This article appeared in the January 8, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Why General Shelton must retire now
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
January 8, 1999
A dense pattern of publicly known military and political deployments into the Middle East region, observed from western Europe and the Middle East, indicates a certain scenario for early, escalated, British-U.S.A. military operations, the which are implicitly intended to impose a London-controlled puppet-state on Iraq. Apparently, the launching of the full-scale assault of combined forces, is presently intended to occur about the close of Ramadan.
Although this attack upon Iraq would be coordinated with Israel's own presently continued, strategic nuclear-missiles targetting of Iran and Sudan,[1] I think that the precedent of 1990-1991 "Desert Storm" will apply to Israel's role in this operation; therefore, I think it not likely that a Suez 1956-style, overt involvement of Israel's forces would occur in presently planned British and U.S.A. military operations against Iraq itself at this time. At this moment, it appears likely that the principal attack would probably be limited to British, U.S.A., and some auxiliary forces.
The British and U.S.A. bombing attacks of December, have already been a potentially irreparable, strategic catastrophe for the U.S.'s position and influence in the world at large, in addition to being a leading factor in the crucial weakening of President Clinton's ability to fight off the ongoing, London-directed U.S. parliamentary coup d'état. A new such British and U.S. attack on Iraq of the sort I have described, or anything similar to it, would unleash a chain-reaction of much worse effects than the December bombings, not only within, but far beyond the Middle East theater. Such a chain-reaction would be an incalculable disaster for United States, a catastrophe in our strategic position in the world, from which it were likely that our republic might never recover.
Not only must that new folly be prevented. With regard to this and related earlier developments of a similar nature, there must be an immediate re-examination of the so-called "Principals Committee," and of the disastrous role which Vice-President Al Gore and his cronies of that Committee are playing. This re-evaluation must examine their outrageous and willfully malicious incompetence, both in respect to complicity by members of the Committee in the parliamentary coup d'état against the President, and in that and other matters of U.S. foreign and military policy-making.
The case of recent and present State Department and Defense Department complicity in British-directed operations targetting Iraq, should be compared and correlated with the relevant and related case of U.S. Defense Department complicity with Israeli weapons-trafficking and related operations in the incitement and continuing support for London-directed, genocidal operations against large populations within Africa. These Africa correlatives include, but are not limited to the continuing, London-directed crimes of genocide, against populations in southern Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Zaire/Congo. These are criminal operations which have already killed more than six millions Africans in London-orchestrated genocide; they continue to be orchestrated, and escalated throughout black Africa, by complicity of U.S. State Department official, and agent of British influence Susan Rice's shameless collaboration with the policies of Hitleresque Uganda dictator Yoweri Museveni.
Those considerations imply the need for early retirement of certain persons who may be known to have been functioning as Gore accomplices, or other relevant Gore cronies, such as Gore security advisor Leon Fuerth, in respect to the work of that Committee. This list presently includes Secretary of Defense William Cohen, most prominently. The strategic effects of the combined December bombing and its sequelae, also require the early retirement of General Henry Hugh Shelton, a relatively long-standing Cohen co-thinker on military policy, and the present Chairman of the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is urgently required by the vital strategic interests of the U.S.A.
Consider the highlights of that renewed attack on Iraq which is in preparation now, together with other implications of those New Age-style Pentagon policies reflected in the planning of that and similar after-births of the former, disastrously failed U.S. conduct of the 1964-1975 war in Indo-China.
The indicated next phase of major military attacks on Iraq, features two leading targets for U.S. and other ground forces assigned to invade Iraq, and to occupy the major city of Basra, and probably also sections of the capital city Baghdad. The trained military Iraq-opposition forces now being repositioned within Kuwait, would be the core of an intended occupying force for Basra. U.S. special forces would be among the ground forces needed if an attempted occupation of key centers in Baghdad were included in the operation. My personal estimate, from my past studies of special operations policies and practices, is that, in such an operation, the invading ground forces' action would probably be designed to reach its primary on-the-ground objectives within approximately three days of on-ground operations, preceded and accompanied by continuing massive air and other covering fire.
The objective would be, to establish an interim puppet government of Iraq, whether or not targetted President Saddam Hussein himself were killed or captured in the process.[2] To achieve what the authors of the invasion would delude themselves into regarding as a success, some key centers, notably including Baghdad as well as Basra, must be established as "beachheads" of Special Forces' deployments, within the several days of initial ground assault and holding operations.
Then, not long after the special operations forces had reached their assigned objective, the catastrophe in all this would become undeniably apparent. The world--quite literally--would begin to cave in upon both England's already very shaky Blair government--at no loss to humanity, but also upon the political strategic position of the U.S.A. in the world at large.
The result, in any case, would be the worst catastrophe in U.S. military history. This would be not just a regional, but a global political catastrophe.
Of that result, it should be said, that "necessity is sometimes the mother of self-delusions," the self-delusions of Messrs. Blair, Cohen, and Shelton notably included. After several days, the special-forces component of the attack, even if nominally successful up to that point, would begin to become acquire a most unpleasantly ripe smell, in strategic terms, growing riper each day thereafter.
Remember, how World War II's plausibly worst Field Marshal--on any side, piping prima donna Montgomery, lengthened World War II by more than several months, by an operation which witlessly sacrificed certain U.S. parachutists who had the mortal misfortune to be placed under British command. He dumped those U.S. forces into what even maps and sand-box calculations should have forewarned was a mortal trap.[3] Everyone who should remember those unfortunate U.S. forces, especially in today's U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, should have known, that when a special-forces type of operation is launched, it is those who are conducting the operation who are intended to flank their opponents. Dangerously silly, lumbering, palpably ever-constipated, and racist Montgomery[4]--as he had been from El Alamein until Normandy--put the U.S. paratroopers into a position in which they, and Montgomery's entire thrust, were flanked from the start.
