LaRouche:
Empire's War Drive Stalemated,
But Threat Remains
by The Editors
April 21—The British Empire's demented drive for global thermonuclear war, most recently using the Ukraine theater as a fulcrum, has been stymied over the past week, Lyndon LaRouche commented in discussions with associates on April 19. But the stalemate emerging from the April 17 quadripartite Geneva agreement, is highly unstable. The British Empire's war drive will either be derailed by removing President Obama from office, or it will again escalate rapidly towards thermonuclear confrontation, this time with direct involvement of the British Empire.
LaRouche stated:
"The entire operation so far, is now stalemated. Which means the next stage is: the British Empire moves in. Which means, Australia, and points in the Middle East, and trying to pull the United States in. But if they can't pull the United States in, it ain't going to work! Without the United States, they cannot start a Eurasian war.
"So it's an interesting situation. That's the stalemate. The British are not in a situation to declare war, unless they can get the United States to push it through, and there are blocks right now."
LaRouche then took note of the pressure Obama is coming under as the result of a Florida judge's decision to compel the FBI to release 92,000 pages of documents relevant to Saudi financing of activities related to 9/11; and he underscored the strategic significance of the Kesha Rogers campaign for the Senate from Texas, which can blow open the entire situation in the Democratic Party nationally, to good effect.
The Neo-Nazi Factor
The crucial issue which Russian President Vladimir Putin has used to gum up the works on the war drive for the moment, LaRouche explained, is that the neo-Nazi squadristi—which the British and Obama intentionally put in the driver's seat in their illegitimate and unelected Ukrainian government—must be disarmed and demobilized, as part of the Geneva agreement. "Putin put something in very clearly, on the question of the conditions, in terms of Ukraine," LaRouche said. "That there has to be no thuggery continued in Ukraine. That's where the block is. And Putin says, there's no giving in on that, that these guys have to surrender their guns."
Indeed, when Right Sector squadristi attacked pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine on Easter Sunday morning, killing a reported four people in a firefight, the Western media broke its usual black propaganda profile, and accurately reported the Right Sector's effort to blow up the Geneva deal.
Meanwhile, the eastward expansion of NATO to Russia's borders continues, with reports of the possible forward-basing of some 10,000 American troops in Poland, and similar deployments. In his four-hour April 17 video town hall meeting, President Putin denounced the eastward expansion of NATO—which is occurring despite early 1990s promises from the first Bush Administration that this would not happen—and commented: "If we don't do anything, Ukraine will be drawn into NATO sometime in the future. We'll be told 'This doesn't concern you,' and NATO ships will dock in Sevastopol [in Crimea], the city of Russia's naval glory."
Putin also warned: "Let me remind you that the Federation Council of Russia [the upper house of parliament] gave the President the right to use the Armed Forces in Ukraine. I very much hope that I will not have to exercise this right and that, through political and diplomatic means, we will be able to resolve all the pressing, if not to say burning, issues in Ukraine."
Those remarks of Putin's have been widely covered in the West. But what has been almost totally blacked out are his comments at the same meeting, warning that the U.S.-NATO ballistic missile defense system is even more threatening to Russia than NATO's eastward expansion.
Putin said:
"I'll use this opportunity to say a few words about our talks on missile defense. This issue has no less, and probably even more importance, than NATO's eastward expansion.... At the expert level, everyone understands very well that, if these systems are deployed closer to our borders, our ground-based strategic missiles will be within their striking range.... If they deploy these elements in Europe, we'll have to do something in response, as we've said so many times.... We'll do everything to guarantee the security of the Russian people, and I'm sure we'll succeed."
LaRouche took note of these developments, and concluded his discussion with associates by saying:
"This is what goes on the record as of now, as spoken, here, at this point. That defines what we're saying is the issue of war, as of now. We now recognize, we are a factor in this process. And what I'm doing is a factor in this process of determining peace and war issues."
Further Breaks on War Avoidance
With the opportunity to push back against the British Empire war drive provided by the Geneva agreements of April 17, some voices in U.S. institutions have decided to press the point. On April 19, Reuters published a lengthy special report, detailing how the Bush and Obama Administrations wrecked the prospects of strategic collaboration with Russia. The report revolved around comments by an unnamed senior Obama Administration official, who bluntly stated that it was Washington, not Moscow that blew up the potential for strategic partnership—even after Putin was the first foreign leader to offer and deliver strong support to the United States following the 9/11 attacks. Under the dominant influence of Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W. Bush responded to the Russian cooperation by abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missle (ABM) Treaty, to deploy the very missile defense shield into the European theater that remains the number one source of potential thermonuclear war.
