INTERVIEW WITH LYNDON LAROUCHE
Cheney Wants War Against Iran Now
Lyndon LaRouche gave a live interview to the Lebanese television station NewTV SAT's talk show program "Bila Rakib," hosted by Maria Maalouf, on Aug. 17, 2005. NewTV Sat's website describes "Bila Rakib" as "an inclusive live talk show that discusses international political as well as pan-Arab issues" and "debates the most important political, social, and educational subjects that concern Lebanese and Arab viewers."
Maalouf: We started this conversation from Washington with Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, the ex-Democratic candidate for the American Presidency election, and the head of LaRouche PAC, and Executive Intelligence Review, EIR magazine.
Mr. LaRouche, good evening.
LaRouche: Good evening.
Maalouf: First, an update question about Iran: The Iranian negotiators said that they would restart the uranium enrichment facility where work has been suspended for the last two years, as part of an agreement with the Europeans. Do you believe that Iran is really working on an atomic bomb?
LaRouche: There's no indication that Iran has developed the capability at present, for doing so. This doesn't exclude that somebody might provide that capability, but as far as we know, and as we're getting from official UN agencies, there's no indication that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
Maalouf: Even if there is indication, Iran is still not permitted to own the bomb, like India, Pakistan, and especially Israel, which has 200 atomic warheads.
LaRouche: That is a very hot issue. We've raised the issue many times. We've said, since Israel has nuclear weapons in the Middle East, don't we have to take that into consideration in talking about nuclear proliferation? It is a great danger—I understand the problem, but it is a great danger.
Maalouf: Do you expect in the next time period, that Europe will join the United States in its hard line against Iran? Don't you think that the issue will be submitted to the Security Council?
LaRouche: I think the danger comes from a different quarter: We have people in the United States who wish to go to war, as they did in Iraq. They don't care whether there's any truth or not in the pretext they're using. But people behind Cheney intend to go to war against Iran now, contrary to all perceptions of rational people in Europe and elsewhere. The problem is the threat that some terrorist act might occur in the United States, say, in the month of September, and that Cheney has threatened to attack Iran, if such attacks occur in the United States, is of great concern to us all. It's a great danger.
We got into the Iraq war. We shouldn't have gotten in there in the first place. Lies were used to get us into that war. Right now, lies are being used. But also the threat of a new 9/11 is being used to try to drive the United States into an unprovoked attack on Iran. This is dangerous. It could blow up the whole world.
Maalouf: Mr. LaRouche, you were talking about details of this expected attack on Iran. But, do you think that Russia and China will back the Security Council resolution, or possibly abstain from voting?
LaRouche: I think that neither Russia nor China wishes to be involved in a quarrel with the United States, today. But they also understand, as many Europeans do—for example, the Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, understands: There must not be a war over this issue of debate about what Iran's nuclear program is. Such a war would start Hell on Earth throughout the planet, and it must not occur. That's their view. That's my view. We may differ in some degree, on some details of it, but that is the view of all sane persons in the world.
The problem is, in the United States, there is hysteria because of the spreading fear that there might be a nuclear weapon deployed in Washington, or New York, or someplace like that. That's what the problem is.
Maalouf: Umm-hmm. Do you think that the United States will go to economic sanctions, to harm Iran?
LaRouche: They may threaten to do that. With Cheney running as acting President, which is what the situation is, those kinds of things are possible. But that is not the sentiment, I think, generally in the Congress, even the bipartisan sentiment in the Congress. We wish to avoid these problems; we know Cheney's crazy, but some people are not willing to take the risk of stopping him.
Maalouf: Mr. LaRouche, on July 27, you issued an international warning in EIR magazine on an imminent nuclear strike against Iran. What scenario could such an attack take?
LaRouche: Well, we have a group in the United States, and also in the British intelligence services, which we call the "spoon-benders," because they're very eccentric people, very wild people, and do some of the wildest things that happen. Cheney is very close to these people. These people are capable of all kinds of things. They are, in my view, clinically insane. They were clinically insane in the views of, for example, former head of the CIA, Bill Colby, and people like that, and most of our senior military. But they are a power in this Administration while Cheney remains the Vice President. And that's our problem.
Maalouf: Mr. LaRouche, in your warning, you call it the "Guns of August," expecting it to happen within this month, or by Sept. 4, knowing that in this period, American Congress will be on holiday, on vacation. That means we have 20 more days to go. Is it really so serious?
