The Blair Doctrine Redux:
Obama Claims WMD in Syria
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
April 26—The news about the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syria's Assad government, according to opinions which the White House indicates have been assessed with "varying degrees of confidence," must trigger, for all our contemporaries who do not suffer from total amnesia, a vivid "déjà vu effect" with respect to the Iraq War, where the issue was also weapons of mass destruction (which, however, turned out to be complete lies perpetrated by Tony Blair). Anyone who now argues that the "red line" drawn by President Obama has been crossed, and that the United States must intervene militarily, as U.S. Sen. John McCain or the Anglophile international media demand, is playing with the fire of a third world war—this time a thermonuclear war—which in all probability would lead to the extinction of human civilization.
The chronology of this obvious fabrication is interesting:
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On Monday, April 22, at a meeting of U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel with his Israeli counterpart, Moshe Yaalon, in Israel, there was no mention of the use of poison gas.
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Curiously, on the next day, Tuesday, April 23, Israeli Brig. Gen. Itai Brun said in a speech in Tel Aviv, that Syria had "repeatedly" used chemical weapons.
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That afternoon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not mention this to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
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On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Hagel remarked on how strange it was that no one had spoken of it during his visit on Monday.
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On Thursday, White House legislative director Miguel Rodriguez announced that it is assumed that Syria has deployed "chemical weapons on a small scale."
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Then that afternoon, during a conference call, with regard to the intelligence failure in the case of the Iraq War, there was some backtracking; a White House spokesman said they would continue the investigation until they have verifiable facts. Meanwhile, the Israeli military let it be known that Brun's "evidence" came from photos that originated with "rebels" in Syria. British Prime Minister David Cameron joined the chorus—harking back to Tony Blair—saying that there is "limited evidence" that chemical weapons had been used, and that these were "probably" used by the regime; he then had the nerve to emphasize that this would be a war crime.
Even CNN had a commentary on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War, demanding that George W. Bush and Blair be indicted for war crimes, and a two-year-long tribunal in Malaysia found them both guilty of the same charge.
Where Are the Facts?
Nevertheless, Senator McCain promptly claimed that the red line had been crossed, so the U.S. must now create a no-fly zone and provide "trustworthy" rebels with weapons. The first measure could be accomplished only by military means, for which there is neither a UN mandate, nor permission from the American Congress; and the second is sheer madness, given the proliferation of weapons to similarly "trustworthy" rebels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, all of Southwest Asia, and half of Africa. Lyndon LaRouche commented that McCain had obviously lost his capacity for judgment and asked: "Where are the facts? ... You're talking about going to thermonuclear World War III on the basis of bullshit."
Since a no-fly zone could of course be enforced only by military means, that's where the real red line would be crossed—namely between the Blair Doctrine, which prescribes so-called "humanitarian" interventions all around the world, and the Putin Doctrine, which upholds the UN Charter and the inviolability of national sovereignty guaranteed by international law.
Both Russia and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff are trying to prevent an escalation, but so far nothing prevents Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf states from providing terrorist organizations such as al-Nusra in Syria with unlimited amounts of money and weapons. The fuse is burning for thermonuclear world war, and all who are pushing for an escalation, as do some media in Germany, are clearly out of their minds.
Financial Disintegration
The threat of war in Southwest Asia is growing, as the trans-Atlantic financial system, as well as the Eurozone, are in an advanced state of disintegration. The so-called "quantitative easing"—i.e., money printing—is like an IV drip on which the entire bankrupt casino economy depends, like a terminal patient on a life-support system. The hyperinflationary increase of liquidity, in tandem with the murderous austerity of the Troika [IMF, ECB, European Commission], is destroying one nation after another, and it can no longer be dismissed out of hand that this is fully intentional.
In Spain, unemployment is at its highest level since the Spanish Civil War (1936-39): 27.2%. Each day, there is an average of 3,581 new unemployed, and there are 2 million households in which not a single member of the family has a job. In Andalusia, the unemployment rate is 36.8%; youth unemployment in Spain is 57.2%! The brutality of the police against protesters outside the parliament in Madrid reflects the moral bankruptcy of those who constantly prate about how we should have "more Europe."[1]
In Portugal, the 77-year-old poet and former Socialist Party presidential candidate Manuel Alegre wrote in an article entitled "Cyprus and Us":
"We are like prisoners in the concentration camps, who live in the illusion that their time has perhaps not yet come, while others have already been lined up for the gas chambers. There is not a swastika in sight, there are no soldiers barking orders, the phrase Arbeit macht frei has not yet appeared above the entrance to our country.
"But Minister Schäuble, Durão Barroso,[2] and the proprietors of Germanized Europe strike fear. They do not need to invade nor bomb. They make a decision and exterminate a country. Yesterday it was Cyprus. The fifth column which governs the European countries and the regimented commentators believe that they will not be affected; Cyprus is a small country. They already said the same thing about Greece. As long as they do not put a mark on our lapel, they believe that we are going to escape. But I am already beginning to feel condemned. I cannot stop feeling like a Cypriot. I was convinced that we belonged to the European Union, a project for shared prosperity among equal and sovereign countries. But Cyprus, after Greece, and, in a certain way, after ourselves, make me see that this Europe is a fraud. It is no longer a project of peace and liberty; it begins to be a totalitarian threat, with the objective of impoverishing and enslaving us countries of the South. That is why it behooves us to feel like Cypriots. Before it reaches us."
Alegre is unfortunately right, and only errs on one point: Europe is not "Germanized," but is in the clutches of the British Empire, as the EU in its current form is nothing but the regional expression of globalization, which, in turn, is nothing other than the British Empire. Because the majority of the German population is also already on the killing floor of severe cuts in health care, pensions, and the education system, and for many people, the fear of the future has long since given way to a fear of the present.
The German population is by no means to be equated with the unspeakable Finance Minister Schäuble, who in an April 25 radio interview with Deutschlandfunk was asked about the consequences of the policies of the Troika in Italy and Greece—for example, that many retired people are commiting suicide because of the cuts. Schäuble's response reflects the indifference of a desk-bound bureaucrat, who, of course, sees no connection between his signature and the "collateral damage" triggered by his policies. Schäuble said: "There are, unfortunately, in some cases, terrible, wrong decisions and despair. There are exaggerations in media coverage." He then cited the European Central Bank statistics on the distribution of assets in the EU Member States, which show that the assets in other countries are much higher than in Germany.
Friedrich Schiller came to the conclusion, after the failure of the French Revolution because of the Jacobin Terror, that the biggest problem of his time was the lack of a capacity for empathy among his contemporaries. If Schiller could hear today how Schäuble coldly dismisses suicides by many people as "wrong decisions," he would probably say: "How is it that we can still allow ourselves to be ruled by barbarians?" For it is only our habituation to the culture of submission that allows us to accept Schäuble, and the also incredibly cold-hearted Chancellor Merkel.
We have a very short window of opportunity to prevent the Third World War and the complete disintegration of the trans-Atlantic financial system. The reason for the threat of war, namely this systemic crisis, must be resolved immediately by terminating the casino economy, with a real banking separation. We need to bring the struggle for the reintroduction of the Glass-Steagall Act in the U.S., into the Bundestag and all parliaments in Europe.
Translated from German by Daniel Platt
[1] Greater supranational control by the EU bureaucracy, less national sovereignty—ed.
[2] Wolfgang Schäuble is the German Finance Minister; José Manuel Durão Barroso is the president of the European Commission.