In November 2002, the Bush Administration escalated the confrontation with Russia by pressing for seven former Warsaw Pact nations and former Soviet republics to be invited to join NATO by 2004. President Obama further exacerbated the conflict by moving forward with the ABM deployments, and by attempting to bypass Putin during the period when Putin ally Dmitri Medvedev was Russian President.
In addition to the unnamed senior Administration official, the Reuters report quoted several former U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union, and then Russia, who are still active, including Jack Matlock and James Collins, and former Bush National Security Council Director for Russia Thomas Graham. Graham, in particular, argued that the United States had missed a golden opportunity with the fall of the Soviet Union, to abolish NATO and create a new tripartite security structure for Europe involving the United States, a reunified Europe, and Russia.
The Hair-Trigger Remains
The Easter ambush near the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk highlights the fragility of the situation on the ground. A statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry following the attack stated, "The Russian side is indignant at this provocation of the militants, which proves Kiev's authorities are not willing to control and disarm the nationalists and extremists."
As LaRouche warned in his April 19 dialogue with colleagues, it is critical to watch carefully for British-engineered provocations to draw the United States deeper into direct confrontation with Russia.
The Economist, a leading voice of the British Crown and the City of London, called for just such a provocation this week, editorializing:
"The West needs to show Mr Putin that further action will be costly. So far, its rhetoric has marched far ahead of its willingness to act—only adding to the aura of weakness. Not enough is at stake in Ukraine to risk war with a nuclear-armed Russia. And European voters will not put up with gas shortages, so an embargo is not plausible. But the West has other cards to play. One is military. NATO should announce that it will hold exercises in central and eastern Europe, strengthen air and cyber defences there and immediately send some troops, missiles and aircraft to the Baltics and Poland. NATO members should pledge to increase military spending.
"Another card is sanctions, so far imposed on only a few people close to Mr Putin. It is time for a broad visa ban on powerful Russians and their families. France should cancel the sale of warships to Russia. A more devastating punishment would be to cut Russia off from dollars, euros and sterling. Such financial sanctions, like those that led Iran to negotiate over its nuclear programme, would deprive Russia of revenues from oil and gas exports, priced in dollars, and force it to draw on reserves to pay for most of its imports. They would be costly to the West, especially the City of London, but worth it. Impose them now, and give Mr Putin reason to pause. Do any less and the price next time will be even higher."
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the London Telegraph voice for the British intelligence establishment, has written several recent columns, reporting that the Obama Administration has already launched covert financial warfare against Russia, cutting off access to credit lines and forcing the Russian government to dip deep into its financial stability reserve funds to roll over debts amounting to more than $10 billion per month.
Other Fronts for Provocation
This week, Vice President Joe Biden is in Kiev conferring with Ukrainian government officials, while President Obama travels to Asia to meet with treaty allies Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines (he is also visiting Malaysia). The absence of a China stop-over is indicative of the fact that relations between Washington and Beijing are more strained than they have been in years, largely due to Obama's "Asia pivot"—the policy of promoting a doctrine of Air-Sea Battle that blurs the lines between conventional and nuclear war. Chinese officials will be closely watching for indications that Obama is looking to tighten the containment of China through deeper military arrangements with the three allied countries of the East and South China sea regions.
London has also been aggressively promoting the idea that a new North Korean crisis could erupt at any moment. An exclusive story published in the Telegraph earlier this month warned that a new purge is underway in Pyongyang, citing a recent North Korean intelligence defector called "Mr. K" who has provided a stream of inside intelligence on the splits in the North Korean leadership.
Between the Obama trip to the Far East and the uncertainty about the situation inside North Korea, the Asia-Pacific region could also detonate into crisis at any moment.
It is precisely in this context that LaRouche has continued to warn that the danger of conflict is not centered in Ukraine, but is global in nature—and is driven by the growing desperation in London and Wall Street that the current financial system is doomed and a "little war" could be the best vehicle for settling financial accounts without diminishing the power of the Empire over global affairs.
