EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25 , 2021

The True Power of the American Presidency

Aug. 24 , 2021 (EIRNS)—When President Joe Biden made it clear in his afternoon statements to the press following his virtual meeting with the G7 nations, that he was sticking to his Aug. 31 Afghanistan pullout deadline, a somber pall appeared over 10 Downing Street, Porton Down, and Gee Street in Clerkenwell, home of the Tavistock Institute. The dismayed Nigel Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, said, “It is going to take quite a long time for the West as a whole—because it is a Western failure, a Western disaster, this is not just the U.K. and the U.S.—to recover from all this, to recover our reputation.” He of “flooding the Trump zone” fame had to reckon with the hard truth that the multiple attempts to stop Biden from carrying out the promised Afghanistan withdrawal had not worked, and that the public relations stunt known as “Global Britain” had just been revealed to be “Windsor Castles made of sand.”

Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 2007 till September 2011—that is, under both Bush 43 and “Bush 44,” Barack Obama—confessed that he, Obama, and that entire administration had been wrong, and then Vice President Joe Biden had been right, about whether or not to “surge” in Afghanistan with 40,000 troops in 2009. Biden had opposed the surge, suggesting 10,000 troops who would fight terrorism at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and otherwise train the Afghan military. Biden “had it right back then.... I give him credit for that,” Mullen said. He is the first to exercise the conceptual option of what former career CIA analyst Ray McGovern has called “metanoia.” When Metanoia (“Beyond-Thought”) was personified, it was often as a goddess, cloaked and sorrowful, who inspired both regret and reflection, leading to repudiation of wrong judgments.

Those who have been afflicted by chronic misjudgment of current history for the past several years due to “the pestilence of partisanship,” particularly after Lyndon LaRouche’s September 2012 observations on the post-Cheney/Obama “Bush 43/44” death of the political party system in America, are baffled by the present moment. Caitlin Johnstone, in an Aug. 22 article entitled “Bush-Era War Criminals Are Louder Than Ever Because They’ve Lost the Argument,” observed: “After the U.S. troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan ‘government’ they’d spent 20 years pretending to nation-build with, was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history. But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken.

“The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister. who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of ‘obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending “the forever wars,” ’ bloviating about ‘Radical Islam,’ and asking, ‘has the West lost its strategic will?’ ” Blair has long believed and practiced through Responsibility To Protect the idea that Global Britain must be vigorously defended down to the last American. But those that refuse to understand the British “Babylonian priesthood special relationship” to the United States, “can’t touch this,” and remained intentionally unenlightened.

A statement written by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the situation said: “The SCO member states reaffirm their intention to assist Afghanistan in becoming a peaceful, stable and prosperous country, free from terrorism, war or drugs, and are ready to join international efforts to stabilize and develop Afghanistan with the central coordinating role of the UN.” Afghanistan joining the Belt and Road Initiative is the pathway forward, and the United States, using the very real need for a world health platform, can turn its attention to joining these nations while simultaneously retooling and re-employing its own nation for that battle.

Over two-thirds of the American people want the war to end. The Presidency has moved to honor that desire, and to complete that policy in Afghanistan. As for the evacuation’s chaos: Has anyone considered that the fact that factions in the United States turned down the offer to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan, including evacuation efforts, with the Russians, and possibly others, contributed to the instability? Or that an announced and implemented anti-Covid-19 world health initiative, begun months ago, along the lines of what Helga Zepp-LaRouche had proposed in conference after conference since June 2020, would have also helped to “pre-stabilize” the conditions of withdrawal in Afghanistan prior to evacuation? Even now, and for a small percentage of the $2 trillion known to have been spent in the war in the past 20 years, the United States could help win the peace in Afghanistan, through a world health platform construction program involving all the nations of the area.

Lyndon LaRouche said, in a 1991 interview given in prison:

“Whether I remain in prison or not is essentially at the pleasure of the President, or the Presidency. The legal grounds for removing me from prison, by removing the sentence, by removing the conviction, exist.... The evidence exists. As to whether that evidence and that procedure will be acted upon, will be up to the political pressures acting upon the Presidency. I am here because the President wishes me here, and for no other reason. If the President were to change, then I probably would—the law would be allowed to release me from prison.”

LaRouche, who campaigned as a Presidential candidate more than any other individual, realized that the institutional powers of the United States Presidency were of a different nature than the compromised capabilities of a prime minister. When the power of the Presidency of the United States is deployed for the good, it is immense, the greatest in the world. Biden’s completion of the withdrawal that Trump started, despite British-inspired Pentagon and State Department pressures to do the opposite, is, if completed, an example of that.