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This article appears in the November 1, 2013 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

LaRouche: Glass-Steagall Only
Viable War-Avoidance Strategy

by Jeffrey Steinberg

[PDF version of this article]

Oct. 27—Lyndon LaRouche warned this week, in a widely circulating statement, "On the Eve of War: Glass-Steagall Now Would Change Everything," that the danger of a general war is growing by the hour, and that the main factor driving toward a potential thermonuclear war of extinction is the commitment of the trans-Atlantic financial oligarchy to push ahead with its genocidal policy of bail-outs and bail-ins of the bankrupt financial system.

In his regular weekly webcast on Oct. 25, LaRouche made clear that the only viable war-prevention policy is the immediate restoration of Glass-Steagall in the United States, an action that would bankrupt Wall Street, and rapidly lead to the ouster of President Barack Obama through a Constitutional impeachment process.

LaRouche pointed to a series of heads of state summit meetings involving Russia, China, and India, where major joint economic agreements were signed. More broadly, LaRouche characterized the summitry as the forging of a de facto military defense pact against the increasing provocations coming from the trans-Atlantic powers. While President Obama called off ordered military strikes against Syria last month, in the face of massive opposition from within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence community, and the American public, he is now coming under increasing pressure from the Anglo-Saudi apparatus to go ahead with the orders.

Last week, two Saudi princes denounced the U.S. decision to call off the strikes on Syria, and what they view as U.S. betrayals of the Anglo-Saudi policy of a new Hundred Years War across Eurasia. On Oct. 22, Saudi intelligence director and head of the kingdom's national security council, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, told a visiting European diplomat that the United States had betrayed Saudi interests in Syria, Egypt, and Bahrain, and that the pending P5+1 talks with Iran were a sellout of the Arab cause that would lead to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, and triggering an arms race in the region, or worse. The Bandar assault on the U.S. was detailed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

On the same day, Prince Turki bin Faisal, the former longtime head of Saudi intelligence, and the brother of the current Saudi foreign minister, delivered a blistering attack against U.S. policy at a Washington, D.C. conference of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. Turki singled out Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for allegedly colluding with Syria's Assad regime.

Bandar and 9/11

It should be recalled that Prince Bandar was deeply implicated in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, by a joint Congressional select committee. Its final report included a 28-page chapter detailing how Bandar and his wife provided money to two of the 9/11 hijackers. Bandar, who was at the time the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, was protected by President George W. Bush, who ordered the 28 pages suppressed. President Obama has continued the coverup.

Bandar was also the architect of the 1985 "Al-Yamamah" arms-for-oil barter deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia that established a huge offshore slush fund for covert operations. That Anglo-Saudi operation continues to this day, and has financed everything from al-Qaeda's global spread, to a series of coups in Africa.

According to informed Washington intelligence sources, the objective of the Bandar and Turki attacks on the Administration was to force Obama to reverse his cancellation of the bombing campaign planned against Syria, despite continuing strong opposition from the JCS.

Under the terms of an agreement among Damascus, Moscow, and Washington, brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Syria has so far complied with the chemical weapons ban, and has allowed inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to dismantle its entire CW manufacturing capacity, and take charge of existing stockpiles for destruction. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has confirmed that a Geneva II conference will take place at the end of November, aimed at reaching a ceasefire and a political settlement of the nearly three-year Syrian conflict.

Bandar is running an extensive operation aimed at arming jihadist forces inside Syria, including the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which are formally affiliated with al-Qaeda, to wreck any possibility of a successful OPCW and Geneva II process. According to Saudi reports, Bandar's brother is now based in Jordan, where he is coordinating the infiltration of foreign jihadist fighters and heavy weapons on behalf of the Kingdom.

Last month, during a visit to Moscow, where he met with President Putin, Bandar attempted to bribe the Russians into dropping support for the Assad government in return for $15 billion in Saudi arms purchases. Bandar also threatened to activate Chechen terrorism around the upcoming Winter Olympics in Socchi, Russia. Putin rejected the crass briber and since then, Chechen terrorists have carried out a number of suicide bombings in the Caucasus.

Saudis—British Pawns

In and of themselves, these Saudi provocations would not be sufficient to trigger a general war; however, they come in the context of growing desperation within the Anglo-Dutch financial imperium over the bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic financial system. It was under similar desperate circumstances in the early 1930s that Europe was plunged into war, and it is the parallels today that pose the clearest menace to world peace and stability.

Saudi Arabia is a primitive pawn in the Anglo-Dutch game, as some factions within Saudi Arabia understand. The very jihadist fighters being bankrolled by the Kingdom to wage war against the Assad government—including an estimated 500 Saudi nationals—will return home at some point to wage a terror war against the existing regimes. The Saudi royals, in bankrolling and provoking these neo-Salafist fighters, are laying the seeds of their own doom.

The more immediate danger, however, is that an escalation of warfare in Syria would immediately draw Iran in, strengthening the hand of hard-line factions, centered in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who oppose any diplomatic agreement with the P5+1. A collapse of the upcoming talks with Iran would set the region on yet another confrontation course; a U.S. attack on Syria, which the British, the Saudis, the French, and the Turks are all demanding, would create the conditions for a much bigger confrontation, pitting the United States against Russia and China.

It is the ongoing threat of just such an outbreak that leaves the world on the brink of potential extinction. It must be remembered that the policy of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy is to eliminate 80% of the human race in the years ahead. This is the explicit "green fascist" policy of Prince Philip and the late Prince Bernhard. As LaRouche emphasized in his Oct. 25 webcast, the return to a Glass-Steagall system in the United States would bankrupt the financial oligarchy, and end the danger of general war. A U.S. return to Glass-Steagall would be followed by similar actions in many other nations, and would lay the foundations for a durable peace based on a global economic renaissance. Anything short of the Glass-Steagall option means that the world will remain on the edge of general war.

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