LaRouche: It is—well, you can not predict the day that something like that will happen. But you can foresee the timeframe in which it could begin to be a possibility of happening. The beginning point, the danger point, starts in August. It continues into September.
Now, I don't control the date that these guys are going to do something. But the possibility, we have to treat seriously: There's an immediate threat, beginning in August, running into September, of a combination of incidents, including some people from inside the United States—from this crowd, the spoon-benders—are capable of provoking, or organizing, a terrorist attack inside the United States, which would then be used for the bombing of Iran. And the bombing of Iran would be, under Cheney's dictate, a nuclear-weapons bombing. That's the danger.
Maalouf: You said this is about mini-nukes.
LaRouche: Yes.
Maalouf: Yes, mini-nukes. How do they differ from other nuclear bombs, such as the one dropped in Hiroshima?
LaRouche: Well, these are specialized types of nuclear weapons, which would be designed to hit deep bunker positions inside Iran, if they were deployed. And there are a number of deep positions in Iran. So, what you have is a multiplicity of targets in Iran, for individual bombing, from the air, or by missiles, and including some use of mini-nukes. That's specified.
In my view, if this occurs, you blow up Iran; you're going to blow up the entire region; you're going to set off a chain reaction around the world which can not be stopped. Because we're on the edge of a financial crisis beyond belief, under these kinds of conditions—under conditions of social crisis, spreading war, and a nuclear attack on Iran—the effects on the world are incalculable. Therefore, it must be stopped.
Maalouf: These bombs, you call it the "nuclear bunker buster," why don't you use it to kill Osama bin Laden, in the mountains of Afghanistan? Or to put him under siege, for example?
LaRouche: Because, I don't think Osama bin Laden is the key to any of this. I think Osama bin Laden, was created as an al-Qaeda figure by British and U.S. intelligence services, including George H.W. Bush, the father of the current President! So, this fellow was created as a U.S. asset, for the Afghansi operations, and there's no indication in my book, that he's not still a secret asset of some of these secret intelligence operations from the Anglo-American side.
Now therefore, he is a factor, because he can be used, to the degree he is directly or indirectly controlled by Anglo-American intelligence services. But he is not the source of the threat: The source of the threat, of the type they are talking about, from my estimation, can only come from complicity of very-high-level elements inside the U.S. establishment, the elements I would call "the spoon-benders." These are crazy people who would bring an attack on the United States itself, in order to provoke the United States to a policy such as bombarding Iran: That's the danger.
Maalouf: Yes, you called them, in your magazine, in EIR magazine, "crazy." You say now they are crazy people. And on July 27, 2005, you said, that "Shultz, Cheney, Bolton, and company have managed to hold the world hostage to unilateral nuclear weapons within the grasp of a President who shows increasing signs of madness." [See EIR article on CONPLAN 8022, May 27, 2005, p. 4.]
What are the real intentions of such a weird policy? Is America ruled now by a rather mad President?
LaRouche: Not exactly, no. The United States has conventional institutions which are very serious. And I'm very close, sentimentally and in practical ways, to these institutions.
But, you have on the other side, just as Bill Colby denounced, these kinds of characters who were inside the CIA and other institutions—they were based largely, say at Offutt Base up in Nebraska, you have people who are insane! You have general officers, four-star and other general officers, who are this type, like Boykin, who are insane. The military faction that ran Guantanamo interrogations, Abu Ghraib, they are insane. They are a special group, which has existed inside our institutions for the entire period since World War II.
They are dangerous, they have power, they have influence. They are opposed by most of the people in our institutions. So, this is not a United States operation, in the sense of being part of our institutions. It is something in the institutions, which Cheney and company are, shall we say, associated with. That's where the danger comes.
My view is, we have to get Cheney out of the Presidency, out of the Vice Presidency, in order to remove that factor inside the White House, which could unleash this kind of monstrosity.
Maalouf: You are talking about the Cheney doctrine. How can you define the global strike doctrine that was originally conceived when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense, under George Bush, Sr., in the 1990s?
