ARGENTINA
London Frantic Over Clinton Intervention
by Cynthia R. Rush
March 13—Since the beginning of March, City of London media outlets have violently attacked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after she accepted an invitation from Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to mediate in the dispute between the British and Argentine governments over the Malvinas Islands. Clinton accepted the offer during her March 1, 90-minute meeting with the Argentine President in Buenos Aires, which was not originally scheduled on her four-country tour of Central and South America.
The Malvinas—or Falklands as they are called in the United Kingdom—belonged to Argentina until 1833, when Britain illegally seized them. Since then, London has proclaimed itself the colonial master of the islands, and refused to have any discussion with Argentina on their sovereignty. When Argentina retook the islands by force on April 2, 1982, the British, backed by NATO, launched a brutal war against the South American country, to punish it for defying London's imperial dictates.
Since the U.S. allied with Britain in that colonial war, turning its back on both the Monroe Doctrine and the 1947 Rio Treaty, which provides for a collective defense of all signator nations, of which the U.S. was one, London assumed it needn't worry about Washington's support for its sovereignty claim. The only prominent American voice that, at the time, backed the historical U.S. position that the Malvinas belong to Argentina, and that the British should stop meddling in the Americas, was that of Lyndon LaRouche.
Hence, the fireworks when Clinton stated in Buenos Aires that the U.S. maintained neutrality on the sovereignty issue, and stood ready to facilitate Great Britain and Argentina "talking to each other"—something London refuses to do. The Times of London, the Daily Telegraph, and London Economist, among others, went ballistic, not only over what Clinton said in Buenos Aires, but also over remarks by Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Phillip J. Crowley, who twice, during a Feb. 25 State Department briefing, used the dreaded word "Malvinas" to refer to the islands, in replying to hostile questioning from a British journalist.
The U.S. ignored British "sensibilities" on this issue, fumed the London press, claiming that the U.S. was trampling on the U.S.-U.K. "special relationship."
A Community of Principle
While the British Empire never tolerates displays of sovereignty or independence from nations it considers its inferiors, the hysterical screams coming from London reflect more than just imperial displeasure.
Why? The global financial system is in the terminal phase of collapse, and anything less than the global Glass-Steagall plan proposed by Lyndon LaRouche will doom the planet to a hellish existence for generations to come.
London knows this. It also knows that the early demise of its puppet, the wildly unpopular President "Nero" Obama, is very likely.
As LaRouche explained in his March 11 interview with Argentina's Radio Splendid (see below), the minute Obama were to disappear from the scene, and the world set on a path of real economic development, the dynamics in the Americas would change dramatically. More favorable conditions would free the United States to move toward creating the community of principle that John Quincy Adams envisioned for the hemisphere, instead of acting like "a cock boat in the wake of a British man-of-war," which has largely characterized the U.S. approach to the region, since the demise of Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy.
An "easy solidarity" would develop between the United States and Argentina," LaRouche said, because "we, in the Americas, have esentially an historic interest in the independence of the Americas as a continental matter. And we have to work to associate ourselves together, as a unit, to defend ourselves against this problem that's coming from Britain."
Clinton was "representing the traditional, official understanding of the international law," LaRouche stated. At the time of the 1982 war, "the Malvinas was recognized by the United States as being legally the territory of what is called today Argentina."
A Presidential System
But it isn't just Clinton's recent actions that have provoked London's rage and fear. Just two days after her meeting with the Secretary, in a March 3 speech before a group of agricultural producers and businesmen, President Fernández pointedly reminded her political enemies that Argentina is based on the U.S. Presidential system, not British parliamentarianism. This is one of the reasons the British want to dump Fernández, before next year's Presidential elections.
"I know," she said, "that the Argentine Republic has a Presidential system ... that we have copied exactly from the Constitution of the United States." Those who wish for a parliamentary system in which a prime minister or other leaders can be easily removed, should remember that, in Argentina, "there is no co-government with the opposition. This is not a parliamentary system."
In this same speech, the President, who has also come under attack by London-centered financier interests and their local hangers-on, charged that there are "obvious attempts" to overthrow the government "by certain national sectors." While failing to note that these sectors are steered internationally by the British Empire, she charged that the opposition has apparently been able to "rent" judges to issue court orders to block her attempt to put Central Bank reserves under government control, and to use them to meet foreign debt obligations.
Fernández warned that it is those who advocate a parliamentary system who are trying to force her government to either default on its debt obligations, or savagely slash productive government spending, in order to make those debt payments. These, she said, are the very same factions that indebted the country in the 1980s and 1990s, and who now turn around to try to stop her from paying those debts using Central Bank reserves.
"I want them to tell me how," she said, "paying the way they propose, we are going to be able to keep paying retirees their two increases per year, how we will be able to keep paying family benefits, how we will be able to continue with an infrastructure plan like the one we are announcing today."
What About the Debt?
According to the March 10 London Times, the British Foreign Office has already issued three complaints, in phone calls and e-mails to the State Department—tantamount to a formal protest—to "restate Britain's position on sovereignty over the islands, and seek clarification of the U.S. position," after Crowley referred to the islands as the "Malvinas."
Crowley's use of the unmentionable "M" word caused "consternation" among British officials, sputtered the Telegraph's blogger Nile Gardiner on March 2, adding, on March 10, that Clinton's acceptance of Fernández's invitation to serve as mediator was a "strategic error in judgement by Washington, and yet another demonstration of a poorly conceived foreign policy doctrine that attaches little importance to preserving friendships and alliances, while currying favor with anti-American regimes."
But, it's instructive that, in all its ravings, London made no mention of what Clinton said on March 1, about Argentina's foreign debt. London-centered financier interests have hammered away at Fernandéz for months, deploying their predatory vulture funds to seize Argentine assets in the U.S., to satisfy their fraudulent claims stemming from the 2001 debt default, while shrieking that Fernández has no right to pay debt using reserves at the "autonomous" Central Bank.
Asked by a reporter to comment on the President's plan to use the reserves to pay foreign debt, Clinton replied,
I think that Argentina has made a tremendous amount of progress in paying down its debt. And the President and I were talking about the progress, which is very dramatic, just in the last several years. And I confessed to her that so far as I know, based on the figures, Argentina's debt-to-GDP ratio is a lower percentage now than the United States debt-to-GDP ratio. So however Argentina is doing it, it's working.
This provoked peals of laughter from the press corps that no doubt could be heard all the way to London.
