Sept. 3—On August 31, just hours after the last U.S. plane left the Karzai International Airport in Kabul in keeping with President Biden’s withdrawal deadline, he defended that decision in an address to the American people. “The decision about Afghanistan,” the President said, “is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Biden’s statement, if followed through, represents what the Schiller Institute’s President Helga Zepp-LaRouche called a “phase change in international politics.” Since the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989-91, U.S. policy has been shaped by a triumphalism predicated on the belief that America was now the world’s only superpower.Those nations which refused to surrender their sovereignty to the U.S.-led post-Cold War order were subjected to crippling sanctions and the denial of credit by international financial institutions. Acting with a hubris shaped by the belief that, in a unipolar world, Americacould impose its will as it pleased, American officials, urged on by the British, and with backing by their NATO allies, launched repeated regime-change wars against those who rejected the arbitrary rules defending the “western values” of the so-called Rules-Based Order (RBO). It was in defense of this order that the “endless wars” were launched, including the 20-year war in Afghanistan which ended this week. In a separate comment on the end of the war, Secretary of State Blinken, who routinely hoists the flag of the RBO everywhere he goes, stated on August 30, “The military mission is over. The diplomatic mission has begun.” Though he was speaking about the removal of U.S. officials from Afghanistan, it seems that, in the context of Biden’s speech the next day, he could have been speaking about the end of a foreign policy in which launching destructive wars had replaced diplomacy. Whether this is true is not yet determined. Both Biden and Blinken continue to justify disengagement from the “small wars” in Southwest Asia as a necessary precondition to concentrate on the alleged threat from Russia and China, especially to fulfill the delayed “Pivot to Asia” initiated under President Obama. Starting a New Era? The “end of an era” theme has been seized upon, by many who are critical of Biden for following through with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, to insist that on the contrary, the era must {not} end, America must {continue} deploying its military power to counter the alleged “malign, authoritarian intent” of Russia and China. Ironically, Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on the slogan of ending the “endless wars”; who negotiated the deal with the Taliban signed in February 2020 setting the timetable for withdrawal; and then tried unsuccessfully to withdraw U.S. troops; has joined with his own most outspoken critics in attacking Biden, calling on him to “resign in disgrace.”War hawks among the anti-Trump crowd, such as leading neocons William Kristol and Rep. Liz Cheney, have called for Biden’s resignation or impeachment. A common theme of those in the Military- Industrial Complex, who profited outrageously from the wars, and who are already nostalgic for the “forever wars,” is that Biden’s action means the United States cannot be trusted to stand up for “western values” in the future. This line has been pushed especially hard by key figures from the United Kingdom. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who should face a war crimes tribunal for his role in launching the wars in southwest Asia, attacked not only Biden but Trump, and the American public, saying that the decision was made “in obedience to an imbecilic slogan about ending ‘the forever wars.’”Going a step further was British Defense Minister Ben Wallace, taunting America by saying it is no longer a “superpower.” A superpower, he declared, “that is also not prepared to stick at something, isn’t probably a superpower either. It is certainly not a global force, it’s just a big power.” The present preoccupation of the War Hawks and their sponsors from what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the “Military-Industrial-Congress-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank Complex” (MICIMATT) is advancing a military counterweight to Russia and China. This includes the push for NATO expansion, to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia in NATO; escalating the Color Revolution against Belarus; establishing a “Pacific NATO” to defend Taiwan and counter China in the South China Sea; continuing the regime-change drive against Syria with Caesar Sanctions and occupation of territory; continuing the war in Yemen; etc. Given the now-acknowledged failure of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, such a bold global agenda would be laughable, except that there are many indications of serious intent including statements in the last days by both Biden and Blinken on Ukraine and China.Zepp-LaRouche insists that this agenda, based on British geopolitics, must be ended now. In posing the question, “What’s next?” she has put the Schiller Institute (SI) in the forefront of the mobilization for an alternative that represents a decisive break with the British geopolitical doctrine behind these wars. She has campaigned relentlessly for a shift to peaceful cooperation for economic development. In two recent SI conferences, one before and one after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, a panel of experts was convened to discuss a development perspective, predicated on a mobilization of Afghanistan’s neighbors to support the extension of China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative into Afghanistan and Southwest Asia, with corridors of development, as the key to peace for the long-suffering war-torn region.*1
By Helga Zepp-LaRouchePDF of this statement The catastrophic failure of NATO in Afghanistan, and with it the policy of 20 years of wars of intervention, couldn’t be more dramatic. It is not only that the war was lost; it is paradigmatic for the whole spectrum of misconceptions of the Western liberal system. It is therefore to be welcomed when President Biden announces that the withdrawal from Afghanistan marks the end of the entire era of the use of American military power with the aim of “remaking” other countries. But if this reorientation only means that we will no longer busy ourselves out in the boondocks with the “endless wars,” but instead will concentrate all forces on the “new challenges”—namely the confrontation with Russia and China—then the lesson from this shameful disaster has not been learned and we are embarking on an even worse catastrophe. But the wound is still fresh, the shock of defeat has shaken the whole Western world and the chance exists for a completely new approach.A Brown University project to ascertain the costs of U.S. wars since September 11th, for which we are about to mark the 20th anniversary, has calculated that the total costs for the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc. are $8 trillion and at least a million people have lost their lives. This breaks down to $2.3 trillion for the Afghanistan war, $2.1 trillion for the Iraq/Syria war zone, $355 billion for military operations in Libya, Somalia, etc., $1.1 trillion for Homeland Security programs, and $2.2 trillion for the upcoming care of U.S. veterans who were deployed in these wars, a large number of whom suffer from secondary physical and mental illnesses. At least 15,000 U.S. military personnel and roughly the same number of international NATO troops were killed. Around 70 million people are refugees from these wars. Hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed, an unknown number of civilians perished, and the majority of the troops were essentially occupied with protecting themselves in a hostile environment. They had just as little idea of those people and their culture at the beginning of the 20 years, as at the end of it, as was known to the public no later than with the publication of the Afghanistan Papers in 2019. The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is appalling. World Food Program Director David Beasley, who visited Afghanistan last week in August, announced that 18 million Afghans are starving—more than half the population—and 4 million are at risk of starvation next winter without massive help. The WHO fears a medical disaster in view of the scarcely existing health system in the midst of the COVID pandemic, and only around 1 million people are vaccinated so far. Can the people of Western countries have any idea what kind of suffering the Afghan population has had to go through in the past 40 years of war, and must still endure at this point in time? In view of this almost unimaginable tragedy, it is downright absurd and deliberately misleading that in the context of the “endless wars” one still speaks of “nation-building.” What was built in Afghanistan when half the population is starving? If the U.S.A. and other NATO members had invested only 5% of their military spending in the real economic development of Afghanistan, this horrific debacle would never have occurred. Modern Health System and Agriculture So far it has not been apparent that there is any real rethinking in the United States or Europe. Because this would not mean merely that one is willing to “talk to the Taliban,” but that one is correcting the entire premise of the policies of the last 20 years. If Biden is serious about ending the entire era of the wars of intervention, then U.S. troops must finally comply with the vote of the Iraqi Parliament, which demanded their withdrawal in January 2020. Then the murderous Caesar Act sanctions of the U.S.A. against Syria must be ended immediately, which to this day contribute to holding over 90% of the population to a standard of living below the poverty line. Beyond that, especially during a pandemic, we must end the policy of sanctions against all countries; they have no UN mandate, and they only strike at the poorest sections of the