http://www.larouchepub.com/eir_talks/eir_talks_990331.html
And it came down to a moment when I believe it was the 13th or 14th of
November 1998, when President Clinton was facing the imminent vote in the
House of Representatives for his impeachment, that the President
nevertheless called off the bombings. This was yet another incident where
the planes were ordered to turn around. And in this case it was a very
different consequence.
When President Clinton ordered the bombers to turn around from their mission
targetting Iraq, it was a brief pause. And it was a temporary but rather
significant setback for this BAC apparatus--the Principals Committee, Blair,
Netanyahu.
The moment that President Clinton put his foot down, stood down the
Principals Committee and these other elements, there was a massive reaction
against him. I remember seeing the interview with British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, who was fuming with anger. It was a moment of betrayal of his
real view towards President Clinton. He ranted and raved that there would be
a war against Iraq.
And in fact, he sent the defense minister of Britain, George Robertson, to
Washington while President Clinton was away, to make sure that all of the
forces that were necessary in Washington were lined up to make sure that
President Clinton could no longer resist the drive towards a war against
Iraq.
Now, remember that there was a down side to the fact that President Clinton
had been able to prevent that November launching date of the war with Iraq.
The down side of it was that the president had to stay in Washington to be
on top of the minutiae of the decisionmaking, and therefore he missed
participating in a crucial summit of APEC that took place in Kuala Lumpur.
Instead, he sent Vice President Al Gore, who proceeded to violate the
principle and spirit of President Clinton's policy, which was to not go out
of his way to make enemies of heads of state, particularly in Asia.
So Vice President Gore staged a visible, violent provocation against the Pri
me Minister of Malaysia, the host of the conference, Mahathir Mohamad. And
as the result of that, there was a major deterioration in U.S. relations
with all of the countries of Asia, and as well, a deterioration of relations
with Russia.
Remember that at that summit meeting, President Clinton would have been
meeting both with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian Prime Minister
Primakov. So this would have been the first face to face opportunity for
Clinton to sit down with Primakov. It would have been a very important
moment.
<snip>
It was on the 12th of March of this year, that President Clinton for the
first time in I believe 15 months, actually had a press conference alone,
where it was President Clinton standing at the podium, and it was the White
House jacobin press corps faced up against him. There was no other head of
state there, it was not a limited photo opportunity; it was a full-scale
hour or so press conference--during which the two points that to my mind
came across most clearly and most dramatically, was (a) President Clinton's
strong commitment to go forward with the head of state to head of state
meeting with Primakov.
And remember that Primakov is the prime minister of Russia, not the
president. So President Clinton actually chose to upgrade the meeting with
Primakov, which was to have begun on March 23rd, to a de facto heads of
state meeting. He had scheduled two private sessions with Primakov that were
to take place, one to deal exclusively with the Russian economic crisis.
So on the 12th of March, President Clinton elaborated a very sympathetic
policy view towards Primakov. And the other thing that he emphasized, even
in the face of a massive media Republican Party/Principals Committee attack
against him, was that he is also committed to a strategic partnership with
China, under the leadership of Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji.
Again the president unilaterally decided to upgrade the summit meeting with
Zhu Rongji, which is scheduled in Washington for April 8th and 9th and 10th.
And whereas again this was to have been a prime ministers' meeting, which
normally, understanding protocol, would have meant that the vice
president--Al Gore--would have been the principal American representative,
the President interceded to invite Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to Washington
himself, and to again insert himself into the whole meeting process.
So on the one hand, we have President Clinton's diplomacy. And there are
people in the administration who stand more with President Clinton than with
Gore, Albright, Cohen, and Shelton. The deputy secretary of state, Strobe
Talbott, is a Clinton man all the way. He recently travelled to Moscow, came
back basically deeply troubled by the fact that U.S.-Russian relations,
because of the fact that in December President Clinton did cave in to the
Principals Committee and Gore and authorized the bombings of Iraq, joint
U.S.-British bombings without the approval--in fact wit, the opposition of
the U.N. Security Council. this was a major point of deterioration.
<snip>
But anyway, on December 4th, EIR editorialized that even though for the
moment Clinton has called off the war against Iraq, there are war clouds
being built up by the British, by the Israelis, and with the complicity of
this Principals Committee team in the Far East. We talked about in that
editorial a North Korea crisis; we talked about a crisis stretching across
the Eastern Mediterranean, Asia Minor, at that moment the Turkish situation
was hot. But this is an area contiguous with the Balkans and it's notorious
that a Balkan crisis spreads into that area of the world very quickly.
<snip>
Then, on the 16th of March, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a major strategic study
that we published in EIR, called "Mad Brzezinski's Chessboard," in which he
said we're moving to a situation where the Balkan crisis, the crisis in
Asia, the ongoing Iraq crisis, is reminiscent of the kind of imperial
warfare--geopolitics--that brought on the Dark Age of the 14th Century, that
was the characteristic feature of the 17th-Century Thirty Years' War, where,
as LaRouche emphasized, these kinds of situations can easily spread
completely out of control.
<snip>
In one particular hearing that took place on the Russian situation, James
Woolsey, who was the first CIA director at the beginning of the Clinton
administration, came in and delivered this ridiculous scathing attack
against Primakov. What he said was Primakov is organizing a coalition of
well-armed rogue states, including Iraq, Iran, and Serbia, with the idea of
building them up as a kind of military bulkward against the United States
and the West.
We have received reports from a number of offices on Capitol Hill, that Vice
President Al Gore's chief national security adviser, Leon Fuerth, who
although he has never been confirmed by Congress for any job, is a full
voting member of the Principals Committee, which is supposed to be, in
effect, a Cabinet-level ersatz National Security Council minus President
Clinton.
