Warning to Europeans:
Where Baker-Hamilton Stands
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
December 22, 2006
Since the majority of the leading European press surveyed has promoted a falsified view of the current political situation inside the U.S.A., I report the following essential facts of the situation there.
The framers of the Baker-Hamilton Commission's report have informed leading circles inside the U.S.A., that the report was composed on the basis of foreknowledge that both President George W. Bush, Jr. and Vice-President Dick Cheney, would reject those proposals, unless maximum public pressure from relevant circles would mobilize broad popular and other opinion to bring about the adoption of those proposals.
At present, the new U.S. Congress will not be seated until shortly after the beginning of the new calendar year. In the meantime, there is no doubt among well-informed circles inside the U.S.A., that Vice-President Dick Cheney is committed to a massive aerial attack on Iran at some time during the immediate few months ahead. Throughout the U.S., the opposition to both the present war in Iraq has reached the level of a widespread demand for Cheney's early impeachment.
Europeans should not underestimate that demand for Cheney's impeachment. What Europeans appear to think they are hearing from leading spokesmen for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, is based on Europeans' lack of understanding of the difference between a European parliamentary system, and the U.S. Presidential system.
Concisely, in the case of an impeachment of a U.S. President or Vice-President, the U.S. House of Representatives adopts the role of a Grand Jury in a criminal proceeding, whereas the U.S. Senate acts as the jury which tries the case and delivers the decision. Now, precisely because the impeaching of Cheney, or Bush and Cheney, is actually on the table, the spokesmen from the two branches of the U.S. Congress are obliged to do nothing which would make a delivery of a decision for impeachment appear to be a lynching born of blindly impassioned seeking of vengeance. However, the restraint being shown now by leaders of the two Houses of the Congress does not reflect the mood of the voters, or a growing ration of Republican as well as Democratic officials individually.
The hatred against the war in Iraq, and the hatred against a spread of that war into Iran, has accumulated to somethng approximate to the level of a political explosion against both the President and Vice-President. The current wisdom is, that the impeachment, or resignation of Vice-President Cheney is imperative, although an impeachment would come about as a more or less circumspect, although impassioned form of due process. If the impeachment, or resignation of the Vice-President does not lead to the President's conceding to the essential spirit and crucial points of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, then, given the presently onrushing general world monetary-financial and economic crisis, the impeachment of President Bush would soon follow.
Those among those of us who are better-informed U.S. citizens with relevant experience of government, are concerned that whatever we shall do, we shall proceed, as we did with the Nixon case, with the greatest concern that what is done in a governmental crisis such as the present one, shall be done with minimal damage to the institutions of our system of government. This same concern is also tempered by knowledge of the United States' unavoidably leading role in world monetary-financial and economic institutions under conditions of crisis. The Baker-Hamilton Commission's report represents a sense of the absolute need for action which both preserves the institutions of the U.S. Government, and also maintains the indispensable role of leading cooperation which the U.S. must provide as its role in meeting the challenge of what is presently the oncoming, greatest global monetary-financial crisis in modern memory.
Only the most incompetent sort of member of government, or political organization, in Europe, could believe that the internal politics of the U.S. will stagnate during the months immediately ahead. The current President of the U.S.A. lives in the real world, but his opinions do not. His mind, like a dead Autumn leaf, will go where the winds of change carry it.