population and often kill them. What the U.S.A. and the European nations have to do now, if they ever want to regain credibility with respect to “values” and “human rights,” is to offer real help to the Afghan government that is being formed, e.g. by building a modern health system. One of the things that is urgently needed now is a whole system of modern hospitals, in connection with a system for the training of doctors, medical professionals and a training program for young people who can help the population in all rural areas to familiarize themselves with the hygiene measures required in a pandemic. With the help of partnerships, such a system could be linked to medical centers in the United States and Europe, as is already in place with other countries in the developing sector. In view of the famine, in addition to the airlift that David Beasley of the WFP is setting up from Pakistan, which can bring food into Afghanistan, a comprehensive offer of agricultural support is needed urgently. If we are to stop the farmers from falling back to the cultivation of poppy plants for the production of opium out of sheer necessity, then the development of agriculture, integrated into the general economic structure, must be supported. With the agreement concluded with the Taliban in 2000, the former UN drug commissioner Pino Arlacchi demonstrated that the abolition of drug cultivation is possible and that the religious convictions of the Taliban can be met. Provided that the sovereignty of Afghanistan and the new government is absolutely respected, and it is guaranteed that such aid in building up agriculture is not mixed with a political agenda, various pilot projects based on the model of Jawaharlal Nehru’s green revolution could be started with the regions that are ready to do so. There are committed young and older farmers in the United States and Europe who would be willing to participate in such a peace mission to improve agricultural production in Afghanistan in such a way that the famine can be permanently eradicated. In view of the repeated droughts, such programs would of course have to go hand in hand with irrigation programs and general water management. An Aid Coordinator Who Is Trusted It must first and foremost be about helping the Afghan people in a gigantic emergency that they did not cause themselves, and this is only possible if a basis of trust is established with the new government, regardless of all ideological reservations. The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites therefore proposes that the U.S. and European governments choose the person to coordinate such an aid program, who has shown in the past that such a policy can work: namely, Pino Arlacchi. It would guarantee that Afghanistan’s sovereignty would be respected and that no attempt would be made to impose Western standards, since he has already won the Taliban’s trust in the past. Such a redefinition of policy towards Afghanistan naturally also means completely turning away from thinking in geopolitical categories, rejecting the idea of politics as a zero-sum game in which the rise of China and Asia are automatically understood as the decline of the West. With his visit to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the new head of government, Abdul Ghani Baradar, signaled that his government is counting on cooperation with China and the integration of Afghanistan into the New Silk Road. The Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, has proposed an international conference for the country’s economic development to discuss which projects must have absolute priority in order to overcome the emergency. If the West has learned anything from the millennium defeat in Afghanistan, then it must cooperate impartially with Russia, China, and neighboring countries in Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran and India in building not only Afghanistan, but all of Southwest Asia. The slogan “to end the endless wars,” which got Tony Blair so excited, is not imbecilic—what is imbecilic is the policy of colonial wars of intervention he proposed. This was not only moronic, but criminal and murderous, and has destroyed the lives of millions of people or plunged them into unspeakable suffering. The architects of this policy should be held accountable. But if the cycle of violence and revenge is to be overcome, then a new policy must be on the agenda: The new name for peace is development, as Pope Paul VI once said. Afghanistan is the one place where the United States and China can begin a form of cooperation that can be a baby step toward strategic cooperation putting humanity’s common goals in the foreground. Ultimately, its realization indicates the only way that the end of mankind in a nuclear Armageddon can be prevented. In any case, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer does not seem to have learned anything from the “severe defeat,” if all she can think of is the demand for “more military independence for the EU.” The “lack of skills” of which she speaks does not only refer to the failure of European resistance to the U.S.-driven withdrawal from Afghanistan. If the self-induced decline of the West is to end, we need an honest analysis of why the neo-colonial liberal social model has failed, and above all we need a renaissance of our humanistic and classical culture. Our attitude towards the construction in Afghanistan is the test case of whether we are able to do so.
The level of panic, and outright horror, being expressed by leading spokesmen for the British Empire, is unprecedented in modern times. Perhaps a review of the British press in October 1781, following Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, would find a similar public gnashing of teeth. Perhaps also in April 1865, when the Empire’s Confederate Army under Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Empire’s last great hope for the military destruction of the Union. Since then, the Empire has depended on subversion rather than military power. In the Great War, the British succeeded in dragging the racist, Anglophile Woodrow Wilson into saving them at the last moment, while in World War II Franklin Roosevelt joined the war only because the Frankenstein monster the City of London had created in Germany was an even greater danger—and he forced the British to accept an alliance with the Soviet Union and China, without which the war would possibly have been lost.Unfortunately, after the death of Roosevelt, and Harry Truman’s capitulation to the Empire and help to the European imperial powers in retaking their colonies, and especially after the successful assassination of Jack Kennedy, the City of London has systematically replaced the Hamiltonian American System of directed credit with the British System of free markets and deregulation of banking and industry, while also flooding the U.S. with their drugs and their Malthusian “environmentalist” delusions. Despite Lyndon LaRouche’s clear explication of this subversion, and his presentation of the steps necessary to return to the American System, his ideas were suppressed and he was slandered and persecuted, while America became the dumb giant to the British financial oligarchy, waging wars on behalf of the Empire in Indochina, Central Europe, and Southwest Asia. When Donald Trump appeared out of nowhere (or so the Empire’s minions believed), threatening to end the endless wars, be friends with Russia and China, reject the fake science of anthropogenic climate change, and rebuild American industry and infrastructure, the British control of the U.S. media, the intelligence community, and Wall Street left Trump impotent to do anything but fight the coup attempt led by MI6 and GCHQ. In the end, none of his promises were realized, and the Empire heaved a huge sigh of relief. But look what has happened now! The aging, stumbling Joe Biden has done what Donald Trump failed to do—end the endless war in Afghanistan, without listening to or even consulting John Bull. Biden acted on the basis of what Tony Blair called the “imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars,’” And, horror of horrors, the Empire is suddenly seeing the ghost of FDR drifting overhead, threatening to bring the World War II cooperation between the U.S., China, and Russia together again, to address their common aim to develop Afghanistan, to end the miserable backward conditions which foster terorism and drug production, and extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into Afghanistan as part of the New Silk Road. See below for the hysteria coming from the British today. Biden is not promoting this himself, at least not publicly, although representatives of his government have participated in international forums where these issues were put forward. But even the Empire senses that decisions in the U.S. are not always made by the President alone, but by what Lyndon LaRouche called the “institution of the presidency.” Just as that institution during the Trump Administration was dominated by the military-industrial complex and their Wall Street allies, so today the Afghanistan decision, and Biden’s capacity to stand up against the almost universal denunciation from the Congress, the media, and the military-industrial crowd, demonstrates a powerful resistance from the current institution of the presidency. As demonstrated in the last year-and-a-half of Schiller Institute conferences, leading scientists, political leaders, policy experts, retired military, health professionals, farmers, and more, from all over the world, including from Russia and China, have engaged in dialogue at the highest level on the urgent need for a new paradigm based on global “peace through development.” The Empire is not omnipotent. In fact, it is decadent and dying. It is capable of provoking chaos, even a nuclear war, but only if the people fail to live up to what Friedrich Schiller posed as the responsibility of all human beings to be “patriots of one’s nation and citizens of the world.” This is our moment.