So, Fuerth has been running around Capitol Hill saying that Primakov is the
enemy, that Primakov should be overthrown. Now remember that back in March
of 1998, you had a lovefest between Chernomyrdin and Gore, in which, as we
reported, the two men decided they would do everything in their power to
advance each other's careers into the number-one spot.
This became so obviously a power play against Yeltsin, that Yeltsin fired
Chernomyrdin on the spot. But again, at the end of the summer, in the midst
of the financial crisis, Chernomyrdin with the full backing of Gore, tried
to come back in power. The first few days of September, Yeltsin briefly
backed down and reappointed Chernomyrdin as interim prime minister. That
fortunately failed, and Primakov came in instead.
But a few weeks ago, just before this whole Balkan crisis full-scale
erupted, both Chernomyrdin and Boris Berezovsky, one of these Russian
tycoons, who's been a target of a corruption campaign against him by
Primakov and the more sane forces in Moscow, these guys both came to
Washington. We know Chernomyrdin met with Gore. We have unconfirmed
indications that Berezovsky may have met with Gore. So you had a concert of
action aimed at getting rid of Primakov.
And you've got people very close to Gore, working with the more fanatical
Republican elements in the Congress, and with the BAC media--the Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Moonie Times, the British press, the Daily Telegraph
and the Times of London--all arguing that Primakov is a revanchist and that
you've got to get rid of Primakov, otherwise Russia is going to be back in a
Cold War confrontation with the U.S.
Well, I think the reality is that if Primakov were to be ousted, and he and
Maslyukov, his deputy prime minister working on economic policy, have made
it very clear, that if they are overthrown, then Russia either goes in the
direction of chaos or a kind of military dictatorship that will
unquestionably be pan-Slavic, will be anti-West, and that's when it's time
to really start worrying about those 30,000 Russian nuclear warheads pointed
at the United States.
The fact of the matter is that anybody who has really seriously been a
student of the history of the Balkans, even just in the 20th century, you
know that every time we've gotten into what appeared initially to be a
limited conflict in the Balkans, it very rapidly spread into a Europeanwide
war and eventually a world war.
World War I started, in terms of the technical features of it, with the
assassination in Sarajevo, but as we said earlier, events had already been
set in motion around it. And now of course we're in a situation where
Milosevic is if nothing else clever. And he realizes that the kind of
strategy that's been adopted by NATO, is, as LaRouche put it, born on
Fantasy Island. What's the concept?
The concept is that we can use air power alone, with a very low risk of
casualties, to knock out a military that cuts its teeth on fighting
irregular partisan warfare in a mountainous region. It should be no surprise
that we're now exactly a week into the fighting, and we've had if anything
an escalation of the humanitarian tragedy. You do have an aggressive policy
of ethnic cleansing going on, and the use of this precision air power is
having a minimal if any effect whatsoever, on stopping that from happening.
And it makes perfect sense. I mean, we're talking about an escalation of
aerial bombardment. And Milosevic's military forces have not turned on, on a
regular basis, their radar positions, so there's been very little ability to
pin down where these installations are. We said at the outset that the
Yugoslavs have a much more sophisticated air defense system. It's highly
mobile. They've got experience with this kind of partisan warfare.
So we're moving into a situation where either we come up with a serious
diplomatic solution right away--within days, literally--or either NATO takes
a serious military defeat by stubbornly sticking to this air doctrine, or we
wind up with ground troops in there. And the military commanders at NATO,
even the people at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some retired European
military experts that we've spoken with, say that it would take between
100,000-200,000 NATO ground troops to be able to actually win this fight in
a reasonably decent period of time.
And even they admit it will take two weeks to stage to have that happen, and
by then, every ethnic Albanian in Kosovo will have either been killed or
deported from the country.
...
Tony Papert: Now the British are saying--for instance, Tony Blair and also
people out of power like Paddy Ashdown and Lord Owen, are saying we must
send in ground troops to stop the genocide in Kosovo. But what is these
people's record as to genocide?
Jeff Steinberg: Well, these are people who not only turned their back on the
worst genocide since World War II, which has taken place over the last
three-four years in Africa; but in fact there's ample evidence that the
British and some of the other continental European old imperialist factions,
did everything they could to stoke this policy.
...
So, we're talking here about genocide on a scale far beyond anything
accomplished by Adolf Hitler. And so therefore, when a Tony Blair steps
forward and says that we can't allow the atrocities in Kosovo to continue,
you've got to say what hypocrisy! What's his real game, because it's
certainly not a concern for the survival of those poor people--the Albanian
minorities in Kosovo.
<snip>
Jeff Steinberg: Well, I think that what's going to be required is a real
dose of reality hitting President Clinton very, very hard, very fast. I can
tell you that Executive Intelligence is preparing a seminar in Washington
immediately following the NATO summit, at which we plan to spell out the war
danger, the danger of the strategic financial collapse. There will be town
meetings all around the United States. I expect that subscribers and
supporters of LaRouche will be inundating the members of their congressional
delegations who are back in their districts this week and next for the
Easter recess, demanding that they take immediate action.
And so the idea is to create a popular groundswell so that President Clinton
comes to his senses and realizes that right under his own nose, members of
his own administration at the highest level are pursuing a diametrically
opposite policy.
...
Now, anybody with a brain would realize that as Europe is sinking into war,
a lot of European investors are panicking, pulling their money out of the
European markets, and putting it into the relative short-term safe haven of
Wall Street and U.S. Treasuries.
So the drive of the Dow Jones over 10,000 was actually provoked by the
accelerated move towards war in Europe, not through any sort of recovery of
any of these companies
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