarding the events and actions that shaped the work he directed, and which defined the world in which he operated. While the U.S. has cast Soleimani as a byproduct of Iran’s malign intent in the Middle East, the reality is much starker: Soleimani is the direct result of America’s irresponsibly aggressive policies. . . .

Soleimani’s actions in accomplishing this outcome, however, were not part of a master Iranian plan for regional domination, but rather part and parcel of Iran’s ability to react effectively to the mistakes made by the United States and its allies in implementing policies of aggression in the region.

Now remember that that was exactly the context about which General Flynn tried to brief President Obama in the White House in 2012. Namely, that the United States was backing all the wrong forces in the region. This is why General Flynn was targetted, and why much of the impeachment and Russiagate was pinned on Trump—because of his connection to Flynn.

We should remember that this assassination was not a retaliation, but a pre-planned assassination of a foreign official, a national hero, who together with Khamenei, is the leader, or was the leader of Iran. The significance of this is as big as if the National Security Advisor of the United States, or Vice President Pence, would have been assassinated. And in one sense, for the Iranian people, it’s much bigger than that, because this person was loved and admired.

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said:

To condemn attacks on their embassies, states go to the UN Security Council submitting draft statements. Washington did not appeal to the Security Council, which means that it is not interested in the world’s response [and that it is] interested in changing the balance of power in the region. That will not result in anything but escalating tensions in the region, which will be sure to affect millions of people.

Call for an Urgent Four-Power Summit to Develop Southwest Asia

And I will say for myself, that we are now faced with the law of the jungle since international law has been abandoned. There is still time to remedy this situation.

We are calling for an emergency summit among President Trump, President Putin, President Xi Jinping, and if possible, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These four leaders should declare a joint plan for the entire Southwest Asia region to develop, to be industrialized, as the only way to establish peace. This has been the policy of the Schiller Institute for a very long time. That only if all the big neighbors of the so-called Middle East—Russia, China, India, Iran, and also all other countries including hopefully the United States and European nations—would agree on a regional development plan, by extending the New Silk Road—which is already going into Iran and Pakistan—just develop that further into Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, and then via Egypt into Africa, and via Turkey into Europe.

Such a plan already existed only five months ago, when Putin had worked very hard to get all the different opponents in the region to one table to work together. He had exerted maximum pressure on Saudi Arabia and Israel; he worked with Syria and Turkey, and it all looked very promising. If Trump would have continued on that course, working with Russia and China in the back channels, he could have become and still can become a hero of peace.

Now China at that time had approved $1 trillion for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Xi Jinping, in his New Year’s address just a couple of days ago, again offered that the Belt and Road Initiative is open to all countries to participate in. The only way you can establish world peace at this very late hour and point of escalation, is for the Four Powers—the United States, Russia, China, and India—to cooperate. This is now the most important point on the agenda.

There is, on April 25-26, the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Meeting at the Elbe, where Putin has invited Trump to participate, and also for Trump to participate in the 75th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II and the victory over fascism. Trump has indicated that he would be very interested to go to one or even both of these events.

Now, we may not get to April and May. Therefore, we propose that such an emergency conference of the four Presidents be held immediately, because if we learned anything from two World Wars, it is that world wars are absolutely horrible in terms of the consequences for the people. If we would have a Third World War right now, maybe nobody would survive; because it should be clear to any thinking person that in the age of thermonuclear weapons, war cannot be an option of conflict resolution anymore.

So, I’m appealing to you to get this message out; get it debated, and get the public support for Trump to do exactly that—line up with these three other Presidents and save world peace! That is my appeal to all of you.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 2, January 10, 2020

Cover This Week

Left to right: White House/Shealah Craighead; www.quirinale.it; Kremlin.ru

Presidents Trump, Xi, and Putin.

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CALL FOR EMERGENCY SUMMIT

2 EDITORIAL

Urgent Call for Summit

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

5 A SOLUTION IS POSSIBLE

Iran, Iraq and the World in This Moment of Crisis

by Hussein Askary

16 LAROUCHE ON THE MIDDLE EAST

The End of Sykes-Picot: Moving Beyond Colonialism

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

May 4, 2009

28 British Creation & Control of Islamic Terror: Background to China’s Defeat of Terror in Xinjiang

by Mike Billington

35 SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST

2020: Will We Head Toward War, Or Put the World in Order?

Featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche

42 LAROUCHE PAC STATEMENT

A Call for Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi to Convene an Emergency Summit to Address the Danger of War

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Watch The LaRouche Case video

Watch the LaRouche Memorial video

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

at lpac.co/exonerate

A SOLUTION IS POSSIBLE

Iran, Iraq and the World in This Moment of Crisis

by Hussein Askary

CC by 4.0/Tasnim News Agency

Maj. General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

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We present here an edited transcript of the LaRouche PAC live webcast with Hussein Askary and Matthew Ogden on Monday, January 6, 2020. Mr. Hussein is the Southwest Asia Correspondent for EIR. The full video is available here.

The assassination of Qassem Soleimani has brought the whole region and the world to the brink of a new, major disaster, or war; but at the same time, it has within it, the ingredients of a comprehensive solution, if people keep their heads cool and a shift is induced to take place, most importantly with the way the Trump Administration is acting and how the U.S. Congress and the American population are acting at the moment. Because it’s a very, very dangerous situation. It’s very difficult to predict what will happen, it’s very difficult to predict the Iranian reaction, but so far we have had calm, in a certain way.

Most importantly, these events took place in Iraq—it’s very important to remember that. And—what we’re going to discuss a little bit today—this could also become the starting point for solving this whole situation. The reason we are here and talking today is not just to give people some interesting analysis: We are, in Lyndon LaRouche’s spirit, we are here to try to put the world on a better path towards peace, prosperity and progress for all nations. So it’s in that spirit, and it’s in this way, that people have to see this discussion today.

Now, what happened? Qassem Soleimani, unlike what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or others say, is not hated in Iran—he’s a national hero. Even in Iraq, and in many countries in the region, he is seen as a person who played a key role in, first of all, pushing back the Islamic State terrorists and other groups, and finally defeating them. He did not do that singlehandedly. We had the Iraqis; the United States was involved in that, you had the Russian and Syrian Army, and so on. Soleimani’s body is now back in Iran; he’s getting the full honors of a real hero and a martyr.

But at the same time, the Iraqi parliament managed to get a quorum to vote a resolution to disinvite foreign forces, which had been invited, like the United States, to help in defeating ISIS in 2014. Of course, the United States has had permanent bases in Iraq since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it has been playing a key role in all matters in Iraq, both positive and negative. Now, with this resolution, President Trump has a fantastic chance to disengage from Iraq, not as a defeated force, but as having accomplished the mission which President Trump identified, that defeating ISIS is the mission of the U.S. forces in Syria and in Iraq.

That mission is accomplished, and now it’s time to disengage from Iraq, before worse things happen. This is what President Trump had promised the American people in the elections in 2016, and now there’s a window of opportunity, as he used in October by announcing the withdrawal from Syria. But these things were blocked, by both internal and external forces, most importantly the impeachment process inside the United States.

And as usual, when we look at these events, as Lyndon LaRouche has taught us to do, he himself said, you have to look at the general context of things; you cannot just look at the event in itself. That event is the result of many factors. But most importantly, we have a world situation where the trans-Atlantic financial system is on the brink of collapse. We have a coup inside the United States against the President himself, and the people who are pretending to protect the President from the coup, like neoconservatives and other Republicans, hardliners, are pushing President Trump to escalate this war move. So it’s a very complex situation.

But at the same time, what we have had in the global situation is a new paradigm in international economic and political relations: First of all, the Russian intervention in Syria managed to shift the whole regime-change policies which destroyed Libya, Syria, and before that Iraq, and put the whole region on the path of settling all of these problems, getting rid of terrorism, and starting the reconstruction of these nations; the other important factor is that the Chinese-proposed Belt and Road Initiative has taken hold in Asia and globally, and it’s advancing. It’s a positive force for change; it’s a good vehicle for nations, both big powers and smaller nations to participate in a real economic and cultural Renaissance on a global scale. So this is the general context.

USAF/Ashley Brokop

There is no “safe place” from terrorism. Iraqi police and U.S. forces respond to a car bomb explosion outside Gate 3 of the Green Zone in central Baghdad.

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Destruction of the Iraqi State in 2003

But, as I said, because these things are happening in Iraq, we have to look at the situation: Because the real crime which was committed, from the beginning, at least since 2003, is that Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of Britain, had already declared that the system of sovereignty of nations, the system of the Peace of Westphalia from 1648 was “obsolete,” null and void, and now it’s up to us, he said—we, the British and our friends in the United States and whoever works with us, to define who should live and who should die, and how nations should function. And we are the ones who will decide these things. That was the basis for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Of course, Lyndon LaRouche and our movement, and I myself were completely against that invasion, because we realized that its consequences would be disastrous for Iraq, and also for the world. Because when you take the sovereignty and independence of a nation out of the international equation, then you have the law of jungle, where the powerful can dominate and destroy the weak, and then we have an escalation towards world war.

So that was the original crime. The Iraqi state was completely demolished; the armed forces, the security forces, the intelligence, and all other functions of government—it was not simply that they arrested and killed Saddam Hussein. That was not really the story. The story is that Iraq as a nation was cancelled. And therefore, you created a situation where we had all kinds of forces taking advantage and trying to gain a foothold. People, in the absence of a real government, had to go back to their tribal, ethnic, and sectarian loyalties, to seek protection, and also to try to survive in these new circumstances where we had a sectarian war developing.

So you had all these militias growing; we had other forces in the region, not only Iran, besides the United States and Britain, you had Saudi Arabia, Turkey, other Arab countries, all intervening in Iraq, to destabilize or secure their positions, and so on.

That was when the Iranian role came into play in Iraq. Iran has many allies inside Iraq, especially in the Shi’a section of the population. So we have had a chaotic situation since the invasion of 2003, and the cancelling of the Iraqi state. That’s what has happened.

Now, after 15 years of U.S. occupation of Iraq, and all these disturbances, Iraq has not even been restored to what it was before the invasion. All the infrastructure, all the services, agriculture, industry—it doesn’t exist in Iraq. The oil industry has been the only thing developing, so Iraq has been simply exporting oil, and importing everything it needs—food, medicine, everything else is imported. So, Iraq became a “cargo cult” rather than a real nation.

There was however a new development, I was informed by Iraqi sources, and we will get to that soon. It is really significant: Because there was quite recently a chance for Iraq and the Iraqi government to rebuild and to reestablish a real, sovereign government in Iraq. And this is a really key element. It also reflects what I mentioned about the new paradigm, and its impact in stabilizing and rebuilding the region with the Belt and Road Initiative as a key component of that.

Trump and Neighboring Syria

Now, we have to look at the context of how the escalation took place, and then I can come back to this story of Iraq and the Belt and Road.

If you remember, on October 6, President Trump ordered the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria. That was welcomed, actually, everywhere, except by the British and their friends in the United States. Immediately afterward, on October 9, the Turkish President ordered his troops to launch an operation inside Syria, under the pretext of combatting Kurdish terrorists.

I have been on this show before, and we have discussed that Turkish incursion into Syria, and at the time, we said there is no need for alarm; this is coordinated, even if just implicitly, between President Putin of Russia, the Turkish President, President Trump, the Syrians, the Iranians and the Kurds themselves. So there was no reason for alarm; that Turkish invasion that everybody was warning against, was not really an invasion—the Turkish army was merely guarding the border between Turkey and Syria; the Russians have been patrolling the region together with the Syrian troops and Turkish troops. So the whole situation is stabilized.

But the problem was that in October-November—and into December—the impeachment process went into high gear, and President Trump’s focus shifted, but also he was obviously blackmailed by people like Sen. Lindsey Graham who were against withdrawing from Syria—to keep some forces inside Syria, allegedly to keep control of the oil fields. So the process was not complete, and that became a bit of a problem for fulfilling President Trump’s policy to implement that promise.

At the same time, the Syrian Army, with support from Russia, started to regain control of that northeastern part of Syria, in the Raqqa and the Hasakah provinces, although not complete control. In the west, in Idlib province, in the northwest close to the Turkish border, you still have the last remaining obstacle, which is the control by the al-Qaeda types, of this province, Idlib. There was an agreement between Turkey, Syria and Russia to gradually manage the situation, but the Turkish side did not fulfill its obligations, and now the Russians and Syrian Army have decided it’s now time to clean up and retake Idlib province.

So, that operation is going on, and people are screaming in the New York Times and Washington Post that there are hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing that region, because the Syrian Army might kill them. That’s not completely true. So the final stronghold of the terrorists in Syria could be eliminated soon.

The Turkish army and the President of Turkey did not really react to that; some people expected that he would try to stop it. Instead, he has created a completely new maneuver, by saying that Turkey is going to support the Muslim Brotherhood government in Libya, and that Turkish troops could be sent to Libya, to keep that Muslim Brotherhood government alive. President Erdo˘gan has changed the subject of discussion, from supporting the so-called “rebels” in Syria, to supporting the government in Libya.

We expect that the Idlib province could also be brought back into the control of the Syrian state.

And then on October 26, U.S. special troops went into Idlib province and killed the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and then President Trump could show that as a trophy to convince people that his policy to withdraw from Syria is viable because the goal has been accomplished, the Islamic State and its chief have been eliminated. As I said, it was an interesting move, but it is blocked by the impeachment process, and by keeping U.S. troops still inside Syria. So, the sovereignty of Syria is not really restored: The United States still has some boots on the ground there.

Iraqi Prime Minister Goes to Beijing

When everybody was watching this situation in Syria, something was going on in Iraq. Iraq had been relatively calm; ISIS was defeated already in 2017. There were new elections, a new government came in in 2018, but the formation of government was a problem, because of the parliamentary system that we have got in Iraq—which is another problem that Lyndon LaRouche warned against in 2003, that changing the Iraqi Constitution from a Presidential system to a parliamentary system would be a big problem, because the head of state is incapable of implementing any policies: He has to go to a parliament that is highly split among ethnic, sectarian, and even tribal groups, and militias, so how can you get a parliament like this to agree on any policy? Even the formation of the government took about a year to complete!

