LaRouche Demands
Cheney's Resignation
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. based his Sept. 20 demand for Vice President Dick Cheney's resignation on newly accumulated evidence that Cheney, and a team of his longtime underlings, have willfully lied to the American public, Congress, and the President, about the circumstances under which they have promoted war against Iraq; and have promulgated a dangerous new national security doctrine for the United States, based on the abrogation of the basic principles of international law and the Constitutional principles of the American Republic. The basic facts of the case are clear.
The White House's Sept. 19 proposed Congressional resolution on Iraq, and "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," issued Sept. 17 over President George W. Bush's signature, have been presented as a "new" national security doctrine, forced by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and by Saddam Hussein's persistent pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, which he is purportedly about to unleash against American targets and/or share with terrorists. The common feature of the draft war powers resolution and the "National Security Strategy" is that they promote a doctrine of American unilateral pre-emptive military action.
But as LaRouche wrote on Sept. 20, "The existing proof is, that neither of these two documents has been prompted in any way by factually defined, recent developments within the Iraq-controlled portions of the area within that nation's borders, nor . . . the attacks on the U.S.A. by any of the nations or organizations fingered as `rogue states' since Sept. 20, 2001."
The doctrine of preemptive war, which Bush Administration hawks claim is an outgrowth of 9/11 and the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein, was actually written in 1990, by Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, and other utopians. It was triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the prospect of the Anglo-American utopians moving unfettered to their goal of world imperium, in the image of H.G. Wells' book The Open Conspiracy.
Details of 1990 Pre-emption Doctrine
This was documented in an April 1, 2002 New Yorker magazine article by Nicholas Lemann. In "The Next World Order," Lemann reported:
"After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense, set up a `shop,' as they say, to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The project, whose existence was kept quiet, included people who are now back in the game, at a higher level: among them, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Eric Edelman, a senior foreign-policy advisor to Cheney—generally speaking, a cohesive group of conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington. . . . Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mounted a competing and presumably more ideologically moderate effort to re-imagine American foreign policy and defense. A date was set—May 21, 1990—on which each team would brief Cheney for an hour; Cheney would then brief President Bush, after which Bush would make a foreign-policy address unveiling the new grand strategy.
"Everybody worked for months on the `five-twenty-one brief,' with a sense that the shape of the post-Cold War world was at stake. When Wolfowitz and Powell arrived at Cheney's office on May 21st, Wolfowitz went first, but his briefing lasted far beyond the allotted hour, and Cheney (a hawk who, perhaps, liked what he was hearing) did not call time on him. Powell didn't get to present his alternate version of the future of the United States in the world until a couple of weeks later. Cheney briefed President Bush, using material mostly from Wolfowitz, and Bush prepared his major foreign-policy address. But he delivered it on August 2, 1990, the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, so nobody noticed."
Lemann continued: "The team kept working. In 1992 the Times got its hands on a version of the material, and published a front-page story saying that the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power. . . . Controversy ensued about the Bush Administration's hawks being `unilateral'—controversy that Cheney's people but an end to with denials and the counter-leak of an edited, softer version. . ."
The "softer version" was the parting-shot, January 1993 "Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy," issued by Cheney. Lemann also noted that another member of the Cheney team, Zalmay Khalilzad, published a short book, putting forward the same thesis several years into the Clinton Administration, under the title From Containment to Global Leadership?, which featured the same call for the United States to take preemptive steps to "preclude the rise of another global rival for the indefinite future. . . . It is a vital U.S. interest," Khalilzad preached, "to preclude such a development—i.e., to be willing to use force if necessary for the purpose."
Buttressing the basic point of the Lemann story on the Cheney "Team B" exercise in the Spring of 1990, Jim Lobe wrote about the Spring 1992 Cheney draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), which promoted the same preemptive war doctrine, causing a factional firestorm inside Bush 41's team. Lobe wrote, in several online news publications in early September 2002, "When excerpts of the document first appeared in the New York Times in the Spring of 1992, Sen. Joe Biden, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was particularly outraged, calling it a prescription for `literally a Pax Americana,' an American empire. . . .
"The document argued that the core assumption guiding U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century should be the need to establish permanent U.S. dominance over virtually all of Eurasia." Among the strategies spelled out by Wolfowitz and Libby: "Deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role," and taking preemptive action against states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction.
Lobe reported, "The draft, leaked apparently by a high-ranking source in the military, sparked an intense but fleeting uproar. At the insistence of then-National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, the final DPG document was toned down beyond recognition."
Lobe then made the crucial link which Lyndon LaRouche had elaborated one day earlier during his Sept. 11, 2002 webcast (see EIR, Sept. 20): "Through the nineties, the two authors and their boss, then-Pentagon chief Dick Cheney, continued to wait for the right opportunity to fulfill their imperial dreams.
"Their long wait came to an end on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan and a third into the Pentagon outside Washington.
"And the timing could not have been more ideal. Dick Cheney had already become the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, while the draft's two authors, Wolfowitz and Libby, were now Deputy Defense Secretary and Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, respectively."
Lobe noted, "Advocates of the new paradigm are part of a coalition of three major political forces, which include right-wing Machtpolitikers, like Rumsfeld and Cheney, mainly Jewish neo-conservatives closely tied to the Likud Party in Israel, and leaders of the Christian and Catholic Right."
Project for the New American Century
Yet another piece of evidence supporting LaRouche's webcast analysis: The Sept. 15 issue of the Scottish Sunday Herald published an article by Neil Mackay, titled "Bush Planned Iraq `Regime Change' Before Becoming President." Mackay wrote that "a secret blueprint for U.S. global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure `regime change' even before he took power in January 2001."
Mackay referred to the September 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century," by the rabid neo-conservative think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC). He quoted from the section of the 90-page report dealing with Iraq: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The PNAC study precisely repeated the language of the 1990 and 1992 Cheney Defense Department studies, promoting a "blueprint for maintaining global U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." It is not surprising that the study so closely followed the Pentagon studies of a decade earlier. Two of the principal participants in the task force that produced the document were Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby. Others included Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Dov Zakheim (now Pentagon Comptroller).
The Introduction to the PNAC's Sept. 2000 study was unabashed about the fact that it was based entirely on the Cheney Defense Department studies from the early 1990s. The Introduction stated, "In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. . . . The basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound." This is hardly a surprising conclusion, given that the two primary authors of the Cheney DPG, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, were participants in the group.
Indeed, the September 2000 study stated: "At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. There are, however, potentially powerful states dissatisfied with the current situation and eager to change it, if they can, in directions that endanger the relatively peaceful, prosperous and free condition the world enjoys today. Up to now, they have been deterred from doing so by the capability and global presence of American military power. But, as that power declines, relatively and absolutely, the happy conditions that follow from it will be inevitably undermined. Preserving the desirable strategic situation in which the United States now finds itself requires a globally preeminent military capability both today and in the future."
Reviewing this book of evidence against the Cheney cabal, LaRouche noted that while there is no evidence placing responsibility for the 9/11 attacks on the doorsteps of this group, it is undeniable that no one else gained as much from them. From 1990, when the policy was first promoted, in response to the imminent collapse of the Soviet Empire, through to Sept. 11, 2001, the doctrine of imperial pre-emption and unilateral American military supremacy had been promoted by this group of utopians, but persistently beaten back, by combinations of military traditionalists and other institutional forces inside the United States, appalled at the idea of the U.S.A. abandoning its heritage for a British or Roman pursuit of world empire. he Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle-Sharon gang moved, in the wake of 9/11, to pursue their Wellsian nightmare.
