by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Date: February 4, 1998
During the recent thirty-odd years, since the cultural and other relevant strategic shifts which have occurred since the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, the self-imposed, post-1966 devolution of the physical economies of North America and Europe, has shifted the strategic center of gravity throughout this planet, from the Atlantic crossing, to the combination of the Eurasia land-mass, including its immediately associated Pacific-Indian Ocean archipelago.
Recently, up to this present moment of renewal of the London-manufactured, 1990-1991 Middle East crisis, a moment when western Europe has come near to destroying itself through puppet-master Britain's manipulation of the strings controlling the "Maastricht" dummy, the crucial strategic relationship in the world as a whole, has been the U.S. strategic relationship to Eurasia, a relationship whose viability hinges upon, foremost, the U.S.A.-China "summit," and, also, the maintenance of decent relations with the nations of the former Warsaw pact and Soviet Union itself.
Now, however, the net effect of a massive accumulation of reports which EIR has obtained, through both public and EIR's private channels, from high-ranking authorities in various regions of Eurasia, shows, that should President Clinton continue to act as a virtual pawn of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair in the matter of Britain's proposed bombing and break-up of Iraq, that Clinton will be quickly excluded from all further significant influence throughout the strategically decisive continent of Eurasia. Notable are the warnings to this effect from high-ranking circles which have been, heretofore, supportive of Clinton's efforts, and tolerant of his increased tendency for foreign-policy blundering, notably since about the time of the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Under those conditions in which previously sympathetic establishment circles in Eurasia --including western Europe, view Clinton's foreign-policy role as, predominantly, at least, an overall disaster,(1) the President's domestic political defenses against the fraudulent impeachment attacks of Prosecutor Starr et al., would quickly evaporate, marginally but decisively inside the U.S.A. itself. In that case, as noted elsewhere, Vice-President Al Gore would be successfully urged into early retirement by the vicious Washington Post, into what might be fairly described as the category of "prematurely elderly statesman." The thinking U.S. citizen can calculate, and rue the implications of such a development, accordingly.
Every leading indication gleaned from throughout Eurasia, leads to the conclusion, that exactly this would be the overwhelmingly probable, and early chain-reaction outcome of the President's decision to assume responsibility for Britain's demand that Iraq be bombed again, and destroyed by aid of a British SAS-coordinated "civil war," deployed more or less simultaneously against the Saddam Hussein government.
The thinking citizen should consider the leading parameters of the effects of the Iraq-bombing policy throughout Eurasia.
Eurasia As a Political Galaxy
Like our Solar System, Eurasia is not, of course, simply homogeneous, but, as Johannes Kepler was first to recognize the relevant point, both are each governed by its own characteristic, single, subsuming principle of internal relations, internal relations which present each as functionally an indivisible unity in effect. In both cases, the principle exists, and efficiently so, whether we choose to recognize the principle or not. More precisely, it exists to be discovered. Beyond that principled point of similarity, the specific principles of each, are, respectively, quite different: as different as the conscious, willful role of cognitively driven conscience, distinguishes social processes from all others.
With due respect to the relevant genius of Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, and Leibniz's leading successor in such matters, Carl Gauss, consider the principal interacting cycles which oblige us to view the Eurasia strategic complex as functionally subsumed by a unifying strategic principle. In other words, this principle is expressed for the purpose of attempted analysis, by the colligating permutations of interaction among the various distinct impulses, each considered as acting pairwise, if only in first approximation, and, more accurately, among all impulses taken as a functional totality.
Since the Netanyahu-wracked Middle East conflict is the relevant strategic hot-spot of the moment, let us begin there.
The British monarchy's intervention into the internal affairs of the Byzantine Empire's Ottoman dynasty, during the period of the Napoleonic wars, established Britain's process of takeover of Egypt and the founding of the first foothold for a future British puppet-state of Israel as a perpetual factor of ever-new destablizations within what became the oil-rich region of the Middle East. Later, in the course of Britain's post-1876 efforts to break U.S. influence on the Eurasia continent (leading into World War I), and the British monarchy's (personal) stealing of what became the British Petroleum subsidiary known as Kuwait, for the purpose of fueling Britain's conversion of its navy, from coal-fired, to oil-burning ships, the strategic factor of the politics of petroleum, came to supersede the earlier emphasis upon the strategic role of the dying Ottoman dynasty.(2)
Hence, we have the Arab world, of North Africa and the Middle East, which has become defined during the post-World War II period, as the perpetual strategic ulcer of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a by-product of the same operation, we have the British operations deployed to create the endemic conflict between Arab and Black Africans, which the father of the Hollinger press's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard dedicated his life to creating in British-occupied southern Sudan.