In any case, the new government under Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi tried to form a new policy, to regain some of the credibility of the Iraqi government—because everybody knows there is massive corruption and total failure for 15 years—to restore electricity, water, agriculture and other things. But nobody believes in the Iraqi government. This government nonetheless tried to get something going.

I had a direct experience of that, which I will go into, soon. But Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi tried to restore some of the credibility of the government by coming in with a completely new economic plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, and how to use the Iraqi oil resources to rebuild the economy. I think we should give the government a chance to do that, and the people of Iraq should support the government to see how serious it is about that plan.

How serious the Iraq government is about rebuilding the country was shown when Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, heading up the largest delegation of ministers ever, visited Beijing from September 19-23, 2019. As I said, the situation was still calm in Iraq, and what happened in Beijing is really, really interesting.

A memorandum of understanding was signed between China and Iraq, right there, under Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi and President Xi Jinping, and then under the sponsorship of China’s Prime Minister Li Keqiang. The details of that agreement were known, but never made available to the public; it was never discussed generally, and it was actually ridiculed inside Iraq. But, the agreement is a real breakthrough, both for Iraq, but also for how to do things—if you remember, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, since the 1970s, has been calling for a policy for the Southwest Asia region, called “oil for technology”: In which the countries of the region should use their oil resources to acquire high technology in order to become agro-industrial nations, and not simply rely on the export of oil to buy their goods as in the past.

Iraqi Prime Minister’s Office

Iraq and China sign a series of MOUs in Beijing on September 23, 2019, covering financial, commercial, security, reconstruction, communications, cultural, and educational matters, and foreign affairs. Rear left: Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi; rear right: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

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The Iraq-China Agreement

I recently learned some of the details of that agreement. It is available, although some of the details still need to be clarified. We got confirmation of the existence of the agreement from an advisor to Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who spoke about it in a TV interview, in October. The agreement is that Iraq and China will establish an Iraq reconstruction fund; it will be an Iraqi fund, in which the government will deposit every month, the equivalent in worth, of 3 million barrels of oil, exported to China, which is one of the big importers of Iraqi oil. Part of the revenue from that oil will be deposited in the reconstruction fund. When the Iraqi government establishes the fund and deposits the first installment, which was supposed to happen in October-November, the Chinese SinoSure (China Export and Credit Insurance Corp.) will issue insurance for the Chinese Export and Import Bank and other banks to issue credits to the Iraqi government.

Courtesy of Hussein Askary

Hussein Askary (l.), presenting the Green Belt plan to control the Iraqi desert to Dr. Mahdi Al-Qaisi (r.), Deputy Agriculture Minister of Iraq, in December 2018. Accompanying Mr. Askary (on his left) are Prof. Cai Mantang, Chief Science Advisor, Elion Resources Group, and Dr. Nihad Mutlag, Professor of Biology and Environmental Science at Koufa University. Senior advisors to the Agriculture Ministry are also at the table.

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The credits, worth up to $10 billion to start with, for Chinese companies to start working on rebuilding and developing Iraq’s railways, roadways, power plants and distribution, building ports, airports, and restoring and cleaning the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and rebuilding the canal system, water desalination plants; and to rebuild and create new Iraqi industrial zones, and to re-energize the Iraqi agricultural sector which had been destroyed. So, this is an extremely massive reconstruction plan, which is supported by the most powerful infrastructure in the world: China. The Iraqi prime minister, at the same time, pledged to actively promote the Belt and Road Initiative in the region, and said that Iraq will play a role in that process.

FIGURE 1

The Iraqi National Green Belt

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Now, just to go through why that is so important—first of all, my personal experience, as I said, as you know, I was in Iraq in December 2018, together with the scientific adviser of the largest Chinese desert control company, the Elion Resources Group. In my capacity as the CEO of the company Swedhydro, I presented the plan for building the Iraqi Green Belt to control the desert of Iraq. The map in Figure 1 shows our plan to protect Iraq from sand and dust storms, but also to rebuild the Iraqi agricultural sector. We met with the Minister of Water Resources of Iraq; we met with the Deputy Agriculture Minister and his team, and they loved the idea, and they also loved the idea that the Chinese would be involved in this.

The problem was that there was no financial nor political framework to implement such a major project. That’s why none of the major projects which were proposed, not only by me, but by many other people, were never implemented, because there is no political or financial framework; the Iraqi government has no resources. The people we met in these ministries, many of them hadn’t gotten their salaries for months!

Courtesy of Hussein Askary

Left to right: Hussein Askary, CEO of Swedhydro and Schiller Institute member; Dr. Jamal al-Adeli, Minister of Water Resources of Iraq; Prof. Cai Mantang; and Dr. Nihad Mutlag.

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Breakthrough Links Iraq to Belt & Road

So, with China proposing this reconstruction fund, now, the financial framework would be available to start implementing these kinds of projects. But of course, there are many priority projects which the Iraqi government has to identify.

So, this is a breakthrough for Iraq. It’s a breakthrough for the whole region—how a region which is just coming out of a war, can be rebuilt, even though you don’t have financial resources, even if you have a complicated political system.

FIGURE 2

Abu Kamal Border Crossing

The Abu Kamal border crossing between Iraq and Syria—closed for 5 years during the Syrian war, when the Syrian territory was under the control of ISIS—was reopened on Sept. 30, 2019.

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In addition, we also had, interestingly, at the same time, at the end of September when Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi and his delegation were in China, we had the opening of the Abu Kamal border crossing between Iraq and Syria, which is shown in Figure 2. That border crossing had been closed for about five years, during the Syrian war and the control of that region by ISIS. When both the Iraqi and Syrian forces managed to liberate Abu Kamal on both the Syrian and Iraqi sides, then on Sept. 30, we had this border crossing opened. Many people in the West were upset about that, because the propaganda was that this will open the road from Iran into Iraq to Syria and Lebanon to take weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is the only thing they were thinking about.

FIGURE 3

Syrian Connections to the New Silk Road

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The reality is, as we discussed, in Project Phoenix for the reconstruction of Syria, this crossing is very important, as we show in Figure 3, which is an image of the Syrian reconstruction connection to the New Silk Road: The Abu Kamal crossing is very important to connect West Asia to the Mediterranean.

The economic aspect of the Abu Kamal crossing is very important. The problem is that everybody else was fixating on its military and geopolitical implications. That crossing also became a big problem, which we’ll come back to later, and also the escalation which took place in the last month or so.

FIGURE 4

Crossroads of the Continents

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If we go back to the whole idea of the World Land-Bridge, Lyndon LaRouche’s plan for rebuilding the world economy by connecting the continents, when you look at where Iraq is located, in the so-called “Middle East,” that’s what Lyndon LaRouche called the crossroads of the continents. This is the pivotal point of all the oceans, all the trade routes, whether maritime or land trade routes, between east and west. Also, this region has massive wealth, both natural, human, and financial.

When this region is racked by all these never-ending wars, sectarian wars and terrorism, it’s impossible to get anything done, either for these nations as such, but also on an international basis. We have the situation in Yemen, which is right in the crossroads between Asia and Africa—so this has been a chokepoint. It’s what the British have managed to create, to block cooperation between nations and continents, to get big powers enmired in conflicts in this region, and that can potentially lead to big wars.

Hidden Hand Against Belt & Road

If we go back to this Abu Kamal crossing being opened, and the visit of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to China, what happens immediately after that? As soon as Abdul-Mahdi is back in Iraq, you suddenly have massive, so-called “spontaneous” demonstrations against the government, by frustrated youth—I know many of them have legitimate reasons to be upset with the government; the lack of all basic services, the massive unemployment, especially among educated youth; many of the people I know personally, were out demonstrating. The problem is the demands these youth people were making were exactly the issues that Adil Abdul-Mahdi was discussing in Beijing, how to solve all of these problems. Of course, these projects will not happen in one day, such projects take time.

The Iraqi government was trying to get those solutions started in that visit to Beijing! We should give them the benefit of the doubt so they can implement these ideas, and we do trust the Chinese government to do these kinds of projects, as they have great experience with these. So, there is no reason to ridicule, as happened in Iraq, with the media, or have suspicions against the intentions of the Iraqi government and Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

When Adil Abdul-Mahdi was oil minister under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi from 2014 to 2018, he actually had proposed this same plan, to exchange Iraqi oil for reconstruction. But you remember what happened in 2014: ISIS came into the picture, after many years of support from the Obama administration in Syria, and then they invaded Iraq in June-July of 2014. From that moment on, all these plans were put on ice. So, the Iraqi government was actually prevented from implementing policies which will benefit the same young people who were demonstrating against them, as of Oct. 1, 2019. [Box: Hamiltonian Banking Principles in the Iraq/China MOU]

What happened next, was clashes with the security forces. The government tried to calm the situation by instructing the security forces not to intervene. But militias went in there, as a third force, shooting demonstrators. That plunged the whole thing into violence, with about 470 young people being killed—mostly in Shi’a areas. This enraged people even more, and because these Shi’a militias are connected to Iran in a certain way, the demonstrators then also turned their anger against Iran, and the Iranian consulate in Najaf, which is a Shi’a stronghold, was actually stormed and burned, and the Iranian diplomats had to flee the building.

So, suddenly you have a situation, where instead of the government having a rational discussion about how to rebuild the country, you now had a conflict, between militias, and the peaceful demonstrators. The Iraqi government was forced to resign—this being the demand of the demonstrators. The problem was that the demonstrators—I spoke with people who called it a “revolution,”—did not understand what was happening. It was not a revolution, because there was no alternative available to replace this government. It’s exactly like 2003: You take out the government and then you have no alternative. You will have only worse options to deal with.

This government should have been allowed to implement the oil for technology initiative, as it was on paper. Let the government carry out these policies. We know these things work when they are implemented. Instead, we now have an Iraqi caretaker government. The parliament has so far failed to form a new government. The Prime Minister and his government, who signed the MOU, are unable to implement that agreement now. They no longer have the legal authority to do so.

The Power of the Militias

Interestingly, Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi, in July 2019, gave an order to abolish the so-called “Shi’a militias,” especially the Popular Mobilization Forces, whose commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was killed along with Soleimani in the recent drone attack. In July, Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi ordered the demobilization of these Shi’a militias, which could then be incorporated into the Iraqi Army so that the government and Iraqi Army could regain control over the military forces of the country, which was the right idea.

But that did not happen as planned. These militias have enormous power, and there are forces in the region that are not interested in taking the power away from these militias and handing it back to the Iraqi government. Then, in August, the Israeli air force, for the first time since 1984, bombed positions of these militias in Iraq. What message does that send? The message is, we want those guys to be our rivals, our counterparts, so to speak, inside Iraq. And we want to continue this war, and we don’t want the militias to lose their base, their capabilities.

So, the Prime Minister of Iraq was made to look as if he were allied with Israel against the militias, which gave the militias even more power, and more support to continue. In that sense, the Israelis and the United States forces which are continuously attacking the militias, are actually empowering them, rather than weakening them. They’re weakening the Iraqi government and Army, by saying, “you don’t have control over your territory,” so we can continue playing this cat-and-mouse game inside Iraq. Whereas the Iranians themselves and of course the Revolutionary Guard can also continue to be active in Iraq. This is the kind of situation.

With the bombing—on the Iraqi-Syrian border, In the south, there’s al-Tanf, controlled by the United States forces; in the north, it’s controlled by the Kurdish militias, and partly by the United States; and there is the Abu Kamal area, which was guarded by Iraqi forces but also by these so-called Hezbollah militias, which were attacked in late December. They had units guarding the border and also chasing remnants of ISIS in the desert area there; but inside both Iraq and Syria.

The United States bombed a number of these units guarding the border and killed 19 people, in retaliation, the Defense Department said, for an attack on an American base by these forces, which is not confirmed. The problem is the attack took place in Kirkuk—see the arrow on Figure 2—which is far, far to the east of Abu Kamal. So it was a whole setup to create a situation where you would have a new confrontation between the United States forces and the militias.

What happens next is those who were killed by the United States were taken to Baghdad and after the funerals, you had the attack on the American Embassy—which was more or less symbolic, but for Americans, it is a big attack on the United States itself. Then, three days afterward, you have the assassination of Soleimani in Baghdad, on his way from the airport.

Diplomacy for Cooperation Disrupted

Now, Prime Minister Abdul-Mahi said yesterday, and we have good reason to believe him, that the reason he was going to meet with Soleimani was to take a message from the Saudis to the Iranians. If you remember, there was great tension in the Gulf, throughout the spring and summer last year, with oil tankers being attacked, American drones shot down by Iran, and the Yemeni group in Sana’a attacking a major Saudi oil installation in Saudi Arabia, which cut its oil production massively. Under these circumstances, there was a heightened level of tension. Adil Abdul-Mahdi was trying to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran to ease the tension, to leave no pretext for the United States, Israel, or anyone else, to start a new war, with Iran this time. As everybody knows, if you start war with Iran, the whole region is going to be set on fire.

So Adil Abdu-Mahdi was actually sending a message through Soleimani, to the Saudis, or receiving a message from the Saudis to give to the Iranians via Soleimani. But Soleimani was killed in that operation.

Somebody was trying, during this whole time, to undermine the sovereignty of Iraq, undermining the possibility for having a peaceful solution for the whole region, and also starting reconstruction—remember, a few days before the assassination of Soleimani, China, Russia, and Iran had held naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman, in the northwest of the Indian Ocean. That was a signal that to have security in the region, you have to involve everybody.

Russian President Putin, in the summer, at the height of this tension in the Gulf, and the Foreign Ministry of Russia had issued a statement saying we need a new security regime in the Persian Gulf and the whole West Asia region, which involves all parties. Not only the United States and allies are guarding the area and trying to maintain security—that’s not going to work; they said we have to involve everybody: Iran, the Saudis, and other Gulf countries. In that context, also it’s possible to solve the problem in Yemen.

So, you have had all these developments, starting in the summer of 2019 going through to the September visit by Iraq’s prime minister to China and the signing of the oil for technology agreement. In October, the President of the United States ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. The Syrians, in coordination with Russia, are getting back their territories and their sovereignty. The terrorists are being eliminated.