Look at the military result of the indicated action being prepared against Iraq, from the vantage-point of the U.S. strategic position within today's increasingly unstable world financial, economic, social, and political situation as a whole. After a few days, more or less, the U.S. special operation will have caused the U.S.A. to outflank itself strategically, globally, by its very choice of political position in military attacks upon Iraq.
At that point, if we come to it, future military historians--if any outlive the present patterns of today's British, U.S.A., and Israeli strategic lunacies--would be obliged to compare General Hugh Shelton, unfavorably, with that far better educated, copperheaded Democratic Party's one-time Commanding General of the U.S. Army, George McClellan, who is notorious in U.S. military history for his skills at winning individual battles, at relatively great, unnecessary losses to his own forces, while adhering stubbornly to strategies which would ensure losing the war.
1. The decay in command
This presently looming strategic catastrophe, obliges us to review the entire sweep of the process of degeneration in the U.S.A.'s adopted approach to strategic thinking, and erosion in quality of the military command, since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This, in turn, requires us to look still deeper, to the degeneration of U.S. strategic practice since President Harry Truman was lured by Britain into the needless folly of dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1946. This obliges us to reflect upon the subsequent kindred folly, and ultimately catastrophic effect, of that errant President's April 1951 firing of that General Douglas MacArthur who then best exemplified the accumulated competence of the U.S. officer corps' training, since the upgrading of West Point's program under Commandant Sylvanus Thayer. What Cohen and Shelton are doing, clearly does not reflect the quality of military leadership formerly associated with the best of West Point.
General Shelton has exposed himself as the type of military commander who might win a local battle or two, but whose linear thinking, shortfalls of political education, and politically, ideologically motivated misconceptions of both history and modern warfare, have often become, in earlier examples of such aberrations, the cause of the very wars which such types may ultimately lose. He tends to misdirect the forces under his command to outflank themselves by ignoring those crucial features of their terrain and other circumstances which some combination of his ignorance, vanity, or ideological self-blindedness prompts him to overlook.
In this instance, the blunder is globally strategic. In this case, Shelton has expressed the ultimate folly to be encountered in a modern military commander, the substitution of a Roman circus-like, cabinet-warfare conception of victory over some designated (preferably much weaker, preferably brown-skinned, or other Third World) opponent, for those restraints inhering in the notion of a necessary warfare chosen and fought according to an actual and worthy moral principle.
Although Britain's Tony Blair, not Shelton, is the author of the looming strategic catastrophe around the Middle East situation, Shelton's role in implementing that hair-brained, Eighteenth-Century-style cabinet-warfare adventure, has made the situation much worse than it could have become had a competent U.S. military professional trained in Scharnhorst's principle of Auftragstaktik,[5] been on the scene, one who would have gone over Secretary Cohen's head, as he had the obligation and right to do, to warn the President of the implications of such an attack.
In tandem with former Senator and now Defense Secretary William Cohen, Shelton represents a perverted, historically illiterate notion of the use of "special forces." That latter, ideological aberration shared by Shelton and Secretary Cohen, is now misleading the United States toward the early prospect of the worst military catastrophe in our nation's history, far worse than Vietnam, a catastrophe centered in, but not containable within the Middle East.
Meanwhile, either running, or even merely condoning, even tacitly, a foreign-directed coup d'état against one's own commander-in-chief, in deference to a corrupt Vice-President, is not exactly a recipe for glorious victories on the battlefield.[6]
Matters have already reached the point, that if we are to prevent Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair from plunging the United States into the worst military disaster in its history, Shelton, Secretary Cohen, and those others associated with foisting Blair's presently ongoing Iraq adventure on President Clinton, must now step down publicly; otherwise the U.S.A. has no way of disassociating our republic's present political and military command from a strategic catastrophe much worse than the U.S. suffered in McGeorge Bundy's, Robert McNamara's, and Henry Kissinger's Vietnam War. Blair's and Vice-President Gore's continuing war against Iraq, is already spiralling into what threatens to become, very quickly, a global catastrophe for civilization as a whole.
As a result of Blair's and Gore's success in pushing the current war against Iraq this far, the global strategic situation is now becoming worse by the day. It is emphasized by a growing number of senior military and other strategic analysts inside and outside the U.S.A., that Vice-President Gore's pushing President Clinton into the recent bombing of Iraq, has now, unleashed, as I shall show here, the kind of strategic, thermonuclear and other "doomsday" postures symptomized by recent developments around Russia's announcement of its deployment of its SS-27 missile.
The resignations of Cohen, Shelton, and relevant others, together with effecting a highly visible form of expulsion of Gore advisors such as Leon Fuerth from the White House, are among the indispensable corrective measures the U.S. government must take now, if the U.S. government is to prevent the present situation from spiralling rapidly into a global strategic catastrophe. Such prospective catastrophes include even a pattern of "doomsday scenarios," featuring thermonuclear-missile bombardments ricocheting from Ariel Sharon's and Bibi Netanyahu's Middle East cockpit.
Had the kinds of policies which Cohen and Shelton practice now, been proposed to senior professionals from the ranks of leading World War II commanders, or even up to the time of McGeorge Bundy's and Robert S. McNamara's U.S. 1964-1975 war in Indo-China, they would have agreed with General Douglas MacArthur's warning against such a foolish military adventure, that the U.S. should not allow itself to be sucked into "a land war in Asia." The kind of rubbish which Secretary Cohen and General Shelton, among others, are practicing today, would have evoked expressions of contempt and disgust among most honorable leading military professionals.
It is important to outline here, if only in a summary fashion, the succession of changes in the political-military environment which have led U.S. military policy, downward, from the standard of competence usually recognized by the officer corps and relevant others, prior to the 1945-1964 transition, down to the disastrous strategic nadir represented by the current folly of Cohen's and Shelton's U.S. Iraq policy of today.