LaRouche: Yes, well, first Cheney was, of course, Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush as President. He had big quarrels with other people in that Bush Administration. At that time, when he was Secretary of Defense, he had these same policies, which he represents as Vice President today. At that time, the Bush White House—H.W. Bush, "41," Bush 41—with the Department of State, and other people in the institutions of the government, like Brent Scowcroft for example, sat on Cheney, and prevented him from carrying out these policies.
The instant that Cheney was in the government, in 2001, from that point on, he was pushing these policies. The Iraq War policy was his policy in January of 2001. It had been his policy since he was in the first Bush Administration, back in the 1990s.
So, this is a continuing policy by certain people, which Cheney happens to coincide with. It is not U.S. policy as such, but we have—for example, many people, Democrats and Republicans alike in the Senate, will say, as they have said recently—that the way we got into the war in Iraq, is, Senators were convinced to support that, because Cheney lied to them. President Bush lied to them, but we don't know that President Bush knew what he was saying. But Cheney lied, personally.
Maalouf: We need to know, what in your opinion, is the difference between the Bush-Cheney new policy, and the conventional American policy, concerning the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.
LaRouche: Well, this is a part of trying to set up world government. This is a view of a certain group in London and the United States, in particular. They're a minority. In my view, they're crazy, or they're just simply evil.
The problem is, our institutions have not responded to get these people out. My insistence is, we must get these people out of our institutions of government. Because, if they have control, over nuclear institutions and things of that sort, they will use them—for their purposes—even though the rest of us don't want it to happen.
We saw what happened in Iraq. The majority of our military, the majority of our experts, did not want to go to war with Iraq. We were pushed into it by weakness of some of our people, but mostly by lying and by the fact that the Bush Administration was in charge of the government. And, of course, Blair was equally responsible.
There is no reasonable motive, there is no interest, of the type that ordinary people understand, for having these wars. We are on the verge of the greatest financial crisis in modern history. That's our big problem. But the fact that we're in a financial crisis, causes, as it did during time of the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of fascism, it creates the circumstances in which some maniacs begin to play upon the insecurity of the situation, and get us into adventures in the way that Mussolini and Hitler did.
Maalouf: Mr. LaRouche, about Iraq: You said that America has 150,000 troops and thousands of spies who form the biggest "spying concentration" globally, despite having failed to find the Iraqi insurgents. What do you mean in that proposal?
LaRouche: Well, there's no sense in the war in Iraq in the first place. We had made a mess earlier, with the Afghansi war, we made a mess of Afghanistan. We now have made a hopeless mess of Iraq. For example, if I were President of the United States, I know the only way to get out of Iraq is very simple: You go to the people who were formerly part of the government in Iraq, and you negotiate. You can negotiate your way out of Iraq, but not on George Bush's terms. You have to be more imaginative, to realize that our objective in that area is to have stability and peace. The entire area is ready to blow up. We must have stability and peace in Southwest Asia.
I'm convinced that if you have the right government in the United States, with our friends in Europe, we can go to people in the Middle East (so-called), we can negotiate peace. We're going to have to listen to what they have to say, not just what we say. But, if we're willing to cooperate, I'm convinced we can get peace.
The problem is, these guys don't want peace.
Maalouf: Mr. LaRouche, it seems that the Bush Administration is trying to replace these 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, by these bombs, the new bombs. What do you think about that?
LaRouche: I don't know what they're going to do. You know, people have to take into account—I had a meeting with Abba Eban back in 1975, who had been formerly Foreign Minister of Israel: We were talking then, about my concern for trying to find a Southwest Asia peace, an Arab-Israeli peace, on the same kind of basis that Eisenhower had proposed earlier. And he said to me, in our discussion, he said, "You're overlooking one thing"—rebuking me for overlooking something—"you forget that some heads of state in the world are clinically insane." And that's the problem we have to take into account here, now.
From the standpoint of the governments and people of the region, what is happening in the region is insane. Reasonable people would work to find ways to avoid the worst. Reasonable people in the United States would accept that, as in Europe. The problem is, you have some people who are either personally, or politically, insane. And that's what our problem is in this whole region.
Maalouf: We go back to Iran, and we have to ask you about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, about the article on July 26, 2005 in EIR. There is indication that the Bush Administration is deploying Mujahideen-e-Khalq to carry out provocations against the regime in Iran? What are the provocations here?