It is time, in the context of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, to turn the attention of bamboozled Americans to the task of reacquainting our nation with the American System of physical economy, as expressed in the LaRouche Four Laws. Simultaneously, we must also cure the widespread addiction to self-destructive ideas and practices, the tragic effect caused by a genetic defect in today’s "entertainment culture."A rapid immersion in Classical art, particularly the tragedies of William Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, is the most economical means to cure our present compulsion to tragic factionalism in politics. The American System, on the contrary, emphasizes "the harmony of interests," not ethnic or class warfare. It insists on economic development as the basis for peace , and introduces a practice of self-government which is the opposite of the American military's British-style occupation policy in Afghanistan. As we move the world to joint collaboration for a world health platform, and with the Belt and Road initiative, so we must move the individual citizens away from tragedy to reason through Classical culture. Speaker: Harley Schlanger. A special tribute to actor and Ed Asner (1929-2021) will be featured.
The American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the entire 20-year military occupation there, are widely recognized as the worst disaster in NATO’s history. But have the lessons from his failure been learned?Shortly following the suicide bombing that killed a dozen U.S. troops and over 100 Afghans at the Kabul airport, President Biden announced to those responsible: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” While making such a statement (and using drones for revenge) was obviously far superior to extending the date of U.S. withdrawal, that such a statement would be considered politically necessary or expedient points to a deep and widespread sickness in the trans-Atlantic establishment. This sickness is seen in far more advanced form in Britain, whose institutions are frantically trying to assure themselves of their ability to continue to project force anywhere in the world, and to continue their endless war policies, with or without the United States. The sickness comes in a denial of the nature of the human species, a denial that looks towards a future of maintaining past dominance, rather than one that looks towards an era of new development, of growth, and of changing dynamics. Aeschylus captured this tension in his Oresteia trilogy, in which a series of revenge killings, including a demand for revenge in the form of the Furies—the Erinyes—is transformed, through the mediation of the goddess of wisdom Athena herself, to a concern for the future. The furious Erinyes become the Eumenides (the Gracious Ones), and serve as a constructive force for the future of Athens. The “forever war” policy that has come to characterize the trans-Atlantic approach since the murder of U.S. President Kennedy, against which Trump inveighed in his campaigns, and against which Biden took what could be a significant step with his Afghanistan withdrawal, must be replaced with a policy of peace through development. In the Eastern Economic Forum, held in Vladivostok, Russia, aspects of this principle were raised by Presidents Putin and Xi, who insisted that development is the path forward, and that “democracy” could not be instilled at gunpoint. Will Biden’s executive order on declassifying 9/11 reveal truths that will cast the 20-year experience in Afghanistan in a new light? Terry Strada, the leader of 9/11 Families United, rejoiced: “We are thrilled to see the President forcing the release of more evidence about Saudi connections to the 9/11 Attacks. We have been fighting the FBI and intelligence community for too long, but this looks like a true turning point.” Biden’s move for declassification, following his decision, taken despite enormous pressure from media and political layers, can be a powerful flank against the intelligence agencies whose lies have been used to maintain the forever war policy. Will the momentum away from permanent warfare continue through improved relations with Russia and China? Will a growing portion of the world’s leaders and thinkers—aided by you—come to understand that the true, immortal self-interest of the human individual lies not in maintaining power over others, but in doing good? If so, this present era can be a singularity, an inflection point, a change from one geometry to another, in which we defeat empire and raise our heads from the muck of conflict to look to the stars that hold our future. Lyndon LaRouche devoted himself to fighting for such a world, a commitment carried on by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the LaRouche movement, internationally, today. Will that movement, and its allies, succeed?
Last night, Paul Gallagher of Executive Intelligence Review discussed the difference seen in the relatively devastating hurricanes over the past week. Contrary to most discussion about these, it was not man-made "climate change" which was the issue here, but rather man-made "sanity-change" which caused us to not learn the lessons of the necessity for adequate flood control and infrastructure. In this respect, consider the Afghanistan pivot as a decision point in world history, as Helga LaRouche pointed out 2 months ago, which can be influenced by the heavy power of ideas. Lyndon LaRouche's spectre looms large over the planet today, and is a force we should all learn to wield.
What does it mean to say that we have reached the "end of an era"? It's good we are no longer putting U.S. troops in harm's way in Afghanistan. But was this merely a way of shifting troops to beef up the military deployment to contain and confront Russia and China? Or is it possible to really end the era of geopolitical provocations, and live in a world committed to peace and economic cooperation? What the war hawks and proponents of empire fear is that the American people will rally behind a rejection of the policies of the last thirty years, of a "unipolar" world controlled by U.S. military power deployed under City of London and Wall Street direction, and instead restore the American system of physical economy at home, and collaborate with other nations for mutual benefit.
On Aug. 31, the day the U.S. completed its pull-out of evacuees and military forces from Afghanistan after 20 years, President Joe Biden spoke in a national address, of the “end of an era.” The same day in Afghanistan, the Taliban held two press conferences in Kabul—one at the international airport, and one at the national TV building, at which leaders announced their commitment to Afghanistan’s sovereignty, building its economy, asking for international support, and or the return of Afghans to build their nation. “Get the solutions out front,” was the urgent call to action today, by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. This is a turning-point moment, she stressed. There are the immediate humanitarian needs in Afghanistan, as well as ongoing crises from the pandemic and famine worldwide which must have attention, and there is the necessity to launch infrastructure-building for basic livelihoods and the future. In the forefront is the necessity to build capacity to provide world health security. All this requires international collaboration.Instead of this overview, there abound all types of abreactions in the Transatlantic Establishment, on the end of the “forever war” by the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan, ranging from shock, to benign babble on “diplomacy”—but without development content. The MICIMATT complex is working overtime to thwart needed action. That is, the complex made up of the “military industrial congressional intelligence media academia think tank” circles. For example, the media try to inculcate fixated fury, mostly on the Kabul evacuation, and strictly military “issues.” Zepp-LaRouche, instead, called for focus on “What to do next?” It is time to reflect on why this whole sad situation happened in the first place. That raises the question of the 20-year cover-up of those behind the perpetration of the 9/11 attack. In 10 days, the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks will take place. In 2001, blame for that atrocity was deliberately misattributed to shield the British/Saudi Arabia and related networks responsible, to instead focus on bad guys in bat caves in Afghanistan for the next two decades. In New York, the Independent Candidate for U.S. Senate Diane Sare has released a Special Supplement to her monthly newspaper, the New Federalist. Dated today, her lead article is headlined, “9/11 Was Preventable; Only Facing the Truth Will Secure the Future.” The broadside features excerpts from Lyndon LaRouche’s live interview appearance on Utah radio at the very time of the 9/11 attacks. He warned then, on the real nature of the networks which perpetrated the assault, saying, “Osama bin Laden is not an independent force….” On the ground in Afghanistan right now, of the total population of 39 million, there are an estimated 18 million in need of humanitarian relief (shelter, water, food, medicine, livelihood aid). Well over 500,000 Afghanis are displaced within their own nation. UN staff are on the scene from UNICEF, UNHCR and other agencies, to keep relief going. Last week David Beasley, Executive Director of the UN World Food Program, went personally to Afghanistan during the evacuation period, to meet with the Taliban, to keep continuity of aid going. He estimates that 4 million Afghanis could die this year from starvation if food relief is not constant. He reported that the Taliban are cooperating fully, including by providing food warehouses and routes for delivery. The WFP is committed to pre-stage food for the winter over the next 45 days, provided an additional $200 million comes in to the WFP. The events in Afghanistan—historic and dramatic—are in fact part of the collapse of the whole neo-liberal system. The absence and decrepitude of infrastructure in the United States for the last half-century—especially provision of new water supplies, disaster protection structures, rail building, and the takedown of health care capacity, are at the extreme stage. This is the story—not climate change—of the raging Western wildfires, and the vulnerability to hurricane damage on the Gulf Coast and elsewhere. Many states have a harvest disaster, which makes for a world food crisis. The “solutions” Zepp-LaRouche refers to, include banking reorganization on the Glass-Steagall principle, directed credit for crash programs of infrastructure construction, particularly health care, and R&D for space, nuclear fusion energy, and other advanced scientific programs. Afghanistan is a special conjuncture, involving the necessity to change course. But meantime, the danger persists from the pro-“endless war” crowd, which continues the Asia Pivot, anti-China actions in the Pacific; the Ukraine activation against Russia; and all the other geopolitical maneuvers. On Aug. 30, British Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston crowed about how Britain stands ready to make airstrikes anywhere, if terrorism is the target. Even if no longer on the ground in Afghanistan—“one of the most inaccessible parts of the world … we’re still able to operate there” through airstrikes and drones, he said. After all, we launch airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, said Wigston. “I know there will be instances where there will be unavoidable civilian casualties.” By one estimate, the U.K. has conducted 50 airstrikes since January, in Syria and Iraq. Instead of death and failure, the world is ready and open for peace through development.