The Arab world, with its associated Arab-Israeli conflict, and the related strategic issues of oil, is a special sub-set of the Islamic population of Asia as a whole. This is the Islamic world which British asset and Trilateral Commission flunky Samuel P. Huntington proposed to adopt as the leading strategic hate-object for the post-Soviet world.
India, together with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, constitutes a South Asia "island," cut off from most of the rest of Eurasia by the high-mountain ranges sometimes called "the roof of the world." This part of Asia is chiefly a blend of ancient Dravidian and (Central Asia) Vedic cultures, both of which are at least as old, as civilized cultures, as China's culture. Southeast Asia, including today's Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and, to a large degree, the Philippines, are reflections of the millennia-long interactions among Dravidian maritime culture, Vedic culture from Central Asia, and China culture, including large-scale migrations of populations from south China, such as the principal cultural-language stock of Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. The northern archipelago, and Korea, are dominated by interactions with China, including the powerful influence of classical China culture upon the educated tradition of Japan. The entire region, including South, Southeast, and East Asia, is powerfully impacted by Buddhist cultural influences, with special emphasis upon the later influences radiated about a thousand years ago, from Sri Lanka.
From the North and West, the strongest impact upon Transcaucasus, Central, South, and East Asia comes from post-"Mongol" Russia, especially from the Sixteenth Century onward. The Venice-promoted Mongol depredations, into China, Central Asia, and Europe, represent a powerful disruption of earlier land-route connections between Europe and East and South Asia. On the latter account, although we can not overlook the deeper cultural implications of earlier connections, it is from the Sixteenth Century onward, that direct European influence upon South, Southeast, and East Asia developed significant implications for today.
The principal distinction to be apprehended, to account for the strategic dynamic characteristic of Eurasia as a whole, is the impact of Christianity upon shaping the conception of man, and relationship between man and nature, which supplied the source of special strength in the post-Fourteenth Century spread of western Europe's civilization as the most powerful form of culture, per-capita, on this planet, until the so-called "cultural paradigm-shift" introduced during the 1964-1972 interval.
Thus, the divisions within Christianity, first between Augustinian Christianity and the Byzantine imperial tradition, and, later, Venice's orchestrations of the division of western European Christianity between a collection of sundry Protestant sects and the Papacy, plus the implications of the rise of Islam, became the crucial features of the interaction between western Eurasia, and the southern and eastern regions.
There is one, most difficult difference between western Eurasian culture, on the one side, and eastern and southern Eurasian culture, on the other. That is, putting aside the recent centuries' influence of Christianity and Islam, with the conditional exceptions of the Confucian tradition in China culture, and one of the two principal branches of the Vedic tradition in South Asia, that the two regions are separated by an axiomatic difference in the conceptions of both the nature of man, and the nature of the relationship between man and nature. On this account, Gottfried Leibniz's ground-breaking study on axiomatically manifest ancient roots of the culture of China, is an already influential pioneer work on locating a Christian's point of reference within the Confucian tradition of China.(3)
Before turning to the other features of the dynamics between western and other parts of Asia, focus upon the most characteristic practical, strategic implications of this issue of the nature of man, and of the nature of man's relationship to nature.
Two Models of Civilization
Let us summarize the relevant argument as elaborated more fully in earlier published locations.
The rise of the modern European form of post-Fifteenth-Century Renaissance civilization, is premised upon what first appeared as the Christian notion of the universal equality of all men and women, without permissible ethnic distinctions on this point. To bring this message of Jesus Christ to the world, Apostolic Christianity, as typified by the work of the Apostles John and Paul, relied upon the work of Classical Greece, the work of Plato most emphatically. Christianity located the notion that each man and women is made equally in the image of God, in the function of Reason, as Plato defined Reason. This notion of Reason, and the notion of the sacrosanct quality of the individual personality which follows from the notion of Reason, is the central feature of all of the outstanding accomplishments of the modern European form of civilization.