2. From Vietnam to doom
Apparently, Blair and Shelton have learned nothing important since Cohen and Senator Sam Nunn took the lead in ramming through the foolish conception of "Special Forces" operations, set forth in 1986 Senate proceedings. These conceptions were foisted upon them by Israeli and JINSA sources, and reflected the same hare-brained notions featured in Vice-President Bush's and Lt. Col. Oliver North's "Iran Contra" side-show.[7]
Wherever such and other lunacies as "Iran-Contra," have reigned in military and intelligence policies since the beginning of the 1980s, the common excuse for every folly perpetrated in the name of "anti-terrorism" or military policy, has been, "We have to learn how to do it from our Israeli friends." Under these conditions, the degree to which British intelligence channels have controlled U.S. military and intelligence functions, has been masked increasingly through the conspicuousness of the massive penetration of our military and intelligence institutions by certain U.S. citizens and other Israeli agents formerly associated with convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.
The Israelis are accountable for the mischief they, and Pollard, have done in this way; but, it is the relevant U.S. officials, not the Israelis, who are entirely responsible for the great folly they have perpetrated by their own silliness on this account. The question is: What made the U.S. military and intelligence services so stupid, as to allow such a massive degree of any foreign nation's penetration of our nation's most sensitive force capabilities to occur? How did this corruption of our institutions come about?
To expose the fraudulent chatter, both anti-Semitic and Zionist, which usually runs rampant in today's U.S.A., turn briefly to what is called "the Jewish question." Let us speak of those German Jews who were known, prior to Hitler, as the most German of all Germans, German Jews according to the model of the great Moses Mendelssohn. These Germans, typified in the excellent cases by Mendelssohn, played a key role, especially during the late Eighteenth Century and the Nineteenth Century, in creating a German nation out of the long-lasting ruin left from the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War. That German Jew, associated with the image of some among Germany's leading scientists and Classical musicians of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries, played not only a crucial part in bringing together a functional form of German nation, but thereby contributed a crucial part in German Classical culture's contributions to the U.S. in particular, and to humanity as a whole.
The crucial significance, globally, of this Lessing-Mendelssohn undertaking, is that that work, establishing a principled notion of ecumenicism on the natural-law premises of Gottfried Leibniz, which Lessing and Mendelssohn employed for Jew and Christian in Germany, is the proper, Classical model for the world as a whole still today.
This beautiful, ecumenical truth of the Lessing-Mendelssohn collaboration, was almost obliterated by what the leading bankers of London and Wall Street allowed Hitler to do, and by the effects of concealing from the world British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's personal, witting, hideous responsibility for what happened to the mass of Jews sent from Hungary to Auschwitz. In my estimation, the only hope for conquering the effects--upon Jews and others--of those crimes against Jewry, is by upholding the image of the crucial role of the collaborators Lessing and the extended Mendelssohn family, in creating the foundations for what became the late-Eighteenth-Century and Nineteenth-Century German Classical movement of Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, the Humboldts, et al. Restoring this Classical dignity to the Mendelssohn image of the German Jew, as among the most German of the pre-Hitler Germans, is the obvious starting-point for reversing the Hitler nightmare haunting Germany--and other nations--still today.[8]
In the matters of principles of statecraft, including warfare, under consideration here, the policy of a constitutional republic, such as the U.S.A., must be the ecumenical standpoint of natural law. So, as Leibniz followers Lessing and Mendelssohn insisted, the followers of Moses and Christ had a common basis in a Socratic view of the Mosaic principle: law and human nature alike must be defined from the view of each man and woman as made in the image of the Creator. Thus, no arbitrary religious doctrine can be permitted to determine what the law of a republic shall be; only natural law, as Leibniz, Lessing, and Mendelssohn understood this, and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa before them, can inform the principles of law-making, and of warfare employed by a sovereign nation-state republic such as the U.S.A. today.
Among civilized nations, the only proper object of warfare is durable peace. War may be fought, only when it can not be rightly avoided, and when its objective is never to impose conquest or punishment, or to take revenge, but only to establish a more durable form of just, equitable, civilized relationship among the former adversaries.
Thus, the U.S.A. can point with pride to General Douglas MacArthur's superlative alliance with Curtin's Australia, in conducting the 1942-1945 war in the Pacific. Unlike the bloody follies of unnecessary battles fought by some other U.S. commands involved in that Pacific theater, MacArthur's operations achieved the greatest economy of effort and suffering, of both his own forces and those of Japan, over the greatest distance, and the relatively least time, of any leading commander of military forces in general warfare during this century to date: echoes of the military genius of General William Tecumseh Sherman![9] The nuclear bombing of Japan had nothing to do with winning that war; the forces under MacArthur, together with the naval blockade of Japan, had already secured inevitable, early victory before either bomb was dropped. Then, MacArthur led the effort to rebuild the shattered economy of Japan, with the minimal abuse of the institutions and people of that defeated nation.
There is nothing of such great humanity and honor in the ravings of the corrupt and despicable Prime Minister Tony Blair, or the habitual, hateful, lunatic rantings, either on Malaysia, or the subject of Iraq, by such Principals Committee members as aberrant Vice-President Al Gore, or by Secretary Cohen, or the colonial-warfare style in operations against Iraq recently outlined by General Hugh Shelton.
Marine hero Major-General Smedley Butler would have understood and agreed with the premises of my comment on Shelton's practice. Shelton is certainly no General Douglas MacArthur, more like a Nineteenth-Century British colonial colonel on duty in India or Africa, in fact.[10]
What Shelton has said, on camera, in support of Secretary Cohen and the Committee, at official press conferences, should have been, in itself, sufficient grounds for a President of the United States to issue the command, "Get that clown out of there!" Out of his own mouth, Shelton has demonstrated, on camera, that in matters of strategic conflict, he is the kind of mad rogue, a "Dr. Strangelove" or "Bozo the Clown" type-casting, who might enjoy a lucrative and celebrated career in funny movies, but certainly not in leading the military arms of the U.S.A. or any other constitutional republic, as long as he continues in his currently expressed state of mind.
