Jeffrey Steinberg
U.S.-India Ties:
Restore The Westphalia Principle
| Here is an edited transcript of the remarks of EIR Editorial Board member Jeffrey Steinberg to the Forum on Strategic and Security Studies, New Delhi, Dec. 3, 2008. Subheads have been added. |
Moderator: I will now go on to Mr. Jeffrey Steinberg on the military relationship between India and his home. I would request that you reflect on how you see the current case of extreme radicalization of Islam....
 EIRNS/Richard Magraw Jeffrey Steinberg (right) adddressed a seminar in New Delhi Dec. 2, of the FSSS, on the military-strategic relations b etween the United states and India. |
Jeffrey Steinberg: Thank you. Since Mr. LaRouche made the point earlier about the critical importance of intelligence, and proper intelligence evaluations of the situation, I think the important starting point is to review what’s widely recognized, but poorly understood, about what happened in the United States over the course of the last decade. Because, unless it’s understood from the vantage point of this larger issue of the British strategic intent globally, then even the experience that we went through will not produce a proper understanding of what actually happened, and we’ll be doomed to continue further along what Mr. LaRouche defined as Plan B, which is a global disaster.
I go back to the Spring of 1999, as a useful reference point, because, during that time, you had the 50th anniversary celebration of NATO taking place, against the backdrop of the Balkan War, which was, in a certain sense, one of the initial wars of what Tony Blair, at that time, described as the “emergence of a post-Westphalian system.” Blair gave a famous speech in Chicago, during the course of that NATO summit, in, I believe, it was April 1999, in which he said: The world is now going into a dramatic phase-shift in which the Westphalian period has ended, and we’re now going to post-Westphalia. Not surprisingly, in the exact same time-frame, Henry Kissinger came out with a book on a discussion of future foreign policy, and he used the exact same formulation: “We’re entering a post-Westphalia world.”
Now, what that meant, concretely, was, number one, the end of the nation-state system as the primary form of international relations. It had been already badly compromised, but it had been the conceptual framework of world affairs, particularly in the Trans-Atlantic, extended European civilization, since 1648, when the period of 150 years of religious and other kinds of warfare in Europe, ended with the Treaty of Westphalia: that both accepted the principle of sovereign nation-states, and the idea of the “benefit of the other”; that the way to deal with foreign policy among nations, is to put the legitimate interests of other nations first, as a way of understanding and setting up a framework for cooperation. So, what Blair, and Kissinger, and others laid out at that point, was the intent to destroy the nation-state system, and to, at the same time, embark on a revival of the kind of status of perpetual warfare, that had characterized the 150 years before Westphalia.
Coup d’Etat: The Clinton Impeachment
Now, at that time, in 1999, there was already in effect a political coup d’état carried out in the United States, which was the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, which was run, in part, as an inside job, within the Clinton Administration itself. Al Gore played a dominant role, with people like Sen. Joe Lieberman, in trying to force President Clinton’s resignation in the Summer and Fall of 1998: Why? Because Clinton and Treasury Secretary Rubin, at that point, were moving in a direction defined by Mr. LaRouche, to go for a New Bretton Woods system along the lines that Mr. LaRouche laid out earlier today.
And there was a intervention at that point that we made organizationally—Mrs. LaRouche played a leading role in that—to save the Presidency of Bill Clinton. And, to a certain extent we succeeded in that. The impeachment was nominally defeated, but Clinton was rendered pretty much powerless for the last 18 months of his Presidency. And so, you had already, the beginnings of the phase-shift with the Balkan War, and other things, including the escalation on Iraq, with Operation Desert Fox at the end of 1998 or ’99; Gore replaced Clinton in the famous APEC summit meeting in Malaysia, and provoked a major fight with Prime Minister Mahathir. So we were already in a phase-shift.
By the time we got to the 2000 elections, this British Fabian apparatus had the Presidency locked up. They had Al Gore on the Democratic side, who was already a well-known figure presenting British policy within the United States, going back to his embrace of Prince Charles and Prince Philip around a radical Malthusian anti-science agenda. The alternative was Bush. And one of the mistakes that people tended to make, as the policy of George W. Bush played out, and became an absolute disaster on every front, is that there was a false nostalgia about the “good old days of Bush, Sr.”
Well, in point of fact, all of the policies of [George W.] Bush 43 Administration, were laid out in seed crystal during [George H.W.] Bush 41. And if you go back, again, to the family history, and recall that the grandfather of the current President, the father of Bush 41, was prosecuted by the United States government in the 1940s, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, for collaboration with the Nazis: Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the current President, had, along with Brown Brothers Harriman, provided the critical funds to save the Nazi Party after its defeat in the 1932 election, and later were deeply implicated in major Nazi financing, even after Pearl Harbor, to the point that the U.S. Congress conducted investigations, and under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the assets of the Bush family were confiscated.