Reason, in this usage, does not mean formal, deductive logic. It signifies those Socratic functions of cognition, by means of which the mind of the individual person may either effect an original, validatable discovery of universal principle, or, as in the role of a student, may replicate the original act of such discovery within the sovereign confines of his, or her own cognitive processes. This is a view of human nature unlike that found generally in the more familiar institutional forms of Asian society. This consideration is foremost among words of caution to be borne in mind, whenever a person of European cultural extraction begins to speak of Asian cultures.
The most relevant of the practical implications of these distinctions, for the purposes of strategic study today, is the effect of the Fifteenth-Century first establishment of the modern European nation-state, upon Europe's emergence to global supremacy in terms of per capita productive powers of labor. This gain, represented a break with all earlier, known forms of society, including the so-called Asian model, as well as the intrinsically evil characteristics of not only the ancient Roman and Byzantine empires, but also all of the essential features of medieval European feudalism.
The principles were, chiefly: 1.) that the sovereign form of nation-state must be the highest political authority on this planet; 2.) That the highest social rank in society, is the citizen, who is defined as made in the image of God, as Reason defines that quality of potential inborn; 3.) That the state must exist, to defend these principles against all tyrannies and other usurpations; 4.) That the state must ensure the development of the cognitive potentials of the individual, and ensure the opportunities for the fruitful expression of the individual's such developed potentialities; 5.) That the state must foster scientific and technological progress in economy, and otherwise, including the maintenance and development of the territory of the state, in such a fashion as to permit individuals to pursue their proper economic and other functions in as fruitful a manner as may be reasonably required of the state.
There was a radiating impact of this political revolution, flowing from the A.D. 1439-1441 sessions of the Great Ecumenical Council of Florence and the fostering of the first modern nation-state, that of France's Louis XI, by the same circles who had played the crucial leading roles in organizing that Council. The result of these initiatives was the greatest rate of increase of per-capita productivity, and improvement of demographic characteristics of populations, wherever these principles were meaningfully expressed.
The highest form of development of modern society achieved to date, on these accounts, was the principled design, derived largely from the radiated influence of Leibniz, of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and 1787-1789 drafts of the Preamble and other central features of the Federal Constitution, of the U.S.A. The highest form of political-economy yet realized on this planet, was the Lincoln-Carey version of the American System of political-economy as developed during the interval 1861-1876. This was model imitated by Japan, by post-1876 Bismarck's Germany, and by the Russia of Alexander II, D. I. Mendelyeev, and Count Sergei Witte. In general, this is the best form of political-economy yet found in practice anywhere during the recent six centuries, or earlier.
The success of such forms of economy depends upon accepting the Christian notion of the individual person in the same way U.S. President Abraham Lincoln expressed this in doctrine and thrust of his practice.
To the degree, that a society embraces such conceptions of the nature of both the human individual and of man's proper relation to nature, that society acquires a corresponding potential for economic and strategic superiority, per capita, over all known alternative forms. Thus, during the period of World War II (in particular), the characteristic aspiration of the people of India and other so-called developing regions of the world, was to secure the efficient access to a sovereign nation existence, and the efficient access of that nation to the technologies enjoyed by any other nation of this planet.
The last gasp of that policy, at the UNO, was Secretary-General U Thant's 1967 Second Development Decade. That policy died with the rise of the 1964-1972 youth-counterculture in North America and Western Europe. The 1971-1972 first establishment of the "floating exchange-rate" monetary system, the London petroleum-marketing cartel's, Kissinger-orchestrated oil-price-shock of the mid-1970s, and the 1975 Rambouillet monetary conference, crushed the aspirations of developing nations as a newborn baby might be subjected to infanticide within the delivery-room. The August 1976, Colombo, Sri Lanka conference of the Non-Aligned Nations group, was the last gasp of any significant agreement among even developing nations for true sovereignty. By the time of the Fall UNO General Assembly meeting, only Foreign Minister Fred Wills of Guyana, was still defending publicly the resolution adopted overwhelmingly at the August, Colombo conference.
