EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

General Milley’s Role in Britain’s Attempted Coup d’État Against Trump—and Biden

Sept. 15, 2021 (EIRNS)—A two-day summit meeting of the heads of state and government of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization begins on Sept. 16 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, which will focus on how to stabilize and economically reconstruct Afghanistan. The nations of Asia are generally committed to working with China’s Belt and Road Initiative to bring infrastructure and related development to Afghanistan, and to make sure that international terrorism and the drug trade don’t carry the day.

Not so the United States and Europe, whose governments are applying the British imperial policy of starving the nation into submission—or into mass death. The Western nations have frozen Afghanistan’s assets abroad, making it impossible for the economy to function and workers to be paid by their employers; sanctions are ensuring that elementary health care cannot be provided to the population, sanctions that now threaten to explode already widespread poverty into the outright starvation of millions.

This is the actual strategic backdrop to the revelations contained in Woodward and Costa’s new book, Peril, which are receiving ample coverage in the mass media. The central fact—which is known to this news service totally independently of the contents of that book—is that there was a British-steered attempted coup d’état against President Donald Trump and the U.S. Constitution in and around the period of the Nov. 3, 2020 presidential election. That operation included efforts by leading figures of the military-industrial complex, reportedly including Gen. Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to unconstitutionally substitute themselves for the President in the role of Commander in Chief. It also included setting the trap of planned Jan. 6 violence orchestrated by agents provocateurs employed by the FBI and other intelligence agencies, and then ensnaring President Trump in that trap with the assistance of the likes of the seedy Steve Bannon.

The underlying strategic issue, as the British and their minions such as Milley repeatedly made clear, was Trump’s active decision to pull American military forces out of Afghanistan, end the entire British imperial policy of perennial warfare under the phony flag of “fighting terrorism,” and work cooperatively with Russia and China.

That is why that same British apparatus, including General Milley, reacted with shock and dismay when President Biden announced that he would carry out the Trump-initiated policy of a total pullout from Afghanistan and ending the decades of perpetual genocidal wars. Milley, who today is still head of the JCS under Biden, took to national television on Sept. 4 to openly contradict Biden’s stated policy, predicting that the American pullout would mean that Afghanistan would collapse into civil war, that widespread terrorism would erupt there—and, of course, that American troops would have to return to continue the war.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche has presented a totally opposite policy for Afghanistan, and for the world. She issued a call for the United States and Europe to join with China, Russia and Central Asian nations in the economic reconstruction of Afghanistan. This approach can stop the perennial war policy, defeat the ongoing British attempted coup d’état in the U.S., and otherwise establish a new strategic alignment capable of replacing the bankrupt London-centered Western financial system.

The current attempted coup is actually a continuation of what was unleashed 20 years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001. American statesman Lyndon LaRouche explained the matter in an interview he gave to the daily Al-Bayan, from the United Arab Emirates, on Nov. 16, 2001—scarcely two months after the infamous 9/11 attack. In it, LaRouche began by locating the recently-occurred events in their proper strategic context:

“The currently ongoing monetary-financial collapse is far worse than a mere depression, such as that of 1929-1933; it is a systemic collapse of the world system set into motion by President Nixon’s actions of August 1971. That system could never be resuscitated from the present collapse. Our goal should be to eliminate the present system, so that we may resuscitate the world’s economy.”

He then took up the question of fighting terrorism.

“The reply to this question must be situated within a corrected view of what actually happened in the U.S.A. on Sept. 11. Those attacks could have been organized by nothing less than an intended coup d’état deployed from within very high levels of the U.S. internal military-security apparatus....

“Somewhere, during the evening of Sept. 11, there was a new decision made, to respond to the effect of the morning’s attacks by declaring a war on ‘terrorism,’ and, as I warned against this on a radio interview earlier that day, picking long-standing Anglo-American asset Osama bin Laden as the scapegoat for the case....

“Someone, at very high levels, within the U.S. command structure, unleashed an attempted coup d’état against the Bush government on Sept. 11. Had that crisis led to a nuclear alert escalation between the U.S.A. and Russia, the coup plotters would have succeeded, almost without doubt. President Putin’s Sept. 11 telephone conversations with President Bush, changed the situation in a radical, beneficial way.

“Otherwise, nothing else has been solved. The coup d’état has been defeated, at least temporarily, but the nightmare rolls on....”

LaRouche then pointed to the way to end that nightmare: “Without putting the present international monetary-financial system through a most drastic form of bankruptcy reorganization, the attempt to continue that system with most reforms, will plunge the entire planet into an early new dark age which will last for perhaps two or more generations.... Were the U.S.A. to become partner of such a Eurasian-cooperation system, the needed basis in economic interest for a peacefully developing world, is established.”