COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS CALLS FOR IRAQ WAR

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Executive Intelligence Review

3-13-02

"The New York Council on Foreign Relations, the American branch office of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs, has issued a public call for a full-scale war on Iraq, as a stepping stone to imperial world government. The declaration for war and empire appeared in the form of two articles in the March/April 2002 Foreign Affairs, the Council's bi-monthly journal.

In addition to the publication of the articles--by Kenneth Pollack, deputy director of the CFR's national security studies program, and Sebastian Mallaby, former Washington bureau chief of the London {Economist}, now with the Washington Post--EIR has confirmed that CFR officials have been travelling around the United States, soliciting support from leading regional political and financial circles, for the Iraq war scheme. And former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the self-professed British agent and leading light of the CFR, has launched a personal diplomatic offensive, in support of the H.G. Wells one-world scheme--including the need for a "lovely little war" to replace Saddam Hussein.

'Suitcase Nuke' Scare Stories

Because there is not a shred of evidence credibly linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the rationale being put forward to justify an invasion of Iraq is the threat that Saddam will soon possess "weapons of mass destruction." In furtherance of this scare story, Time magazine published a preposterous black propaganda story in its March 4 edition, claiming that terrorists are believed to have obtained a 10 kiloton portable nuclear bomb from Russia, and had been prepared to detonate it in New York City or Washington last October. While the Time story acknowledged that the unnamed government source for the loose nukes tale, code-named "Dragonfire," was thoroughly discredited, and the portable nuke story was shown to be a complete hoax, the incident gave Time the pretext to flash scare-'em headlines, "Can We Survive the Next 911?" The Time story was widely circulated by Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Fox TV News, and the Washington Post gave the hoax front-page treatment on March 3.

Some cooler heads on Capitol Hill moved to counter the propaganda barrage. On March 6, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-Del.) took testimony from three nuclear weapons experts, who debunked the idea that terrorists could easily access and explode "suitcase nukes." They also gave solid scientific evidence that terrorists would not be able to inflict mass casualties, even if they were able to detonate a "dirty bomb," which would spread radiation poisoning.

The Policy Decision Has Been Already Made

While sources in and around the Bush Administration continue to insist, in private discussions with EIR, that there is no final decision on a military operation to effect a "regime change" in Baghdad, mounting evidence suggests that this is a lie, and that the primary purpose of Vice President Dick Cheney's tour of 11 Middle Eastern countries, beginning on March 15, is to arm-twist the Arab world into accepting the inevitability of an American-run military campaign to oust Saddam from power sometime this year.

According to one Pentagon source, the accelerated campaign to crush the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces holed up in Afghanistan is, in part, driven by the need to prepare the 101st Airborne Division and the 10th Mountain Division for redeployment to the Persian Gulf.

Active duty U.S. military officers have told EIR that there is a rush to cobble together an "Afghan Army," dominated by regional warlords and opium lords, to create a "Potemkin Village" appearance of victory and stability in Afghanistan, and to justify the redeployment of the American front-line combat-ready units to the Iraq theater, perhaps as early as late Summer. There is also a growing concern about "the fatigue factor" in Afghanistan, as more U.S. combat aircraft crashes occur as the result of pilot and maintenance crew exhaustion. Much of this has been so far kept out of the media.

U.S. 2004 Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche warned, during a Presidents' Day weekend conference, that U.S. military forces are about to be drawn into an Afghan quagmire--just as British and Soviet forces were drawn in and beaten in the past. The idea of a quick victory and easy exit from Afghanistan--without leaving all of Central Asia in a state of greater instability than it was facing prior to the October 2001 start of the war--was preposterous from the outset.

A Utopian Scheme for 'Regime Change'

Such reality factors appear to be of no consequence to the mad utopians planning the war on Iraq. In this context, the Kenneth Pollack Foreign Affairs article deserves special attention. Prior to taking the post of CFR Deputy Director for National Security Studies, Pollack had been the Director for Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council (1999-2001).

