Britain's `Managed Chaos'
Drives the World Toward War
by Jeffrey Steinberg
By all accounts, U.S. military commanders in Iraq, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are furious at the British government not only for pulling the vast majority of its troops out of Iraq, but for turning over the keys to the vital oil region of the south to competing Shi'ite militias. Great Britain's military departure from Iraq is not the consequence of anti-war ferment inside the United Kingdom. It is a key feature of a British oligarchical "Great Game" strategy of fomenting "managed chaos" throughout the vital Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean areas—and sticking the United States with the legacy of crushing failure and the hatred of much of the Arab and Islamic world.
Senior U.S. intelligence sources have shared with EIR this assessment of Britain's strategic manuevers against a United States, already saddled with a Dick Cheney-led Executive branch, hell-bent on bringing down the United States before the Bush Administration leaves office. In effect, Vice President Cheney is the greatest British asset in official Washington since an earlier Vice President, Aaron Burr, fled to London, following the murder of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and schemed for the rest of his life, against the continued existence of the American Republic.
The problem, on which these senior U.S. intelligence officials agree with EIR, is not limited to the British geopolitical machinations against the United States—at a moment of perhaps the greatest U.S. official leadership crisis ever. That very real problem is vastly compounded by the fact that many well-meaning and patriotic Americans, including many within the top echelons of the military, the intelligence community, and the diplomatic corps, lack the depth of historical insight to fathom the British agenda. The British have positioned themselves to exploit this American vulnerability. For some within the British oligarchy, the remaining months of the Bush-Cheney Administration represent the greatest opportunity in over 200 years, to avenge the American Revolution, and crush the republican ideals that spread around the globe as the result of the events of 1775-87.
The following ongoing British manuevers are exemplary of the larger problem.
The Iraq Gambit
While the assumption of most Americans, including the majority of members of the 110th Congress, is that the Bush Administration manipulated and cajoled Tony Blair's Britain into joining the United States in the Iraq disaster, nothing could be further from the truth. From the outset, the British were 100% in on the Iraq War scam, fabricating much of the original disinformation that sold the war to an all-too-gullible U.S. Congress and American public; and housing the Ahmed Chalabi-led Iraqi National Congress which fed the dezinformatsiya stovepipe into the White House.
When the "hot phase" of the Iraq invasion ended in April 2003, the British, with more than a century of experience as would-be imperial overlords of the world's petroleum patch, took control of the oil-rich southern region, around the port of Basra, whence all of Iraq's oil is shipped to the world market. Despite the overall chaos and lack of infrastructure reconstruction, Iraq manages to pump 1.2-1.5 million barrels of oil a day for export, a fraction of its earlier capacity, but a factor in world oil flows, nonetheless. When the Brits announced plans for further troop withdrawals, oil prices on the spot market shot up, as speculators bet that oil flows from Basra were in jeopardy. They are almost certainly right.
While U.S. forces concentrated on the no-man's land of Anbar Province and the increasingly ethnically cleansed capital city of Baghdad, British forces manned the southern Iraqi energy choke-point, and are now leaving it, over the next six months or so, in the hands of local battling Shi'ite militias—not the central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S. military and intelligence sources estimate that it would take upwards of 70,000 U.S. troops to bring some stability to southern Iraq once the Brits leave—troops that do not exist.
Al-Yamamah Revisited
While setting up a situation of semi-permanent instability in southern Iraq, the British are also playing a Sunni fundamentalist card, through their Saudi Arabian partners, particularly the Saudi monarch's national security advisor and former Ambassador in Washington, D.C., Prince Bandar bin-Sultan.
In late September, the Saudi government announced the signing of yet-another major arms deal with Great Britain's leading arms manufacturer, BAE Systems. The deal, worth an estimated $8 billion, involves the sale of 72 Euro-jet fighter planes, along with a range of support services, air defense infrastructure, etc. The deal is an extension of the long-standing "Al-Yamamah" contract, involving the Saudi purchase of billions of dollars in British arms, in return for crude oil—which the British sold on the spot market for massive profits—estimated at well over $100 billion.
