EDITORIAL

War and Peace Are on the Ballot:

A Memo to the Anti-War Folks
Who Can’t Decide How To Vote

by Tony Papert

[Print version of this editorial]

Oct. 20—No one who has seen it will ever forget Hillary Clinton’s uncontrollable chortling over the sodomy-murder of Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, ordered by Obama and French President Hollande in October, 2011. “We came, we saw, he died!” she guffawed, mimicking the words of Julius Caesar, whose successor Tiberius crucified Christ.

Hillary’s moral insanity must force us to remember two things: first, that the Obama-Biden administration was a war administration, whose record of launching bloody, no-win “forever wars” was only rivalled in American history by the preceding Bush-Cheney administration. Obama continued the bloody and useless Afghanistan War throughout both his terms in office. In March 2011, he unleashed a NATO bombing campaign against Libya which only ended with Qaddafi’s torture-murder in October. But, although the NATO bombings have stopped, Obama’s Libya war continues today. The country is still at war and in bloody chaos almost a decade later.

Then, in August 2011, Obama triggered the Syria war with his demand that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Under Obama’s orders, the CIA armed and trained terrorist armies, including bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, to try to overthrow the Syrian government. By 2012, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen. Michael Flynn had warned Obama that his policies were deliberately building up the terrorist group ISIS, which burst on the world with seizures of Iraqi cities and huge, mass atrocities in 2014. (Flynn disclosed this in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2015.) No wonder Obama fired Gen. Flynn, and then, years later, held a White House meeting on January 5, 2017, to frame him up and get him fired as Trump’s National Security Advisor.

In the Fall of 2013, Obama was only stopped from launching massive bombing raids against Syria (after a false-flag chemical attack there), by patriotic elements in the Pentagon and the vocal protests of millions of Americans—and after Britain’s House of Commons voted against it. But Obama’s Syria war still continues today, although on a reduced scale, since Russia started helping Syria against the terrorists in 2015.

In 2014, Obama launched a coup in Ukraine, on Russia’s border, using actual Nazis as his allies, and risking nuclear war with Russia. Obama’s war in Ukraine continues today—intimately linked with the “Russiagate” hoax used to attempt to overthrow President Trump.

Obama’s wars have spread chaos across the map and caused hecatombs of deaths. The Middle East and much of Europe are flooded with refugees. Was Lyndon LaRouche wrong to compare him with Hitler?

Hillary’s cackling over Qaddafi’s murder must also remind us of one other thing. It reminds us of the “Pol Pots in pantsuits,” the super-sadistic women who served as Obama’s uber-generals, such as Susan Rice, Michele Flournoy, Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter (her real name), and of course Hillary herself. Never having been to war themselves, they nevertheless told us when and where to go to war, and told our generals how to fight. Now if somehow Biden were elected, no one expects he will actually function as President. Instead, power will be in the hands of this group, as part of an unelected government of “experts.” As the leaders of the Washington swamp, otherwise known as the “interagency,” they will lead us into genocidal wars once more. This time it may come to an early war against China, as British historian Niall Ferguson has forecast, or against Russia.

What Choice Is There?

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is only the first President since Ronald Reagan who has not started any new foreign wars. On the contrary, he has sought to bring U.S. troops back home—thus infuriating the media, the civilian and military permanent bureaucracy, and majorities of both parties in Congress. The President rejects “forever wars,” or “no-win wars,” as do the so-called “deplorables” who elected him. (Those whose children go abroad to fight in those wars are called “deplorables” by some in our professional classes—whose own children remain here in college.) Anti-Trump war hawk John Bolton complained recently that rather than starting new wars, Donald Trump in his second term will be more likely to make peace with old enemies.

Who is it, what is the “interest group,” that insists that we fight these wars and others like them? President Trump has echoed President Eisenhower’s warning against the “military-industrial complex.” Yes, indeed, our retired generals and former congressional staffers are getting rich through the “revolving door” between government service and the defense contractors. But there is much more to it than that.

By its nature, the United States is a Republic. And it still has that character within its people and institutions, despite the corruption which has largely overtaken us since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and then the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But although ours was the first nation in history expressly founded as a Republic, the Republican tradition in European history is far older than the United States; it can be traced back through Plato, and further back through the Ionian thinkers who preceded him almost three thousand years ago. It was their ideas, especially as developed later through Christianity, which shaped our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

From its inception, Republicanism, with its concept of man as a creative being in the image of God the creator, confronted oligarchism, or imperialism, as its deadly enemy. (Other names for it are slave society or serfdom. Or Bidenism.) When our American farmers and workmen defeated the world’s most powerful military at Yorktown in 1781, we opened a new chapter in this very old story—as yet another chapter will be opened this November 3.

The problem of war in recorded history has been that empires have used wars, especially long wars, to weaken and destroy the nation-state. The Roman Empire kept the peoples on its borders in a state of continual warfare against each other and itself. The British Empire first rose to world pre-eminence by using the Seven Years War (1754-63), what we call the French and Indian War, to cause all its Continental European rivals to destroy each other. Then Britain intended our Civil War to reduce the United States to a number of squabbling ministates. Britain triggered World War I, again, to cause the Continental powers to destroy each other, in which it succeeded, even though Britain itself was almost destroyed. Britain’s original objectives for what became World War II were similar.

Franklin Roosevelt intended a post-war world without empire, but his untimely death, and his successor Truman’s acquiescence to Britain, aborted Roosevelt’s plans.

The post-World War II version of the British Empire, especially after 1971, was a financial empire centered in the City of London and its Wall Street colony. When President Kennedy threatened a robust revival through his space and infrastructural programs, Britain extended its project to assassinate France’s Charles de Gaulle, into an assassination of Kennedy. Thereafter his space program was wound down, and the United States was inveigled into Viet Nam through Britain’s proconsul for Southeast Asia. We have never yet recovered from Viet Nam, but it was only the first of many such needless, wasting wars to come.

Thus, the targets of decades of America’s no-win, endless wars have not only been the poor Third World countries that were invaded, but the United States itself—and, in another respect, Russia and China. The Americans who have hatched these war schemes have been working against our country’s interests on behalf of a foreign power, whether wittingly or not.