Just before joining the Clinton Administration, while a Senior Research Professor at the National Defense University, Pollack had co-authored another Foreign Affairs article, published in the January/February 1999 issue, tearing apart idea of a "rollback" of Saddam's power. Pollack and his two co-authors, Gideon Rose and Daniel Byman, had warned that any effort at "regime change" in Iraq would produce a fiasco equal to the 1961 Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba.

After singling out then-Undersecretary of Defense (now Deputy Secretary of Defense) Paul Wolfowitz as the leading proponent of "rollback," Pollack et al. wrote, "Even if rollback were desirable, any policy to achieve it would have to pass three tests to be considered seriously. It would have to be militarily feasible, amenable to American allies whose cooperation would be required for implementation, and acceptable to the American public.... For the United States to try moving from containment to rollback in Iraq would be a terrible mistake that could easily lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths."

How things changed in just three short years! In the March/April 2002 Foreign Affairs article, "Next Stop Baghdad?," Pollack bluntly declared, "The United States should invade Iraq, eliminate the present regime, and pave the way for a successor prepared to abide by its international commitments and live in peace with its neighbors."

Pollack explained his change of heart. The previous containment policy, he argued, has failed to prevent Saddam from rapidly gaining access to weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and the majority of nations of the world have lost the will to maintain the sanctions. With Saddam in possession of WMDs, the idea of deterring Iraq from waging war against Israel, or even its Persian Gulf neighbors, is tenuous, at best, he argued. "With containment eroding and deterrence too risky, some form of regime change is steadily becoming the only answer to the Iraqi conundrum."

Pollack argued that a war on the model of the recent American "success" in Afghanistan would run too high a risk of failure, given the size and capabilities of the Iraqi military forces. Any idea of an internal coup d'etat against Saddam by top military or the ruling Ba'ath Party circles is preposterous. And the array of exile opposition groups, typified by the London-based Iraqi National Congress, would have zero chance of overthrowing Saddam.

His solution: A full-scale U.S. military invasion.

"All told, the force should total roughly 200,000-300,000 people: for the invasion, between four and six divisions plus supporting units, and for the air campaign, 700-1,000 aircraft and anywhere from one to five carrier battle groups (depending on what sort of access to bases turned out to be possible). Building up such a force in the Persian Gulf would take three to five months, but the campaign itself would probably take about a month, including the opening air operations."

Pollack admitted that the diplomatic fallout would be far more devastating than the military losses. However, here again, he blustered, "Although both the Saudis and the Kuwaitis have said they do not want the United States to attack Iraq, the consensus among those who know those countries' leaders well is that they would grudgingly consent if the United States could convince them it was willing to use the full range of its military capabilities to ensure a swift, successful campaign."

Giving the tip-off to the whole imperial game, Pollack admitted, "Once the country has been conquered and Saddam's regime driven from power, the United States would be left `owning' a country of 22 million people ravaged by more than two decades of war, totalitarian misrule, and severe deprivation. The invaders would get to decide the composition and form of a future Iraqi government--both an opportunity and a burden."

Every competent military analyst and Middle East scholar contacted by EIR for comment on the Pollack scheme had the identical reaction: "Insane!"

In fact, under present circumstances, with the entire Arab and Muslim world angered at the appearance of total U.S. Administration support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Defense Forces' genocide against the Palestinian people, any American action against any Arab state would be the trigger for the "Clash of Civilizations" religious war in the Middle East, demanded by the likes of Harvard Prof. Samuel Huntington, former Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bernard Lewis, Kissinger, et al. In short, a U.S. "invasion" of Iraq would detonate a new Thirty Years' War on a global scale.

The New Imperium

The fact is, the Anglo-American financial oligarchy is {promoting} just such a "Clash of Civilizations"--for the same reasons that Averell Harriman, Montagu Norman, and other Anglo-Americans bankrolled Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933. These oligarchs saw the orchestration of a global war as a means of retaining their power, under the conditions of a global collapse of the financial and monetary system, which was the basis for their world domination.

Their goal is the creation of a new imperium. The Pollack scheme for provoking such a war by an American invasion of Iraq was carried to its logical conclusion in the second seminal piece in the March/April 2002 Foreign Affairs, Sebastian Mallaby's "The Reluctant Imperialist--Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire."

