LaRouche's 1985 Plan For Nations to Fight a Multi-National Enemy

This statement appears in the October 5, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

LaRouche's 1985 Plan For
Nations to Fight a Multi-National Enemy

Policymakers searching for an effective framework for response to the deadly irregular warfare attack of Sept. 11, 2001, would do well to study the attached document, which contains portions of a presentation by Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., to a hemispheric anti-drug conference in Mexico City, on March 9, 1985.

LaRouche's "Proposed Multi-National Strategic Operation Against the Drug Traffic for the Western Hemisphere," provides an invaluable framework for international cooperation in dismantling the very same global irregular warfare appratus implicated in the Sept. 11 actions. The document also offers a useful reminder that LaRouche has been one of the world's leading combatants against the scourge of irregular warfare for decades. His cumulative experience should be tapped by American policymakers, if the required actions are to be successfully launched against the proper enemy.

LaRouche's March 1985 proposals were focussed on a Western Hemispheric war on the drug trade. But the international irregular-warfare infrastructure, spawned over the past two decades, is itself indistinguishable from the global narcotics and weapons trade, the dirty offshore and onshore money-laundering structures, etc.. Thus LaRouche's "15 points" are of greatest relevance.

What we are fighting, is not only the effects of the use of these drugs on their victims. The international drug traffic has become an evil and powerful government in its own right. It represents today a financial, political, and military power greater than that of entire nations within the Americas. It is a government which is making war against civilized nations, a government upon which we must declare war, a war which we must fight with the weapons of war, and a war which we must win in the same spirit the United States fought for the unconditional defeat of Nazism between 1941 and 1945.
Law-enforcement methods must support the military side of the War on Drugs. The mandate given to law-enforcement forces deployed in support of this war, must be the principle that collaboration with the drug traffic or with the financier or political forces of the international drug traffickers, is treason in time of war.
1. Any person caught in trafficking of drugs, is to be classed as either a traitor in time of war, or as the foreign spy of an enemy power.
2. Any person purchasing unlawful substances, or advocating the legalization of traffic in such substances, or advocating leniency in anti-drug military or law-enforcement policy toward the production or trafficking in drugs, is guilty of the crime of giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.
A treaty of alliance for conduct of war, should be established between the United States and the governments of Ibero-American states which join the War on Drugs alliance to which the President of Mexico has subscribed. Other states should be encouraged to join that military alliance.
Under the auspices of this treaty, provisions for actions of a joint military command should be elaborated. These provisions should define principles of common action, to the effect that necessary forms of joint military and law-enforcement action do not subvert the national sovereignty of any of the allied nations on whose territory military operations are conducted. These provisions should include the following:
1. The establishment of bilateral military task-forces, pairwise, among the allied nations;
2. The establishment of a Common Command, assigned to provide specified classes of assistance, as such may be requested by designated agencies of either of any of the member states, or of the bilateral command of any two states;
3. Under the Common Command, there should be established a central anti-drug intelligence agency, operating in the mode of the intelligence and planning function of a military general staff, and providing the functions of a combat war-room;
4. Rules governing the activities of foreign nationals assigned to provide technical advice and services on the sovereign territory of members of the alliance.
In general, insofar as each member nation has the means to do so, military and related actions of warfare against targets of the War on Drugs, should be conducted by assigned forces of the nation on whose territory the action occurs. It were preferred, where practicable, to provide the member nation essential supplementary equipment and support personnel, rather than have foreign technical-assistance personnel engaged in combat-functions. Insofar as possible:
1. Combat military-type functions of foreign personnel supplied should be restricted to operation of detection systems, and to operation of certain types of aircraft and anti-aircraft systems provided to supplement the capabilities of national forces; and
2. Reasonable extension of intelligence technical advice and services supplied as allied personnel to appropriate elements of field operations.
Technologies appropriate to detection and confirmation of growing, processing, and transport of drugs, including satellite-based and aircraft-based systems of detection, should be supplied with assistance of the United States. As soon as the growing of a relevant crop is confirmed for any area, military airborne assault should be deployed immediately for the destruction of that crop, and military ground-forces with close air-support deployed to inspect the same area and to conduct such supplementary operations as may be required. The object is to eliminate every field of marijuana, opium, and cocaine, in the Americas, excepting those fields properly licensed by governments.