Whence did the U.S. find such military chiefs? When did our military command start to go sour? Most professionals, from western Europe and the U.S.A., have replied to that question, by pointing to the post-1963 transfer of U.S. officers from Europe to Vietnam, most of whom did not return to Europe. 1964-1975 Vietnam corresponds to a phase-shift in the quality of the officer-corps, the mission, and the arms policy of the U.S. military. The next big step downward began during late March and April 1983, when the U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker who had just previously wrecked the U.S. national economy and banking system, deployed to block, on financial grounds, any serious implementation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) which President Reagan had just announced on that March 23rd.
That corruption of large sectors of military professional strata which is exemplified by Vice-President George Bush's "Iran-Contra" operations, has been a crucial part of the moral and other destruction of the U.S. military professionals. The vast expenditure of virtually irreplaceable U.S.A. and other NATO military capabilities, which was lost in the wasteland of "Desert Storm," combined with the accelerating collapse of the physical-economic tax-revenue base of the military capabilities of the U.S.A. and Europe, locked NATO into the substitution of quixotic, science-fiction-tipped scenarios of cabinet warfare, for the dwindling vestiges of what had been earlier a competently modern philosophy and form of war-fighting capability.
This combination of intellectual, moral, and material decay of the military capabilities of NATO and other former powers, has fostered the lunatic kinds of mental state and practice lately displayed by that Gore-dominated Principals Committee, which has now been operating as a de facto counter-Presidency, as part of a de facto parliamentary coup d'état against the constitutional powers and political will of the elected President of the U.S.A.
Any continued escalation of strategic forms of conflict among nations today, leads toward the brink of the maximum degree of warfare economically ruined powers are still capable of footing, as some form of strategic "doomsday scenario" capabilities. Since it would be impossible for any among these powers to fight a conventional, or "flexible response" war, the only alternative available in the last extremity, is "doomsday options," typified by, but by no means limited to the "first use" implications of the deployment of Russia's SS-27.
The lunatic outbursts of Vice-President Gore, and the matching actions as typified by Blair's and the Principals Committee cabal's lunatic fresh targetting of Iraq, show us a world that has been pushed to near the threshold of an interacting snarl of sundry kinds of "doomsday options." These options have become actual options for the near future, because, under present physical conditions of the economies of nations, "doomsday options" are the only post-Clinton options which might provide credible deterrence against the increasingly outrageous demands of aggressive New Age fanatics like NAFTA fanatic, and would-be U.S. President, Al Gore.
Under the new strategic circumstances defined by the December 1998 bombing of Iraq, when any nation with the power to deploy a "doomsday option," views its ability to ensure its own continued existence as a nation to be immediately imperilled, that "doomsday option" will be developed, and, at a certain threshold of tension, probably actually used. If this continues much further, a crescendo of escalations of successive limited launches of thermonuclear missiles, including Israel's as the most immediately threatening, is now becoming not only possible, but even likely.
3. How the doomsday machine was created
Since the eve of the World War I which the British monarchy had, in fact, pre-orchestrated with its cultish "geopolitics" lunacy, that same monarchy's British Empire, now re-named the British Commonwealth, has plotted to bring about a form of world empire, sometimes called "world government," which would eliminate the existence of sovereign nation-states from this planet.
Beginning with World War I, the expressed intent of the relevant British command, until London put Hitler into power in Germany in 1933, was a view of World War I as a "war to end all wars." It was on the eve of World War I, that Britain's World War I foreign-intelligence propaganda official, otherwise known as Fabian Round Tabler and science-fictioneer H.G. Wells, proposed the use of nuclear-fission weapons as a device so terrible that nations would fall to their knees, before world government, to avoid such warfare. This was Wells' crony Bertrand Russell's explicitly stated purpose in prompting the U.S. to develop fission weapons, under the Manhattan Project. Russell later bragged of this role and policy publicly, in the Sept. 6, 1946 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication which he, Russell, controlled through his accomplice, and later Pugwash Conference leader Leo Szilard.
Russell's policy was the basis for discussions between Russell and Soviet General Secretary N. Khrushchev, from 1955 until a time, beyond the 1962 Cuba missiles crisis, when Khrushchev had been ousted. This was the theme of Wall Street's John J. McCloy, in leading the work of his protégé McGeorge Bundy, and Bundy's protégé Henry A. Kissinger, in the ACDA (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) operations of the late 1950s, and in McCloy's negotiations with Russell and Khrushchev during and following the 1962 missiles crisis. This was the premise for Kissinger's association with Pugwash, and the foisting of Kissinger, as National Security Advisor, on President-elect Richard Nixon.[11]
It was the continuing commitment to Arms Control, e.g., "weapons of mass destruction," as opposed to sanity, which has dominated international diplomacy's march toward world government, since the negotiations among the U.S.A., Britain, and the Soviet Union, during and following the 1962 missiles crisis. Thus, in 1989-1991, it was assumed that there no longer existed even the bare possibility that any nation could challenge the authority of the new, Anglo-American, Roman Empire, called world government.
That deluded, but widespread faith in the irreversibly established institutions of arms control and world government persisted, from the January 1992 aftermath of "Desert Storm," until December 1998, when Britain's Tony Blair, and Al Gore's cronies of the Principals Committee, manipulated President Bill Clinton into authorizing the Principals Committee's bombing of Iraq. The preemptive actions of London and Washington, in the December 1998 bombing of Iraq, blew apart, permanently and irreparably, all pre-existing world-government agreements then reposing in the UNO Security Council. By this December action, Blair and the Gore-led Principals Committee set off the potential for new forms of globalized warfare, warfare typified by nuclear-tipped "doomsday scenarios."