LaRouche: There's no provocation—they want it. There's no reason for this, from the Iran side. There are certain people in London and in the United States, who want it! That's the only reason. To them, it's a strategic move for destabilizing the world, in order to bring about, shall we say, "undemocratic governments" in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere—that's the purpose. There's nothing—Iran has nothing to do with it. Nothing Iran has done has anything to do with this problem.
There is, of course, a general concern—as they keep talking about it—about the spread of nuclear weapons in more and more parts of the world. And the concern is, of course—legitimately—is Iran going to develop a nuclear weapon? But that is not the reason for this thing, even though it's said it's the reason.
The reason is, people want a war! And they want to get a war. They don't have to have a reason.
Maalouf: You said the war, or the plan, is not going to be immediately military. What are its oil and strategic factors—
LaRouche: There are none!
Maalouf: In attacking Iran?
LaRouche: There are none in the area! There are no strategic factors in Iran, or in the region, which warrant or provoke this kind of threat.
It's like Hitler invading Poland: Hitler wanted to invade Poland. Not because Poland was a threat to Germany, but because Hitler wanted to start World War II. What he did, is, he got some people, dressed up as Polish activists, to commit an incident, a border incident, which was then blamed on Poland. On the basis of that pretext, World War II started with the invasion of Poland, at that point, to get the British involved in a war! There was no "Polish" reason, there was no threat to Germany, there was no reason of state, for starting that war. The war started, because some people wanted it.
Maalouf: Only fake arguments, yes. What about attacking Lebanon. Michele Steinberg in EIR also said that Bush is using Lebanon as a "strategic ground to launch a military strike against Syria, with the objective of changing the Syrian regime." What do you think?
LaRouche: Well, that is absolutely the threat. The point is, as you know, I have had some concern with Lebanon since I was in Iraq back in 1975, in April. And I warned people there, at this meeting—it was a Ba'ath Party convention where I was invited to be as a guest—and I warned them. I said, that Henry Kissinger was about to start a civil war in Lebanon. And it happened.
Now, as we know, there was no reason for that to occur. It was provoked, because it was a geopolitical move, by Kissinger, as part of his role in government; contrary to the policy of William Rogers, who had been Kissinger's predecessor as Secretary of State, who had worked for the opposite thing.
The destabilization of Lebanon was used to produce an entire, new chaotic situation throughout the region. The same thing is true, now. They want to destabilize Lebanon all over again, as a way of getting forth with their operation for the entire region. We're trying to stop it.
Maalouf: So you think that there's not going to be any invasion in Lebanon, by U.S. or by international forces, to ultimately install a puppet leader in Lebanon, who will back a U.S. invasion of Syria?
LaRouche: Well, I think at this point, the United States has no military capability for invading much of anything. We have pretty much tied down or exhausted our capability in this Iraq War, which is one of the reasons why the picking on Iran has occurred. Because what's planned is not an invasion of Iran, but a bombing of Iran, a destructive bombing, including nuclear weapons. There is no reason for it.
I think there's no one in Europe with any brains, who would not do everything possible to try to prevent an intervention in Lebanon at this time. If Lebanon goes, it would be a factor of instability in the region—this would involve Turkey; it would involve every part of the region, in a new kind of a Middle East war, beyond anything we've seen before! We all know that we must have peace in Lebanon, and we must accept whatever the Lebanese people decide are the conditions that they're going to have for internal peace. We must support it. Anyone who wants to do the opposite—
Maalouf: At the end, Mr. LaRouche, on Feb. 25, 2005 in EIR, there was an article, entitled "Hariri Assassination in Lebanon Marked a Clear Break." Who killed Prime Minister Hariri, in your opinion?
LaRouche: Well, Mr. Hariri of course, was a very positive figure connected to the Saudis, and was involved heavily in the financial work in the rebuilding of Lebanon, in the attempt to recover from the effects of the previous conditions. The point is, I think that Hariri was a target, because killing him would tend to destabilize Lebanon, at a time that a negotiation was in process. I don't think there was anything he was doing, as such, which provoked an attack from international forces. The point was, that he was a target, because killing him made it possible to set forth an attempt at destabilization of Lebanon.
Maalouf: Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, we thank you. We end our conversation with you here, and we thank you a lot for your participation, and with our TV program. We had Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, the head of EIR and LaRouchePAC, and the ex-Democratic candidate for the American Presidential election, from Washington. Thanks a lot.
LaRouche: Thank you.