But in the middle of all those positive developments, some people decided—while the coup going on in the United States against President Trump—including Israeli elements that were not happy with the situation in Syria and Iraq were making trouble. Remember that the head of Hezbollah revealed that Lebanon had gotten a similar offer from China. He reported the Chinese came and offered to help build our infrastructure. But the government of Rafiq Hariri, who is a French-Saudi-American asset, rejected the Chinese offer. But the whole region was oriented towards reconstruction, towards working with China on the Belt and Road, working with Russia. It was a fantastic chance for the United States to become involved in this reconstruction of the entire region.

Instead, what we have now is the threat of a new war.

Putin-Xi-Trump Summit Is Urgent

The reason I’m mentioning these things, is not to present an interesting analysis, but rather because people need to know why this happened. We have, right now, a golden opportunity, actually, in the middle of this crisis, to turn the whole issue around and start working for peace. Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, issued a statement on Jan. 3, urging an emergency summit between President Putin, President Xi Jinping and President Trump. And of course, you can include others that might be interested, like India, Japan, Germany, France.

Now we do have reactions from many parts of the world, trying to calm things down. But we need an emergency summit to discuss how to calm this situation, bringing all parties to the table, and also discussing the reconstruction of the region. We have very good reasons to believe that it’s going to happen quickly, with the reconstruction: The plans, the projects are there; China is willing to participate; Russia is willing to participate. We need to get Europe and the United States onboard. This is the way we can have peace and security—not by assassinations and bombings and sanctions.

The Iraq-China Reconstruction Fund

Jan. 6—We present here Hussein Askary’s translation from Arabic of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signed between the governments of Iraq and China in Beijing on September 23, 2019, to establish an Iraq-China Reconstruction Fund, an “oil for reconstruction” fund, parts of which were referred to by Mr. Abdel-Hussein Al-Honen, an advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, in a televised interview on Iraqi Dijla TV on September 25, 2019. EIR has not authenticated the MOU with either government.

1. This is a non-binding agreement and is part of the friendship agreement. Disputes will be resolved through international arbitration institutions.

2. Duration of the agreement (MOU): 20 years.

3. An Iraqi-Chinese Reconstruction Fund is to be established, supervised by the Iraqi government and a consultation company that will be selected by the [Iraqi] Central Bank from among the best five international consultancy corporations.

4. The Chinese party guaranteeing the agreement is the China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation (SinoSure).

5. The revenues of 100,000 barrels of oil/day of the oil to be sold to China through two specified Chinese companies, Zhenhua Oil and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), are to be reserved every month and transferred to the Iraqi-Chinese Reconstruction Fund.

6. Chinese banks will issue credit to the Iraqi Reconstruction Fund with a credit ceiling of US$10 billion, with the interest rates subsidized by the Chinese state.

7. When the first package of projects is successfully implemented, and if the Iraqi side wishes to increase the investment level, the limit of Iraqi oil sales [reserved for the Fund] can be increased to 300,000 barrels per day, and the Chinese side would raise the ceiling on loans to US$30 billion.

8. These sums will be deposited in [China’s] CITIC Bank, which in turn will transfer the money to the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York, which supervises the total sales of Iraqi oil, and where Iraq has an account. Following that, the sums will be transferred to another new account called an “investment account.”

9. Another account, a “repay account,” is created for debt servicing and is dedicated to subsidizing the interest rate, and is financed by the “investment account.”

10. The Fund will cover the financing of the following [types of] projects:

• Airports

• Building schools

• Paving highways

• Railways

• Dealing with pollution and rehabilitating the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

• Building residential clusters

• Infrastructure projects

• Power generation and water desalination projects

• Other projects requested by the Iraqi government.

If the cost of a project is [hypothetically] US$1 billion, this sum will be withdrawn from the fund at a rate of US$850 million from China and US$150 million from the sales of Iraqi oil.

11. The Iraqi cabinet identifies a project [from the list] above and signs a single contract. For example, a contract to build 2,000 schools is signed as an “open contract.”

12. [This section includes the MOU text and some comment on it by those involved—H.A.] The process of depositing revenues of sales of Iraqi oil in the Fund started on October 1, 2019, and a sum of half a billion dollars has been accumulated so far [the average price of oil in October-November-December was US$55 per barrel, times 3 million barrels, times 3 months, is US$495 million—H.A.]. It was hoped that the first projects would soon be identified, but that has not happened, because the government has been transformed into a caretaker government stripped it of its authority to proceed.

13. The Iraqi government preserves its right to choose international, European or American companies as partners with the Chinese companies.

Hamiltonian Banking Principles in the Iraq/China MOU

by Paul Gallagher

The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iraq and China shows an understanding and application—perhaps at the Chinese initiative—of Alexander Hamilton’s principles of national banking and credit, as set out in his 1790 Report on the Public Credit, commissioned by the first U.S. Congress. In addition, the overarching development idea at work is the “oil for technology” concept developed by Lyndon LaRouche in his “Oasis Plan” of July 12, 1990 for Mideast development.

The credit, in the form of loans against Iraq’s oil revenues from sales to China, comes here from Chinese banks, forming most of the operating capital of a Reconstruction Fund. The critical infrastructure and reconstruction projects for investment are largely determined by the Iraqi government. The credits for these investments then come jointly from Chinese banks and from the Fund itself, in a ratio of roughly 6:1. (In the case of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, that bank’s major equity “partners” were Dutch bankers.) All the credit is backed by specified oil revenues of Iraq, placed in insured escrow in the Reconstruction Fund.

But the credit issued to the Fund by China’s banks is a multiple of the oil revenue, whereby roughly $2 billion per year in oil revenues is the basis for $20 billion, or later $3 billion per year the basis for $30 billion, in what appear to be 20-year project loans. (It is a 20-year MOU.) The oil revenues are essentially guaranteeing the interest for a number of years: “A ‘repay account’ is created for debt servicing and is dedicated to subsidizing the interest rate, and is financed by the ‘investment account’ ” of the Fund.

As Hamilton wrote, such a “national debt” of the Reconstruction Fund is a “national blessing” for Iraq because the “means of its extinguishment” are provided—short-term interest and minor principal repayment, by the repayment account; long-term principal repayment, by the increased productivity and wealth of Iraq’s economy and people resulting from this reconstruction.

The investment account, like the operating capital of a Hamiltonian national bank, is itself also investing in the critical projects. And, its dedicated oil revenues are capable of backing more than China’s $20 billion or $30 billion development loan—the Reconstruction Fund could, if desired, issue additional debt to Iraqis and Iraqi institutions as Hamiltonian national banks do. [back to text]

LAROUCHE ON THE MIDDLE EAST

The End of Sykes-Picot:

Moving Beyond Colonialism

Editor’s Note: This is a reprint of the EIR report on Mr. LaRouche’s presentation to faculty, students and guests at Central Connecticut State University, including the full transcript of his lecture, which was originally published in EIR, Vol. 36, No. 19, May 15, 2009.

One of the greatest threats to mankind today can be summarized in the familiar saying: “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”

It was in this spirit that Lyndon LaRouche delivered the following lecture, before an audience of approximately 200 faculty, students, and guests of Central Connecticut State University on the afternoon of May 4, 2009.

From the moment he was invited to deliver the lecture as part of the Middle East policy series, chaired by the distinguished Middle East scholar Prof. Norton Mezvinsky, LaRouche contemplated how best to use the limited time allotted, to deliver the most thought-provoking message.

As you will read below, LaRouche stepped outside of the rigged game of the Middle East per se, to deliver a message, intended to reverberate in the Obama Administration as it prepares for an urgent round of diplomacy, and within governing institutions around the world.

LaRouche’s message was: Unless the fundamental global struggle between the republican and oligarchical outlooks—expressed most clearly, still today, in the struggle between the American (republican) and British (oligarchical) systems—is understood, no Middle East peace is possible.

That empire, as LaRouche reiterated during his CCSU lecture, is not based upon the English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh people. It is a global financial empire, centered in the City of London, but with tentacles on Wall Street and in every financial capital around the globe. It is the power of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system that must be defeated today, if humanity is to survive, and if the Middle East is ever to enjoy true peace and prosperity.

Hence, LaRouche titled his lecture, “The End of the Sykes-Picot System.”

‘A Controversial Speaker’

Lyndon LaRouche gave this address to the Middle East Lecture Series at Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain, Conn., on May 4, 2009, at the invitation of Prof. Norton Mezvinsky. Professor Mezvinsky spoke at a Schiller Institute conference in Germany on Feb. 22.

Prof. Norton Mezvinsky: Thank you all for coming. As many of you know, my name is Norton Mezvinsky, and I’m a professor of history here at Central Connecticut State University. I also plan and coordinate the CCSU Middle East Lecture Series. Today’s lecture is the last of the 2008-2009 series, and in addition, it’s my own addition to the series. By that, I mean, as has happened in previous years with this series, the money allocated has previously been used. Hence, as I have previously done the last couple years, I have, out of my own pocket, provided the funding for the expense of bringing today’s speaker.

Because of some controversy that had arisen over this session, I want to state this specifically: Those of you who have some objections to today’s speaker—you have only me to blame. Controversy, of course, is endemic to the Middle East lecture series. We have had speakers who have presented views that, to some other people, are controversial. Different speakers have presented diametrically opposed points of view. This is a university, so therefore, so be it.

My standard, my requirement, for a lecturer in this series, is that she, or he, is knowledgeable factually, about one or more important issues within the context of the Middle East, and that she or he has presented orally, and/or in writing, useful ideas, and/or has engaged in useful activity in regard to the serious issues.

EIRNS/Christopher Jadatz

Lyndon LaRouche urged his audience at Central Connecticut State University: “Don’t look at the history of the Middle East; look at the Middle East in history.” That’s where the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict can be found, he said.

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Today’s speaker, Lyndon LaRouche, measures up to the standard I have just said. A controversial individual for many decades, Lyndon LaRouche is a leading political economist, and prolific author. He has been a precandidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. LaRouche has produced a series of economic forecasts, dating back to 1956. He forecast, for example, the present global economic collapse, in an international webcast, delivered from Washington, D.C., on July 25, 2007.

LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire in 1922. He has authored more than a dozen books, and hundreds of articles, many published in Executive Intelligence Review, a weekly magazine he founded in the mid-1970s, which is, I have personally discovered, must reading for numerous members of the United States Congress, United States State Department officials, other politicos in Washington and around the world, and many academics.

LaRouche has been dedicated to a just peace in the Middle East for decades, working tirelessly for economic policies that can provide an underpinning to a lasting solution to a crisis that, in some ways, is rooted in the topic of his discussion today, the Sykes-Picot Agreement. LaRouche has travelled in the region, visiting Iraq in the mid-1970s, and delivering a lecture in the early 2000s at the Zayed Center in the United Arab Emirates. He collaborated with members of the Israeli Labor Party in developing what became known as the Oasis Plan, for high-technology regional development, centered upon nuclear power-driven desalination, and high-speed mass transportation throughout the region.

At major Middle-East-oriented think-tanks in Washington and elsewhere, factual information, supplied by the LaRouche group, at least some of his views, are regularly studied and considered. During the past year, especially, when I have been in Washington starting a new Middle East political think-tank, I have witnessed this personally.

EIRNS/Christopher Jadatz

Prof. Norton Mezvinsky invited the “controversial” Lyndon LaRouche to address his Middle East lecture series.

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One final word, before bringing Lyndon LaRouche to the stage to speak. Some sharply negative attacks upon him have been made by some people, on and off the CCSU campus. Material is being handed out, as you know, even though I wrote on the listserv that I urged groups not to distribute material at the sessions of the Middle East Lecture Series. There are other fora and other channels to hand out material. I told LaRouche supporters, before the lecture, not to hand out material. I have seen much of the materials being handed out, and believe that much of it, that I have seen, is at best problematic factually, and some of it clearly inaccurate. But we can discuss that at another time. Because unwarranted attacks have been made against me for at least the last four decades, I suppose it’s fair to say that I am especially sensitive to this kind of thing. My hope is, that you in the audience will pay close attention to what Lyndon LaRouche has to say about an important topic.

I shall field questions and answers after his lecture, which is titled “The End of Sykes-Picot: Moving Beyond Colonialism in the Middle East.”

The Middle East in Context

Lyndon LaRouche:Thank you very much.

I shall suggest it is an error to talk a Middle East policy. That is, I think, one of the reasons we have a problem with the Middle East, is, we keep talking about a Middle East policy. Instead of talking about a conflict in the so-called Middle East, we should talk about the Middle East as a conflict, and a conflict that is largely global, especially within the context of nearby European and related civilization.

This is demonstrated, especially, since the British took over the Middle East, in a process which began with the development of petroleum in what is now called Kuwait, by the British monarchy. And the petroleum development, of this monopoly, was to change the British naval fleet from a coal-burning fleet, at least in principal capital ships, to an oil-burning fleet. The advantage of the use of petroleum, as a fuel, rather than coal, was a decisive margin of significance for the British in World War I.

Government of Israel Press Office/Assaf Kutin

The so-called “Arab-Israeli” or “Arab-Jewish” conflict, is, in fact, one which has been played, from the outside, in our time, by the British Empire, whose intention is to control the vast oil resources of the region. Shown here: Israeli tanks advance in the Golan Heights, during the “Six-Day War,” June 1967.

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Out of that, the breakup of the Turkish, the Ottoman, Empire, came a new situation, in which the British, with their puppets in France, formed what was called the Sykes-Picot coalition, under which the entire area was intended to be carved up between France and Britain, as a joint colony, as such.

It didn’t work out that way, because you had an able Turkish commander [Mustafa Kemal Ataturk], who embarrassed the British very much, during the First World War. Who defeated the British, and the French, and set up an independent Turkey, which he consolidated by proceeding to make agreements immediately with Syria, in order to keep Turkey out of the Arab world, to save it from being embroiled in the Arab world. And who also made an agreement with the Soviet Union, in respect to that border, and, in that way, created a nation-state of Turkey, which, in a sense, has been a success. Not that everything has been successful, but that the existence of the state of Turkey has been a success, with all its peculiarities, which have been shaped in its history.

