PRESS RELEASE
What Secretary Powell Did Not Say
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
On March 8, 2003, the statement was issued by the Presidential candidate's political committee, LaRouche in 2004, for international circulation and distribution as a mass leaflet in the United States.
Monday, March 10 begins a week whose importance could possibly, even probably, prove more or less as significant, in its own way, as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This memorandum serves to summarize the following crucial issues of the present crisis.
The Root of the Crisis
1. The first factor, the root of this crisis, is a Classical quality of existential crisis within the institutions of the U.S. government.
The pivotal issue of the crisis is, as France's representative said, implicitly: The issue of war or peace as such, is not Saddam Hussein or Iraq; but, primarily, two distinct but converging features of the current U.S. Bush Administration. The first cause of that aspect of the crisis, is the influence of the imperialist followers of the late fascist ideologue, Professor Leo Strauss, in creating the core of those war-mongers known variously as the "Chicken-hawks" or "neo-cons." The second, converging cause of that critical factor, is the convergence among the pro-imperialist "neo-cons" inside the Bush Administration, with the thoughtless and stubborn, "barnyard-style unilateralism" expressed by President George W. Bush himself.
The added feature of the crisis, on the U.S. side, is that Cheney's and Wolfowitz's lunatic tribe of neo-con "Chicken-hawk" fanatics, is reenforced, on the side of the Democratic Party, by those organized-crime-linked, pro-imperialist hard-core DLC Democrats who are typified by the circle of cronies of right-wing ideologue and war-monger Senator Joseph Lieberman.
What this bipartisan combination of imperialists and Bush's unilateralism has done, is to exploit the frightening effects of Sept. 11, 2001 to unleash a policy which currently sets the United States against, in fact, the most vital interests of every other sovereign nation-state of the planet. Summarily: If the U.S.A. is allowed to use the UNO-outlawed threat of unilateral force—even the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states—to blackmail the UNO Security Council into tolerating a war upon Iraq, that precedent either soon establishes a U.S. world-empire modelled upon the ancient Roman Empire; or forces the nations of the world to undermine the power of the U.S.A. to conduct such policies; or sends the world to spend a few generations in Hell as punishment for failing to prevent the proposed war.
In effect, as I, my wife, and others associated with me have warned on earlier occasions, the current Iraq policy of the Bush Administration is a caricature of the same hubristic folly which led ancient Athens into the tragic Peloponnesian War. Unfortunately, "Education President" Bush is not notably strong on the subject of history.
For the United States to declare itself on the brink of launching unilateral, imperial warfare, when there is no objective need to go to war—especially when we have all the power and support we would require did a need exist—is not only a great folly, as the case of the Peloponnesian War attests. To launch such a war under such unlawful pretexts, including the pretext of the fraudulent reports transmitted from Israeli and other origins, through British channels, into an address of Secretary of State Colin Powell and the UNO Security Council, is also a crime against humanity, under the implications of those precedents accumulated since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. These are precedents freshly acknowledged, in 1945-1946, as the lessons adduced from the combined experience of two preceding World Wars.
In fact, the unilateral Anglo-American warfare threatened by the bipolar froth from certain official and mass-media Washington and London sources, is not a war prompted by any action by Iraq itself. It is the use of wildly exaggerated allegations of external threats from Iraq as a pretext for launching what has been called by some relevant circles a "Clash of Civilizations" war: a war against not only the Arab world as a whole; not only the Islamic populations as a whole; but also China, and targets beyond. This threatens the outbreak, even during the month of March, of the third geopolitical world war launched by imperial maritime (and aerial) power against continental Eurasia as a whole.
That, in summary, supports the case which France has presented against the arguments presented by the U.S. and British spokesmen. In effect, the current U.S. Administration has declared an imperial war policy against the world. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, have been misused as a cover for reviving this imperial "preventive" nuclear war policy, first pushed during the mid-1940s by the evil Bertrand Russell and his pack of utopians, and which was already pushed during the 1991-1996 interval by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and by Israel's right wing.
The saner, and less purchasable majority among the world's governments are now saying to the current U.S. Administration: "True friends do not encourage a stubborn ally in such a piece of lunatic folly as the currently bankrupt U.S.'s present strategic posture. We oppose your foolishness for your own good. You need our advice, desperately, much more than we need yours."
An Accelerating Economic Collapse
2. The second aspect of the present crisis is that the Bush Administration pushes this imperialist folly under the conditions of the 2000-2003 plunge of the economies of the Americas and Europe into a now accelerating economic collapse of the world's present monetary-financial system.
As I have said frequently: Rome launched its drive to empire when Rome was at its relatively greatest strength; President Bush's Administration has launched its campaign at precisely the point the U.S.A.'s economy is disintegrating internally at an accelerating rate. As James Carville said in 1992, so today, the problems of President Bush's desire for re-election are summed up essentially as, "It's the economy, stupid!"