These factors, as they intersect economy as such, are the foremost determinants of what we recognize as strategic relations, and correlations of forces, in recent centuries to date.
The assisted economic, "post-industrial" suicide of the U.S. economy and Europe's, during the recent thirty years, has created the circumstances of the actual form of a qualitative shift in the strategic correlation of forces in the world today, in contrast to the correlation existing as recently as the 1970s, or even early 1980s.
Led by the post-"Gang of Four" change in economic and related policies of the Peoples Republic of China, there has emerged a powerfully expressed, long-term commitment to increase the rate of development of the productive powers of labor, reaching toward the elevation of both the population and land-area, each as a whole. Even a relatively tiny net growth in per-capita productivity, in the region where most of the world's population, and population-growth, is concentrated, becomes, under present circumstances, the most crucial consideration in long-term world economy. This would be the case, even if the U.S.A. and western Europe economies were not destroying themselves most efficiently. Under present actual conditions, the strategic economic significance of China-spearheaded East, Southeast, and South Asia becomes relatively overwhelming, dominant, strategically.
Thus, the presently underlying strategic position of continental Europe, since the 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet system, has been shaped by two opposing economic trends. First, the destruction, at accelerating rates, of the economies of both eastern and western Europe, through, chiefly, the Thatcher-Mitterrand-Bush agreements of 1989-1992, shaped to keep Germany down, and to prevent eastern Europe from ever rising from rubble to potency again. Second, as much as remains viable of European economy's elements, looks chiefly to actual and potential, long-term markets in East, Southeast, and South Asia, as replacements for the other, domestic and foreign markets for Europe's machine-tool and associated sectors.
Thus, anything the U.S. does, especially in concert with the British monarchy, in Islamic or other regions of Asia, has an immediate, even existential political-economic impact on the perceived, most vital interests of the nations of the former Soviet Union, led by Russia, and, secondly, Ukraine, as well as continental Europe otherwise.
This brings us to President Boris Yeltsin's Russia. President Yeltsin, speaking for a consensus of influential factions and institutions of Russia --and also other nations which will join with Russia on this point, has warned the U.S.A. and others, repeatedly, and with absolute accuracy, of the deadly strategic lunacy of President Clinton's continuing to support the murderous assaults on Iraq demanded by both London and London's Israeli puppet Netanyahu. It is of absolute existential importance for Russia, that the world avoid the inevitable consequences to the entire world, especially throughout Eurasia.
The natural, historically determined, present self-interest of Russia, is to find a basis for effective revival of the most advanced technological elements of the former Soviet economy, as a basis in machine-tool-design capability, for participation in the large-scale, continental Eurasian infrastructure-building, denoted by the term "Eurasia Land-Bridge." Without that Russia dies; Russia is therefore impelled to defend its own existence, by means of whatever resources it has to bring that about.
Putting the rest of Eurasia in hopeless crisis, while menacing the continued existence of entire productive sectors of the economies of continental western Europe, and driving a desperate Russia up against the wall of threatened extinction, while conducting a virtual declaration of war against the Islamic world, is not a particularly sane, or friendly policy to recommend to a President of the United States.
Being a Soldier Might be Necessary
It is not absolutely indispensable that we exclude from the office of President citizens who have not experienced war-time military service, but the suggestion of the idea makes an important point. The point is illustrated by its bearing directly on the role of the President's displayed lack of nerve in dealing with the developments in Israeli since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin.
As Andreas Ranke recently emphasized, in the pages of EIR, in contrasting the cases of Germany's great strategist, Alfred Count von Schlieffen, with his unfortunate successor, "young" Helmut von Moltke, Schlieffen planned to win war, and would, like the General William Tecumseh Sherman he admired, have taken the risks indispensable to winning it, had he been in command, whereas "young" Moltke, by placing the emphasis upon minimizing risks, lost the war. That is precisely what President Clinton has done in numerous critical situations,(4) particularly in handling the Middle East situation since the assassination of Rabin. This is not only my judgment; this is the considered judgment of leading strategic thinkers in western Europe.