Now, if you look back on this thing, and look at what the conflict in this region is, since the developments of the late 19th Century, this has always been an area of conflict. But people look at this, and say, “This is a conflict among this person or that person.” And, more recently, since the end of World War II, it’s considered a conflict between Israelis, or Jews, and Arabs—which is also, not quite true.

What we have to do, is think of this area, as I said, as being an area within the world—the Middle East is a part of the world!—the conflict in the Middle East is a part of the world conflict, not the other way around.

But then, look at it from the standpoint of economics: What is important about this area, which is called today the Middle East? Why is it such a cockpit of conflict? Why has it been such a cockpit of conflict since way before anybody knew of a Jew in the Middle East? In the ancient wars, among Egypt, among the Hittites, among the people of Mesopotamia, and similar kinds of wars. The wars of the 7th Century B.C., which involved essentially, the Greeks, allied with the Egyptians, against Phoenicia, and the extension of Phoenicia in the Western Mediterranean, being combatted and controlled by another civilization, there.

So, the conflict is ancient.

The Difference Between Man and Ape: Fire

Now, why this conflict?

Well, we have to go back a little more to ancient history, to understand these things. Because men are not animals. Human beings are not animals. Animals have no history; they have a biological history, but they have no cultural history. Mankind’s conflicts of today are the product of cultural conflicts, in cultural history. And we must look back, perhaps a million years, to get some glimpse of this.

For example: In our archeology, with the frail evidence we have of mankind’s probable, or actual existence then, say up to a million years ago: How do we distinguish between ape and man? There’s one simple explanation. If you can find evidence of a fire site, together with fossils which look like they might be either anthropoid or human, if you find a fire site, that’s human.

The primary difference of man from ape, is fire. But fire is only a symptom. Fire is an expression of the nature of the human intellect, of the creative powers of man that do not exist in the ape.

In lower forms of life than man, in the so-called biosphere, development is built into the physiology, the physical circumstances. In the case of man, as the case of ancient fire sites, which distinguish man from ape, in anthropology, we have the secret of man, which is ideas. Fire is the illustration of the concept of discovery of ideas, of the concept of culture, of the concept of development of the human race, development of civilization.

And therefore, to understand human behavior, we must look back as well as we can, to ancient times, to see, as much as we can, this pattern of distinction, between the ape, and man. Between the biosphere, and what is called the Noösphere—the sphere of the human mind, and its creative potential—and the ape, lacking that kind of creative potential; and all beasts, lacking that kind of creative potential.

So, then we have to look at this question from the standpoint of humanism. And what do we mean by humanism? We also mean language. We mean cultures which are transmitted by or with the assistance of language. So we study man in terms of language, not merely because of the use of language, but because of the invention of ideas, which do not start and end with the life of an individual, but are the transmission of ideas from one generation to the next. And so it is the development of ideas, the development of mankind, over thousands of years, over even a million or 2 million, perhaps, where we find the secret of human behavior at any point or location within history.

And this is no exception, this so-called Middle East conflict.

This conflict arose long after the period of about 17,000 B.C., when the last great glaciation, of about 100,000 years ago—these glaciations are never quite simple, but they do have demarcations—and we’re coming to the end of a warming period. As a matter of fact, we’re already, contrary to some rumors, we’re in a cooling period. And the lowering of sunspot activity, is one indication of a 10- to 11-year cooling period now in process. It’s global.

There are other factors involved, but, as far as the Sun is concerned, sunspot activity and changes recently, indicate that we’re in an 11-year cycle, typical of the past, of sunspot decline, and therefore a cooling period.

We’re also in a long-term cooling period, because we have another 100,000-, approximately, year cycle, to deal with, which determines long-term glaciation, and deglaciation.

So, in this process, there’s a lot we don’t know, because a good deal of this planet was buried under many layers of ice, especially the Northern Hemisphere, for a long period of time.

The Shift from Maritime to Inland Culture

And during this long period of time, culture was primarily located in transoceanic, or at least other maritime cultures, not land cultures. As far as we know, culture, human culture’s progress, is determined by maritime culture, which in its navigation, discovered the significance of astronomy, discovered its importance for man, and for navigation itself. And these were the leading cultures in the Great Ice Age period, in particular, when many of our calendars, as we know them today, the ancient calendars, and the markings of these ancient calendars, became apparent.

And then, the ice began to recede, about 20,000 years ago. And the rate of melting increased. Gradually, the oceans rose by about 400 feet, changing the definition of coastline. Making India much smaller than it had been, in an earlier period. The Mediterranean was opened up into a longer and lake-like formation that became a sea, a salty sea. And then, about 10,000 years ago, as the Mediterranean rose, it broke through the so-called Dardanelles Strait, and transformed what we call the Black Sea, changing it from a freshwater lake into a saltwater lake, with a freshwater underbase.

So, in this process, these changes are going on. Man is reacting to these changes. Gradually, as the glaciation recedes, civilization moves inland. It moves along the coast first, as we see in the 4th and 3rd Millennia B.C., in the Mediterranean region. It goes through various crises, but there’s a gradual inland movement. The first movement is along the coast: maritime culture. Secondly, it begins to move upriver, along the major rivers, particularly the rivers that were being flooded by the melting ice, from the glaciation.

And, in this situation, something happens. You have a culture whose leading characteristic, in this known period, was that of a maritime culture, not an inland culture. There were inland cultures, but they were not progressive, in the sense that the maritime cultures were progressive, scientifically, or the equivalent of science, and culture.

So, what now is the meaning of this area we call the Middle East, at that point? It’s an area between the Mediterranean, which becomes a center of growing culture, and the Indian Ocean, and Asia in general.

For example, let’s take the case of Sumer, which is the first major civilization which emerged in the southern Middle East. This was an Indian Ocean culture, it was not a Semitic culture. It progressed. It was a very advanced culture in many respects; much of the idea of language, of written language, was developed there, and influenced the entire region for a long time after that, with the cuneiform writings.

But then, it degenerated. And the lower part of Mesopotamia became salinated, because of a physical economic degeneration in the area. Then you had the Akkads. Then you had the Semitic cultures, which were based upriver, on the structure which they had adapted to, in the earlier Indian Ocean cultures. And in this process, now, you have a development, a powerful development, between the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, as an area. That remains to the present day.

Centennial Photography Company

A history-changing event occurred in 1875, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, where the great industrial achievements of the U.S. were put on display. Nations from all over the world sent representatives, who took home the ideas of the American System. Here, a wallpaper printing press, in the Machinery Hall of the exhibit.

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A Fundamental Change in World History

Then there was a change, a change in the middle of the 19th Century, or slightly afterward. The victory of the United States, in defeating the British puppet, called the Confederacy, in the Civil War, resulted in a fundamental change in world history.

Up until that time, the superior cultures in power were cultures which were based on maritime culture, because the ability to move by seawater, and up rivers, which were the large parts of the rivers, became the places where civilization, where economic power developed. Inland movement was difficult, compared to movement across water. And so, until about the 1870s, the world was dominated, in terms of powers in the world, by maritime cultures. And the British Empire’s emergence was a product of that process.

But, in 1876, there was a change. The change was the Philadelphia Centennial celebration, in which all of the achievements of the United States, especially those of the recent period, were put on display in Philadelphia. People from all over the world, prominent figures from various countries, came to see this. Japan came to see it, and Japan was changed, and transformed from what it had been, into an emerging industrial power, through visits to the United States, in the context of the Philadelphia Centennial.

Russia, the great scientists from Russia, came there, and adopted a policy which results, among many other things, in the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

In Germany, Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor, had direct representation, and negotiated directly with the circles of those who had been associated with Abraham Lincoln, and transformed Germany, with many reforms instituted in the late 1870s. Among these reforms were the imitation of the United States on one crucial point: We, as had been intended by John Quincy Adams, when he had been Secretary of State, had defined a policy for the United States, as one nation, from the Canadian to the Mexican borders, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Not merely a territory, but a nation which was developing in an integrated way, through the development of the Transcontinental Railroad system.

Germany then adopted that policy, for Eurasia, a policy of developing Europe, continental Europe and continental Asia, on the basis of transcontinental railway systems, and the things which go with that.

Suddenly, there was a transformation in the character of economy, for as far back as we know much history, from national power based on maritime power, to national power, a superior national power, based on the development of inland transportation, rail transportation, and the industries that went with that.

This was recognized by the British as being a great threat to the existence of the British Empire—which is not really a British empire; it was a financial empire, with headquarters in the Netherlands, and in England. It was not the British people that were the empire; it was an international financial group, based on maritime power, which thought they could create a power dominating the world.

So, from that point on—from Lincoln’s defeat of the British puppet, the Confederacy, through the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia—there’s a great conflict between the British Empire, as a maritime power, and the United States, as a model of transcontinental internal development of national areas. And the pivot of this thing, which became known as World War II—what started the first war was actually the assassination on the President of France, Sadi Carnot, on behalf of British interests. Which made a mess of things, and therefore, allowed the British to begin to Balkanize.

In 1895, the British organized the first Japan-China War, and continued that policy as an attack on China, up until 1945, Japan’s attack on China. Japan was also dedicated to a war with Russia. Then, the Prince of Wales, who actually ran the place for his mother [Queen Victoria]—she was kind of dotty at that point—the Prince of Wales planned to have his two nephews go to war with each other. One of his nephews was Wilhelm II of Germany, the other was the Czar of Russia. And they were determined to start a war.

Bismarck knew this, and made an agreement with the Czar of Russia, that if anyone tried to get Germany to support Austria in a Balkan war, that Bismarck would kill the operation. And on that basis, peace was preserved, for a while. But then, Bismarck was dumped in 1890, and the process of war began. First, through the assassination of Sadi Carnot of France, who was close to the United States, and close to its policy. And, with the dumping of Bismarck beforehand. Then, with the launching of the Japan-China warfare, which continued until 1945, until August 1945.

So, we went into what was called a Great World War, but really a whole series of great world wars, which had been ongoing since 1890, to, in fact, the present times.

The conflicts of the world today, are, proximately the echo of this long conflict, between the idea of the internal development of national territories, and across national territories, as typified by great transcontinental railway systems, and by technological progress, and the other side: the idea of maintaining a maritime supremacy, a maritime financial supremacy over the world at large. We’re still there.

There Was Nothing Accidental

About Franklin Roosevelt

Now, in this process, a time came, at which Franklin Roosevelt had intervened in this process, and had broken it up. Up until that time—frankly, from the assassination of McKinley, which was a key part of getting us into World War I, and then World War II—from that time on, the United States was going in a bad direction. We had bad Presidents. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the nephew of the organizer of the Confederate intelligence service, became President. And he was a loyal British subject. He made a mess of things.

Then we had Woodrow Wilson, whose family was notorious for its leading role in the organization and tradition of the Ku Klux Klan. And it was Woodrow Wilson who, personally, from the White House, as President, launched the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, on a scale far beyond anything that was in existence ever before.

Then we had the case of Cal Coolidge. He kept his mouth shut, because he’d incriminate himself if he talked, in public.

Then we had the case of Hoover. Well, we say, Hoover sucked. He was a bright man, but he had bad politics, and worked for people who controlled him, and he was their puppet.

Then comes in, a man who’s a descendant of a friend of—guess who? Our great first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. And that friend was Isaac Roosevelt, and Isaac Roosevelt had started the Bank of New York. Isaac was a close collaborator of Hamilton, and Franklin Roosevelt, who was a descendant of Isaac Roosevelt, wrote a paper, in his Harvard graduation period, honoring his ancestor Isaac Roosevelt and his policies.

FDR Library

President Franklin Roosevelt, whose ancestor Isaac Roosevelt was a collaborator of Alexander Hamilton, adopted Hamiltonian policies to rebuild the U.S. out of the Great Depression. FDR is pictured here at a CCC camp, Co. 350, at Big Meadows, Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, on August 12, 1933.

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There was nothing accidental about Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt, who had to struggle against the people in New York and elsewhere, who we would call fascist today—and they were fascists—they’re still fascists, some of them. He turned the tide against them. And while he was President, despite the difficulties under which he labored, he went into the Presidency with a very clear intention, and a very clear perspective. Roosevelt, in his Presidency, made and implemented policies faster than anybody else could think of them. You look at that from his first steps in office. He knew exactly what he was going to do. He had to improvise in some degree—and all leaders in societies do improvise. They know what their mission is: Now they have to find out how to bring the forces together to accomplish that mission in principle, even if it has repercussions. And that’s the way our system works.

We are a people with many different views, and the way you get the job done, is find a common interest in the nation, awaken the people to a common interest, and then figure out how to get the job done. And do a lot of bargaining and negotiating in the process, to get the thing through.

The thing you count on, first of all: Can you innovate? Can you innovate the way which is in the right direction? Are you laying the foundation for further steps which may correct what you have failed to do in the previous action? And you have to also educate the people. You have to educate them, not by preaching at them as such, but by organic methods, by influencing them to see things about themselves, and about the world, they have not seen before. And as people come slowly to a realization, sometimes with a jerk: “This is right!” Then they make another leap forward.

And had Roosevelt lived, the world today would be far better, and also far different than we’re seeing since Roosevelt died. The world as it existed, on April 12th of 1945, when Roosevelt died, and the day after, April 13th, when Truman became President, were two entirely different worlds.

And I know it. I was in military service abroad during that transition period. I was in India and Burma. When I came back, in the late Spring of 1946, after a beautiful experience with the attempt of India to achieve its independence, my United States had changed. It was no more the United States of Franklin Roosevelt. The same fascist crowd that Roosevelt had kept under control while he was President, was back in power, under a puppet called Harry Truman. Harry S Truman—no point, no initial, no name. His mother had planned to have a name with S in it, at a point at some time, but she never got around to filling what the rest of the S was. I don’t think she cared, and I don’t think he cared.

