Behind the Generals' Revolt
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On April 15, Lyndon LaRouche hailed the actions by a group of retired flag officers, demanding the immediate firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as both "unprecedented" and "appropriate, given that the nation is being betrayed."
In the week preceding LaRouche's comment, some of America's outstanding retired military commanders, including Gen. Anthony Zinni (USMC-ret.), Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (USA-ret.), Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold (USMC-ret.), Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (USMC-ret.), Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, Jr. (USA-ret.), Maj. Gen. John Riggs (USA-ret.), and Maj. Gen. John Batiste (USA-ret.), all surfaced with public calls for Rumsfeld's immediate ouster, on the grounds that he had ignored the advice and warnings of his military commanders and had, as the result, drawn the United States into a disastrous fiasco in Iraq, which is now on the verge of erupting into a full-scale, uncontrollable civil war.
While the criticisms of Rumsfeld by the ex-officers ostensibly focussed on Iraq, sources close to the Pentagon have confirmed that the outpouring of calls for Rumsfeld's immediate ouster have more to do with Bush Administration plans for a preemptive military strike against Iran, possibly as early as late April through the middle of May.
Ex-military and intelligence sources report that a group of active duty generals and admirals have written to Gen. Peter Pace (USMC), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, threatening to resign, if the White House orders military strikes against Iran. The generals and admirals, according to the sources, are particularly outraged that the White House has refused, ostentatiously, to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons against hardened targets inside Iran.
Furthermore, while the generals' ire has been directed at Rumsfeld, they are collectively aware of the fact that the true architect of the Bush Administration's perpetual war policy, including the plan to launch preemptive nuclear strikes against Iran, is Vice President Dick Cheney. Unlike Rumsfeld, who can be fired by President George W. Bush at any moment, the Vice President was elected to office, and his ouster is politically more complicated. The constitutional complications are vastly compounded by President Bush's severe psychological dependency on the Vice President, and Mr. Bush's deteriorating state of mind, as he tries to avoid the unavoidable reality that his Presidency is in a free fall, and that he has been personally written off by a vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, all the way up to the U.S. Congress.
The Looming Monetary Blowout
The picture, however, is incomplete without identifying the principal factor driving the immediate crisis: the imminent collapse of the entire world floating-exchange-rate monetary system.
This crisis is compelling those financiers of the Synarchist (Fascist) International, who control Vice President Cheney, to distract attention from the monetary blowout, by going for a preemptive war against Iran. Under such circumstances, they will go, once again, for dictatorship, as they attempted, with only limited success, following the attacks of 9/11.
Inside the United States, this apparatus is most publicly identified with Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, and is associated with a Boston- and Geneva-centered apparatus of banks, brokerage houses, and hedge funds, known in New England as "The Vault." Through institutions like Credit Suisse/First Boston, this crowd of openly Synarchist bankers maintains ties to those in London and in continental Europe, who are the descendants of the financial backers of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the Vichyites in France. Their policy today is an echo of the perpetual war impulses that led the Synarchist bankers of the 1930s Young Plan era to install Hitler and the Nazis in power, to provoke a war across Eurasia.
These bankers know perfectly well that the disastrous 19-year reign of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve has produced a derivatives and real estate financial bubble that is unlikely to survive through the Spring. The coordinated efforts of leading central banks in North America, Western Europe, and Japan to orchestrate a "controlled" deflation of the bubble, through interest-rate hikes, and the drying up of the yen carry-trade, is doomed to fail. In fact, as LaRouche has warned, the efforts to reverse the Greenspan "wall of money" hyperinflationary policy, will only accelerate the bursting of the real estate bubble.
Add to this the growing alarm on the part of the Synarchists, that they have not succeeded in crushing the Franklin Delano Roosevelt American System policy impulse within the Democratic Party. Two sets of recent developments underscore this latter factor.
First, under the personal initiative of Felix Rohatyn, a series of coordinated slanders have been published in recent days, targetting Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche Youth Movement, which is the fastest growing institution among young Democrats in the United States, and which has parallel, expanding youth organizations throughout Western Europe. The major slanders appeared in the Boston Globe, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland, and on the French broadcasting network, France Inter.
Responding directly to these attacks, LaRouche issued a brief statement: "Felix Rohatyn's Jewish ancestry did not deter him from organizing the financial backing for the Nazi gang associated with Augusto Pinochet's Chile dictatorship and the related fascist death-squad operations in South America's Southern Cone. Perhaps the European antifa ('anti-fascist') crowd is just a front for the neo-Nazis who have been 'earmarked' to call themselves the left."
Rohatyn, who, along with George Shultz, has been an architect of the "privatization of war" policy of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Halliburton, makes no bones about the fact that he asserts the primacy of private financial interests over sovereign governments—including in the area of infrastructure investment.
Rohatyn's Synarchist ideas were echoed in the second development. On April 14, the Wall Street Journal reported, in a front-page story, that Treasury Secretary John Snow, in a speech at the University of Mississippi on April 12, had launched into an attack against former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and the Hamilton Project, a Brookings Institution-housed effort by a group of former Clinton Administration economists, to shift the nation's economic policy from its current catastrophic course. At a Brookings briefing launching the project, Rubin had invoked Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States, whose policies of national banking and directed Federal government credits for infrastructure and education, had built the U.S. economy. Snow, babbling like a true spokesman for the Bush Administration, lied that Hamilton was a free-trade proponent and advocate of the "private sector," and that, in pushing "for a larger government role" the Hamilton Project had "misappropriated" Hamilton's name.
Cheney at the Epicenter
While the accelerating time-table of the financial collapse is the leading factor, driving the Bush Administration to a possible preemptive strike on Iran, another issue is also driving the Synarchist crowd to desperate near-term measures.
Vice President Cheney, the point-man for Shultz and Rohatyn, has once again emerged as the central figure in the Valerie Plame leak probe by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, was outed as a CIA officer in a July 14, 2003 syndicated column by Robert Novak. Ambassador Wilson had conducted a fact-finding trip to Niger in February 2002 on behalf of the CIA, to probe unsubstantiated intelligence reports that Iraq was seeking large quantities of uranium from that African state. The CIA had been tasked to pursue the Iraq-Niger story by Vice President Cheney.
Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were false, and when he began making noises that the Bush-Cheney claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program—a key justification for the Iraq invasion—were known to be false by top Administration policymakers, Cheney ordered a campaign of leaks to discredit the ex-Ambassador.
As the result of a series of recent court filings by Fitzgerald and by attorneys for Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, now under indictment for obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury, new evidence has surfaced, identifying Cheney as the architect of the Plame leak. Fitzgerald's April 12, 2006 thirty-nine-page filing, nailed the fact that a plot existed at the White House, centered in the Office of the Vice President, "to repudiate Mr. Wilson before and after July 14, 2003."
While Special Counsel Fitzgerald had reportedly intended to take up Cheney's role in the Plame leak after the November 2006 midterm elections, the timetable has been radically altered, and Cheney's head is now on the political chopping block, as the discovery battle in the Libby case reaches a showdown moment over the next weeks.
A senior intelligence community source acknowledged that the moment that Cheney's role as the author of the Plame leak is proven, and an indictment appears likely, Cheney will be forced out.
A timely departure of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense is the kind of shock that is now desperately needed, to assure that the Bush Administration does not push the button on Iran, triggering events that no one is prepared to handle.