With all the hand-wringing and finger-pointing over events of the last two weeks in Afghanistan, two pivotal questions are not being discussed: Why were we there?; and what comes next? The LaRouche Organization insists that, until the truth about what happened on 9/11 becomes known, the same disastrous mistakes will be made again, next time on an even larger scale. Further, were these wars really mistakes, or instead were they deliberately designed, to keep the U.S. permanently ensnared in "endless wars"?
The statement by President Biden, that the "era of military operations to remake other countries" has ended, raises two crucial questions: 1) Will governments fully reject the geopolitical axioms which led to "endless wars"? 2) What comes next? Providing answers to these questions was the task undertaken by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her weekly dialogue today. It is a moment for "serious reflection," she emphasized. The unipolar approach of the post-Cold War has collapsed. Will small regime change wars be replaced by bigger wars? Or will the wealthier nations work together to bring prosperity to the whole world? This is an historic moment, which has caused so much hysteria that the Financial Times and the New York Times both claim that Biden's defense of the way the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan shows there is no difference between Biden and Trump! She called on our viewers to get involved, and work to bring humanity into a world of reason.
President Biden declared yesterday that the decision to leave Afghanistan is about "ending an era of military operations to remake other countries." This raises the obvious question, what will replace this era, which has been characterized by "endless wars"? Will the U.S. and NATO continue to pursue, unilaterally, an arbitrary Rules-Based Order, demanding submission to the failed neoliberal policies insisted upon by globalist financial and corporate cartels? Or will civilization advance to policies based on economic cooperation among sovereign nations, committed to mutual benefit?
“This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” The American Presidency, as represented by Joe Biden, has, as of August 31, potentially shut the door on more than three decades of post-1989 trans-Atlantic triumphalism by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); by Bush #41 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s neocon 1990 “5/20 Committee;” by Margaret Thatcher’s and George Bush’s 1990-1991 “Desert Shield/Desert Storm” Gulf War; by Tony Blair’s 1999 Chicago “responsibility to protect” speech; and by the "forever wars of the post September 11, 2001 period.With respect to Afghanistan, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has offered, not an admonition but a sound proposal: “Any action taken by the [United Nations] Security Council, including the timing, should help to ease the conflict instead of flare up tensions, and facilitate a smooth transition rather than plunge the country back into chaos…. We hope that relevant countries will realize the fact that withdrawal is not the end of responsibility, but the beginning of reflection and correction…. The US and some other Western countries should provide Afghanistan with urgently needed assistance for the economy, livelihood and humanitarian needs, help Afghan people overcome difficulties as soon as possible and start peaceful reconstruction at an early date. What they should not do is to simply take to their heels and leave a mess behind….” The end of geopolitics is the beginning of wisdom here. And not mere “geo-economics” replacing geopolitics. A new idea, the idea of increasing the potential-relative population density of the planet as a whole, by strategically increasing population to increase the physical wealth of the planet as a whole—including the biosphere itself—through the enthusiastic cooperation of sovereign, independent nation-states, is the “outrageous” idea to which the trans-Atlantic world has to be won, on behalf of humanity as a whole. It won’t be easy. But “You cram these words into mine ears against /The stomach of my sense” need not be the presumed response from all factions of the United States and the trans-Atlantic world. The living body of work contained in the economic proposals of Lyndon LaRouche, including how to resolve the seemingly insoluble problems of each area of a world now embroiled in the tempest of conflict, disease surge, and underdevelopment, must now be set free to rebuild the Earth. That is the actual mission of our LaRouche Legacy Fund archive project, one which must over the course of the next months make available in video, written, and oral form the method of problem-solving contained in the hundreds of works of LaRouche. While other nations, particularly those that have initiated and affiliated with the Belt and Road initiative, have clearly manifested their desire and capacity for self-development, Lyndon LaRouche’s approach to physical economy, and his invention of the “development corridor” as the physical basis for an upshift in the evolution of the biosphere as a whole, is qualitatively superior to every notion of future progress presently underway. Transmitting LaRouche’s unique contribution to world knowledge, as well as to the reproduction of human creativity, is our purpose, particularly in the next days to months. Afghanistan is a presently unique situation, the theater of vast potential transformation by means of which a multiply connected process of world economic development can be triggered throughout the planet. In this way, we avoid the seemingly inevitable onset of this greatest of still-impending, but rapidly on-setting human tragedies. If it seems to be inexorable, that is only to those that lack the courage to change their axioms. Though LaRouche is not physically here to witness it, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the winds of destruction, blowing the lethal three-part pandemic of disease, war, and famine/poverty to the shores of the Atlantic world, have delivered the enemies of humanity to the judgement of current history. That current history will not tolerate the silly self-eliminating utopianism of the Green New Deal. Even as the Scottish National Party mistakenly brings the Greens into government for the first time, and Angela Merkel gives her keynote speech at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the German chapter of Greenpeace, the world recognizes the vapid promises of green bliss are a recipe for death. “No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil/No occupation; all men idle, all, and women,too.” We must now orchestrate, not an ending, but a new beginning to an Afghanistan circumstance that becomes, if not a convivencia, at least a dialogue of civilizations. Politics as art—not “the art of the deal”—is the only recourse the world now has there. In Laughter, Music and Creativity, Lyndon LaRouche says, “The crux of the genuine issue is the principle of Freedom in respect to Necessity. The analogy of the creative musician to the creative physicist bears out here most emphatically…the essence of creativity is problem-solving. In the final analysis, all creative problem-solving subsumes man’s mastery of nature, mastery of the implicitly adducible laws of the material universe.” This new American era of cooperation, of a return to the “human foreign policy” of Classical scholar John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State and American President who later successfully defended in court the kidnapped Africans of the slave-ship Amistad, must take into account the true interests of everyone in the world. The Helga Zepp-LaRouche-proposed World Health Platform, including public sanitation, clean water, medicines, and food, as World Food Program director David Beasley has recently demanded for Afghanistan, is the means to tame the sea of troubles facing the world, and by changing one’s axioms, end them.