So this is not an American family. This is a family that was part of the Anglo-Dutch-American apparatus, going back to the World War II period, in precisely the terms that Mr. LaRouche laid out afterwards.
So, by the time of the 2000 elections, regardless of whether Bush or Gore won the election, the net effect was going to be that the British were going to have the United States available as an instrument for carrying out this transformation to a “post-Westphalian” policy. The intention of the wars that the United States got into during the Bush 43 period was never to win the wars. The intention was to lose them, and to, in the course of losing those wars, destroy the United States as both a sovereign republic, and a military and industrial capability. The idea was to take an already weakened United States, and put it through the absolute ringer of self-destruction. And to do it a way in which the architects of it would never really be clearly identified. Because, by and large, around the world today, there is a poor understanding of the issue of the continuing existence of this British Empire, in the form of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal apparatus.
Blair and Bush
Now, the British government is always a cats-paw for this Anglo-Dutch, and now extended Anglo-Dutch/Anglo-American, capability: And we saw the relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush play out in a number of different ways. If you go back and actually do a serious chronology of events leading up to the invasion of Iraq, you see that it was a British intelligence-directed policy, to the point that when Bush gave his speech in January 2002, which heralded the advent of the war—his famous State of the Union speech, in which he cited the British dossiers on the Iraq nuclear weapons program, the obtaining of [uranium] yellowcake from Africa, all of this: It was a British intelligence-directed flow into the Bush Administration, that was repeatedly countered by elements of U.S. intelligence that were basically ignored, or outright suppressed by the White House.
Now, the key figure of continuity from Bush 41 to Bush 43, was Dick Cheney, the Vice President under the now-ending Bush Administration, who, remember, had been Secretary of Defense under Bush 41. And all the essential policies, implemented by Bush 43, were spelled out in detail during the Cheney period as Secretary of Defense [1989-93], including the doctrine of preventive war. And, there was a famous policy study, that was prepared for Cheney in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was prepared by Scooter Libby, by Paul Wolfowitz, and by Zalmay Khalilzad, and by Eric Edelman, who’s sort of the fourth person in the policy shop, under Cheney. What they basically said, is that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has emerged as the sole global superpower, and American policy is to perpetuate that role as the only global military power for as long as possible; and therefore, the U.S. should entertain, not preemptive war, but preventive war. In other words, not war because an enemy is about to strike, and you’ve got actionable intelligence to confirm that that’s going to happen; but, take preemptive action against a potential problem that may not emerge for 20 years.
So, those policies were not ready to be adopted at that point, or they were shot down. There were people inside the Bush Administration who were voices of opposition to that. But the fundamental thing is that those policies were clearly laid out in intent, and were then adopted and implemented, with a pivotal role by Cheney, working out of the White House as the real, de facto President.
The Cheney Cabal in the White House
Now, we know a good deal about Cheney, and we know that he’s not that bright. But he has brains nearby, in the form of his wife, who is virtually a card-carrying member of the British Fabian Society. I could go into the details of that, but the point is simply that, Cheney, through his wife Lynne Cheney, has always had a policy outlook, that has been oriented towards a British model.
And so, Cheney gathered around him a number of people, who served as his very quiet kitchen cabinet for shaping all of the national security policies of the Bush Administration. Aside from his wife, the other two key people, were Bernard Lewis, who was in a virtual permanent residence at the Vice President’s house for all of the key policy deliberations; and secondly, Henry Kissinger. And here’s where you get into hard evidence of a major British presence, dominating the policy-shaping out of the Bush-Cheney White House.
Bernard Lewis was sent over here to the United States from London, in 1973, at exactly the time Mr. LaRouche identified that the United States was losing sovereign control over its own currency through the end of Bretton Woods, and when you had the beginnings of the “petrodollar policy,” under the Oil Hoax of 1973. That’s precisely the moment that Lewis arrived. And when we get into this discussion of the promulgation of this sort of “Islamic policy,” you have to identify the pivotal role of Bernard Lewis, who came out of the old Arab Bureau during World War II, was a leading figure in British intelligence, and has been an anchor of the anti-American British policy, that’s been implemented through various American Presidencies, since that point. This covers the period when Zbigniew Brzezinski was National Security Advisor, and Bernard Lewis was his key policy advisor on the “Arc of Crisis” strategy: to use Islamic fundamentalist insurgencies, at that point, against Brzezinski’s favorite target, the Soviet Union. And then, of course, it was Brzezinski and Bernard Lewis who orchestrated the whole mujahideen war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, that got us into many of the Afghan problems we’re dealing with today.