President Clinton, like most post-1967 U.S. Presidents, is terrified of London's nastiest puppet, the so-called "Zionist Lobby," inside the U.S.A. The trouble has been, that Presidents who themselves, have a streak of thinly-veiled latent or other anti-Semitism within them, are misled to regard the thuggish Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or the homicidally inclined "fundamentalist" cults of New York's Long Island, as representing "the Jews." No one raised, as was the present writer, among a large ration of Jewish friends, could ever make such a foolish, and unfair mistake. We, my friends and I, understood clearly the meaning of the thugs you would not invite to dinner, and certainly not permit to marry your sister, such low-class types as the local gangster, or, sometimes the same thing, the thug from the ADL.
It is in fact, as much an insult to Jews generally, to confuse them with the ADL thugs, as it would be to regard a black ghetto drug-pushing gang-leader as secreting the spirit of Frederick Douglass or the Rev. Martin Luther King. It is a natural impulse, often confirmed by closer investigation, that many who are first to identify the ADL as representing "the Jews," usually turn out to be persons who have good reason to wish to cover over a discoverable history of anti-Semitism in themselves.(5) Unlike the ADL, the typical Jewish American, is not a thug, and would not wish his sister or daughter to end up married to a Netanyahu.
In any case, the hard-core of ADL support inside the U.S. does not come from Jewish-Americans, but, rather, from circles typified by televangelists Robertson and Falwell, circles which are often able to bark their lunatic message into a large ration of the fifty to sixty millions estimated "low church" evangelicals. As Robertson and Falwell have not hesitated to make clear even to the densest citizens, they are hard-core, Heritage Foundation-type yahoos, of the same Phrygian type, as those hyperventilating, Newt Gingrich devotees which the Heritage Foundation sent blearly-eyed into the opening session of Congress in January 1995.
Thus, as President Clinton has bent, more and more, to what dirty Dick Morris defined as "triangulation," and as the impact of the search for Hollywood campaign-support impacted the 1996 campaigns, the President's tendency to waffle, like "young" Moltke, has increased perceptibly. This is what close observers of relevance in continental Europe see as a pattern; these include relevant European circles, which, otherwise, tend to be most pro-U.S.A., and more likely to defend, or at least be tolerant of Clinton's better foreign-policy efforts.
The best, and worst thing about these criticisms from Europe, is that such critics are absolutely right.
Finally, Israel
The best and worst thing to be said about President Clinton's Middle East policy, since the murder of Prime Minister Rabin --by the very circles to which the President is bending today, is that the President is being "blackmailed" on several relevant points, not only including the "swing factor" of the so-called "Zionist Lobby" in the matter of sex-maniac Kenneth Starr's threats of creating an impeachment pretext, but in the recent months' continuing, and escalating threats, by the gang behind Netanyahu, to launch air assaults against highly sensitive targets in Iraq and Iran, and also possibly Sudan, under the umbrella of Israel's nuclear and thermonuclear arsenal.
This aspect of the Eurasia factor is crucial. It is the targetting of the combined Arab and Islamic worlds, by an act on behalf of Israeli right-wing nuts, which is the detonator threatening to turn all of Eurasia against the President, and also the U.S.A. Some more intelligent leaders from Arab and other Islamic states, such as Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, know of, and have either identified, or alluded to the British authorship behind the actions of London's Israeli assets. In any case, a U.S. participation in a bombing of Iraq, will be read throughout much more than the Islamic world, as an attack on the interests of the general population of Asia, by the U.S.A., on behalf of Israel. That perception can not be effectively denied, because it is both widely known, and true. There lies President Clinton's strategic dilemma.
That targetting happened in 1988, and was a crucial part of the mechanism by which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pushed President George Bush into both "Desert Storm," and, later, "Thyroid Storm." In 1988, I was warned, that I would be sent to prison, if I failed to commit myself in credible terms, to support an Israeli attack on Iraq. This warning came from a high-level source in London, and was indicated as the included cause of the legal process against me, in an allocution on the record. This was the basis for the setting up of Saddam Hussein, according to his profiled susceptibilities, in the case of Kuwait, and this was the basis for President Bush's submission to Thatcher's "...do it, George" orders to the President. That is what is being replayed.