August 27 -- Even before the bloody ISIS-K terror attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26, there was a proliferation of calls for President Biden to resign, be removed under the 25th Amendment, or be impeached. Leading the charge in the U.S. are war hawks and neoconservatives, including supporters of former President Trump, such as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who said, "I think Joe Biden deserves to be impeached" for leaving behind Americans and Afghans who worked with U.S. forces. Graham seems to have missed Biden's pledge to evacuate as many as possible by the August 31 deadline, and the effective evacuation underway by the U.S. military of more than 100,000 since the Taliban marched into Kabul on August 15. Joining Graham is Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, and the unhinged Congresswoman from "Q-Anon", Marjorie Taylor Greene, who announced that she will file impeachment charges on August 27. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, was among the first to suggest that the 25th Amendment be used to remove Biden; the amendment calls for removal when a President is incapable of conducting his duties, and was previously promoted by anti-Trumpers such as Nancy Pelosi and the London Spectator.Former President Trump released a statement on August 22 saying, "It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen in Afghanistan." Trump is trying to distance himself from the deal he made with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops, negotiated directly by his Secretary of State Pompeo and signed in February 2020. Trump intended to finalize the deal by bringing Taliban officials to Camp David, but backed away from that when the "optics" of such an event were met with sharp criticism. However, ending the "endless wars", which included withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, had been a consistent theme for Trump, even though he was unable to use his position of Commander-in-Chief to accomplish it, due to enormous opposition from the War Hawks of both parties. Others calling for Biden's resignation are former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri -- both of whom are considered possible presidential candidates in 2024 -- and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Joining them is Rep. Liz Cheney, who emerged as the leading anti-Trump Republican in Congress, voting in favor of his impeachment in January 2021, and is the daughter of one of the key sponsors of the "endless wars", former Vice President Dick Cheney. While representatives of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex are heaping abuse on Biden, an even more virulent attack has come from the United Kingdom and NATO, led by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Unapologetic over his responsibility for promoting the wars, under the imperial doctrine of the "Responsibility to Protect", Blair used the withdrawal from Afghanistan to launch an attack on the American political system and population, not just on Biden. "We didn't need to do it," he wrote. "We choose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending 'the forever wars'." The decision to leave, he continued, was not driven by "grand strategy, but by politics." He asks, "Has the West lost its strategic will?...If the West wants to shape the twenty-first century it will take commitment." Blair is referring to the commitment of the British Empire, a "commitment" demonstrated by its willingness to go to war, and to induce others to fight wars which it instigated, since the 18th century. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is especially bitter for apologists for Britain's "Great Game", the contest over control of Afghanistan which dates back to the mid-19th century, and was the model for Zbigniew Brzezinki's "Arc of Crisis" doctrine, which first brought the U.S. into Afghanistan's civil war beginning in July 1979, months before the Soviet invasion at the end of that year. The damage is compounded by Biden's rejection of the gang-up against him, at the G7 meeting called by Boris Johnson, to convince Biden the U.S. must remain in Afghanistan. Blair commented that Biden's rejection of the British demand poses the risk that the U.K. will be relegated "to the second division of global powers." This theme was reiterated by numerous British commentators, typified by Andrew Rawnsley, who wrote in the {Observer} that "Mr Johnson's capacity to influence Mr Biden was less than that of the President's dog." Rawnsley made clear why this decision was such a blow to imperial Britain, which is accustomed to deploying American military strength to back up British global policy, stating that the U.K. has "lots of vital interests around the globe, but not the means to safeguard them by itself" -- thus, the shock and rage which has greeted Biden's betrayal of "Global Britain". The Issue Is The U.S. "Presidential System" The deeper, underlying issue exposed by this outburst of impotent rage is the long-term British project to transform the U.S. from a "Presidential system," in which the president is mandated to defend the "General Welfare", above partisan and special interests, into a "Parliamentary system", in which the president is captive to special interests, represented by political parties which serve global corporate cartels -- especially those aligned with British imperial interests. The British have intervened repeatedly in U.S. politics, usually through their allies among Wall Street financial interests, to undermine this unique feature of the American system, including the empire's support of the Confederacy against Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War, and its role in coordinating assassinations of American system leaders, beginning with Alexander Hamilton, and including Lincoln, McKinley and Kennedy. Today, they have added scandal mongering, run by intelligence agencies through media cartels, to their tools for destabilizing governments, scandals which are completely fabricated, as in the case of Russiagate against Trump.
Most of those involved in dissections of "What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?" are missing the obvious point. What was wrong is the system, which placed the American military in a series on no-win wars, in defense of a "unipolar" world order which benefitted the few, i.e., those who run the global central banks and financial institutions on behalf of City of London and Wall Street interests. That system should be buried, and replaced by a new system, which can bring lasting peace through economic development. The era of "endless wars", of "Color Revolutions" to conduct "regime change", has been exposed on a global stage by the western military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Good Riddance to that system -- we can now enter the era in which Development Is the Name of Peace.
