E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 29, No. 50 - December 10, 2015
Helga Zepp-LaRouche Addresses Japanese Business Leaders in Tokyo Schiller Institute chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed two events in Tokyo on Dec. 2, delivering a clear message to the Japanese business leaders that the World Land-Bridge is the only way to end the tyranny of war and geopolitics, solve the ongoing Middle East crisis, and stop international terrorism. In the morning, Zepp-LaRouche addressed the seventh annual Asia Innovation Forum, attended by 300 young Japanese entrepeneurs and hosted by Nobuyuki Idei, former Chairman and CEO of the Sony Corporation and now the founder and CEO of Quantum Leaps, as well as the founder of the Asia Innovators’ Initiative. In the afternoon, she spoke at a separate event, sponsored by the Canon Institute for Global Studies, which was attended by 100 top executives of the major Japanese industrial corporations and financial institutions, as well as of the Japanese government’s overseas investment agencies and funds. In her comprehensive presentation at both events, Ms. ZeppLaRouche warned of the global pattern of regional wars that can easily lead to global catastrophe, including a new superpowers conflict, and emphasized that to change the course of events, a fundamental change in the paradigms of thinking is required. She went through the major global projects that can transform the world, as laid out in the Schiller Institute’s World Land-Bridge proposal, noting that the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” initiative could become the seed of a global renaissance. Ms. Zepp-LaRouche touched on the American System of economics, as developed just prior to and during the emergence of the young United States, and noted that those ideas spread around the globe in the 19th century, leading to the creation of the modern nations of Germany and Japan, under Bismarck and the Meiji Restoration, and are today evidenced in the Chinese economic miracle. Such a system, contrary to monetarism, puts the priority on creative discoveries in science, that are applied to the physical economy and thus to the improvement of mankind’s living conditions. Ms. Zepp-LaRouche was joined on the panel by former IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn; former head of the Russian Railroad Corporation and co-founder of the Rhodes Dialogue of Civilizations, Vladimir Yakunin; and Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., the former executive director of the IMF, who is now a Vice President of the New Development Bank, founded by the BRICS and headquartered in Shanghai.  The panel was moderated by Daisuke Kotegawa, a former Japanese Ministry
of Finance top official who was also Japan’s IMF director at the time of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. During his presentation, Dr. Yakunin strongly endorsed Ms. Zepp-LaRouche’s World Land-Bridge proposal, noting that Russia’s Eurasian Development Corridors and China’s One Belt, One Road policies were thoroughly compatible and represented the “new paradigm” of thinking that is urgently needed to avoid wars brought on by the dying system of neo-liberalism. Strauss-Kahn, in opening the panel, detailed the ongoing crisis of the world financial system, and acknowledged that the austerity policies were a failure and had to be replaced by a growth model, while admitting that there is no real support for a viable change in policy from within the dominant world financial institutions today. Obama’s Meltdown Revives Push  to Remove Him from Power President Barack Obama was supposed to enjoy a moment of personal triumph in Paris on Nov. 30 at the opening of the COP-21. But exactly the opposite happened. The U.S. President went into a meltdown, and his bizarre performance before the convention and later at a press conference, provoked a flurry of media attention and revived the call for his removal from office under the 25th Amendment (cf. below). There is ample explanation for Obama’s state, as he faces harsh criticism at home and abroad for his childish provocations of Vladimir Putin and his failure in the “war on terror”. Obama’s state of mind has certainly set off alarm bells among some of America’s top military strategists, who fear that his anti-Russia fanaticism could bring the world to thermonuclear extinction. Bruce G. Blair, a retired US nuclear missile launch officer, wrote a stinging warning of the danger of the launch on warning doctrine, under the present circumstances (cf SAS 49/15). Blair was seconded by former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who is a mentor of the current Defense Secretary Ash Carter. In a speech on Dec. 3 in Washington, the former head of the Pentagon under Bill Clinton warned of the danger of thermonuclear war, stemming from the renewal of worsethan-Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow. Importantly, Perry said the rise in tensions is “as much our fault as it is the fault of the Russians” (cf. below). Meanwhile, since the Turkish shoot-down of the Russian Su24 and the subsequent public support for the attack by NATO and by Barack Obama, Russia has beefed up its own military
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presence in Syria. It has deployed its modern S-400 air defense systems to its main air base in Latakia province, which is just 50 km from the Turkish border, and its missiles have a range of 400 km. Not only Syria but Iraq as well has become a potential hairtrigger for superpower confrontation as the result of U.S. and Turkish actions. Indeed, the Pentagon announced Dec. 1 the deployment of some 200 Special Forces to Iraq to “hunt and kill” ISIS leaders, despite the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said his government “does not need foreign ground combat forces”, but only needs weapons, training, and support from international partners. At the same time, without consulting Baghdad, Turkey sent some 150 troops and 25 tanks into northern Iraq, which the Iraqi government called an “invasion”, and demanded they be withdrawn. The reality that is becoming more and more apparent is that Islamic State must be defeated decisively in both Syria and