With aid of the same technologies, processing-centers must be detected and confirmed, and each destroyed promptly in the same manner as fields growing relevant crops.
Borders among the allied nations, and borders with other nations, must be virtually hermetically sealed against drug traffic across borders. All unlogged aircraft flying across borders or across the Caribbean waters, which fail to land according to instructions, are to be shot down by military action. A thorough search of all sea, truck, rail, and other transport, including inbound container traffic, is to be effected at all borders and other points of customs-inspection. Massive concentration with aid of military forces must be made in border-crossing areas, and along relevant arteries of internal highway and water-borne transport.
A system of total regulation of financial institutions, to the effect of detecting deposits, outbound transfers, and inbound transfer of funds, which might be reasonably suspected of being funds secured from drug trafficking, must be established and maintained.
All real estate, business enterprises, financial institutions, and personal funds, shown to be employed in the growing, processing, transport, or sale of unlawful drugs, should be taken into military custody immediately, and confiscated in the manner of military actions in time of war. All business and ownership records of entities used by the drug traffickers, and all persons associated with operations and ownership of such entities, should be classed either as suspects or material witnesses.
The primary objective of the War on Drugs, is military in nature: to destroy the enemy quasi-state, the international drug trafficking interest, by destroying or confiscating that quasi-state's economic and financial resources, by disbanding business and political associations associated with the drug trafficking interest, by confiscating the wealth accumulated through complicity with the drug traffickers' operations, and by detaining, as "prisoners of war" or as traitors or spies, all persons aiding the drug trafficking interest.
Special attention should be concentrated on those banks, insurance enterprises, and other business institutions which are in fact elements of an international financial cartel coordinating the flow of hundreds of billions annually of revenues from the international drug traffic. Such entities should be classed as outlaws according to the "crimes against humanity" doctrine elaborated at the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, and all business relations with such entities should be prohibited according to the terms of prohibition against trading with the enemy in time of war.
The conduct of the War on Drugs within the Americas has two general phases. The first object is to eradicate all unlicensed growing of marijuana, opium, and cocaine within the Americas, and to destroy at the same time all principal conduits within the Hemisphere for import and distribution of drugs from major drug-producing regions of other parts of the world. These other areas are, in present order of rank:
1. The Southeast Asia Golden Triangle, still the major and growing source of opium and its derivatives;
2. The Golden Crescent, which is a much smaller producer than the Golden Triangle, but which has growing importance as a channel for conduiting Golden Triangle opium into the Mediterranean drug-conduits;
3. The recently rapid revival of opium production in India and Sri Lanka, a revival of the old British East India Company opium production;
4. The increase of production of drugs in parts of Africa.
Once all significant production of drugs in the Americas is exterminated, the War on Drugs enters a second phase, in which the war concentrates on combatting the conduiting of drugs from sources outside the Hemisphere.
One of the worst problems we continue to face in combatting drug trafficking, especially since political developments of the 1977-81 period, is the increasing corruption of governmental agencies and personnel, as well as influential political factions, by politically powerful financial interests associated with either the drug trafficking as such, or powerful financial and business interests associated with conduiting the revenues of the drug trafficking. For this and related reasons, ordinary law-enforcement methods of combatting the drug traffic fail. In addition to corruption of governmental agencies, the drug traffickers are protected by the growth of powerful groups which advocate either legalization of the drug traffic, or which campaign more or less efficiently to prevent effective forms of enforcement of laws against the usage and trafficking in drugs. Investigation has shown that the associations engaged in such advocacy are political arms of the financial interests associated with the conduiting of revenues from the drug traffic, and that they are therefore to be treated in the manner Nazi-sympathizer operations were treated in the United States during World War II.
The War on Drugs should include agreed provisions for allotment of confiscated billions of dollars of assets of the drug trafficking interests to beneficial purposes of economic development, in basic economic infrastructure, agriculture, and goods-producing industry. These measures should apply the right of sovereign states to taking title of the foreign as well as domestic holdings of their nationals, respecting the lawful obligations of those nationals to the state. The fact that ill-gotten gains are transferred to accounts in foreign banks, or real estate holdings in foreign nations, does not place those holdings beyond reach of recovery by the state of that national.