The massive hype by the war parties in the U.S. and the U.K. that China covered up the “fact” that the COVID-19 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has taken a hit, as the 90-day investigation by the U.S. intelligence community, mandated by the Biden Administration, found no evidence that the virus had any source other than through nature. The idea that an intelligence community could determine such a thing was an absurdity from the beginning, but apparently the claims against China were so lacking in evidence that the intelligence agencies did not wish to risk being exposed for carrying out a purely political witch hunt, as happened with their fake “proof” of Russian collusion with Donald Trump in the 2016 election.Some accusations were dangerously preposterous, such as those of Mike Pompeo, who suggested that the virus may have been intentionally created at the lab, and Niall Ferguson, the advocate of restoring the British Empire, who presented faked evidence that China intentionally sent infected persons to countries all over the world. The final report from eight different U.S. intelligence agencies, released to the public with some redactions on Friday, Aug. 27, refuted such nonsense. The report says that one of the agencies claimed “modest confidence” that the virus came from the lab, but that it was purely accidental. Four other agencies said it emerged through natural transmission, although they had “low confidence” in the conclusion since the actual source is yet to be determined. Three agencies said they could reach no conclusions. The report says that there was “high confidence” that it was not a biological weapon, and that the government had no foreknowledge. China’s response, as covered in a front page article in Global Times, was to ridicule the idea that intelligence experts, not scientists, could determine the source of the virus. Quoting Chinese experts, the Times says that the investigation has “ruined the self-proclaimed professional ethics of the U.S. intelligence community.” They also call on the U.S. to “rectify its anti-science attitude and conduct origins tracing in its own country.” [“U.S. ‘Inconclusive’ Intelligence Community Report on COVID-19 Origins ‘Lack of Confidence’: Expert”] The Global Times editorial “U.S. Politicization of COVID-19 Origins Tracing Suffers a Major Setback,” asks, “Why did the U.S. intelligence community fail to even falsify evidence this time? After all, it has done this before.” They point to the “washing powder” which was presented as evidence that Iraq sought to obtain weapons of mass destruction, and U.S. funding the “White Helmets” to make fake videos accusing Syria of using chemical weapons against civilians. But, they assert, “These tricks are indeed hard to implement against China. The COVID-19 origins tracing is a major global issue, and people are all watching. Besides, facing the U.S.’ vicious and slanderous farce, China itself has sufficient capabilities to identify the information, defend itself and make counterattacks.” The editorial strongly protests the claim in the U.S. report that China was “obstructing” the investigation, stating: “Can smearing China stop the Delta variant from raging on in the U.S.? Can it save the more than 600,000 lost lives due to the U.S. government’s ineffective fight against the epidemic?” While some may object that this is “Chinese propaganda,” the facts are clear: China: 122,852 Covid-19 cases; 5,680 deaths U.S.: 38,158,495 Covid-19 cases; 628,456 deaths Recall that China has four times the population of the U.S.. Then, consider that over the past 50 years, the U.S.has systematically taken down its public health system, closing over 1,000 hospitals, while the number of available hospital beds fell from 1.5 million to 900,000. Why was this allowed to happen? Because part of President Nixon’s implementation of fascist economic policies, as exposed by Lyndon LaRouche at the time, was to privatize health care, making Wall Street’s insurance companies, not doctors, the formulators of health policy and the decision-makers for how much treatment would be allowed, based on profitability for stockholders, not the health of the individuals or of the nation. Then consider that in the so-called “developing nations,” under IMF “conditionalities,” even a minimum level of health care has been denied in vast areas of the world. Half of Africa has no electricity, while 800 million people do not have access to clean water. Without electricity and clean water there can be no adequate health care. The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders in 2020, is organizing for every country on Earth to have a modern health care system, as the urgent first step toward the development required to become modern industrial nations. China not only has such a modern health system for its 1.4 billion people, but is doing everything it can to build such systems in the 140 countries which have joined the Belt and Road Initiative, through what they call the Health Silk Road. It is to be hoped that the United States, having begun the process of ending the “endless wars,” will join with Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran and the Central Asian nations, to build Afghanistan, with modern health systems, rail and road connectivity, and other basic infrastructure—and then extend that process throughout the world. That is the necessary task for the human race today.
The final flights bringing foreigners and Afghan refugees out of Kabul are now in process, with President Biden sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline. A second U.S. drone attack today, in Kabul, claimed to take out a car with several intended suicide bombers inside who were heading to the airport. The profound issue facing the world today is whether or not the U.S. will join with China, Russia and the countries in the region to begin an economic development process for this war-torn nation, to become the prosperous crossroad of Eastern and Western civilizations, or to become again an impoverished center of terrorism and drug production. If the former, such a transformation would serve as a model for the development of the other nations destroyed by the Anglo-American regime change wars over the past 20 years, establishing the notion of “peace through development” as the necessary new paradigm to replace the failed geopolitics of British imperialism.In Iraq today, the government held a ten-nation conference entitled “Conference for Cooperation and Partnership,” including France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, U.A.E. and Jordan. Like Libya and Syria, Iraq’s industrial infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the insane and illegal regime change war, falsely justified through lies by Tony Blair and the Bush-Cheney administration. While China has offered to bring the Belt and Road process into Iraq through an oil-for-infrastructure plan, this has been repeatedly sabotaged by foreign interests and manipulated intrigue within Iraq, just as the reconstruction of Syria has been prevented by the vile U.S. “Caesar Sanctions,” punishing any country which offers to invest in Syrian reconstruction. These imperial sanctions policies must be ended if the current descent into a new Dark Age is to be reversed. The Schiller Institute has provided the framework for the world to come together behind Afghan development in a series of conferences and publications (see “Afghanistan—A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era” and “Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?”). This approach—to end the geopolitical division of the world into warring tribes, and to address the common aims of mankind—is not just a good idea, or a naive dream. The choice of peace through development, which has driven every renaissance throughout history, is the only option to end the current global crises—the out-of-control pandemic; the exploding financial bubble; the threat of thermonuclear war; and the cultural decay dragging the Western nations into a drug-infested perversity reminiscent of the last days of the Roman Empire. The upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 will be the occasion of a Schiller Institute conference celebrating the cultural and intellectual ideas required to defeat this evil, and to bring about, at this moment of profound phase-change in human history, the necessary creative direction required of our citizens, and citizens around the world (details of the conference will be available soon). Anticipating that event, the Schiller Institute has announced the publication of the first issue of a new quarterly magazine of art, science and statecraft, Leonore. The announcement of the new publication asks: “What would a world look like if every young person could fully exercise their creativity?” Leonore will be sent automatically to every sustaining member of the Schiller Institute. Click here to become a sustaining member.
Join us live on Saturday at 2pm EDT. Now that the United States has irrevocably committed to withdrawing its military from Afghanistan, finally recognizing the intrinsic failure of the use of military force of any magnitude to address that circumstance, is the trans-Atlantic world ready to change its axioms?For example: Would a president Martin Luther King have successfully applied the physical-economic principle of nonviolent direct action to American foreign policy? Stated differently, what is the relationship between the capital-intensive physical economic development of a nation, the rapid mastery of mining, manufacturing, agricultural, construction and transportation skills by that nation’s workforce, and competent military strategy? Lyndon LaRouche campaigned for the United States Presidency multiple times, not only because he understood that relationship. LaRouche also understood that the American Presidency was invented by Washington, Hamilton and Franklin to establish the primacy of that relationship to physical economic production, rather than slavery, as the basis for self-government. President Barack Obama‘s sophistical “Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech”featured a blasphemous attack on King in order to justify the “Afghanistan surge policy” of 2009 now admitted to be a failure by then-Joint Chiefs of Staff head Admiral Mike Mullen. It also provided a textbook example of the failure to grasp, either the strategic significance, or the moral imperative of the principle of economic progress as the preferred mode of nonviolent direct action for progress, both within and among nations, embedded in the very establishment of the Office of the Presidency by Revolutionary War veterans and commanders George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her proposed “Coincidence of Opposites” approach to the positive resolution of the Afghanistan conflict, has called upon the United States to resurrect the Classical idea of the American Presidency as a sovereign interlocutor in foreign policy, separate and independent from British Colonial Office influence. An American Presidential response to Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and the other nations surrounding Afghanistan, taking the occasion of the present world medical crisis as a jumping off point, should reassert the productive power of the United States, rather than resort any longer to war, as Hamilton and Washington, in particular, would have advised.