This should have surprised no one who was not lulled into accepting pre-existing trends in just such a direction. Since the aftermath of the combined 1962 missiles crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy--even since Truman's nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, the strategic doctrines of the U.S.A. and British Commonwealth had been moving in just such a direction, toward the ultimate self-destruction of the utopian delusion called "world government."
The present military policies of the British Commonwealth, the U.S.A., and NATO, the reigning military policies of these powers from Hiroshima until now, have been a turning back of the pages of history of civilization, toward those feudalistic abominations in both economic and military policy, the which the literature of modern military and diplomatic history has associated with use of the term "Eighteenth-Century cabinet warfare." Such return to a feudalist past in military policy, is to be recognized as the complement to those same "British Eighteenth-Century methods" of "free trade" policy, of Adam Smith et al., which U.S. war-time President Franklin Roosevelt denounced to the face of Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill during their quarrel respecting the anti-colonialist, post-war foreign economic policy of the United States.
We must trace the proximate origins of today's Anglo-American and UNO "world government" and related military doctrines, to no later than their roots in the Round Table and the related racist, eugenics cult of King Edward VII's reign as both de facto ruler, as Prince of Wales,[12] and formally enthroned monarch. However, the drive toward the post-1962 trends in Anglo-American and UNO policies, while in those late-Victorian traditions of Edward VII, was begun by the present Duke of Edinburgh, a.k.a. Prince Philip, with the 1961 founding of the racist World Wildlife Fund, and the related launching of the dirty Duke's campaigns for those Hitler-like eugenics policies, which openly avowed U.S. enemy Philip has promoted under the rubrics of "ecologism" and "population control."
It is probable, that General Shelton has no comprehension of, and little to no acquaintance with, that fundamental change in the history of warfare, the which occurred as a result of what the late Professor Friedrich Freiherr von de Heydte described as "the hour of birth of the modern sovereign state," the fundamental change in European civilization which erupted during the middle of the Fifteenth Century.[13] Certainly, yahoo rage-ball Al Gore knows less than nothing of today's most crucial topics of statecraft on this account. This area of statecraft, in which Cohen and Shelton, among others, have so conspicuously displayed their incompetence, is one which need be, most urgently, understood by all relevant statesmen and military professionals today.
We have now come to the point of the issues set forth in this present report, at which any competent military or other important issues of the practice of statecraft, must consider the effects inhering in the breakdown of the institutions of that form of modern state and economy, set into motion by what is known as the great ecumenical Council of Florence, notably the sessions of A.D. 1439-1441, where modern European civilization was born, after a long preceding struggle in this direction, since Solon of Athens. I have addressed that historical background in numerous locations published earlier; therefore, I need but merely summarize that background as it bears directly on the issues posed by the cases of Secretary Cohen, Al Gore, General Shelton, and the Principals Committee now.
The task here, is to show how that degeneration of modern society caused by the combined policies of world government, eugenicism, ecologism, and arms control, has brought the planet to the present point at which the people of this world are at the verge of blowing themselves up, by exactly the kinds of folly which the Principals Committee has exhibited, that in a chain-reaction of sundry forms of resulting "doomsday scenarios."
To understand the mechanisms which now threaten to cause the relatively immediate collapse of this planet into a planetary "new dark age," we must take into account those changes, from European feudal society, to the modern sovereign nation-state, which are the source of all of the increase of population, and improvement of general welfare of most of that population, since the first establishment of the modern sovereign form of nation-state by the radiated impact of the Fifteenth-Century "Italian," or "Golden" Renaissance. (See Figure 1.)
If we now eliminate those institutions upon which the post-A.D. 1441 increase of the world's populations and life-expectancy has absolutely depended, the result must be nothing other than a collapse of both the world population and life-expectancies of individuals, to levels at least as low as the European "New Dark Age" of the mid-Fourteenth Century--probably even those of earlier than the Christian Era. This would be a very steep rate of combined, entropic collapse of not only human, but animal and plant populations. The effect for such a case, would not be a gradual collapse, but rather like setting off explosive charges on the legs supporting a stilt house. Six hundred to two thousand years of civilization would collapse in a global demographic earthquake.
It is in such a circumstance that the combined effect of a new attack on Iraq, and the ongoing coup d'état against President Clinton, could set off a general chain-reaction of "doomsday scenario" catastrophes. The collapse of the physical-economic and demographic levels of civilization, since the New Age cultural-paradigm shift of the 1964-1972 interval, has brought the world to the threshold condition at which such "doomsday scenarios" and their effects now become increasingly probable.
Feudal versus modern society
To appreciate that point, and its relevance for the cases of Gore, Cohen, and Shelton, we must pin-point the crucial features of the change now under way. Those changes must be seen in respect to the foundations of both the unprecedented achievements of modern European civilization's establishment of the sovereign nation-state form, and the changes in the character of warfare which emerged in the transition from feudal to modern society. The interpolated summary of that required here, is as follows.
All of the accomplishments of Egyptian, Classical Greek, and early Hellenistic civilization, the pre-Christian history of Europe and the adjoining Mediterranean regions, is soiled by the barbarism of a form of social order known to Classical scholars as the "Persian (i.e., Babylonian) model," or, generically, the "oligarchical model." Reduced to simplest terms, the leading features of the social composition common to such oligarchical models of society, until the Fifteenth-Century, or "Golden" Renaissance, were as follows.
