LaRouche Warned:
Bush-Cheney Re-Election
Means Perpetual War
by Jeffrey SteinbergAt a conference in Dubai, on Jan. 5-6, Patrick Clawson, speaking on behalf of the Bush-Cheney Administration, announced that Washington is hell-bent on taking out Iran's "nuclear weapons sites." Clawson, the vice president of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and a leading Beltway neo-con, was part of an American delegation to a conference sponsored by the Gulf Research Center.
One Arab participant in the event told this news service: "It was not a conference. It was a notification by the Bush people, of their intentions to attack Iran." The source continued, "There were several scenarios for the attack, from a military strike to a political destabilization."
While Clawson's claim to be speaking for the Bush Administration may have contained more than a little hubris, the fact is, in a television interview with Don Imus just hours before the Bush-Cheney Inauguration on Jan. 20, Vice President Dick Cheney made similar threats of military action against Iran, going so far as to cite Israel's bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, with a warning: If Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon is not stopped by Washington and Europe, Israel will strike unilaterally and let the rest of the world sort out the mess.
Washington sources confirm that a battle royal is raging behind the scenes within the intelligence community, over the Bush Administration's zeal to bomb Iran and, as some neo-cons fantasize, trigger a "velvet revolution" by Gap-Jeans-clad, Internet-savvy Iranian youth. Even with Cheney stooge Porter Goss installed as the Director, Central Intelligence Agency analysts insist that the United States does not have the ability to take out Iran's purported nuclear weapons program; and a failed bombing and commando attack would trigger a deep anti-American backlash among all sectors of the Iranian population, strengthen the hand of the hard-line clerics, and dash any prospects of a diplomatic solution, through Euro-Russian negotiations, which have already led to a six-to-nine-month freeze in reprocessing of nuclear material.
LaRouche Was Right
Throughout the 2004 election campaign, Lyndon LaRouche, while campaigning for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, and later, while backing the Kerry-Edwards ticket, warned that, were Bush-Cheney to be reelected, they would unleash perpetual warfare across Eurasia. Now, Bush and Cheney's own words have proven that LaRouche was absolutely right. Every statement coming out of Team Bush since the beginning of the year has been a call to war—just as LaRouche warned.
As LaRouche stated on Jan. 25: "The key on this thing, is the fact that I forecast this entire scenario. That if Bush were reelected, they would proceed immediately with the attacks on Iran and similar targets. And this 'outpost of tyranny' thing is exactly that, it is a restatement, out of the mouth of Condoleezza Rice [at her confirmation hearings], of exactly the policy.... The report from Dubai is really the same story Seymour Hersh had. And now people are getting it, and they are saying: 'Is it true?' Of course it's true! They intend to do it."
LaRouche added one more crucial dimension: "But also, the point is, the essential thing is that the President of the United States is a psychotic. And his mental condition is not improving, but quite the contrary. And circumstances help to make things worse, because he has more to pretend. And he's now so far out in the world of pretend, that he has no contact with reality. So therefore he's flailing out there in the world of pretend where he has, really, no opposing voices."
Hersh Revelations Confirmed
Clawson's appearance in Dubai, and Cheney's blustering comments to Imus, add further weight to the expose by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine of Jan. 28, which identified Iran's nuclear program as "target number one" of the Bush-Cheney second term. Hersh warned that the Bush Administration would consider bombing attacks and clandestine commando operations, targetting as many as three dozen nuclear and chemical weapons sites inside Iran—as early as Summer 2005.
Sources on the ground in Southwest Asia have confirmed other details of the evolving war plans against Iran (see International). According to one Egyptian source, Israeli commandos are operating extensively in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and have been linking up with guerrillas from the Mujahideen el Khalq (MEK), the formerly Iraq-sponsored Iranian exile group, which is on the U.S. State Department's list of International Terrorist Organizations.
Leading neo-cons, including self-professed "universal fascist" Michael Ledeen, have been promoting the idea that the MEK should be removed from the State Department list and drafted, instead, as an American-backed insurgent force, deployed to destabilize the Iranian government.
New, Damning Revelations
In the intervening days since the publication of the Seymour Hersh exposé, scores of articles have appeared in newspapers around the United States, exposing other dirty secrets of the Bush-Cheney Administration, particularly the secret Pentagon spy units, which are operating outside the framework of Congressional oversight—under the supervision of Straussian Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and his bonkers military deputy, Gen. William Boykin, a self-professed fundamentalist Armageddonist, who views the war on terror as a new holy crusade against Islam. One prominent retired military officer warned that U.S. military intelligence teams, under Cambone and Boykin, are operating on U.S. soil and are targetting American citizens. He warned that the United States, under Bush and Cheney, have entered a slippery slope which leads inevitably to the kinds of clandestine assassinations that the British Special Air Services (SAS) carried out against alleged Irish Republican Army "terrorists," which Israel has routinely carried out against Palestinian "militants," and which the French carried out in the 1950s in the "dirty war" in Algeria.
As the result of the flurry of revelations, a number of Congressional committees are planning to hold hearings on the Rumsfeld reorganization, and some of the allegations in the Hersh article.
This, in turn, has produced an hysterical reaction from at least one neo-con voice, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, the man who coined the term "axis of evil."
Writing in the Jan. 17 National Review Online, Frum went ballistic over the pattern of leaks from within the U.S. national security establishment, to expose the Bush-Cheney Administration's spitting on the Constitution: "Read Seymour Hersh's latest piece in The New Yorker with a yellow marker in hand," he fumed. "Can you count how many vital national security secrets—secrets that could potentially get U.S. personnel killed—have been betrayed in just this one article by serving and former agents of the Central Intelligence Agency or by serving or senior and former military officers?" Frum moaned that, "the fact is that considerable elements of the national security apparatus have gone into open mutiny against this war. If the only way to stop it is to drive the country to defeat, then they will welcome—indeed hasten—that defeat.... The saboteurs do not believe that the Administration will take serious action against them. It's long past time to correct that misapprehension."
The reality is that Frum is, in part, correct. There are growing legions of patriotic Americans within the institutions of government—the military, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence community, the Congress—who have concluded that LaRouche was right, when he warned of a new Thirty Years' War if Bush and Cheney were reelected, or allowed to get away with stealing the November 2004 election. Now that Bush and Cheney have been inaugurated, and have confirmed their intentions to launch perpetual war, starting in Iran, but extending from Syria to North Korea, to the Caucasus, to the Great Lakes region of Africa, a concert of action is required. Richard Nixon won a far more serious mandate in 1972, but just 18 months later, his Presidency was finished, because his Watergate crimes—minor by comparison to Bush and Cheney—were exposed.
The First Scalp
Against the backdrop of accelerating patriotic resistance to the Bush-Cheney madness, one leading Pentagon neo-con bit the dust on Jan. 26. A brief Defense Department press release announced the departure of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith. Feith's office has been the epicenter of neo-con subversion, including the Office of Special Plans unit which was a major propaganda/disinformation unit, feeding wild lies directly to the Office of Vice President Cheney in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. At least three Feith aides have been identified as targets of espionage probes by the FBI, including Larry Franklin, the Iran desk officer at the Pentagon's Near East South Asia (NESA) policy shop, who is suspected of feeding classified information to Israel via the official Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Feith, a second-generation Jabotinskyite, was a co-author, with Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, and others, of the "Clean Break" study, delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July 1996. That document spelled out, in precise detail, the "regime change" agenda against Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, which Cheney and company are now accelerating, with their talk of the Iran bombing plans.
