PRESS RELEASE
LYNDON LAROUCHE ON BBC:
`A War That Has No Satisfactory Exit'
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed on April 3, 2003 on the BBC international news program "Five Live Up All Night" from London, on the Iraq war. This is the portion of the interview with Richard Ballyn aired that night.BBC: I understand from what I've read, that you are diametrically opposed to the war that America is conducting with Britain in Iraq. This is very much at odds with the vast majority of opinion in America. Why are you so against it?
LaRouche: I think what may be reported as opinion in America, and what is actually the opinion in the United States, may be two different things. Of course, there is a lot of orchestration, this is a wartime situation, and you have to expect this sort of thing. The point is, this is a war which has no exit strategy, and from a military standpoint, very little competence. The generals are competent, but I think the Defense Secretary is not competent—at least, from what we've seen. And I know a good deal about how this war was engineered. It's unnecessary; the matter should have remained in the United Nations. We, as a group of nations, have the ability to control any actual problem which existed there. It was not necessary to go to war, and this war can not stop with Iraq, because it's a war that has no satisfactory exit, as we say in the United States, no satisfactory exit strategy.
BBC: You say "no satisfactory exit strategy"—[but] there is no intention, as far as one can judge, to take the war any further. This is it. There is a specific purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power, and destroying his weaspons of mass destruction. That seems clear enough, doesn't it?
LaRouche: No. If you look back at the record of this thing, if you go back to January 2002, when the President [gave his] State of the Union address, in which he formulated this concept of "axis of evil." If you know the details of the policy, as I do, looking behind the scenes, to what is the policy. The policy is a policy of a group of people, who outlined this in 1991, under the direction of then Defense Secretary Cheney, who is now the Vice-President. Subsequent to Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney resurrected his war plans from 1991. And that crowd, which includes Richard Perle and some of the people around him, are the people who are orchestrating the policy over very strong objections from the ground-based military generals, both retired and active, serving.
So this is the general situation. I don't see how it can be stopped. The next problem to look at, among others, is the possibility of a spread in the Middle East, of conflict. The question of the Iranian threat, that is the threat perceived, and also, much more significant, the North Korean situation, which does require attention at this time, and has become much more hot, as a result of the Iraq war.
BBC: What you're saying, that the war should be stopped now, the troops should be withdrawn.
LaRouche: Essentially, if the President has the courage and the conviction to do that. The thing should go back to the United Nations. I think the United Nations could handle any real problem, without getting into the complications of this particular venture, which is rather messy at the present time....
BBC: But it would be a good thing for Saddam Hussein to be removed from power. You would go that far, wouldn't you?
LaRouche: No, I wouldn't say we—. Maybe we shouldn't do it. We have a lot of problems around the world, a lot of governments which may have objectionable features, but if we start going about and do what Hitler threatened to with Benes in 1938, or what Hitler did with Poland in 1939, we'd have a rather complicated world. That we must avoid. This concept of preventive war, of getting rid of people we don't like, is rather, it's imprudent activity. We don't need it.
BBC: Well, you use, you brought in Hitler into our conversation, here, I believe, you were saying back two years ago that there would be new Adolf Hitlers would appear; and this time, inside the United States. Who are these new Adolf Hitlers you mean?
LaRouche: Well, they're people who have adopted—followers of the late Leo Strauss. Most of the people in this circuit around Rumsfeld and Cheney, including Paul Wolfowitz, for example, Perle is in the same circuit, another fellow outside, but actually in it [Bill Kristol], is in it.
BBC: And Leo Strauss, let's be clear what he says.
LaRouche: Leo Strauss, was a—came from Marburg, Germany. He was a protégé of the Carl Schmitt, who created the Notverordnung under which Hitler came to power in 1933. He shares those views, he's a Nietzschean of those propensities. He's credibly a fascist, and he's produced—out of Chicago University—principally the secondary, as well as the primary students of his, such as Paul Wolfowitz, who all share this kind of ideology. This is very much, a Hitler in the bunker kind of thing.
BBC: That was Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche that you've been listening to.