Mallaby, an Oxford University graduate and longtime employee of the City of London's flagship journal, The Economist, spelled out a detailed blueprint for the creation of a one-world agency, to impose order on those parts of the globe under siege by terrorists, drug smugglers, and other criminals.

Mallaby candidly admitted that the threat posed by terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized criminals would not normally "conjure up an imperialist revival, if the West had other ways of responding. But experience has shown that non-imperialist options--notably, foreign aid and various nation-building efforts--are not altogether reliable."

Mallaby's alternative: "White man's burden." The United States, he argued, must rise to the imperial moment. "Might an imperial America rise to fill the gap?" he asked. "The logic of neoimperialism is too compelling for the Bush Administration to resist.... The chaos in the world is too threatening to ignore, and existing methods for dealing with that chaos have been tried and found wanting.... A new imperial moment has arrived, and by virtue of its power America is bound to play the leading role. The question is not whether the United States will seek to fill the void created by the demise of European empires but whether it will acknowledge that this is what it is doing. Only if Washington acknowledges this task will its response be coherent."

Wellsian Doublespeak

Mallaby spelled out a detailed design for a new one-world agency, dominated by the United States, and armed with the military and other force to establish control over regions of the globe that have fallen into chaos. He cited the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as examples of how to structure such a new agency. "Both institutions reflect American thinking and priorities yet are simultaneously multinational.... A new international body with the same governing structure could be set up to deal with nation-building. It would be subject neither to the frustrations of the UN Security Council, with its Chinese and Russian vetoes, nor to those of the UN General Assembly, with its gridlocked one-country/one-vote system."

The new international agency envisioned by Mallaby "would assemble nation-building muscle and expertise and could be deployed wherever its American-led board decided.... Its creation would not amount to an imperial revival. But it would fill the security void that empires left--much as the system of mandates did after World War|I ended the Ottoman Empire. The new fund would need money, troops, and a new kind of commitment from the rich powers--and it could be established only with strong U.S. leadership."

Mallaby's scheme for an American-led foreign legion, modelled on the Roman legions of old, is not new. Such plans for a post-nation-state American imperium were at the heart of H.G. Wells' 1928 The Open Conspiracy, and such post-World War II "Open Conspirators" as William Yandell Elliott and Robert Strausz-Hupe, the mentors of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Huntington, openly discussed precisely such schemes during the 1950s and '60s.

What gives urgency to the present revival of this imperial fantasy is the fact that the sponsors of this plan orchestrated the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and are now pressing for a war on Iraq, that would trigger global conflagration. These utopian madmen cannot succeed in creating their one-world imperium, but they can set events in motion that plunge the planet into a dark age of death and destruction that would last for several generations.

- - -

The above introduces a pungent feature in the March 15 issue of Executive Intelligence Review {EIR}. The package proves that those forces which are now steering the United States toward an invasion of Iraq, and a general "Clash of Civilizations," are acting in service of the H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell "Utopian" Open Conspiracy fantasy to bury not only the United States, but the very idea of the United States, through a global war of destruction.

In the next section, Stanley Ezrol demonstrates that this agitation, even down to details including the "suitcase bomb" scare and opposition to the UN "one nation/one vote" system, is merely a revival of the "Round Table" cult schemes pushed by now-deceased council member, William Yandell Elliott and his Agrarian/Distributist confederates for over seventy years. They tried to aggravate the Second World War, and when that failed, the Cold War, in exactly the way today's CFR followers are now building their "Clash." The Cold Warriors' own words prove that their real enemy was not "Communism," but the system of national sovereignty identified with the American Intellectual Tradition. This they conspired to crush under a new empire dominated by a soldier's cult "religion" which treats the filioque idea that man shares in God's creative capacity, as its chief heresy.

The concluding section, Tony Papert's review of Robert D. Kaplan's Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, shows just how hideous this new Romanism has become. He points out that Kaplan's concluding paean to the Emperor Tiberius--the Emperor who ordered the crucifixion of Christ--is in a centuries' old tradition of anti-Christ worship, which included the short-lived Nazi Caesar, Adolph Hitler, as well as the "Soviet" poet, Maxim Gorky."