While the Al-Yamamah project created perhaps the largest unregulated slush fund for covert operations ever assembled, it also exposed the pivotal role of Prince Bandar, as a key British agent, operating not only within the inner circle of power in the Kingdom, but also inside the Bush family/right-wing-Republican orbit.
The U.S. Department of Justice is probing Prince Bandar's role in the Al-Yamamah program, because of a reported $2 billion in kickbacks he received, via the Bank of England and Washington, D.C. Saudi Embassy accounts at the now-defunct Riggs Bank. U.S. intelligence sources have emphasized that, if the DOJ probe goes beyond the issue of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to the charge of money laundering, it could unearth massive Saudi government funding of Muslim Brotherhood penetration operations all over the United States—at a time when U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services are alarmed about the dangers of another major terrorist attack.
The Saudi government is pouring millions of dollars into Sunni tribes in Iraq, to buy their temporary loyalty to the U.S. occupation forces. On a deeper level, and in sync with the British "managed chaos" schemes, the "neo-con" faction of the Saudi monarchy, led by Bandar, is building up a fundamentalist Sunni "buffer state" in Anbar Province and other Iraqi border areas, in anticipation of a long Sunni versus Shi'ite war.
Every American expert on the Persian Gulf interviewed by EIR confirmed the assessment that the United States has bought a degree of near-term stability in Anbar and other Sunni areas of Iraq, but in the long term, Saudi factions and their British partners—committed to the spreading of Salafi Sunni fundamentalism—are going to have their way.
Watch Out for Tony Blair
The historically challenged U.S. President George W. Bush is the perfect fool, to be exploited by London's Great Gamesters. Bush angered Russia and the European Union, when he unilaterally anointed former British Prime Minister Blair as chief "peace emissary" for the Quartet (the U.S., Russia, UN, and EU), assigned to get an Israeli-Palestinian accord.
Some U.S. intelligence sources have alerted EIR that Blair's appointment further advanced Britain's "controlled chaos" schemes. It was Blair, in his final hours in office, who secured the latest Saudi-British arms deal. Late in 2006, he quashed Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) probe of the Al-Yamamah scheme, claiming that British national security would be jeopardized by any further inquest.
Now, these sources warn, Blair is intent on eking out some small progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, while avoiding any kind of final settlement that might bring genuine stability to the conflict zone. At all costs, Blair will ally with Cheney and others in the war party in Washington, who oppose any kind of peace deal between Israel and Syria—despite the fact that final agreements over the Golan Heights, the division of the waters of Lake Tiberius, and all other stumbling block issues, have already been settled, and Israeli President Shimon Peres, with the full endorsement of Lyndon LaRouche, has signalled that now is the moment for Israel and Syria to make peace.
Genuine peace is not the British aim; however, a small step forward on the Israel-Palestine track, some senior U.S. souces warn, could warm London to the idea of a U.S.-Iran confrontation before Bush and Cheney leave office. Right now, these sources report, with the Palestinian issue still a burning passion for a vast majority on the Arab and Muslim street, any direct U.S.-Iranian confrontation would likely trigger uncontrolled chaos—which is more than London cares to bargain for—at least for the moment.
What drives the Gordon Brown government is the City of London's knowledge that the post-Bretton Woods, London-run global financial system is about to blow. At moments like this, the greatest fear, from the Anglo-Dutch oligarchical standpoint, is a U.S.A. returning to the American System outlook and policies last expressed, within government, in the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Any glimmer of the FDR impulse, now so actively being promoted by LaRouche; and any suggestion of a U.S.-Russian strategic partnership—already placed on the table by Russian President Vladimir Putin—to put this fragile world back together again, would spell doom for the Anglo-Dutch system.
For now, London's major weapon against such developments, is "managed chaos." To understand the unfolding events in Southwest Asia, this concept must be grasped. Ignore it at a very high price.
