REACTION TO GLASS-STEAGALL BREAKTHROUGH:
Beware of War Provocations
If London Strikes Back
by Jeffrey Steinberg
May 20—Lyndon LaRouche warned yesterday that world leaders should be on alert for a major provocation coming from the British Crown, in reaction to the introduction on May 16 of a bill to reinstate full Glass-Steagall bank separation in the U.S. Senate. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced S. 985 on the 80th anniversary of the introduction of the original Glass-Steagall Act, which forced the breakup of the Depression-era "too big to fail" banks into separate commercial banks and brokerages.
With a Glass-Steagall bill already introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in January, momentum is building for passage in both Houses of Congress. Glass-Steagall passage would represent a near-death blow to the system of London-centered universal banking that has been the hallmark of British imperial power since the 1985 "Big Bang" deregulation of the City of London by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Not coincidentally, 1985 was also the year that the British and Saudi Crowns sealed the "Al-Yamamah" barter deal that created the slush fund behind all subsequent global terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, which led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
London's Dilemma
London is facing a double dilemma. A return to Glass-Steagall in the United States would inspire similar moves in continental Europe and in other parts of the world, effectively wiping out the system of monetarist oligarchical power. At the same time, Britain's asset President Barack Obama is facing three major scandals; LaRouche told colleagues yesterday that "Obama is going down."
The fact that three scandals directly hitting the Obama White House erupted in a one-week period shows that there is now a serious institutional break with Obama. The break was, in part, precipitated by the danger of a regional war erupting in the Middle East over the President's aligning with London and Paris for the overthrow of the Syrian regime. After two Israeli air strikes on targets in Syria, the region was put on the brink of war. The President's insistence on President Bashar al-Assad's overthrow, and his promotion of "red lines" around the use of chemical weapons, convinced significant circles in the U.S. military, the intelligence community, and diplomatic corps that Obama had become a danger to the nation.
In discussing the war danger yesterday, LaRouche stated that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, had prevented the outbreak of general war by his insistent opposition to a replay of the Libya regime-change operation in Syria. Dempsey has also placed a high premium on rebuilding cooperation with both Russia and China, to avoid what he has called the "Thucydides Trap"—the danger of confrontation between rising and declining powers.
Diplomatic Maneuvering
Following Secretary of State John Kerry's May 7 trip to Moscow, where he met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin to organize a Geneva II conference to bring the Syrian government and rebels to the table to reach a political settlement to the two-year war, steps have been taken to prepare for the conference, which is tentatively scheduled to begin on June 11. This week, American, British, and French officials will meet, and then a full meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) will take place as part of the Geneva II preparations. A meeting of the Friends of Syria (international forces that support the opposition to Assad) will take place in Jordan, ostensibly to select a rebel delegation to attend the conference.
While the joint Russian-American initiative represented an important war-avoidance effort by two of the world's three superpowers, the British are moving to insert themselves into the process, to steer it on behalf of London's interests. Prime Minister David Cameron was in Moscow and Washington last week, conferring with Putin and Obama, while insisting that the European arms embargo against the Syrian rebels must be immediately lifted.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his own pilgrimages to confer with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin in recent weeks. While Israel has been told, in no uncertain terms, to back off from any provocation that could trigger regional war, the Israeli factor is a wild card, and London exerts tremendous influence over Netanyahu, who is the heir to the British-sponsored Jabotinskyite terrorist movement.
Israel or Turkey, on Syria's southern and northern borders, respectively, could launch cross-border attacks on any pretext at any moment. When a car bomb killed a number of people in a southern Turkish town last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Interior Minister immediately blamed Assad, although the Syrian government, engaged in intense combat inside the country, had no interest in provoking a cross-border attack from Turkey, a NATO member with the largest armed forces in the region, and the second-largest in NATO.
Media reports are hyping the danger pf a new Israeli attack, although senior Israeli military officials are stating loud and lcear that Israel has no interest in a war with Syria.
Targeting Iran
Trigger-happy elements in the U.S. Senate led by Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), are promoting new legislation targeting Iran and Syria. Bills were brought to the Congress last week, to impose harsh new sanctions, amounting to a total oil blockade, on Iran; other legislation calls for the U.S. to arm the Syrian rebels. This kind of neo-con and "humanitarian" interventionist "Congressional foreign policy" is clearly aimed at sabotaging both the Geneva II conference and the negotiations between Iran and the Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), which are expected to resume soon after Iran holds national elections in June.
The targeting of Iran is particularly time-sensitive, given that Russia is insisting that Iran be invited to the Geneva II conference, along with Saudi Arabia. Unless key regional players are fully brought in on a political solution, it is guaranteed that they will sabotage the effort. This is especially true for the Saudis, who align their geopolitical ambitions with those of the British empire, and who have poured the largest amounts of money and weapons into the most radical jihadist factions of the Syrian rebels, including a growing number of foreign fighters with years of combat experience fighting the West in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Mali.
Regional Ramifications
A retired American military officer, just back from meeting with King Abdullah II in Jordan and other regional leaders, expressed grave concern that the Kingdom of Jordan is on the edge of economic and political collapse, as a spillover of the Syria conflict.
On the ground in Syria, the Assad government has launched a series of successful military operations aimed at retaking control over crucial transportation corridors into Lebanon and Jordan. The situation on the ground inside Syria is a stalemate, in which rebels have no capacity to take the capital city of Damascus, yet the Syrian Army and the central government in Damascus do not have the ability to retake and control all of the national territory.
This is the backdrop to LaRouche's warnings about a British move to overturn the chessboard.