Under such economic conditions, unless there were a type of direct present threat by Iraq to the U.S.A. or other relevant nations which does not presently exist in fact, the launching of such a war by the United States would be criminal, because it would be axiomatically unjustified under the modern natural law of nations. Under the presently bankrupt economic policy thinking of the presently bankrupt U.S. Bush Administration, the United States has no means for carrying through the regional Middle East and broader war detonated by its assault on Iraq to a successful "exit" to durable peace.
The currently demonstrated folly of the most recent of the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan—where the threat today, presently created by "a successful war," is worse than at the outset of that war—illustrates the point. The demonstrated folly of the operations in Afghanistan, if repeated in the Middle East, would be a degree of negligent misconduct like that of Ariel Sharon, which future courts might adjudge as having been criminal.
On the subject of Middle East peace, note the exemplary lesson from the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During the past two decades, circles associated with Ariel Sharon and others have been conducting wars into Lebanon, against Syria, and others, for the purpose of stealing water from such aquifers as those of the Litani River and Golan Heights, in addition to looting the supplies along the Jordan. This was done as part of a continuing "Eretz Israel" policy of driving the Palestinians from their traditional habitation, to make way for immigrants lured into Israel by larcenous real-estate speculators associated with Sharon et al. In fact, there is no possibility of establishing and maintaining peace in any part of this and adjoining regions, without an aggressive policy of developing new sources of potable water which are sufficient for the needs of all of the present and foreseeable populations of the region.
The lack of that and related economic development of basic economic infrastructure of the Middle East region becomes, in and of itself, a source of increasing conflict among the region's populations, whether or not any of those populations desire such conflict. When the consequences are considered, opposition to, or even failure to promote such development, partakes of a criminal quality of negligence.
Thus, the current U.S. Administration's fanatical extension of those economic policies of the 1971-2003 interval, which have produced the economic crisis of the present, failed world monetary-financial system, is itself a cause of those homicidal conflicts which could become a major threat to the U.S.A., as well as Europe and the Americas. Under such present circumstances, wasting precious, scarce economic resources on a needless and bottomless expenditure for warfare, is not the practice of sane governments.
The Strategic Triangle Alternative
3. There are urgent and available alternatives to the folly of the U.S. "Chicken-hawks" ' proposed Middle East war.
Look at the present situation in Eurasia defined by the onrushing economic collapse of the world's 1971-2003 monetary-financial system. Happily, under the present conditions of the world economic crisis which "Education President" Bush is unable to recognize, there has emerged a set of overlapping blocs of transcontinental cooperation in continental Eurasia. In western Europe, the "European Triangle" of opposition to the Middle East war, built around France, Germany, and Russia, is implicitly a growing partner in technology-sharing with the set of nations grouped around the Eurasian Strategic Triangle of Russia, China, India, et al. This includes the North Asia Triangle of Russia, China, and Korea, and, hopefully, the participation of industrial Japan. It includes the nations of the ASEAN group, now brought closer together by the new phase of the Mekong River development project.
Western continental Europe's neighbors have a vital interest in the success of those multi-triangular systems of cooperation for mutual security and development. Every sane, informed resident of the British Isles opposes Prime Minister Blair's wild-eyed rush to war, partly because they know, even instinctively, that the economic future of those Isles depends crucially upon integration in continental Eurasian economic development. Turkey, similarly, looks forward to integration within the European Union.
We in the U.S.A., should be partners in the success of such emerging new systems of cooperation. We should be applying the same principles of progress to reviving those republics of Central and South America which U.S. economic, monetary, and financial policies of 1971-2003 have done the most to ruin.
We do not lack solutions for the crises looming before us this ominous week or two to come. The fault lies, in part, in the packs of leaders in the present government, in the present leadership of our principal political parties, of whom it could be said, as Shakespeare wrote: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies in ourselves, that we are underlings." The fault lies in those fools—fools of all ranks, but all mentally of the state of mind of "underlings"—who whimper, "But the war is inevitable." The fault lies, in large part, in the common men and women who choose such leadership as that.
Small-minded men and women give the name of "tradition," "popular opinion," and the like, to their folly; and thus, by choice or negligence, select the small-minded leaders who reward the people for that support as the leaders of fabled lemmings do: over the cliff to a monstrous folly such as that proposed presently by the U.S.A. and U.K. governments (and such other governments as can be cheaply purchased by the jingle of money from an bankrupt U.S.A.'s emptied purse).
It is time to pull back from the brink of absolute lunacy. Accept France's proposal in good faith. It were better to enjoy French cheese than swallow the dirt of a hot season's desert sand.