A Great Cultural Degeneration

So, we had this process. Truman was a catastrophe. Eisenhower was a relief, but he came in weak. He didn’t have the strength to control the situation politically. He did many good things, but he was not in control of the forces. Kennedy got the idea that he was going to control the Presidency—then he got himself killed, by having that kind of commitment. When Kennedy was killed, Johnson—Johnson was not a bad person. He was a politician, with all that goes, good and bad, in that appellation. But, he was convinced that the three guys who killed Kennedy, who were of French provenance, who had attempted to kill de Gaulle, would get him next. The three guns pointed at his neck was the thing he referred to before he left office, that had frightened him all along. So, he gave in on the Vietnam War.

Then we had the ’68 phenomenon, and what happened after that.

Then we had a fascist President, called Nixon. The guy was a fascist—don’t kid yourself. He was exactly that. Then we had Ford—he didn’t exactly know what was going on in there. He was a pleasant guy, but a lot of bad things happened under him. He didn’t notice what was going on. The guy’s sitting there, he’s happily sitting at the dinner table while rats are running all over it, and he doesn’t notice them.

Then you had Reagan, who was a complex creature, with some good instincts. He belonged to my generation, an older version of it, and was very strong under Roosevelt, but, as we saw immediately, he adapted to the Truman Administration very quickly, and that was his problem. I had some dealings with him which were very important, and could have changed history for the better—and they did change history, but we could have done much better, if he’d been able to stick to his guns. But otherwise he was a mistake, he just went rolling on.

Then, 1987: We had a recession which was as bad, or worse, than the Depression of 1929. And then we had a terrible man, Alan Greenspan, and what he came out of, that [Ayn Rand] cult he came out of, was not very good. The result was terrible.

So, we’ve gone through a process of degeneration of the United States, since the death of Roosevelt, with ups and downs in between, but the cultural degeneration is great.

Look, for example: You’re sitting here in a university. And think about what came out of universities about the time I was coming back from military service, to today. What’s a typical situation? What kind of professions do people undertake, leaving a university?

I’ll give you a case. We just had an affair, I participated indirectly, in Ukraine, a scientific case. And we looked at the population composition of Ukraine, in terms of different age groups. We found that the scientists, those who could actually think in terms which were significant to Ukraine, were usually over 60 years of age, and the leaders were in their 80s, like me. In Russia you find a similar thing going on. In the post-Soviet period, there was disorientation, which had started in Russia earlier, under Andropov, and then Gorbachov: the destruction of the ability of produce. The destruction of the power of the creative process. And replaced by greed, to get money for money’s sake, and for the sake of the power of money. Not to build a nation, not to make conditions better.

And we had the same thing in the United States, in general.

We’re now at a point, that our nation is disintegrating. It has actually been disintegrating in the direction it goes, since April 12, 1945, since Truman became President. And I could go through the details of that, but I won’t here, because that’s too far from the subject.

But we have been destroyed step by step, step by step by step. And because it came on slowly, like the boiled frog, we didn’t react. We just sat in the pool while the heat came to a boil, sitting there contentedly in the pool, while the water reached the boiling point, and the frog died. We’re like the frog that died, in the pool. We’ve been going step by step, down the wrong way.

The British Empire

Come back then to the situation in the so-called Middle East. And see the Middle East, not as having its own history, but the Middle East as something within the process of history.

And the other part is, don’t look at the Israeli-Arab conflict. Don’t ignore it, but don’t look at it. Because the conflict is not determined by the Israelis or Arabs. It’s determined by international forces which look at this region. How? As a crossover point between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, the relationship of Europe to Asia, the relationship of Europe to East Africa, and so forth.

Therefore, what you’re seeing is that.

Now, go back and say, where did the British get this idea—as they did with Sykes-Picot—where did they get the bright idea of keeping the Arab population, and what became the Israeli population, at odds with each other permanently? Killing each other over land that wasn’t worth fighting over, in terms of its quality.

Ask yourself, what is the development of this territory? What is the development of the conditions of life of the people? The development of the conditions of life of the typical Israeli? Look at the Israeli of the 1950s and ’60s, and even the ’70s, the early ’70s, where there was progress. What do you see today? You see decadence. Accelerating decadence, and an increase in warfare.

What do you see in the Arab condition? Decadence. And you sit there with despair, and you say, are these people just going to kill themselves into extinction? Kill each other into extinction? What’s wrong here?

Well, somebody’s playing them. Somebody’s playing and orchestrating the situation. Who? How do the British come in on this?

Well, go back, for example, to the time that Lord Shelburne, who was the boss of the British Empire—which at that time was not the empire of the British monarchy; it was the empire of the British East India Company, which had private armies, and private navies, and private funds, and a lot of drugs. What do we learn from that?

Well, how did Shelburne come into power? How did he become the leader, in February of 1763, of what became the British Empire? Which was really the empire of the British East India Company, not the empire of the British monarchy. That came later, under Victoria. It came because of the Seven Years War.

What was the Seven Years War? The Anglo-Dutch interests, which were largely banking-financial interests, orchestrated a period of warfare among the nations of continental Europe, back and forth, playing the very skilled military commander of Prussia, Frederick the Great, in perpetual warfare, which resulted in the ruin of the nations of continental Europe, through mutual warfare and its effects, such that, in February 1763, the British walked in and dictated a treaty called the Peace of Paris, which established the British East India Company as a private empire. Which led, later, to the formation, under Victoria, of the so-called British Empire.

Since that time, this group, which is not a group of people, as such—I don’t think of British bankers as people, because they don’t act like people. They act like clever apes, with the instincts of apes. What was done in this whole period—especially in dealing with the Lincoln process, and the 1876 effect—was not to engage in direct war against the United States, which they intended to destroy, but to subvert it. To neutralize the United States in its own development, by various kinds of crises.

But mainly, it was to destroy Continental Europe, and to destroy it by warfare, like the Seven Years War in Europe. For example, shortly after 1890, when Bismarck was commenting on what had happened to him, he said, the purpose of this thing was to ruin Continental Europe through a new Seven Years War, like that which had led to that.

The Emperor Napoleon, shown here in a detail from “The Battle of Jena,” by Horace Vernet, was a tool of the British Empire. His new Seven Years War ruined Europe, allowing Britain to emerge triumphant in 1815, until the U.S.A., after 1876, checked its power.

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We also had another example of this, the case of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte was not an enemy of Britain; he was a tool of Britain. He ran a Seven Years War on the continent of Europe, as a dictator, to the point that he ruined Europe, so that Britain emerged as triumphant in 1815. And it was only the emergence of the United States as a power, essentially after 1876, that checked [the British Empire], and therefore, the British were determined to destroy us then. But they weren’t quite ready.

When we had the assassination of McKinley, and the introduction of British puppets, such as Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Coolidge, and so forth, as Presidents, and what that signified, and we became a tool of the British imperial policy, rather than representing our own interests, or representing what we should represent, in our dedication to the establishment of a system of republics throughout the planet.

So what happened was, the British created, beginning in the late part of the 19th Century, what became the Sykes-Picot Treaty.

Fighting for the Common Aims of Mankind

Now, one thing is crucial about this, in all of this, which angers me greatly. Because I’m angered, not at them—I despise them—but I’m angered at my own people, who, like fools, will kill each other over things that are not really worth fighting about, when there are all these other solutions to the problem. And thus, making themselves the common prey, in their own fighting of each other, of an empire.

It’s like the principle of the Seven Years War: Get the other guys to kill each other; then you come in and take over the mess. That’s the way the British Empire has always operated.

This was conscious too. Because, remember what Shelburne’s advice and counsel was: the model of Julian the Apostate, the Emperor Julian the Apostate. What did Julian do, which caused Shelburne to admire him so much? What he did was, he abandoned Christianity. He cancelled it—but not really. What he did, is, he put it into a kind of temple, of various religions, and began to play these against each other.

Now, Shelburne’s conviction was, on the basis of the study of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, that the way the British Empire should operate, was the way he had operated in the Seven Years War, and the way it was to operate in the Napoleonic Wars, and so forth. It was to get the fools to kill each other, to play one against the other.

Now, this is easy to do. If you get people who don’t understand the principle of Westphalia, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, who don’t understand this. Our interest as human beings, is not to kill each other, or not to engage in killing each other for the purpose of trying to get power over other people. Our purpose should be, to set up a system of sovereign nation-states, under which each group of people, using their own language, and their own culture, is self-represented. But these nations, as such, so formed, must have also a common interest, in the betterment of the general condition of mankind.

The only thing that’s worth fighting for, is to prevent evil from happening to this effort, and to promote this effort, for the common aims of mankind. Because the human mind is based on creativity. And because creativity is associated with Classical poetry, the best expression of Classical poetry, of a language culture. In order to evoke creativity in our people, so that our people may prosper, and humanity may prosper, we have to promote the welfare of the other nation as much, or more, than our own.

Because it’s by promoting in them that which is good, which is creativity, which is the development of culture, the development of a physical contribution to the human effort: That’s what our purpose should be. Our purpose is not to compete with each other, as such. Yes, compete in another sense. But not to compete as hostile forces, but to compete in doing good, in sharing the good, and realizing that you must develop our people’s creative powers to the stage of enriching their use of language, especially as typified by poetry and music, to think. And that should be our purpose.

The Solution: End the Imperialist System!

The problem, when you look at this thing in the Middle East, you say, this is a disaster. What are these two groups of people going to do with this damn warfare? They’re going to destroy each other. They’re going to destroy civilization by spreading this disease. What are they fighting for? To kill somebody else? To eliminate somebody else?

Or are they fighting to make their own people more successful, as human beings, by finding ways of cooperation with people of a different religious or similar culture?

The principle of Westphalia.

We get so involved with the issues of the Middle East, that we find we can never solve them! The way we’re playing it, we’ll never solve them.

We will make efforts: Maybe the United States, if it had the right President, could force a peace, with the support of other nations. But without some force, there’s no tendency for agreement in this region. There’s a tendency for perpetual killing. And what many of you can do is, to try to ameliorate that thing, and slow down the killing rate, try to keep it from spreading. To get them not to do it for another day. There are no guarantees.

There is a solution, a solution in principle. And the solution is: End this blasted imperialist system! And understand that we, as a people, must develop our spiritual culture; that is, the creative powers of mankind, to carry further the development of mankind, from some brutish character by a campfire a million years ago, or so, into mankind as we desire that mankind should develop today. That’s the issue.

In the meantime, we will fight. We will do everything possible to try to get peace in this area, because we want to stop the killing. But we’re not going to tell somebody, we’ve got a solution that’s going to be accepted, that’s going to work. We’re going to say, we’ve got a hopeless cause, and we’re going to continue to fight for it.

But you have to understand, the problem comes not from these people, except that they’re playing themselves for fools, by fighting each other. They’re both extremely poor. Do you know what the condition of the average Arab is, in that region? Do you know what the condition of life is, the deteriorating condition of life, of the Israeli? What the hell are they fighting about? Where’s the benefit in the fighting?

But the passions are deeply imbedded. The habits are deeply imbedded. We can try to impose the influence of restraints. Try to prevent these crazy Israelis from thinking about an attack on Iran, because that would be really a hellhole operation. In other words, we try to intervene through diplomacy, through other influences, to moderate the tendency for self-destruction of the peoples.

But don’t believe that there’s some solution for the Israeli-Arab conflict. There is no solution, in that, per se. That’s why I said at the beginning here: Don’t look at the history of the Middle East; look at the Middle East in history. And there you find the solution.

Because it’s being played! The whole region. It’s being played like a puppet.

I’ve got a similar situation in India. I’ve got a worse situation in Pakistan: Pakistan is about to die, it’s about to be killed, by U.S. advice, and British management. The dumping of Musharraf was insane. He’s not a good person, but he kept the country together. The disintegration of Pakistan would uncork all kinds of hell in the entire region.

So, that’s the point. We must grow up, and those of you who are in the university, presumably approaching now the point of where people are graduating, either from that term at the university, or going on to some other education, should think of yourselves not just as being university graduates, or prospective graduates. But think of yourselves as respecting the need for young Americans, in particular, to get out of the habits of thinking which have dominated our press, and our conversations, in recent times. To realize we’re on the edge of a disaster beyond belief. And to realize that what’s needed, is an understanding of history, not an understanding of something that’s happening in some section of history.

A Credit System; Not a Money System

For example, the power of the United States, just to conclude here: The United States has great power it doesn’t know it has. I’m greatly worried about this President, because I think he’s cuckoo at this point. He’s being managed by a bunch of people who are evil.

But we have a mission. For example: We have now a disintegrating world financial and monetary system. We have gone through a depression phase, since July of 2007. We’re now entering a hyperinflationary phase. It’s a process which has a striking resemblance to what happened in Germany, in the early days of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar conditionalities imposed by Versailles, put Germany, at that time, first through a great depression. We in the United States have, since the Summer of 2007, the United States has gone through a great depression. The collapse of the economy, the collapse in the conditions of life, the accelerating rate of collapse in the conditions of life now, have been those of a depression, a deep depression, like that which Germany experienced in the early 1920s.

But then, in the Spring of 1923, there was a change. And between the Spring of ’23, and November of 1923, the German mark disintegrated. The economy disintegrated. And was bailed out by outside forces. It wasn’t really bailed out, because what happened is, that the people who had left, came back and took over. And this led to Hitler.

That was the year that Hitler came to power, in fact. Became a phenomenon. 1923. And it was that, that made Hitler possible. Allowed that to happen. Which was done by the Versailles Treaty—which you don’t do.

So, now we’re in a situation in which we have to change our monetary system. We can reorganize our monetary system and the world monetary system. We can cooperate with Russia, with China, India, and other countries, whose situation, as it stands now, is hopeless. There’s no future for China, under the present conditions. It has lost the means of employment for a large part of its population. It can not carry itself under these conditions, and there’s no prospect for increase of markets, for China’s goods. Russia is also in that kind of condition. India, because it has a low export dependency, relatively speaking, is not as badly off. But the blowup of Pakistan will have an effect on India, to blow India up too. That’s Asia! A major part of the world’s population.

Africa’s already a disaster.

Only by shifting to a credit system, as established by our first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and away from a monetary system, will it be possible to rescue the world’s population from the onrushing New Dark Age. This portrait of Hamilton was painted by Daniel Huntington (1865).