Usually, more than ninety-five percent of the population of every society was reduced to the status of actual human cattle, or virtually so. Such was the lot of the ancient Mesopotamian "bow-tenure" farmer, Sparta's helots, the Roman slave, or the feudal serf. The society was ruled in the interest of an oligarchy. This oligarchy appears in three forms: 1) a landed aristocracy; 2) a financial aristocracy; 3) dictatorship by a state bureaucracy, such as the Mesopotamian priest-caste. The oligarchy may be of a hereditary or quasi-hereditary form; the rule of adoption under the Latin "father of the family," is an example of this. Immediately subordinate to the oligarchs are sundry forms of lackeys, military and other, who conduct the daily dirty work of political and social dictatorship by the oligarchy, over the actual or virtual human cattle.
The essential function of the political and social organization of such a society, is the management and culling of the herds of those designated to serve as the actual or virtual human cattle of that society, as European feudalism, or the neo-feudalistic Confederate States of America, are examples of this form of moral degeneracy. To coordinate the management, of the combined social strata of the oligarchy itself, the lackeys, and the human cattle, some form of dictatorship is selected and perpetuated, or modified, by the ruling oligarchy as a class (or, "estate"). The model of reference for such a dictatorship, as identified by Professor von der Heydte, is the institution of imperial law.
As Professor von der Heydte showed, the only law of the empire was the law-making power reposing in the emperor, or the equivalent of the emperor. The only checks upon that Thrasymachus-like arbitrary law--like that of mass-pornographer Kenneth Starr today--were a consideration which Starr manifestly abhors: respect for the customs of subject peoples. While the use of such imperial forms of arbitrary law-making power was embodied in the incumbent of that office, the incumbency itself was subject to change by the institutions of the oligarchy more broadly. There was no efficient accountability of the imperial law-maker or his law to its consequences for the subject population; there was no consideration given to natural law.
As the reforms of Solon of Athens and the work of Plato demonstrate this most clearly, even before the birth of Christ, the leading currents of Classical Greek culture had introduced the notion of the accountability of the state authority to certain principles of right inhering in the people, rights which might be invoked as a higher authority in practice of law than the government itself. This and related contributions of Classical Greek culture were the setting for the spread of the work of Christ and his apostles; on this account the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul are most notable. With Christ, the notion of a "chosen people" was rejected for realization of the Mosaic principle that each man and woman are equally made in the image of the Creator. Thus, Christianity adopted and used the Classical Greek culture of Solon and Plato as the instrumentality for achieving a Christian standard of justice for all persons, whether those persons were professing Christians, or not.
After a great effort, including the work of Charlemagne, Abelard of Paris, Dante Alighieri, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas, more than fourteen hundred years after the murder of Christ by the son-in-law of the Isle of Capri's Mithra-worshipping Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, an actual modern form of sovereign nation-state emerged, first under the reign of France's Louis XI, then England's Henry VII, and as efforts toward that result by Spain's Queen Isabella. Louis XI's heir was a disappointment. Isabella's death was a tragedy for the future history of Spain, as Miguel Cervantes understood this. Henry VIII become something far worse than merely a disappointment to English patriots such as Sir Thomas More. Finally, beginning with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the germ of a true sovereign nation-state republic based upon natural law, emerged in what became the United States.
We of the U.S.A. should be proud of, and defend the heritage of our fight for liberty, against not only the British monarchy, but also the legacy of the Holy Alliance. However, we must not be so proud that we overlook the fact, that it was Europeans, who could not then establish true republics anywhere in Europe, who acted directly to plant the needed ideas upon our continent, and to assist us in gaining and retaining the freedom gained through our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and President Abraham Lincoln's great leadership. We truly defend the U.S.A. only when we defend its designated special historical mission in the world from the enemies of our principle, from oligarchical influences, such as those of the presently ongoing parliamentary coup d'état and the Principals Committee, acting within our government itself, as zealously as against foreign foes.
The change in the condition of humanity, unleashed by the Fifteenth-Century Golden Renaissance, as these benefits have been adopted by many nations and peoples, have resulted in the greatest improvement in the demographic characteristics of populations in all human existence to date. These have been extensively adopted, to their benefit, by many nations not nominally European, and otherwise desired as benefits by many people who have been denied their right to access to such benefits. None of the actual achievements of the U.S.A. or modern Europe, or the world, so provided, would have been possible without certain revolutionary changes in political and economic institutions which are characteristic of the founding of the modern sovereign nation-state republic.
Foremost has been the establishment of the sovereign nation-state form itself. Without the sovereign nation-state, there are no human rights, simply because there is no means provided by which those rights may be established and defended. Without the modern perfectly sovereign nation-state, there could be no sustainable economic development, no stable supply of currency and credit, no competent development of the basic economic infrastructure upon which economic life's viability depends. Without a commitment to fostering investment of continuing scientific and technological progress to capital-intensive and power-intensive modes of productive and related investment, a catastrophic entropy would grip each nation, and the planet as a whole. The abrupt and rapid collapse of nations to European Fourteenth-Century, or lower demographic levels, would become inevitable, as that prospect now looms immediately before us all today.
Feudal vs. modern warfare
To understand the connection between the onset of changes in the form and principles of warfare which distinguish modern from feudal society, begin with reference to three points on the military map: Wat Tyler's rebellion in England, Louis XI's revolution in warfare, and the Peasant War in Germany. Look then, at the later changes introduced during the Eighteenth Century. Wat Tyler's rebellion was defeated by the doomed English feudal order which subsequently destroyed itself in the Wars of the Roses; the suppression of Wat Tyler's rebellion was the last triumph of the feudal military system. Louis XI was the first head of state to introduce the elementary principles of modern warfare. The peasant revolt in Germany, although defeated, demonstrated the beginning of the new order in affairs, in the successes of the innovation of the Haufe in defeating masses of mounted cavalry. Meanwhile, in Henry VII's England, a technological revolution in warfare had begun, exemplified by work in design of artillery and ships. The pioneering work of Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli on the new principles of warfare suited to the emerging form of the sovereign republic, shaped the progressive evolution of the institution of warfare, from that point on. With the emergence of the form of republican political-economy under the rubrics of mercantilism and cameralism, came the form of statecraft on which modern warfare depended. The leap beyond mercantilism and cameralism, by Leibniz's founding of the science of physical economy, laid the foundations for what became the revolution in warfare in Eighteenth-Century France, in North America, and by Lazare Carnot and Gerhard Scharnhorst in France and in Germany, which put to an end--until recently--the legacy of feudalism known as "Eighteenth-Century cabinet warfare."