Kissinger had gained a certain notoriety, thanks to our efforts in 1982, when he went over to Britain and spoke at Chatham House, at a conference commemorating the 200th anniversary of the founding of the British Foreign Office. And in the speech that he delivered there on May 10, 1982, Kissinger basically said, “I’ve always been a British agent.” He said it in virtually those direct terms: He said, I worked off of speeches and drafts that were provided by the British Foreign Office, because in the fight between Churchill and Roosevelt, I was always with Churchill, never with Roosevelt.”
So: You’ve had these kinds of influences, that came into the greatest of dominance, when Bush 43 came into the Presidency.
What we’re dealing with, now, is an eight-year period, in which U.S. policy has actually been dominated—not even through smoke screens and mirrors, but through hands-on capabilities, that have been precisely of this post-Westphalian, British Fabian apparatus, with case officers literally implanted in key positions in the White House, particularly surrounding Vice President Cheney.
The Anti-Cheney Resistance
Now, there were many, very competent American intelligence and military and diplomatic people, who saw the handwriting on the wall, beginning in August of 2002, when the drumbeat began with a famous speech that Cheney gave at the Veterans of Foreign Wars. At that point, all of the top, patriotic American military and intelligence people knew perfectly well, that we were going to go into Iraq, and that all of the intelligence would be faked. I attended a conference in September 2002, that was given by Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been CENTCOM commander. And he got up, and he very bluntly said [paraphrase]: “I will tell you exactly what’s about to happen. Cheney’s speech signifies that the United States will invade Iraq. And the invasion will go swimmingly well during the hard military phase. We’ll sweep through Iraq; we’ll take the country over; it’ll be over in a matter of weeks or months at the most. And then, we will be bogged down, and we will be destroyed. Because the United States military is not prepared to deal with the kind of asymmetric warfare that we’ll be confronted with. And we will be destroyed on the plains of Iraq.”
It was that blunt, and that was a general consensus among a large number of retired American diplomats, intelligence officers, and military personnel. They talked about it openly; we exchanged views with them, consistently throughout. And in August of 2002, Mr. LaRouche called for Cheney’s impeachment. Because he understood at that point that nothing short of the removal of Cheney would break the momentum toward that disastrous war.
Now, earlier, in January 2001, Mr. LaRouche had delivered testimony before the Senate, written testimony opposing the confirmation of John Ashcroft as Attorney General. And, at that time, what LaRouche said is: I see the shape of this administration coming into being—it was before the inauguration had even occurred, but we already knew Cheney, we knew Bush, we saw the other people who were being brought into the team, and Ashcroft was emblematic of that.
LaRouche’s Warning: 9/11
And what LaRouche said, is that there will be a strategic, asymmetric warfare attack against the United States: Because this is an administration that will look for a Reichstag Fire incident in order to basically go for dictatorship. They have no intrinsic capability of governing, but we know from the Cheney experience back during the earlier Bush Administration what their orientation will be.
And so, this was nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks. We had no crystal ball indication of that particular attack by al-Qaeda, which is really a kind of a symbol of the Anglo-Saudi intelligence operations that have been built up since the middle of the 1980s, under the initial Al Yamamah deal between Margaret Thatcher and Prince Bandar; which created a massive slush fund—unregulated, offshore—for financing asymmetric warfare operations, and it included the bankrolling, throughout the late ’80s, into the ’90s, of the Afghan mujahideen that later emerged in the form of the various Islamic asymmetric capabilities, under largely British, with Saudi assistance, control.
So, that attack, in September of 2001, set the stage for all that followed with the Bush Administration. I can tell you, that anybody with any measure of competence in foreign policy, in national security, or in military affairs, with maybe one or two exceptions of people who were ultimately broken by the process, were excluded from any input, whatsoever, into the Bush-Cheney Presidency, for particularly, the first four years, and then going beyond that. What you began to see happening in the recent period, was an institutional countermove, a containment operation directed against the continuation of the Cheney policies under the Bush Administration. There was an enormous fight inside the national security apparatus, to prevent a war against Iran, that would have basically blown up the planet already. And there were two or three occasions where we were on the verge of an attack against Iran, that would have been devastating, even beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Intention Is To Destroy the U.S.
So, where do we stand now, in terms of a realistic assessment of where the United States stands economically and militarily?
