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EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY OCTOBER 21, 2022

Beyond Hyperbole and Parody: Can We Stop the Failed Imperial State of Perfidious Albion from Launching Thermonuclear War?

Oct. 20, 2022 (EIRNS)—“That Was The Week That Was” was the title of an early-1960s British comedy show and political satire, part of that era’s “British Invasion” cultural counter-offensive against the United States. Without her knowledge, the here-and-gone British Prime Minister, Liz “Nuke ’Em” Truss was involuntarily and inexorably maneuvered and cast in a one-episode “reality show” remake of that series in the past seven days. British broadcaster Piers Morgan provided an autopsy on the short-lived “Truss Turn,” saying, “it is literally impossible to exaggerate the scale of the bedlam that this government has unleashed on our country in the last six weeks ... these useless clowns have basically ravaged our country.”

So, faced with the threat of Truss’s energetic stupidity to the imperial state, and the need to shift policy in the wake of the failure of “financial nuclear war” against Russia and China, and the threat of the financial collapse of the City of London itself, the wheels of the machinery of “parliamentary democracy” in Great Britain, the country without a written constitution, began to turn. In the way often depicted in another, 1980s British series, “Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister,” British “governance” often involves a process of despotic power-shifting and manipulation designed to be undetectable to the victim, including the erstwhile “head of government.” A “self-coup” can even occur “right out in the open,” as this one has, with a Seneca-like commentary seasoned by what some sadists term “the British sense of humor.” Referring, two days ago, to the fact that the biography of Liz Truss, Out of the Blue, was due to soon be released, Labour Party Leader Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, said, “A book is being written about the Prime Minister’s time in office. Apparently it’s going to be out by Christmas. Is that the release date or the title?”

Liz Truss who had declared her readiness to torch the entire human race in a thermonuclear holocaust for the greater glory of the Anglosphere, did not realize that she was “the wicker woman”—the one that was to be torched. Truss, who managed to alienate first, her opponents, and then her allies in record time, has earned the distinction of being the fastest-ever-dismissed prime minister in history. She takes her place in the pantheon of the Madeleine Albright school of imperial diplomacy, whose “Olympian” members have no qualms about saying things like this:

Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima.... And, you know, is the price worth it?

Madeleine Albright: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Truss has made it clear that she thought “the price of thermonuclear war” was worth it, and that “I think it’s an important duty of the Prime Minister and I’m ready to do that.” The dismissal of Truss solves nothing for Britain in the realms of financial and economic collapse, social unrest, public health threats, or the military-strategic debacle unfolding in Ukraine. It does, however, indicate how the principle of Nemesis can suddenly manifest itself as “the noose in the house of the hanged.”

During this 60th anniversary of the “Thirteen Days” of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16-29, 1962), Scott Ritter, writing in Consortium News after an appearance on an American radio show with Independent candidate for New York’s U.S. Senate seat Diane Sare, pointed out that President Joe “Biden got it all wrong” when talking about the potential for nuclear conflict. “The risk isn’t that Russia would start a pre-emptive nuclear war over Ukraine,” Ritter warned. “The risk is that America would.” This, Ritter argues, stems from the doctrine of preventive war adopted by the Cheney/G.W. Bush administration in 2002. Despite Biden’s expressed intentions to assert that “ ‘the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal should be to deter—and, if necessary, retaliate against—a nuclear attack,’ ” no such change in policy has been adopted, and the opposite, previous policy prevails.  Twenty years ago, Oct. 7, 2002, one year after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and just months before the March 2003 war on Iraq, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated: “In the war on terror, the Bush administration has enunciated the Bush Doctrine, which, among other things, affirms the legitimacy of an American preventive strike and emphasizes the notion that ‘If you are not with us, you are against us.’ U.S. foreign policy, therefore, is no longer just about the Truman Doctrine (containment) or about the Reagan Doctrine (supporting freedom fighters), but about shedding the multilateralism favored by the Clinton administration and pursuing a more active, unilateral approach.” It was in this period that the “Prompt Global Strike” policy of a first-strike thermonuclear attack against Russia, China, etc. was adopted by the United States—not later, as some might suggest.

According to the February 2007, “Report to Congress Global Strike Plan” from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Section 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (Public Law 108-136) provides that the Secretary of Defense shall establish an integrated plan for developing, deploying, and sustaining a prompt global strike capability in the Armed Forces, to be updated annually through 2006. The first Global Strike Report to Congress was a classified document submitted in June 2004.” This means that the policy for a thermonuclear first strike was being devised and drafted during 2003, when the United States fought a preventive war against Saddam Hussein on a premise that the Cheney/Bush administration knew to be false—the “weapons of mass destruction” fraud.

In the present, devolving strategic-tactical situation, with no change in American posture, Ritter contends that “nuclear weapons are but another tool in the military’s toolbox, to be used as and when needed, including occasions where the destruction of battlefield targets for the simple purpose of gaining an operational advantage is the objective.”

There are serious reasons, therefore, to be highly concerned about the recent unanimous “sense of the United States Senate” resolution which declares that “Russia is a terrorist state.” After its passage, Senator Lindsey Graham said to the Biden administration: “You have the complete unanimous support of the United States Senate to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. Do it.” If one looks at the original motivation for the Bush Doctrine—protecting the United Staters against a terrorist attack—now consider, in the context of the present “slouching towards Armageddon” of NATO and the Anglosphere, the actual meaning of that resolution being followed. Look at it from the vantage point of Russia or China’s militaries: How would you now read Madeleine Albright protégé Condoleezza Rice’s famous 2002 remark, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” in the context of the “sense of the U.S. Senate” resolution? Would you consider that there was indeed an increasing, if not an imminent danger to you, of thermonuclear war being initiated by the United States?

This should make it clear—perhaps terrifyingly clear—why the campaign of LaRouche Independent Diane Sare for the United States Senate takes on such an immediate importance. One talk show, referring to Sare, said a few days ago,

“Somebody was talking about the woman running against Chuck Schumer, Diane Sare. I gotta tell ya—She’s running independent—.... I would like her to come on. I’d love to talk to her! On her platform she wants to crush the global fascist digital dictatorship. YES! Come on! I’m on board with that. She says ‘How is it that Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey are allowed to deny the President of the United States, Donald Trump, a platform to address the American People? Many leaders from around the world are shocked that this extreme form of censorship is occurring in the United States, including Mexican President López Obrador, whom you can watch here.’ And they have clips of it. I’m interested in this candidate, and thanks for bringing it to my attention.”

Diane Sare may well be being excluded from any face-to-face confrontation with the 42-years-in-the Senate political establishment fixture Schumer, precisely so that a public discussion on the actual, imminent danger of thermonuclear war cannot be heard anywhere in America. With less than three weeks before the election, and perhaps days away from something momentous occurring in the field of war, what would happen, internationally, if that wall of containment were breached? The actions of a few, as seen in recent days, can catalyze the many, for good or ill.

One thing is certain—the old order is gone, to be replaced by something else. Its loudest and most boorish of servants will be “gone in 60 seconds” once ideology meets the reality of physical economy. The LaRouche Organization has been prepared for this moment. The LaRouche movement operates from the realization that, so far as geopolitics is concerned, “that was the world that was.” For a new, better world to be realized, it will take supplanting this clear and present danger with a new paradigm, the conception that motivates the upcoming October 27 conference of the Schiller Institute: “For World Peace: Stop the Danger of Nuclear War.” This will be the Second Seminar of Current and Former Elected Officials of the World. The conference, organized by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is the best possible way to render geopolitics, and the wars that it demands “impotent and obsolete,” and we invite you to join that effort.

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