When Delusion Morphs into Lunacy—

‘Permanent War’ Backers Push
Mankind to Brink of World War III

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this article]

April 5—A month after the September 11, 2001, deadly attack on the United States, the War Hawks in the U.S. and the UK moved ahead with a plan to attack Iraq. According to an article published in the London Observer on October 14, U.S. intelligence had “a growing mass of evidence that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein was involved” in the attacks. The article quoted an anonymous Bush administration official, who said that British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was a leading advocate for a war against Iraq, is a “faithful ally” in the war on terror, and that if the intelligence assessment means that “we are embarking on the next Hundred Years’ War, then that’s what we are doing.”

As was almost immediately discovered, the “evidence” against Iraq was fraudulent, but nevertheless used to build bipartisan support in the U.S. for a war to topple Saddam Hussein. And despite the knowledge that one pretext for war after another was false, the U.S. and its NATO allies continued to launch new destabilizations and wars, with little accountability for their monstrous crimes.

More than twenty-three years later, the “war on terror” has thus become a “Permanent War,” which actually began, in various forms in different regions of the world, decades before the 9/11 attacks. An escalation of the neocolonial policy following the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, which ensnared the U.S. in the war in Vietnam—as American military power replaced the British as the main enforcer of imperial geopolitics—enabled the war party to tighten its grip over strategic policy after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991–92.

Today, unless there is a dramatic shift away from the commitment to use war as the means to enforce the hegemony of an Anglo-American “Unipolar Order,” there is a real danger that the “endless war” policy will escalate to a nuclear World War III, which would have the ironic effect of ending the endless wars, by eliminating the human race!

Ukraine Is Lost

A central feature of the post-Cold War policy has been the eastward expansion of NATO, despite pledges made by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 that it would not move “one inch” in that direction. The question for most of the world then was whether NATO, formally established on April 4, 1949, to defend the West from a possible expansion of the USSR, should be disbanded.

Instead, the neocon advocates of the U.S. as the Sole Superpower, launched a drive with the goal of breaking up Russia. This strategy included incorporating Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, once other former Soviet states had become members. From the twelve original members in 1949, NATO now has 32 members, and continues to insist that Ukraine join, despite two decades-plus of opposition from Russian President Putin. That push to go even further, to bring Ukraine into NATO, despite Russian objections to the earlier expansion of NATO, was a leading factor in Putin’s launch of the Special Military Operation against Ukraine in February 2022.

Despite widespread recognition that NATO’s use of Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia has failed, and has led to the impending collapse of Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken reiterated that intent as part of the celebration of the 75th anniversary of its founding. The event was used as a rallying point to pressure reluctant governments to increase the funding for the proxy war against Russia, and to discuss French President Macron’s provocative assertion that he may deploy French boots on the ground in Ukraine, an idea which has elicited support from some in Warsaw and the Baltic states.

German Defense Minister Pistorius’s call for Germany to become “war ready” has been echoed by others, who assert that Putin must be defeated in Ukraine, or he will move to grab all of Europe! In speaking to reporters at a meeting of NATO Defense Ministers, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis declared that “NATO’s biggest battles to fight are still in the future, and we have to be ready for them.”

The panic over the impending loss of Ukraine is reflected in the scramble to unlock more than $60 billion in funds for Ukraine proposed by President Biden, presently blocked in the U.S. House of Representatives by Republican members loyal to Donald Trump, their party’s presidential candidate against Joe Biden. Trump’s opposition to the war in Ukraine and his repeated attacks on NATO are on the mind of NATO’s General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, who presented a plan for a €100 billion fund for the proxy war, as a way to “Trump-proof” the alliance.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, is seeking to outflank the opposition to the package, as the majority of members in both parties support the war. Johnson is also a strong advocate of the $14+ billion package of military and financial aid to Israel, and is trying to move it through Congress quickly, as opposition is growing to what many identify as the policy of “genocide” by Israel against the Palestinians.

The ‘Breakaway Ally’ Syndrome

The murder of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has sparked outrage, which has led to increasing pressure on President Biden to stop Netanyahu’s murderous policy in Gaza. Biden sent Blinken on another tour to express the administration’s “concern” over the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and to demand that the impending assault against Rafah on Gaza’s southern border be conducted in a more “humanitarian” way.

Yet, despite Blinken’s crocodile tears over the killing of civilians, especially women and children, and Biden’s alleged lecture by phone to Netanyahu, the administration refuses to use the one threat which would likely halt the IDF offensive, that is, to cut off all military and financial aid, and to stop providing political cover to Israel at the UN, the International Court of Justice, and other fora.

Such a step is necessary to prevent the next dangerous escalation by Netanyahu, implicit in Israel’s deadly missile strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1. Such an escalation, which could provoke a regional war, is part of the long-term calculation by the War Hawks to bring U.S. forces into war against Iran. Known as the “breakaway ally scenario,” this was exposed by Lyndon LaRouche as a war strategy dating back to Henry Kissinger’s time as Secretary of State (“The World To Be Seen from Sunday,” Executive Intelligence Review, Oct. 12, 2001).

LaRouche wrote that the breakaway ally strategy entails provocations launched by Israel, which would “apparently break free of its customary Anglo-American leash, to launch a mad-dog war against some neighboring Arab state, or states.” Once Israel had launched such a “preemptive war,” LaRouche wrote that they “would then say to the U.S., in effect: ‘We have started the war; now you are going to have to fight it.’ ”

This was an implicit part of the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” published in February 1992, which asserted the right of the U.S. to impose its will as the Sole Superpower following its “triumph” in the Cold War. Israel would serve as a tool of the empire’s geopolitical strategy—precisely as intended by the British, since their sponsorship of Zionism as a tool of empire with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was updated in a memo drafted by Wolfowitz’s team to Netanyahu in 1995, before his election as Prime Minister the following year.[fn_1]

With Israeli missiles hitting Lebanon and Syria, the presence of U.S. warships in the eastern Mediterranean, U.S. troops still illegally deployed in Syria and Iraq, and Israel showing no sign of ending its genocidal assault on Gaza, the fuse is being lit for World War III in Southwest Asia—as in Ukraine.

This is a continuous policy, of endless war to back up endless neocolonial looting, which has been in place since the assassination of JFK. Kennedy was a supporter of anti-colonial movements in Africa while serving in the Senate in the 1950s and was moving for detente with the USSR after the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. This war policy serves the interests not of the people of western Europe, the UK or the U.S., but the corporate Military-Industrial-Financial Complex which controls most political leaders and parties in the Global North.

It is those who ruthlessly pursue the policy of endless war who are the true enemies of the people, not the leaders of sovereign nations rising up as part of a renewed anti-colonial campaign, to serve the interests of their people. Rather than fearfully accepting the idea that there is nothing which can be done—drummed into people’s heads by the corporate media monopoly—it is incumbent upon the people to stop being victims, and join the movement initiated by the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche to end the control of the war machine, and establish a new strategic and development architecture.

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