The issue is not Israel. The issue is that of an ongoing global, financial and monetary, systemic crisis. Under these circumstances, the British monarchy is committed to destabilizing the government of the U.S.A., in order to ensure that the U.S.A. does not assume its natural leading role in reorganizing a bankrupt world financial and monetary system. The Iraq operation has been selected by the British monarchy, not despite the fact of the global political destablization it will detonate, but precisely in order to bring about that effect.
There are some lunatics, who witnessing the discharge of a bullet, which kills a targetted victim, will shriek "Another conspiracy theory!" at anyone who suggests the existence of the intent to injure the victim. In reality, outside the mind of such lunatics, the words of a celebrated German motion-picture comedy come to mind: "Die Hauptsache is der Effekt!"--the important thing is the effect. Usually, the intention is whatever the perpetrator should have readily anticipated as the effect. This is the time to send all such lunatics off on vacation, to some place where their screams will be heard only by other lunatics such as themselves.
NOTES
1. This does not include the initiatives of the White House and Treasury Department in the field of financial and monetary reforms. Here, the Clinton Administration's performance, while politically weak, has been a counterfoil to the hysteria-driven strategic incompetence of the U.S.A.'s traditional NATO and related allies, and also the government of Japan. However, should the Clinton administration lose strategic credibility on other crucial strategic matters, even its presently indispensable role in the field of international financial and monetary reform will be critically damaged accordingly. Who could argue, that public, or official opinion today, internationally or within the U.S.A., is fair, or that the majority of citizens have shown any recent inclination for secreting political wisdom? Today's world and U.S.A. opinion, also in respect matters under consideration here, is usually unjust, immoral, and even often insane.
2. Relevant is the case of London's use of its planted Saloniki freemasonic lodge to launch its "Young Turk" puppet into power in Istanbul, with the resulting deployment of land-grabbing Kurds in slaughter of the Armenians in eastern Anatolia, that was part of the Transcaucusus aspects of London's "Great Game." Notably, the Saloniki lodge's "Young Turk" operation featured the future Jewish fascist protege of Benito Mussolini, Vladimir "Hitler" Jabotinsky, founder of the Likud, as the editor of the "Young Turks'" propaganda-organization. This Saloniki-based British intelligence operation, served also as the base of 1907-1916 operations of Jabotinsky crony, and British asset, Alexander ("Parvus") Helphand, who had been recruited into British intelligence (Fabian Society) circles, in London, during the mid-1890s. "Parvus," who made millions in the Saloniki-Odessa grain traffick, and as sales representative for British arms interests during the pre-1914 Balkan Wars, was planted by the British on war-time German intelligence, and used the British-controlled "Northern Route" from Copenhagen, via Sweden, into Finland and Russia, for the famous operations featuring Parvus's sub-agent Karl Radek.
3. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, Henry Rosemont, Jr., and Daniel J. Cook, trans. (University of Hawaii: Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, no. 4, 1977)
4. The hopeful point to be made, is that his more forthright reaction, supported by Mrs. Clinton, to Starr's latest atrocities, may signal a more combative, and therefore more effective President Bill Clinton. If so, we must desperately hope that such combative qualities spill into other areas, and that benefit is not spoiled by an intervening, politically suicidal repeat of George Bush's atrocities in attacking Iraq earlier.
5. Since the writer himself was fairly often assumed to be Jewish, either because he was associated with Jewish friends, or was the kind of "intellectual" which American, anti-Semitic yahoos tend to identify with "Jewishness," he has had the advantage, so to speak, of seeing the issue of anti-Semitism in America from both sides: both as a victim of directed anti-Semitism, and as a person to whom an anti-Semite confided those anti-Semitic views which he, or she would seldom, or never confide to a Jew. Some of the ostensibly more committed friends of the ADL are known to be qualified as card-carrying anti-Semites. Such is the nature of politics and popular opinion in these United States. I have sometimes wondered if we must not elected a Jewish-American to the Presidency, as the only likely way to get the ADL's and the Pollard-types' paws out of the back rooms of our Federal government's most sensitive institutions.