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” a scientific investigation of the changes in geometric relations which take place during a phase change in nature, and the role of human cognition in recognizing and investigating those changes, provides the necessary guide to reflecting on the historic phase change taking place in the world today. Poe’s characters are two brothers whose ship is caught in a great whirlpool off the Norwegian coast. As the ship is pulled ever downward towards destruction, one brother recognizes the changed geometry which exists within this vortex, different from existed in the previous space, and creatively discovers the laws of this new paradigm, saving himself, while his brother, terrified, his mind in a haze, clings to the old paradigm and plunges to his death.The world will never return to the era from which we are now departing, into a new geometry. This is true of the pandemic, ending the era of privatized health care and the deprivation of health care for the poor nations of the world; it is true of the global financial system, horribly bankrupt for decades already and now racing into a hyper-inflationary or deflationary bust, a system which can not be saved; it is true of the era of endless wars unleashed by Tony Blair’s 1999 declaration of the end of national sovereignty, unleashing the Anglo-American“ regime change” wars; and, finally, the end of the delusion of the U.S. as the “unipolar superpower” and the “end of history.” Do not imagine that this means a better world will automatically result. The world could proceed as did the seaman’s frightened brother, clinging to delusions of the dying Empire, willing to submit to economic decay, war, pestilence and famine rather than reject the false axioms, to discover the new principles required to not only survive, but to build a more perfect world. The end of the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan provides the crucial test: Will the US break from the British Empire, and act on its actual self-interest, to see Afghanistan transformed from a maelstrom of terrorism, drugs, and perpetual war into a hub for regional and continent-wide development, restoring its ancient role as the “land of a thousand cities,” the crossroad of eastern and western civilization? The British Empire, like the dinosaurs, deserves nothing better than to become extinct. Tony Blair and other spokesmen for the Empire are bellowing their rage, like Shelly’s Ozymandius, that the United States has failed to obey their dictates—or as Blair so revealingly put it, that the Biden Administration has followed the "imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars."’ Ending such wars will, indeed, as Blair fears, mean the end of Empire. Perhaps the bloody ISIS terrorist bombs today in Kabul were aimed at stopping Biden from sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline for getting out, as the British and their assets in the US have demanded. Is it coincidence, or are the British still deploying terrorists to achieve their ends? This is the moment of truth for civilization. Lyndon LaRouche’s concept of the “Four Powers” required as a minimum force to end the Empire, is now before us. The four great cultures of Eurasia—China, Russia, India, and the United States (as the distilled representative of European culture)—can unite at this pregnant moment to make Afghanistan a model for ending the disintegration of nations around the world, suffering from the decades, or even centuries, of deprivation, poverty, and colonial slavery. From this, a new Bretton Woods financial system can be molded by the same Four Powers, and the grateful nations around the world which would join in the deliberations. From this, the replacement of the failed monetary system can be replaced with a Hamiltonian credit system to fuel the recovery of the collapsing western economies, driven by the export of the capital goods demanded everywhere to lift every nation out of poverty, becoming modern industrial nations. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has demonstrated the efficacy of such an approach. This is not just the moral thing to do; without it, disintegration and nuclear war are virtually inevitable. Mankind has faced such moments of peril in the past. In some, the failure to act led to descending into dark ages and depopulation. In some, people of vision and creativity led in forging a new Renaissance—Nicholas of Cusa in 15th-Century Europe; Zhu Xi in 12th-Century China, Harun al-Rashid in the 8th-Century Golden Age of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Gupta Golden Age of the 4th and 5th Centuries. The Confucian Renaissance taking place now in China gives hope for the future, but in the age of supersonic transport and the colonization of space, any true renaissance must be truly universal. This is precisely the message of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche over the past half-century, one which can and must be achieved—or as Helga Zepp-LaRouche often states, an era in which “we all can leave the age of immature adolescence behind us, and enter an era of adulthood, in which we concentrate on the common aims of mankind.”
Mike Billington addresses the dramatic "phase shift" in history taking place, as the Afghan crisis marks the utter failure of the "regime change" era of the British Empire and their assets in the US, but also the opportunity it presents for Lyndon LaRouche's concept of the Four Powers to unite for global development on the model of China's Belt and Road Initiative. He will focus on the intense hysteria in the United Kingdom, terrified that the Empire could indeed come to an end were the US to break from the Empire's grip, join with China and Russia in the development of Afghanistan, and by implication the rest of the world, as LaRouche's new paradigm becomes the necessary reality for human progress.
Many questions were raised by viewers about our coverage this week of the hysterical British reaction to the decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and Biden standing firm in that commitment, despite the attacks on him. Would the British unleash a terror attack to change the policy? Could they? It has happened before! Whether that happened yesterday, it is interesting that several viewers stated that there should be an investigation of whether the British played a role in the attack, noting that if they were so sure an attack was coming, why could they not prevent it?
As unfolding developments in Afghanistan have captured most people's attention, Federal Reserve officials will hold their annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming confab on Friday, during which they will confer on how to proceed with the Great Reset swindle without tipping off too many people as to their real intent. While they engage in "Fed-speak" on such topics as "transitory inflation" and "tapering", what they really are doing is consolidating a global central banker's dictatorship, to hand the biggest banks and financial institutions control over fiscal, i.e., spending policy. The only way to counter this drive for depopulation, is to mobilize for the implementation of LaRouche's "Four Laws", to revive physical production as an alternative to a bankrupt neoliberal speculative system.
American statesman Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly identified a U.S. commitment to help Haiti develop as a moral imperative for the United States, a test of what kind of nation the United States and its people want it to be in the world. Excerpts of two such statements follow, the first from 2004, the second from 2010, in the wake of the unprecedented earthquake disaster. Both still stand as guidelines for how to approach Haiti today, and his 2010 admonition about that no “patch the system” approach will work, being equally applicable to Afghanistan now: the goal of assistance must be to secure “a nation’s ability to maintain itself.”In March 2004, LaRouche was asked about the Haitian political crisis of the time in an interview with a New York state radio program. LaRouche answered: “…The United States has a relationship with Haiti, going back to our struggle for independence. Haiti has been essentially destroyed many times over. I mean, the country is destroyed, even compared to the adjoining region of the island. We have done the worst with that area. It’s not a problem with [recently ousted President] Aristide, or this guy, or that guy. The problem is, the United States has never accepted, in recent times, its moral responsibility to help the Haitians put their country back together again. That is our responsibility. We keep blaming them. “The way we treat the Haitians who are fleeing from that territory into Florida—it’s horrible! It’s wrong! We have to take a positive moral attitude on this thing, and we have to work with the nations of the region, to say —and to tell the Haitians—‘We are determined that you should have your independence, and you shall have development, and you shall have medical care, and the ability to live.’ “We do it not only for the Haitians, we do it for ourselves. We do it, because we want to be the kind of country that does that kind of thing: Where a great injustice exists, we are the kind of country that will offer to help…. “Remember, Haiti established itself as a Republic, which at one point was modeling itself on the idea of the United States. So, this got it special hatred…. Of course, the problems that are occurring in other parts of the Caribbean are not much better; but they’re not quite as bad, either. And the Haitian thing, is the thing that really sticks in my craw: This is the worst example of a rotten policy from the United States. There are other policies that are bad, but this is the absolute worst. “In my view, you always go to the worst case, to set a policy. In your own country, you look at the poorest layer of our population, and say, ‘Will this policy work for their children and grandchildren?’ And if it works for the poorest ones, justly, then it’ll probably work for everyone—as Franklin Roosevelt defined that: Always go to the ‘forgotten man.’ Take the person who’s the greatest victim, of injustice or neglect, and start there; and prove that you are really for the general welfare of people, by showing you’re willing to face that problem. Look it in the eye, and talk about curing it.” https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2004/eirv31n12-20040326/eirv31n12-20040326.pdf The following was LaRouche’s initial call for the U.S. to commit to a 25-year development treaty with Haiti, from a Jan. 30, 2010 webcast, only weeks after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had killed, maimed, left homeless or displaced close to a third of the nation’s people: “What should be done is the following, in my view. First of all, the government of the United States should make a contract with the government of Haiti. And the contract is for the reconstruction of the economy and system of the nation of Haiti…. “You cannot apply a band-aid to Haiti. And you cannot bring in many other countries, because the objective is, if the country is going to be viable, coming out of this mess, you have to have a sovereign Haiti. So, the contract has to be essentially, a United States treaty agreement, a treaty agreement to re-establish the efficient sovereignty of the nation of Haiti, after the destructive effect of this and preceding difficulties. “What’s the big deal, after all? It’s a small nation, of people who have been subjected to all kinds of terrible history; who have been promised this, and betrayed, and promised that, and betrayed, and promised and betrayed. Never delivered. It’s in a group of national territories which has also tended to be somewhat of a mess, in one way or the other. So, therefore, it’s a model approach. We say, ‘Okay, we make a contract with the government, as a treaty agreement, between the United States and Haiti, to assure the rebuilding of their country, in a form in which it will actually be a functioning country which can survive.’ “It’s going to take a quarter-century to get that job done. You’ve got to change a lot of things. But the one, the most important thing to change, is the attitude which presently prevails, around the world in dealing with things like this. It’s called ‘fix-it,’ ‘patch the system.’ My view is, you have to leave a viable system behind. Don’t patch it and walk away. Make a contract and say, ‘Well, you’re a small country. We can absorb the burden. We’re going to work with you, under the protection of the United States, to make sure you come out of this successfully.’ Not merely successfully, in the sense of solving the immediate crisis, which was done before; it didn’t work too well. We have to follow through: We have to think about a nation’s ability to maintain itself, not to be maintained from time to time because of internal crises, or because of an act of nature. “And that’s the kind of relationship we should have with nations, so let’s go back and have it. We used to do this, you know, in the immediate post-Civil War period in the United States. We used to have ex-military, from both the Confederate Army and the Union Army, travel overseas, as to Egypt, to build up the system of that country. Until the British got us kicked out of there, we did a fine job, and then the British turned it into something else. “But in our Constitutional structure, in our tradition, a country right next to ours, Haiti, just a few drops across the street, is in terrible condition, as part of a divided island territory, where problems tend to run across the border. Help them! Not just because you want to help them, but because you want to reaffirm a standard of morality in international affairs. And our commitment must be, to make sure we’re not just going to promise something—we’re going to get it done. And if we get it done, and it’s successful, it will be good for all of us.” https://larouchepub.com/lar/2010/webcasts/3705jan30_qanda.html
When President Joe Biden made it clear in his afternoon statements to the press following his virtual meeting with the G7 nations, that he was sticking to his August 31 Afghanistan pullout deadline, a somber pall appeared over 10 Downing Street, Porton Down, and Gee Street in Clerkenwell, home of the Tavistock Institute. The dismayed Nigel Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, said," It is going to take quite a long time for the West as a whole—because it is a Western failure, a Western disaster, this is not just the UK and the US—to recover from all this, to recover our reputation." He of “flooding the Trump zone” fame had to reckon with the hard truth that the multiple attempts to stop Biden from carrying out the promised Afghanistan withdrawal had not worked, and that the public relations stunt known as “Global Britain” had just been revealed to be “Windsor castles made of sand.”Retired Admiral Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs of Staff head from October 2007 till September 2011—that is, under both Bush 43 and “Bush 44,” Barack Obama—confessed that he, Obama, and that entire administration had been wrong, and Joe Biden had been right, about whether or not to “surge” in Afghanistan with 40,000 troops in 2009. Biden had opposed the surge, suggesting 10,000 troops who would fight terrorism at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and otherwise train the Afghan military. Biden “had it right back then…I give him credit for that,” Mullen said. He is the first to exercise the conceptual option of what Ray McGovern has called “metanoia.” When Metanoia (“Beyond-Thought”) was personified, it was often as a goddess, cloaked and sorrowful, who inspired both regret and reflection, leading to repudiation of wrong judgements. Those who have been afflicted by chronic misjudgment of current history for the past several years due to “the pestilence of partisanship,” particularly after Lyndon LaRouche’s September 2012 observations on the post-Cheney/Obama “Bush 43/44” death of the political party system in America, are baffled by the present moment. Caitlin Johnstone, in an August 22 article entitled “Bush-Era War Criminals Are Louder Than Ever Because They’ve Lost the Argument,” observed: "After the US troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan ‘government’ they’d spent twenty years pretending to nation-build with, was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history. But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken. “The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister. who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of ”obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’." Blair has long believed and practiced through Responsibility To Protect the idea that Global Britain must be vigorously defended down to the last American. But those that refuse to understand the British “Babylonian priesthood special relationship” to the United States, “can’t touch this,” and remained intentionally unenlightened. A statement written by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the situation said: “The SCO member states reaffirm their intention to assist Afghanistan in becoming a peaceful, stable and prosperous country, free from terrorism, war or drugs, and are ready to join international efforts to stabilise and develop Afghanistan with the central coordinating role of the UN.” Afghanistan joining the Belt and Road Initiative is the pathway forward, and the United States, using the very real need for a world health platform, can turn its attention to joining these nations while simultaneously retooling and re-employing its own nation for that battle. Over two-thirds of the American people want the war to end. The Presidency has moved to honor that desire, and to complete that policy in Afghanistan. As for the evacuation’s chaos: has anyone considered that the fact that factions in the United States turned down the offer to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan, including evacuation efforts, with the Russians, and possibly others, contributed to the instability? Or that an announced and implemented anti-Covid-19 world health initiative, begun months ago, along the lines of what Helga Zepp-LaRouche had proposed in conference after conference since June 2020, would have also helped to “pre-stabilize” the conditions of withdrawal in Afghanistan prior to evacuation? Even now, and for a small percentage of the $2 trillion known to have been spent in the war in the past 20 years, the United States could help win the peace in Afghanistan, through a world health platform construction program involving all the nations of the area. Lyndon LaRouche said, in a 1991 interview given in prison: “Whether I remain in prison or not is essentially at the pleasure of the President, or the Presidency. The legal grounds for removing me from prison, by removing the sentence, by removing the conviction, exist…. The evidence exists. As to whether that evidence and that procedure will be acted upon, will be up to the political pressures acting upon the Presidency. I am here because the President wishes me here, and for no other reason. If the President were to change, then I probably would—the law would be allowed to release me from prison.” LaRouche, who campaigned as a Presidential candidate more than any other individual, realized that the institutional powers of the United States Presidency were of a different nature than the compromised capabilities of a prime minister. When the power of the Presidency of the United States is deployed for the good, it is immense, the greatest in the world. Biden’s completion of the withdrawal that Trump started, despite British-inspired Pentagon and State Department pressures to do the opposite, is, if completed, an example of that.
Listen to the whining coming from mouthpieces for the City of London imperial financial swindlers, such as war criminal Tony Blair, or former Ambassador Kim Darroch, who said it will take "quite a long time...to recover from all this, to recover our reputation." The truth is that Boris Johnson's "Global Britain" is a cover for continued British imperial looting, which depends on U.S. military backing to succeed. With the G7 leaders unable to convince Biden to remain in Afghanistan, they are preparing other traps -- such as Ukraine -- to keep the U.S. engaged in "forever wars." Instead, the U.S. must break with geopolitics and neoliberal trade and economic policies, and join with other nations to build up the capabilities of physical goods production, based on scientific and technological progress, to address mankind's needs for the next fifty years.