Hopefully, we will get through the next six or eight weeks, whatever the time is, between now and Jan. 20, without that Iran fiasco or some other disaster taking place. And it would be a mistake to presume that it’s all over. There are things that could happen between now and then, which we maintain an enormous degree of vigilance to make sure don’t happen, and a lot of other people are involved in the same thing. About the first serious element of a kind of a countercoup, by actual U.S. institutional forces, was the replacement of Rumsfeld with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. And Gates’s main purpose, since coming in as Secretary of Defense, has been to prevent the Iran attack from happening. And you could say, at least as of this moment, that that is the most significant achievement that he’s made: being a counterforce against the Cheney efforts inside the Administration to convince President Bush, in his infinite lack of intelligence, even at this late date, to go with an attack on Iran—even though there are over 200,000 American hostages sitting next door in Iraq.
So, the state of our U.S. military is completely broken. And therefore, the issue of a surge in Afghanistan, largely based on a drawdown of American forces in Iraq, doesn’t cut it. The U.S. military, starting with the Army, extending to the Marine Corps, and now, increasingly extending into the Navy, and the Air Force, is absolutely broken. In order to even staff the current level of operations in Afghanistan, you have Navy commanders and Air Force squadron commanders manning American lieutenant colonel army billets, inside Afghanistan. That’s how shattered the force structure of the U.S. military is. The noncom officers who represent the backbone, especially of the Army, are retiring from the military in droves, because they don’t want to be part of what they perceive as a permanent, imperial military force, doomed to lose one war after another.
It’s not even an issue of being able to win any of these wars. The intention of Cheney and Company and their British controllers, the Bernard Lewises and the people higher up than that, was never for the United States to succeed: The intention was always for the United States to fail. And if you look at the histories of Iraq and Afghanistan, with any kind of understanding, you know that these are two areas, where no foreign power has ever succeeded in conquest. Alexander the Great failed in Afghanistan, and George Bush is no Alexander the Great.
So these were wars that were never intended to be victorious. The whole idea that we went into Iraq, in order to conquer Iraq and control the oil supplies, was always a fraud. Because the intention was never for the U.S. to win. The intention was for the U.S. to lose: And by so doing, to destroy the United States, because if the U.S. is destroyed, then you have entered a post-Westphalian world.
Plan A or Plan B?
Now, there’s been a rearguard effort to defeat this process, but by and large, Mr. LaRouche’s leading allies, both internally in the United States, and around the globe, in that fight, do not have a proper intelligence assessment of what they’re up against. And so, that’s a dangerous weakness. I think that’s one of the reasons why Mr. LaRouche said, there’s Plan A, but there’s also Plan B, and we can be optimistic, but also realistic, that we obviously are going to do everything in our power, to achieve Plan A. But the vulnerability is a still-continuing failure to understand what this Anglo-Dutch Venetian system represents, and the idea that there are people at the higher levels of that system, who would rather trigger a period of global chaos, that lasts for several generations, than lose their grip on financial and political power.
So, we have a clear understanding of what we’re up against, and I can assure you, that if Plan A goes into force, there are people who are eminently qualified to play a role within these U.S. institutions in making that happen. These are people who are deeply frustrated, because they were blackballed from any role whatsoever, for the past eight years. It’s not as if the United States has suddenly lost any sense of competence in diplomatic and military affairs: It’s that anybody with any degree of competence was excluded from the process. A very good friend of ours, who was a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has described this process of the last eight years, as “America perfecting a diplomacy-free foreign policy.” We didn’t do diplomacy, so we had no need for diplomats. Because the diplomats would have delivered messages to the White House that they were unwilling or incapable of hearing.
So there’s a depth of people still around, who have been deeply frustrated to see the destruction of the United States, both the economy, and our standing in the world, and our military and national security structures, over the last eight years, who are prepared to come back into service, if we win this fight, over, as Mr. LaRouche said: January-February is going to be the defining time-frame on that. At the same time, it’s going to be the defining time-frame on bringing into play the policy on dealing with this collapse of the entire global financial system.
So there’s been an element of intent, going all the way back to Blair’s announcement in 1999, that the intent of the British faction was to inaugurate a post-Westphalian world. We’ve been largely living in that for the last eight years. And now the question is, can we actually stop that process and reverse it? And go back to a policy based on cooperation among sovereign nation-states; in other words, restore the Westphalian principle?
So, I think that carries with it, all of the implications for U.S.-Indian military and diplomatic relations. It all depends on whether we’re in Plan A, or Plan B, in Washington, as of Jan. 20.
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