The essence of this emergence of modern warfare, and its triumph over feudalism, can be summed up in the following broad-brush observations. No longer could masses of serfs be cowed by a relative handful of squat, armored professionals, the special forces of their day, wielding great swords, axes, lances, and maces. The individual citizen was gradually lifted to equality with, and then superiority over, the professional of the feudal order. In the defeat of Spain in the Netherlands, and the lessons of the Thirty Years War in central Europe, as shown by Cromwell's New Model Army in England, the day of feudal triumph was being brought to its close. Meanwhile, scientific and technological advancement of the productive powers of labor, lifted the new institution of citizen, to military and other equality with forces of the oligarchy itself. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, the domination of warfare by the aristocracy was being superseded by the role of the plebeian officer, such as Lazare Carnot and Scharnhorst, in the artillery and engineering professions.
The increasing role of the masses of citizens, and of scientific and technological progress, in the winning of war, must be viewed as the triumph of civilization over feudalism and other expressions of oligarchical society. To come now to the kernel of the point: modern warfare is axiomatically distinguished from feudal traditions, by its use of the process of civilization, to push back the depravity left over from mankind's past.
It is not the slaughter of war which enables victory to gain the peace. It is the benefits of that same civilization which is summoned to win wars, which win the defeated nation to embrace the benefits of the peace, to find the peace more beneficial than had they won the war. General MacArthur demonstrated an excellent comprehension of that principle, a comprehension lacking entirely in that pack of new barbarians, that pack of yahoos, typified by Vice-President Gore, composing the Principals Committee.
The yahoos, such as the Principals Committee, express the opposite view. Their outlook is a malicious outburst of sadistic glee over the suffering they impose upon the Iraqi innocents. Their outlook is that of Genghis Khan making a horrible example of those who opposed his will. Theirs is the stink of the lust for revenge. There is nothing worthy of being called human in what they do. These are the barbarians, the throw-backs to feudal depravity. There is nothing in them which a U.S. World War II veteran could honestly find honorable.
Since, as Vice-President Al Gore's four-poisons policy typifies the composition of the Principals Committee, these characters are committed to methods of warfare consistent with the economic entropy, which Gore is committed to imposing upon the entire world, including the U.S.A., such fellows are impelled to seek methods of warfare which are, in overall effect, consistent with Gore's four-poisons policies. On this account, the characteristic of the military policy of a Gore Presidency, as of a Gore-dominated Principals Committee, is a strategic commitment to de-civilization, to destroying those institutions which typify civilization.
What Gore is committed to destroy includes such essential pillars of all modern civilization, since the Fifteenth Century, as the sovereign nation-state, the commitment to measures of economic protection of the development of the physically-productive enterprises of the national economy, the promotion of public investment in basic economic infrastructure, upon which the mere existence of healthy economy depends absolutely, and the commitment to preferable treatment for forms of productive and related private investment which foster increase of the physical-economic productive powers of labor through capital-intensive, power-intensive modes of scientific and technological progress. On account of the effects which Gore's economic and related policies must tend to produce, if Al Gore were intelligent, as he is not, he would not desire to become President; he would prefer to become Satan.
Thus, in the attempt to find terrible means to deter adversaries, under conditions of the present trends toward de-civilization, the only alternative apparently available to nations in that state of entropy, is "doomsday options." Since, under such policies, the victor can offer no plausible benefit to the defeated adversary, there can be no peace, and therefore no true victory.
So, when the former thrust of West Point was to gain victory through use of civilization, not only to defeat an adversary, but to win him to embrace the benefits of such a defeat, the U.S.A. was a great power. Now, through the moral degeneration of our military policy over the course of the recent thirty-odd years, we have become a nation which seeks victory over its victims through methods of de-civilization. Thus, if we tolerate such policies, in the end we shall destroy no adversary more dangerous to us, than us ourselves.
[1] Apart from nuclear targets Iran and Sudan, other targets which are either not nuclear targets, or probably not, include Lebanon, Jordan, and (possibly non-nuclear) targetting of Syria. Whenever right-wing fanatics such as the notorious U.S. Moskowitz are in dominant positions, one must lose sight of neither the map of the proposed territory of "Eretz Israel," nor the lust of Ariel Sharon et al. for the continuing "land-scam" real-estate grabs in which we caught Henry A. Kissinger red-handed back in 1982. To understand why this sort of thing is tolerated from Sharon et al., still today, one must look back to Britain's role, with its stooge of that time, France, in the Suez Crisis of 1956; this was the operation by means of which London first established Israel as its ultimately expendable key strategic asset for the entire Middle East region. On Israel, as Lord Palmerston told the British Parliament, in a moment of candor: Britain has permanent interests, but no permanent alliances.
[2] The shrill cry, "take out Saddam Hussein," from certain U.S. public officials who should know better, shows that they are either astonishingly ignorant in military matters, or simply driven insane by the heat of their own populist-style delusions. I am certain, that General Shelton, even with all his known and inferable educational limitations conceded, has acquired sufficient experience in conduct and planning of special operations, that he would never willingly gamble a military operation costing some billions of dollars of U.S. military expenditures, on so silly a presumption as a successful accomplishment of a widely advertised intent to take out a richly forewarned foreign head of state. The alternative is, setting up a puppet government on a captured site, a feasible operation, if subsequent short-term, as well as longer-term blow-backs are not taken into account.