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So, how do you do this? Well, we have a system; we call it the American System, defined by Hamilton. We can shift the world economy, from being a monetary economy, to being a credit system, as specified by Alexander Hamilton. That is, we do not try to run a money system. The money system is finished! This monetary system, as it exists, can not be saved. It’s doomed. But some people are greatly attached to it. It’s like being attached to a certain lead weight, which may drown you, by trying to carry it.

Therefore, we can go back to a Hamiltonian approach, the same approach that Hamilton used, which led to the formation of our Federal Constitution. That is, Hamilton was in a situation, where he was a key figure in Washington’s policy, and he had a situation in which the banks of the United States, which were state banks, state-chartered banks, were essentially bankrupted by the costs of fighting the War for Independence. Therefore, he had to create a national government, a Federal government, which, by being able to reorganize bankrupt banks, to prevent a chain reaction collapse, would save the United States from disintegration.

It was this consideration, of the bankruptcy of the state banks of the former colonies, at that time, which prompted, and motivated, the formation of the Federal Constitution.

Our system, from the beginning, was therefore, a credit system, as our Constitution provides. You can not print money, as such. You can utter money, you can utter credit, by a vote of the Congress, and the President. But what you can do, and how far you can go, is limited by this vote, by this action. So we create a debt, a debt commitment of the Federal government. This is our system. It’s a credit system, not a monetary system.

European systems are monetary systems; they don’t work. We have experimented with monetary systems, and we have now destroyed ourselves by doing so, during this period, because we did not think about physical values. We thought about money values, and said, “The money values will save us. The money values will help us.”

Like this printing of fake money now, which will never be paid. Debt will never be paid under these conditions. Not the existing debt. Then we have to go back to the same thing, again. Go back to a credit system, as Roosevelt had intended on April 12, 1945, as opposed to what Truman did, on April 13. And that difference, between April 12 and April 13, is the key to understanding U.S. history since that point.

We go to a credit system: We can organize credit agreements, like treaty agreements, with Russia, China, India, and other countries. Europe can’t do it. Europe is in a hopeless situation—Central and Western Europe right now. But if we do this, they will come in on it. We can rescue the system.

We have to move, therefore, from thinking about conflict among nations and regions, to the alternative to conflict, by finding that which unites us through our common purpose, as independent sovereign nations, rather than seeking resolution of a conflict we are now enjoying among ourselves. That’s the only chance we have. And when you look at the possibilities for this region, like Southwest Asia, the only chance will come, not from inside Southwest Asia. We will do, and must do, what we can, for that area, to try to stop the bloodshed, the agony, to prevent the war. But we will not succeed, until we change the history, change the world in which this region is contained.

And that’s my mission. Thank you.

British Creation and Control of Islamic Terror:

Background to China’s Defeat of Terror in Xinjiang

by Mike Billington

Photo by Cecil Beaton

“One of the most evil men in history,” Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, 1940-45, at his seat in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing Street.

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This article is based on the report that Mike Billington presented on the LaRouche PAC Fireside Chat on Thursday, January 2, 2020. The full, almost two-hour video, including dialogue with the audience, is available here.

Jan. 6—The hysteria about China in the United States, as addressed in the EIR pamphlet, “End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt Against China and President Trump,” must be viewed as seriously as the hysteria about the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The American people have been inundated by the corporate press with lies asserting that China has created “concentration camps” in which millions of Uighur Muslims have been locked up, forbidden to practice their religion, and forbidden to see their families. The Congress has passed a bill imposing sanctions on China for this alleged set of horrendous attacks on the human rights of the Muslim population.

Consider that this bill came from a Congress that fully supported the Bush and Obama wars, which slaughtered hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent Muslims in Iraq, Libya, and Syria—supposedly to combat terrorism—driving millions more from their homes into refugee camps or to risk death in perilous journeys to Europe.

President Trump rightfully denounced these wars as the greatest strategic mistake in American history. Yet the Congress and the media condemn China, which has ended the terrorist scourge in their country without bombings or military assaults. Instead, the terrorists have been incarcerated. But China, at the same time, invested in extraordinary economic development throughout the region and provided education and vocational training to the youth being subjected to terrorist ideology by the radical jihadists who preach a perverted version of Islam to inspire terrorism. These young people in China were given religious training by Islamic teachers and scholars, presenting a true interpretation of Islam to refute the jihadist lies. (See Christine Bierre, “Xinjiang Province: China Rejects All Accusations,” https://larouchepub.com/other/2019/4631-xinjiang_province_china_reject.html)

This report will examine the true roots of the terrorist threat in China, by looking at the long, ugly history of the British Empire’s intentional sponsorship, and even creation, of Islamic terrorist movements that have been used to undermine sovereign nations, targeting nationalists who refuse to submit to the Empire’s economic and political dictates. I will convey the overwhelming proof, even in the words of those responsible, such as Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher, that this was the intent of the British Empire. General Michael Flynn, in fact, was targeted by those British and American intelligence officials who are attempting to implement regime change against President Trump, because Gen. Flynn had publicly identified the fact that President Obama was funding and arming terrorists, intentionally, in order to achieve regime change against the sovereign nation states of Southwest Asia.

The British Build Wahhabi Terrorism

This funding and arming of terrorists on a large scale started back in World War I. The war itself was launched by the British in order to destroy Germany and the Ottoman Empire, to gain geopolitical control over the “heartland” of Eurasia, and to assert control over the oil-rich nations in the Arab world. They were terrified that the Germans were moving to create a railroad to Baghdad, linking up Europe with Southwest Asia and potentially with all of Asia, undermining the British Imperial control that had been maintained by Britain’s superior naval forces and the City of London’s control over the financing of trade.

The British succeeded; Germany was defeated and destroyed, creating the conditions that led to the next world war. The Ottoman Empire was also defeated and destroyed. In the process, the Caliphate of the Islamic world was shifted from Turkey to Arabia, then under a British protectorate. Soon thereafter, the British overthrew the Hashemite government that they had put in power in Arabia, and supported instead the House of Ibn Saud, creating what became known as Saudi Arabia in 1932. Saud was a radical fundamentalist, a sponsor of the ideas of the 18th century figure, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who created the fundamentalist Islamic ideology known as Wahhabism. It is Wahhabism that has been the ideology of the primary terrorist movements over the past decades, including al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Here are the words of one of the most evil men in history, Winston Churchill, who said the following in a speech before the House of Commons in 1921. He described the Wahhabites, the Saud network, as—

austere, intolerant, well-armed, and bloodthirsty . . . they hold as an article of duty as well as faith, to kill all who do not share their opinion, and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offense to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette.

So, this is Winston Churchill in an honest moment. Soon after that he said, as quoted in Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, by Mark Curtis (2018),

My admiration for Ibn Saud was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us.

This is what you’re dealing with, with the British Imperialists. They know full well what they are supporting in their relationship with the Saud family and the Saudi Arabian government. This kind of radical fundamentalism and its jihadist terrorism offshoots were used to undermine any nationalist government that refused to submit to the Empire centered in the City of London.

The Muslim Brotherhood was created in 1928 in Egypt, which had been a British protectorate since 1882. The British covertly supported the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, appreciating that its theme was that the “Quran is our constitution”—i.e., no nation-states, no sovereign countries, no nationalism. This, of course, was exactly what the British used in their efforts to overthrow nationalists—Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and others.

India is a classic case. After World War II, India won its freedom from the British Empire under the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru. But the British would not allow independence to go through without creating the potential for permanent conflict. The British supported Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the head of the All-India Muslim League, an Islamist fundamentalist who insisted that India be divided by creating the Muslim state of Pakistan. Despite the efforts of Gandhi and Nehru to keep India united, the British succeeded in imposing the division, creating a permanent conflict that is still not fully resolved today. This is the British method.

The Bernard Lewis Plan

Between 1957 and 1965, the same thing was done to Indonesia. British intelligence, working from its outpost in Singapore, and with help from the CIA, sponsored and armed radical Islamic movements with ties to the Indonesian military for a series of coup attempts against President Sukarno, who had led Indonesia’s war of independence against the Dutch after World War II. After a few failed efforts, the British succeeded in creating a mass Muslim uprising against Sukarno and his popular base in 1965. Perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in one of the greatest bloodlettings of history, openly supported by the British, the Australians, and the United States.

Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

When India won its freedom from the British Empire under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British-supported Islamist, insisted on partitioning India to create the Muslim state of Pakistan, creating permanent conflict. Above is Nehru, sharing a lighter moment with Gandhi in 1946; below is Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Wikimedia Commons

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President John Kennedy had defended Sukarno, but with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the military-industrial complex and its associated intelligence networks were successful in turning the U.S. into a “dumb giant” carrying out colonial warfare for the British, in Africa, in Indonesia, and of course in Indochina.

In the 1970s, the Saudis carried out a vast expansion of Wahhabism around the world. They created thousands and thousands of mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools) throughout the world, teaching the Wahhabist perversion of Islam. By the 1990s London became known as “Londonistan,” first called that by French President Jacques Chirac after the bombing of the Paris metro in 1995. Londonistan was known to be the center for virtually every one of these Islamic jihadist movements. The British argued simply: “What you call terrorists, we call freedom fighters.”

In 1979, the British ran a coup in Iran, overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and put the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shi’a version of Islamic fundamentalism into power. At the time, BBC was widely recognized as the source of the “color revolution” attacks against the Shah, and for bringing in taped speeches of the Ayatollah from France. While the British never officially endorsed the Khomeini mullahs who took over Iran, they had succeeded in giving new life to the historic Sunni-Shi’a conflict, creating yet again a permanent conflict through imperial “divide and conquer” policies.

It was also in 1979 that the British and the U.S. began their Afghanistan operation, aimed at creating a global terrorist capacity. A pro-Russian regime had come to power in Afghanistan, and the British and their assets in the U.S. began supporting the Islamist opposition to the pro-communist government, which led to the Russian military intervention to support that government against the Islamist Mujahideen insurgency.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, said he intended to draw Russia into “their own Vietnam.”

Once the Russians went in, the jihadist operation went into full swing. Zbigniew Brzezinski ran the U.S. side of the operation based on what was known as the Bernard Lewis Plan. Bernard Lewis was the leading British scholar of Islam and political adviser in both the UK and the U.S., and the author of the concept of an inevitable “clash of civilizations.” He proposed the creation of an Arc of Crisis, building radical Islamist regimes on the borders of Russia and China, including within Russia in the upper Caucasus, and within China in Xinjiang, all aimed at destabilizing those two nations. Wahhabists from throughout the world were shipped into Afghanistan, armed and trained in insurgency by British MI6 and the CIA, to fight the Russians and the pro-Russian government.

The U.S. Congress, after a big fight, voted to send Stinger missiles and other advanced weaponry to these jihadists. The movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” was later produced to glorify Congressman Charlie Wilson, who persuaded the U.S. Congress to arm these “freedom fighters” against the “evil Russians.” The Stinger missiles were ultimately used against the U.S. by terrorists around the world.

Left: White House; right: CSIS

While Zbigniew Brzezinski (l.) ran the U.S. side of radical Islamic operations in Afghanistan, Margaret Thatcher (r.), British Prime Minister, 1979-1990, and her government, referred to Wahhabist jihadists as “freedom fighters.”

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Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Freedom Fighters’

As for the British, here is what UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to say in 1979 about the creation of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan:

There was a tide of self-confidence and self-awareness in the Muslim world which preceded the Iranian Revolution and will outlast its present excesses. The West should recognize this with respect, not hostility. The Middle East is an area where we all have much at stake. It is in our own interests, as well as in the interests of the people of that region, that they build on their own deep, religious traditions.

Now of course, by “their own deep, religious tradition,” the Iron Lady did not mean Islam, but Wahhabism. Just as in Xinjiang today, when you read that the Uighurs are not allowed to practice their religion, what is meant is that they are not allowed to practice a terrorist pseudo-religion, but in fact, are encouraged to learn from the hundreds of thousands of imams in China who teach actual Islam.

Thatcher continued: “We do not wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of imported Marxism.” So you see the intention there. Thatcher later objected to calling the jihadists “rebels,” although they were fighting the government as well as the Russian forces sent in to defend the government:

This is a strange word to use to me, of people who are fighting to defend their country against the foreign invader. Surely, they are genuine freedom fighters, fighting to free their country from the alien oppressor.

It is useful to consider whether the British today would say that the Taliban and ISIS forces fighting against the British and American occupiers over these past 19 years are “freedom fighters.”

The British, the Bushes and Obama

When the Russians were forced out of Afghanistan, the jihadists returned to their countries of origin, and the global terrorist movement known as al-Qaeda was born, thanks to the British and their foolish American assets.

The head of Saudi intelligence at that time was Prince Turki, the cousin of Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. from 1983 to 2005, and a close personal friend of both Bush presidents. Bandar and his wife funded several of the terrorists who ran the 9/11 attacks on the United States. It was Turki who personally sent Osama bin Laden, a member of the family running the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, to Afghanistan when the Russians deployed their military into the country. Bin Laden stayed in Afghanistan until near the end of the war.

Zia ul-Haq, military dictator of Pakistan, 1977-1988.

White House/Eric Draper

President George W. Bush and family friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., 1983-2005, at the Bush ranch in Texas on August 27, 2002.

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Two of the ethnic groups with large numbers of people in the “Afghansi” operation (as it has been called) were the Chechens from the Russian Caucasus and the Uighurs from China. Many were trained in Pakistan, which was then ruled by the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, who had run a military coup against the elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977, subsequently having Bhutto executed. The military officer in charge of training the jihadis was Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who later ran a military coup of his own and ruled Pakistan from 2001-2008. This was the Pakistan that was training terrorists for the war in Afghanistan, and for wars around the world, including the Chechen terrorism in Russia and the Uighur terrorism in China.

This then brings us to 9/11. Soon after George W. Bush was inaugurated President in 2001, along with Dick Cheney who had chosen himself to be Vice President, Lyndon LaRouche warned that there would soon be a “Reichstag Fire” in Washington or elsewhere in the U.S. As with the original Reichstag Fire, which was set by the Nazis but blamed on “communists” and used as justification for imposing a dictatorship and police-state rule, LaRouche warned that such an event in the U.S. would be used by the neoconservative Bush government to impose police state measures and to launch colonial wars with our “blood brothers” in the UK.

