Russia's Victor Ivanov:
The Right War To Fight
We are pleased to publish a complete English version of the presentation "Worldwide Drug Trafficking as the Key Factor of the Escalating Global Financial and Economic Crisis," given by Victor P. Ivanov, head of Russia's Federal Drug Control Service, in Washington on Nov. 18, 2011. Ivanov's briefing is extraordinary and historic, well worth careful study by anybody concerned with war-avoidance and the economic breakdown that is driving the threat of war.
A somber address to the nation by President Dmitri Medvedev on Nov. 23, detailing military countermeasures to the U.S./NATO anti-ballistic missile system plans for Europe, and the deployment of Russian naval forces to the coast of Syria, provide the setting of Ivanov's speech. He himself has often characterized the flood of Afghanistan heroin into Russia as a "war" assault that is taking the lives of up to 100,000 young Russians each year.
Almost no other prominent figure on the international scene has dared to state the relationship between narcotics trafficking and the global financial bubble in the way that Lyndon LaRouche has done for 35 years. In Ivanov's briefing, the link was demonstrated before an audience that included representatives from a dozen U.S. government institutions, by the head of a major Russian government agency, who is a close associate of Prime Minister and Presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, and was deputy chief of staff and assistant to Putin as President, in 2000-08. Ivanov makes the case unequivocally: "What is behind this phenomenon? The very nature of the current global financial system."
Ivanov crossed the line that all too often keeps officials responsible for security issues out of what Russians call "macroeconomic policy." He asserts that "the logic of the Glass-Steagall Act," of cleaning speculation and related criminal activity out of the banking system, is the right idea, but that "liquidation of the financial bubble alone will not be enough." Rather, "the key way to liquidate global drug trafficking is to reformat the existing economy and shift to one that excludes criminal money, and guarantees the continuing generation of clean liquid assets, i.e., to an economy of development, in which decisions are based on development projects and long-term targeted credits."
In January 2009, Ivanov proposed close Russian-American cooperation to end the drug business in Afghanistan[1]. Those offers are still on the table, and Ivanov upgraded them with his June 2010 call for an international coalition against Afghan drugs[2]. In the meantime, he has repeatedly lamented the lack of "serious measures" against dope, from the countries with forces in Afghanistan.