[3] Operation Market Garden, as the fiasco was known, took place from Sept. 17 to Sept. 24, 1944. Montgomery was attempting to take bridges in Nazi-occupied Holland, in hopes that the Allies could then move into the Ruhr. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, under protest, were seconded to the British command, along with a Polish airborne brigade which was also almost wiped out as a result. See Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).
[4] In the parlance of the U.S. Senate, Montgomery's racism could be fairly described as that of a "bad Lott." For Trent Lott's racist connections, see article in this issue, "Confederates behind the Impeachment Coup," p. 26. See statement of Montgomery's Cecil-Rhodes-like racism, in The Guardian, January 7, 1999. See also, the British praise of Montgomery's racism in the January 8, 1999 edition of the London Times.
[5] When an officer is assigned a mission, he must either carry it out according to his qualified best judgment, or if the mission is wrongly conceived, advise his commander clearly and concisely of the nature of the error, suggesting an alternative, if that is an appropriate response. This was demanded of their subordinates by the greatest of Germany's commanders from Scharnhorst on. On this account, German training of special forces, which developed the existing potentials of recruits, was superior to the U.S. tendency to prefer breaking the recruit to a predetermined stereotype. The best U.S. commanders studied the Gerhard Scharnhorst tradition, such as Scharnhorst, "old" Moltke, et al., as well as our own great William Tecumseh Sherman, on this account. Herein lies the key to the inherent incompetence of those of today's far less literate military officers and men victimized by conditioning to "information theory," New Age doctrines. Note: Although Carl Clausewitz was a student and admirer of Scharnhorst, as a figure too close to the post-1815 Prussian royal court, his representation of Scharnhorst's contributions was colored by a social prejudice inconsistent with the world-outlook of the greatest military commanders of that time, such as Lazare Carnot and Scharnhorst. Clausewitz's formalist misdefinition of the military concept of Entschlossenheit is exemplary of this distinction. The issue is not how to conduct wars, but, first and foremost, which wars should and should not be fought, and if fought, how.
[6] Either General Shelton had the competence to recognize that the U.S. military was being used, by the Gore-led Principals Committee, to assist a coup d'état against his own Commander-in-Chief, or Shelton's lack of awareness of that fact signifies he lacked even the rudimentary competencies to hold the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
[7] Special operations do have a place in the military repertoire, if their purpose and characteristic limitations are respected. The so-called "Israeli" policy for "combatting terrorism" is witting fraud based upon a myth which was derived from fairy-tales. The fairy-tale accounts of "combatting international terrorism," originated as disinformation spread by the various official governmental and related agencies which have, collectively, controlled and deployed all of the significant so-called terrorist operations--such as the "Baader-Meinhof (RAF)" or "Red Brigades"--of the recent four decades. As I emphasized, together with my associates and other relevant military and intelligence professionals during the 1980s, the principles of actual "low-intensity warfare" were summed up by Professor von der Heydte's Der Moderne Kleinkrieg als wehrpolitisches und militärisches Phänomen, 1972 (also published in English translation under the title Modern Irregular Warfare in Defense Policy and as a Military Phenomenon [New York: New Benjamin Franklin House]).
[8] Serious work to this end is in progress now by some of my collaborators, who are treating this subject from a respectively American and German standpoint today.
[9] Not that some of the battles fought by MacArthur's command were not awfully bloody affairs--when necessary. On condition that MacArthur's forces fought what scientific principles would identify as "crucial battles" for winning the war as a whole, MacArthur may be said to have defeated more of Japan's forces by avoiding them, than through those his forces directly fought. Sherman would have praised MacArthur's leadership, as much as he might have wished to say on such a matter.
[10] Reference is made to the testimony of Marine Major-General Smedley Butler to a U.S. Congressional Committee, in November and December 1934. Butler attested to his knowledge of a coup d'état planned against the U.S. government by Wall Street interests associated with the Morgan and Mellon interests. Butler also testified to those Wall Street interests' corrupt use of the U.S. military, notably including the Marine Corps, in the crudest of British-style colonialist operations in the Americas. What Butler, like General MacArthur, would have considered the most degrading and immoral, anti-constitutional roles as Wall Street or City of London mercenaries, assignable to the U.S. military, Shelton embraces with enthusiasm. Worse, Shelton and former Senate crony Cohen are on record as advocates of exactly the sort of lunatic mission for a Special Forces arm which current reports in the public domain show Shelton as heading up right now.
[11] The following datings should be noted. From approximately Summer 1946 until a 1955 London conference of Russell's World Parliamentarians for World Government, the Soviet press could not find words adequate for their feelings, in cursing self-confessed nuclear terrorist Bertrand Russell as the virtual Satan of the post-Hitler Twentieth Century. Then, four official representatives of Soviet General Secretary N. Khrushchev appeared at the London conference, to announce publicly Khrushchev's great respect and affection for the ideas of that same nuclear terrorist, Russell. It was in the setting of the establishment of that love-match between Russell and Khrushchev, that the first Pugwash Conference was organized, and the Wall Street's John J. McCloy set to work in creating ACDA (the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) under which Henry Kissinger's later and present career was launched. It was at the Second, Quebec Pugwash Conference of 1958, that Leo "Dr. Strangelove" Szilard set forth the arms control doctrine which became the SALT I and SALT II doctrines under Pugwashee Secretary of State Kissinger.
[12] While his mother, also known to Scottish locals as "Mrs. Brown," was otherwise occupied.
[13] Friedrich Freiherr von de Heydte, Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates (Regensburg: Druck und Verlag Josef Habbel, 1952). Professor Heydte was not only a leading authority on international law, but had a parallel career as a noted military commander. I had the honor of collaborating with him during the middle to late 1980s in connection with his authoritative work on the topic of modern low-intensity warfare, the field in which Secretary Cohen and General Shelton, in 1986, displayed their incompetence in defining the problems of international terrorism.