Wikipedia/Peter A. Iseman

Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, director of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence (1979-2001) and Ambassador to the U.S. (2005-2007).

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Indeed, the U.S. soon had the Patriot Act, which stripped the citizenry of fundamental constitutional rights, leading to the total surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden. Then came the “endless wars,” as President Trump has labelled them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, fought under the rubric of a “war on terrorism,” ignoring the fact that the Iraqi, Libyan and Syrian nationalist governments were all fiercely anti-terror. It is now abundantly clear that the “war on terror” conducted by Bush and Obama was in fact a war on sovereign, nationalist nation-states, openly conducted in collaboration with the terrorist networks created by the British.

The Defeat of al-Qaeda and ISIS

To conclude, I will discuss something that my associate Hussein Askary pointed out to me. Askary is himself an Iraqi Muslim and the co-author of the Schiller Institute Special Report, Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa. To a very real extent, he said, this Wahhabi terrorism operation has been defeated. It’s not completely defeated, and the British aren’t going to give up easily, but it’s been largely defeated by the collaboration between Russia, China, and President Trump.

There are two aspects to this. One is the way in which it was dealt with internally within countries subjected to terrorist attacks; and secondly, the way it was dealt with through the Belt and Road development policies.

In Russia, the Chechens, or rather the Wahhabi Islamic layers within Chechnya, launched a revolt which took over Chechnya in the early 1990s, in the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When Putin came to power in late 1999, he launched a full-scale war to defeat this insurgency and the terrorist attacks which were being carried out by the jihadists, even in Moscow. It was a brutal war, but he succeeded in crushing this Wahhabi-infested jihadist takeover of this area of the Russian Federation. It is important to note that the leaders of the revolt in Chechnya had their headquarters in Londonistan.

China’s Model for Counter-Terrorism

In China, there were terrorist assaults by Uighurs who had been trained in Pakistan, many of whom had already been engaged in the Middle East wars as well. Between 1997 and 2014, a series of deadly terrorist attacks by these Uighurs swept through Xinjiang and other areas of China, even in Beijing—bombings, assaults on markets and train stations with machetes, running cars into crowds—killing a large number of people.

President Xi Jinping at first thought that the dramatic economic development taking place in Xinjiang would be enough to counter the terrorists. Xinjiang was a major target of China’s commitment to alleviate poverty by the end of 2020 and was also the hub for the New Silk Road rail routes from China to the West. But Xi realized, after an increase in terrorist attacks leading up to 2014, that these networks didn’t give a damn about economic development.

Rather than adopting the self-destructive path of the “war on terror” conducted by the British and the U.S. under Bush and Obama—which destroyed entire nations and actually created more terrorists in the process—Xi created a new and creative solution, one which should actually be seen as a model for counter-terror operations worldwide. The development process was accelerated, while the young people who were being subjected to Wahhabi indoctrination were brought into educational centers, to provide vocational training, civics classes in Chinese law, improvement in the national language where needed, and religious education led by Islamic scholars. They were detained for an average of eight months. As of Dec. 9, 2019, all those detained have “graduated,” and the camps are now being transformed into public education facilities.

There has not been a terrorist incident in China for the past three years.

The Chinese didn’t bomb anybody. They arrested and incarcerated the actual terrorists, and they educated the rest of the population, succeeding in ending the terrorist threat within China.

Putin and Trump Collaborate

In Syria, the defeat of al-Qaeda and ISIS was possible only because Russia intervened, at the request of the sovereign government of Syria in 2015, to support the war against the terrorists, and to stop the Obama administration effort to carry out another disastrous regime-change operation in the region by foreign invaders collaborating with terrorists. When President Trump came to power—and this is very important—he openly declared that, “We are not there for regime change.” He had campaigned against these regime-change wars, these “endless wars.” He said, “We’re there to defeat ISIS, and then we’re going to leave.” He didn’t like Assad, and he was sucked into some pinprick attacks by several “false-flag” chemical weapons attacks, which were not done by Assad at all, but were staged by the British-run White Helmets.

Most importantly, although the Congress had passed laws preventing U.S. cooperation with Russia in military matters, Trump and Putin effectively coordinated their anti-terrorist campaign under the guise of “deconfliction.”

The remaining problem is that Trump’s military leaders and the neocons in his cabinet have refused to follow his instructions. If the coup attempt, now in stage three with the phony impeachment, can be fully defeated, Trump can be liberated to do what he intends, to end these illegal wars.

Christine Bierre

Young Uighur women learning Mandarin (above) and medical first aid skills (below), at a vocational center in the Gaochang district of Turpan, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in July 2019.

Christine Bierre

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Belt & Road the Crucial Ingredient

Lastly—and this was the point made by my associate Hussein Askary—the Belt and Road was the crucial ingredient in ending the British Wahhabi terror operation. The two countries that were crucial in facilitating this terrorism movement were Turkey and Pakistan. Pakistan, under military dictators, was under the influence of the British and the Saudis. But then China went into Pakistan with the largest of all their Belt and Road projects—the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). They are in the process of transforming that country, with new roads and rail lines, new ports, pipelines, power plants, dams, and more. Under the new Pakistani leadership, and as part of the Belt and Road, they have no reason to continue training terrorists, and every reason to join in win-win projects with China and all other states.

Turkey, under the Erdo˘gan government, was working directly with the British and the CIA in moving Qaddafi’s stocks of weapons, left behind after the destruction of Libya by Obama and the Europeans, from Libya into Turkey, and then into Syria. The weapons went to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups which Erdo˘gan, the British and the U.S. were supporting against the Assad regime. The Russians finally intervened militarily in Syria, but also politically in Turkey, essentially telling them: “Cut this crap out, and we’ll help you develop your country. The Belt and Road will come in and help you develop your country, but you’ve got to cut it out.”

Now, they haven’t completely cut it out—Erdo˘gan is still tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, and is now threatening to send troops into Libya, which could provoke even more chaos. It will take the U.S., Russia and China, working together, to prevent such a move, and to combine their efforts not only to defeat terrorism, but to end the threat of new terrorist movements in the only way possible—through internationally coordinated development of the entire region. Here again, this requires that the U.S., Russia and China, as well as India and others, join forces, as we see in the model set by the Belt and Road Initiative.

This is the way in which the al-Qaeda operation was defeated—through a universal concept based on a New Paradigm for the world, ending the British imperial design and working together as the basis on which to create this New Paradigm of peace through development.

SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST

2020: Will We Head Toward War,

Or Put the World in Order?

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s December 31, 2019 interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is Dec. 31, 2019, the last day of the decade, and what would hopefully be the beginning of a new year with a bright future for mankind. But that’s still questionable. As we’ll be discussing today, there’s a great opportunity, but the dangers will continue with the geopolitical doctrines out there.

Let’s start with the situation with Russia, Helga, because there were what you described as “baby steps” taken with the most recent Trump-Putin discussion. Where do you see this going?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think that people at the beginning of the year, always engage in deeper thoughts than usual: Where should this year go? What should be accomplished? What are the dangers? President Xi Jinping, in his New Year’s speech said that the coming year will be a milestone year.

I would even take it a step further: I say that everything will depend on what happens with the Presidential impeachment process in the United States, which concerns relations between the United States and Russia and China. Will a financial crash happen? Can we make a reform in time? By the end of this year, a lot of strategic decisions will have been made that will determine if the world is on the way to a big confrontation and possible war, or if we can use this coming year to put the world into order and establish a completely new set of international relations.

It is very clear that the three presidents, Trump, Putin and Xi, are working in their own way to establish good relations among their respective countries, and I think this is actually the most important strategic question, because once you have an accord among these three countries, I think every other problem in the world can be tackled—not solved immediately, and not overcoming all difficulties, but at least the preconditions to solve the strategic questions.

Since you mentioned the first “baby step,” or one of the baby steps, I think it’s quite important that Trump and Putin had another very useful telephone call. Putin thanked Trump for having provided information that helped to prevent a terrorist attack over the New Year period in St. Petersburg; two Russian nationals were arrested as a result of that intelligence, and the head of the FSB, the Russian secret service, reported that there has been in the recent period an intensification of collaboration among these security forces. So this is very, very positive.

Also, reflecting a direct intervention by Putin with tacit approval of Trump, the situation in Ukraine is easing up a little bit: There was a prisoner exchange between the Kiev government and the Donbas region. Russia and Ukraine signed a five-year transit agreement guaranteeing the delivery of Russian natural gas through Ukraine to Europe. These are all baby steps, but all heading in the right direction.

U.S. Army

The “Handshake of Torgau.” U.S. and Soviet troops meet on the wrecked bridge over the Elbe River at Torgau, Germany, on April 25, 1945.

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But I think the really big event, which is coming up in April and May, will be the 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism, consisting of a May 9 celebration in Moscow, to which Putin has on more than one occasion invited President Trump, and Trump has, more than once, expressed great interest in participating, even if details have not been decided.

There is also on April 25, the 75th Anniversary of the meeting up of U.S. and Soviet soldiers at the Elbe River, which has a very big emotional importance for the Russians, because this was the first time at the end of World War II, when the U.S. and the Soviet soldiers met. It was a very difficult moment, but a moment that has come to be known as the Meeting on the Elbe, that turned into great joy, and it had an enormous significance: Simple soldiers embraced each other and made a solemn commitment that they would put all their efforts into ensuring that something so horrible as Nazism and the Second World War would never, ever happen again.

And they invoked the “Spirit of the Elbe,” to say that this is something where all nations of the world—not just the United States and Russia—but all nations of the world, should really think that from now on, all conflicts must be solved peacefully.

There will be a big celebration April 24-25 in the German town of Torgau on the Elbe River. Putin has invited Trump to attend. Given the fact that this is really a way of improving the relationship between Russia and the United States, on the highest level, namely, with a solemn commitment to never have war again, we really want to support the idea for Trump to attend both of these events—and all other leaders and people of good will. Because 75 years after World War II, it is time to return to this idea of “Never Again!” to never again have Nazism, to never again have conflict resolution through war.

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump in a bilateral meeting with Russia’s President Putin during the June 28, 2019 G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan.

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Trump is committed to ending the endless wars, and, obviously, not having a big war with Russia. He has said that the disarmament discussion around nuclear weapons is the most important strategic priority. For their part, Russia recently has proposed to even include in new START discussions its new, hypersonic missile, the Avangard, which it has now made operational. The development of these hypersonic missiles has really upset efforts to establish a global missile defense system which includes the illusion of fighting and winning a limited nuclear war. The Avangard missile, because it does not follow a ballistic trajectory, does not tip off a missile defense system. The fact that the Russians are now offering to include Avangard in the New START Treaty negotiations, I think is an absolutely important signal and a signal for hope.

The U.S.-Russia relationship is coming to center stage this April-May. I appeal to all people of good will to agree and stop this Russophobia, stop this demonization of Russia, and understand that the improvement in the relationship between these two largest nuclear powers is the absolute first precondition to maintaining world peace.

Trump and Xi Take Steps to Improve

U.S.-China Relations

Schlanger: The other key relationship you talked about is that between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China. It appears as though there will be a meeting in January to finalize Phase One of the trade deal. There are a lot of important things coming out of China—I know that one of the things President Xi spoke about in his New Year’s address was the importance of having lifted 10 million more people out of poverty during 2019. Helga, how important is it that this trade deal go ahead? It’s clear that this is really a sticking point with the geopoliticians that are doing everything they can to stop the Trump-Xi relationship, just as they have tried to stop the Trump-Putin relationship.

Zepp-LaRouche: That is the big problem for the geopoliticians, because the rise of China is regarded by them as a threat to their geopolitical control of the world, while in his New Year address, Xi Jinping again offered that the Belt and Road Initiative is open to all countries—including the United States.

I really urge people to read Xi Jinping’s address, because it’s a very impressive review of the accomplishments of China in the year 2019. I cannot even go through all the aspects: the beefing up of the various economic development zones, including the Beijing-Hebei-Tianjin triangle, which is a complete overhauling and modernization of the Beijing area; and the area of Guangdong-Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Zuhai-Macao-Hong Kong—the region that, despite the troubles in Hong Kong, is actually the motor of the world economy. Within this area the most advanced technologies anywhere in the world are being developed; it is the powerhouse of the Belt and Road Initiative. And various other development zones.

Xi pledged that in 2020, China will fulfill its promise to alleviate extreme poverty in all rural areas and thus eliminate the last pockets of extreme poverty in China. Given that there are, I think, only seven million very poor people left in China, this is an incredible prospect, and there’s no reason not to believe it will happen, because China has already lifted 850 million people out of abject poverty in recent decades.

This was a very important speech, and people who have been bombarded by all of the anti-China propaganda, as well as the anti-Russia propaganda, should read that speech of Xi Jinping, and just think about it. Think what it means not only for China, but for the world as a whole, that China is undertaking such a constructive role.

Now, obviously, this is a thorn in the side of the British Empire, which has shown its face in Hong Kong in a most clear way. British colonial powers still think that Hong Kong should belong to them. There was an article, “Donald Trump, Accidental China Hawk,” dated December 26, 2019, in the London Economist, which I encourage people to read, because sometimes you have to read crucial pieces to understand. The article is sort of a war game-plan for what the British want to do in respect to Trump and China in the coming year.

They write: Well, on the one side, nobody can really say that Trump is not a hawk, because, after all, in the 2016 campaign, he was very anti-China, he imposed tariffs, he imposed sanctions in the context of Huawei. But, really, he does not blame China for the trade deficit; he actually says that the Chinese leaders were smart to use loopholes, and so forth, and this creates a gap between him and his own officials, who obviously do have a much more hawkish attitude against China than Trump.

And then they say, gleefully, well, you know, events in the coming year will drive Trump into a cold war confrontation with China, because when the Hong Kong riots continue, eventually the mainland troops will have to “crack skulls” (and they use this martial language). Then the Republicans in the U.S. Congress will side with the Democrats to impose sanctions on Chinese officials and take away the special status of Hong Kong in terms of trade relations; then the human rights campaign against Xinjiang will escalate; then you will have a Tibet succession fight because the Dalai Lama is already 85 and his life is coming to a close; the crisis with Taiwan will escalate, and also the one in the South China Sea.

And they say, when the financial crisis gets worse, all of these conflicts will actually escalate, and that will force Trump to really go into a confrontation with China.

So that is their game plan. In 2007-2008, during the big financial crisis, there were several articles in the British press, and I’m planning to review them, in which they said, OK, it’s impossible to have regime change against the communist government in Beijing now, but, if there is a global financial crisis again, then all these separatist tendencies, in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, all of that can be escalated, and then the mainland government will lose control and we can replace them.

So that is their intention. I think this is an evil, geopolitical design. I don’t think it will function, but one is better off to recognize what is the intention of these forces—and the Economist is a pretty authoritative publication for the City of London, with or without Boris Johnson. I don’t think the Brexit, which is now expected to happen at the end of January, will change that attitude much.

I don’t think it’s a realistic thing, because if you look at China, they’re doing an incredible job. China’s growth rate is, despite all the efforts thrown against them, is still in excellent shape, and one can only wish that the end result of this would be that Trump overcomes his opposition inside the United States and takes up Xi’s offer to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, because that would be the one thing which really would solve most problems in the world.

Gage Skidmore

Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader.

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Coup Update

Schlanger: Your review of the U.S.-Russia relationship and the U.S.-China relationship is a perfect backdrop to understand the impeachment fight in the United States, that this, as we’ve always said, has nothing to do with the so-called issues raised in the Mueller report, the Russiagate story, or the Ukrainegate story, but has to do with these broader geopolitical issues.

And now, we see the absurdity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, arguing that they had to rush the impeachment through the House, because every day Trump stays in office is a grave threat to national security; and then, once the Democrats got the two Articles of Impeachment, Pelosi withholds them from the Senate for trial!

Helga, what’s your sense of where we’re headed with this impeachment fight as we go into January, with the possibility that there will be a trial in the Senate, sometime during this next month?

Zepp-LaRouche: I wish I could give a definite answer on that. Normally one would say that Nancy Pelosi has no case; she has no proof that Trump pressured the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. She knows that she has no proof, and that’s probably the reason she doesn’t bring the case immediately to the Senate.

However, knowing how these things work, one can only assume that they want to use this time to line up some dirty tricks. So far, two such operations have surfaced: One is an operation by William Kristol, who has formed a PAC to be used to put out advertisements in the so-called “weak” Republican districts, where it’s known that the Republican Senators there are not that pro-Trump. The idea is to use ads to persuade them to abandon their support for Trump. Then you have, naturally, the terrible William Weld, who is a counter-Presidential candidate in the Republican Party, who has also said he’s working on turning Republican senators.

But it’s not clear. I don’t think this will work, because these Republican senators are aware that if they turn out to be traitors against Trump, where the public sentiment is still very high in large support for Trump, that they could risk their own political careers if they’re not successful. So it’s an iffy game.

Pelosi is risking the ruin of the Democratic Party. It’s very clear that these people are absolutely no friends of the U.S. Constitution. This was pointed out by the constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who said that Pelosi’s maneuvering to only go to the Senate vote when she thinks she has a majority, is already unconstitutional.

But this is a coup, and the coup is ongoing, so I can only say, be on the alert. Our colleagues in the United States are trying very hard to get the various weak points in the faked-up narrative to pop. For example, by circulating the revelations by former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney, the truth that there was no Russian hack of the DNC computers, is still at the absolute core of the whole Russiagate story.

Then you have the investigations being conducted by Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, John Durham, on top of the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s Report, which established the crimes of the FBI. Now, the Durham investigation, which is a criminal investigation, is much more broad-ranging. It goes through the origins of Russiagate, who started it. It goes into the cooperation of the U.S. intelligence heads with British intelligence. However, this is going to take some time to run its course.

So we are really in a race against time, and it’s very difficult to say how this will end up. If Trump beats the impeachment rap, and if the Durham investigations all proceed, a lot of people could go to jail. But on the other hand, I warn you not to be complacent. Some Trump supporters are too complacent, thinking that Trump has so much support that everything is OK. But this is an ongoing coup! So, we need to get out these revelations of Binney, of people like former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson, who pointed very much to the origin of the affair beginning with a set-up involving a certain Professor Joseph Mifsud who was working for British intelligence. All the leads have to be followed up. I appeal to you: Be not complacent, become active with us.

Three Options in the Financial Crisis

Schlanger: This brings us to the other leading issue that will have to be resolved in the coming months, what you have referred to as the Sword of Damocles hanging over all of us, which is the financial crisis, the continuing repo operations, the flooding of money, the helicopter money, and the fact that there’s no solution within the existing establishment position. Where do we stand now with the financial crisis?

ECB/Angela Morant

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank.

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Zepp-LaRouche: The Fed put into the system over the Christmas/New Year period more than $500 billion, announcing that it will inject as much money “as needed.” Obviously, Trump has an interest that nothing should happen during the election campaign. Meanwhile, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has announced that she will continue what her predecessor Mario Draghi had done, that is, to do whatever it takes to save the euro, which means, more quantitative easing, more buying of state bonds, more injection of liquidity.

Such actions mean that the world system is already at the absolute end, because if zero interest rates are continued, even negative interest rates, this occurs at the absolute expense of investment into the real economy; it eats up the savings of ordinary people because the inflation rate is higher than the negative or zero interest rates.

And, it basically brings the options for 2020 concerning the financial system, down to three:

One, a crash. That can happen because the whole financial system is a minefield, and while the central banks are intending to flood as much money as needed, it could actually happen that somewhere there’s a mistake, and a chain reaction indeed could happen, given the fact that the complexities of the system are such that no central banker, much less any other banker, has an overview any more. The trading in currencies, done in nanoseconds, and all of these things, means the whole system is a huge casino, run through supercomputers—it’s a completely out of control system.

Option Two: If the central banks continue this absolutely massive liquidity pumping in order to avoid a crash, sooner or later, inflation will come to the fore. They always say, this is not the case, because the money creation is just within the financial system and does not enter the realm of real physical goods, but that is not true, because we already have bubbles: the real estate bubble; the stock market bubble—don’t think that the value of the stocks reflects the actual worth of the firms involved. And eventually, if they keep pumping in money like that, it will end up in hyperinflation, and as we know from the German experience in 1923, that would bring about the complete destruction of the life savings of normal depositors, normal people.

On top of run-away inflation, is the insanity of universal fascist Mark Carney, the outgoing Bank of England Governor and now UN special envoy for climate action and finance, who wants to have a regime change: Take away any power of the sovereign governments and replace it with the central banks running the whole affair directly, and mandating all investments to flow away from carbon-based industries and into so-called green scams.

UN/Eskinder Debebe

Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary General (r.) meeting with outgoing Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, who is the incoming UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.

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He just gave a horrible interview on December 30 to BBC Radio, which was guest edited by Greta Thunberg, in which he said that he wants to have pension funds and others divest from coal- and gas-related industries, going instead into Green finance, going into a “circular economy,” and all of that means the social explosion which you already see around the globe, will increase. Because if you will force people, through increase of prices, to change their behavior towards “Green” behavior, you help fuel the already-existing mass-strike process going on around the globe.

The only third option for 2020, is a global Glass-Steagall separation of the banks and ending the casino economy. I call on you, our viewers internationally, to contact us, because we plan to mobilize for this global Glass-Steagall, together with the other Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche: National banking, a New Bretton Woods system, and crash programs for advanced technologies, like fusion power and cooperation in space exploration. Only if we change the economy, according to the principles of physical economy, in time, can the first two options I mentioned—either a crash with chaos, or hyperinflation—be avoided. So Glass-Steagall must be brought back onto the agenda.

Schlanger: What is clear from your review, as well as the options for the months ahead, is the absolute prescience of your husband Lyndon LaRouche, who died this past February. I think it’s critical that 2020 be the year of LaRouche’s ideas if mankind is going to emerge from this crisis. As the person who was closest to Lyndon LaRouche, your thoughts on this would be most welcome right now, Helga.

There Are No Limits to Growth

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, you have right now an unbelievable assault on the population: This Green ideology, which is really a brown ideology in new clothes, tries to convince people that growth is evil and destroys nature and the climate, and whatnot. The way it is discussed is as old as Malthus. We’ve fought this from the very beginning, when the Club of Rome escalated the old British conservation movement, which was really a continuation of the Nazi idea of treating people like animals. So when the Club of Rome published its report in 1972, The Limits to Growth, my husband repudiated that immediately with a very powerful book, There Are No Limits to Growth.

I challenge everyone to read that book, because it took apart the fraudulent basis of the Club of Rome’s thesis, which was that the world was developing, but as of 1972 we have to somehow adjust, because we are in a closed system, and from now on we have to have austerity, zero growth, because the resources are limited.

In his book, my husband showed the absolute absurdity of the Club of Rome’s ideas, because “resources” are not a fixed thing: What defines something as a resource is always determined by the scientific and technological level with which man is able to use something. The same stone with which you might kill your neighbor in the Stone Age may be discovered to be a rare earth element in today’s world, needed to make mobile phones or other things. It all depends on the level of technology and the intentions humans bring to that something.

Space research and exploration makes especially clear that the Earth is not the sole and final source for mankind’s resources. We are in a process of being able to acquire resources from beyond Earth, from our Solar System, our galaxy, and who knows what beyond that in the future.

In There Are No Limits to Growth my husband put this matter on a scientific basis. One of the fallacies of composition which the anti-growth believers are committing is to equate mindless quantitative growth with the qualitative growth made possible as human creativity discovers deeper and more powerful principles of the physical universe, and applies them in the form of science and technology.

Climate Frenzy, or Climate Science?

Right now, I can only say there is an unbelievable brainwashing, where people are really driven into a frenzy about the climate. There is no question that the climate changes, but what is not discussed out and proven among scientists, are the causes for its changing. There are many factors: For example, the position of our Solar System in relation to the ecliptic of the galaxy, processes on the Sun, many factors. Anthropogenic causes of climate change are very, very small, and that needs to be publicly debated.

Changes in climate, and their causes and effects, will be a big issue in the coming year and years to come. Many people in the United States, in Europe, in Africa, in other parts of the developing world, remember and recognize that my husband was the intellectual counterpole to the City of London, to Wall Street pushing these oligarchical schemes; and they are coming forward. There is a renewed interest in the scientific work of my husband.

Make 2020 the Year of Lyndon LaRouche’s Ideas

We are in the process of preparing the publication of LaRouche’s works. I invite all of you to help to spread these ideas. You can watch the full proceedings of three very successful memorials for my husband: One on June 8, in New York City; one on November 16-17 in Frankfurt, Germany; and one (via video conference) on April 11, in Latin America. I urge everyone to look at these—they are on our websites—and get a sense of who Lyndon LaRouche really is and why the ideas he presented absolutely must be realized in the coming year.

Schlanger: Well, Helga, I think what’s clear is that we have to make sure that your optimism becomes the strategic outlook of all of our viewers and listeners. And on behalf of all of them, I want to wish you a Happy New Year, and let’s make sure that this coming year, 2020, is the Year of LaRouche!

So Helga, thank you, and I’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week!

LAROUCHE PAC STATEMENT

A Call for

Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi

to Convene an Emergency Summit to Address the Danger of War

LaRouche PAC issued the following call on January 6, 2020, which is being circulated internationally for endorsements. Lyndon LaRouche’s speech, cited below, is reprinted elsewhere in this issue of EIR.

If the world is to escape a spiral of retaliations and counter-retaliations in the wake of the killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units Deputy Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Presidents of the United States, Russia, and China must convene an emergency summit to address the current crisis in Southwest Asia and its solutions.

Seventy-five years ago, the United States, Russia and China were joined together in the global fight which defeated fascism, and today, these Presidents must act in concert to save the peace.

On January 3, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued an emergency statement which concluded:

It is clear that, among the three presidents, President Trump—who promised to end the endless wars and has already taken several steps in that direction—and Presidents Putin and Xi, there is the intention and the capability to outflank the maneuvers of the war-mongers and to establish a higher level of cooperation. That potential is the reason that the coup—Russiagate and now the Impeachment—are orchestrated against Trump. It is now the time for those three outstanding leaders to fulfill the potential that historical providence has bestowed upon them.

The Crisis

Every world war and major war of the past century has been triggered by the British Empire’s geopolitical policy of permanent warfare, throwing nations against each other in order to maintain their power as a global elite.

Nowhere have the effects of that evil imperial policy of pitting nations, peoples, religions and factions against each other been more evident than in the Mideast, which policy was codified by the Sykes-Picot Treaty established by the British and French imperial powers during World War I.

Understanding that history, Lyndon LaRouche, in a speech delivered 12 years ago, provided the framework in which to understand and act on today’s crisis:

And when you look at the possibilities for this region, like Southwest Asia, the only chance will come, not from inside Southwest Asia. We will do, and must do, what we can, for that area, to try to stop the bloodshed, the agony, to prevent the war. But we will not succeed, until we change the history, change the world in which this region is contained.

The Solution

Therefore, we call on President Donald Trump to meet with Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to not only address the immediate danger of war in Southwest Asia, but to do so with permanent effect by creating a New Paradigm for the world—to change the world, as LaRouche said.

Such a paradigm must be based on the principles of the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Warring nations broke the cycle of retribution and revenge and acted for the “advantage of the other.”

Such a paradigm must end geopolitics and imperialism, and establish a new financial and strategic architecture for the world, based on defense of the sovereignty and cultural integrity of all nations.

The U.S., China, Russia, and other nations such as India, must act to establish a joint plan for the economic development of the entire region, informed by policies put forward by Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche over the decades, and now given life by China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Such a policy will realize LaRouche’s vision:

There is a solution, a solution in principle. And the solution is: End this blasted imperialist system! And understand that we, as a people, must develop our spiritual culture; that is, the creative powers of mankind, to carry further the development of mankind.