Iraq, and that it is more than feasible to achieve that objective -- but only if the Washington and Moscow can work together in a coordinated military campaign, backed by a clear plan for indepth reconstruction of post-war Syria and Iraq. That is what Obama has refused, until now, to do, which is driving the calls for his ouster. The POTUS Is Losing It! Back in April 2009, Lyndon LaRouche identified Barack Obama as a pathological narcissist, whose need to be both admired and unchallenged meant that he would coldly serve the interests of those who put him in power, forces LaRouche identified as being identical to the City of London and Wall Street networks which had run the George W. Bush administration. In the sixand-a-half years since then, the President of the United State’s (POTUS) actions have shown that LaRouche was right. However, although Obama has repeatedly violated the U.S. Constitution, i.e., committed impeachable offenses, political leaders in both parties have refused to act to remove him from office. There are many reasons for this, related to corruption, opportunism, and just plain fear, but events of the last several weeks , in which Obama’s duplicitous handling of the “war on terror” has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, have finally forced open a public discussion of the issue. Just hours before the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris, Obama was declaring that “ISIS has been contained.” Then, on Nov. 25, he announced that there is “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Less than a week later, 14 people in San Bernardino, California were killed, in what the FBI is now investigating as a terrorist attack. According to our sources, White House officials first pressured the FBI for more than 24 hours to not declare it an attack. At the same time, Obama has been strong-arming America’s allies to refuse to join with Russia to defeat ISIS, and insisting that the removal of President Assad must take priority over defeating the jihadist terrorists. In response to this provocative behavior, and the absence of his usual “eloquence” in a speech at the COP21 Conference in Paris, even usual defenders of the President, such as Dana Milbank and Richard Cohen of the Washington Post have been critical, with Cohen writing that Obama seems to have “lost his voice.” Veteran columnist Robert Parry blasted the President for his lack of empathy for the Russians killed aboard the Metrojet airplane and the Su-24 shot down by the Turks. “After watching Obama’s news conference, one perhaps can hope that his is just speaking out of multiple sides of his mouth as
he is wont to do....Or maybe President Obama has simply lost touch with reality -- and with common human decency.” This theme was taken up by Charles Hurt, in a Dec. 1 op-ed in the Washington Times . “Is it now time to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment?”, he asks. “Has our President officially lost his ability to discharge the powers and duties of his office?” Most ominous for Obama is that Democrats in Congress are speaking up. Senators Murphy of Connecticut and Kaine of Virginia have been demanding that Obama follow the Constitution, by going to Congress for an Authorization to Use Military Power, which he has refused to do. Two Harsh Warnings of Danger of Nuclear War with Russia Tulsi Gabbard: It’s Crazy to Risk War over Assad. Among the most outspoken critics in Congress of President Obama’s illegal war policy is Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii Democrat and Iraq war veteran.  At a Dec. 1 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, she grilled Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on the potential for a “devastating nuclear war”, stemming from the US military posture in Syria. She asked Carter to elaborate on the over-kill arsenals of thermonuclear weapons possessed by both the US and Russia, which can be launched “within minutes”, before challenging him as to why, in the aftermath of the Turkish shoot-down of the Russian fighter plane, the Pentagon was deploying air-to-air missiles aboard the US fighters operating in Syria. Given that the Islamic State jihadists do not have an airforce, she went on to ask, are those missiles deployed against Russia, which continues to back the same Assad regime that the US and allies are trying to overthrow. Interviewed later in the day by CNN-TV , Tulsi Gabbard stated outright: “We have U.S. F-15 planes patrolling the border between [Turkey and Syria] at the same time that Russia has put in place a very sophisticated anti-aircraft missile defense system. This is deeply concerning to me because this again puts the United States and Russia at a head-to-head conflict, with the possibility... that one side will shoot down the other side’s plane, kicking off what is a much larger, potentially world war, and a nuclear war between and Russia. “And the thing is, we have to ask ourselves this, what will the cost of this be? Devastation to the American people, to the world. For what? For what benefit? Why are we trying to do this in Syria? Why are we trying to go to war with Russia, over this disagreement of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad? It’s crazy.’’ Moreover, it’s illegal, concluded Gabbard, since President Obama has not sought Congressional approval for the military actions.
Former Defense Secretary: No Need for ICBMs. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry issued a stark warning, saying we are now at “the brink of a new nuclear arms race.” Speaking on Dec. 3, at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in DC, he went on to argue that the risk of nuclear war is exacerbated by the dismantling of the relationship between Russia and the United States. “Today -- probably I would not have said this 10 years ago -- but today we now face the kind of dangers of a nuclear event like we had during the Cold War, an accidental war,” warned the Defense Secretary under President Clinton (1994-97). “I see an imperative,” he added, “to stop this damn nuclear arms race from accelerating again.” Perry singled out the ICBM force as the greatest source of
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threat, because of the launch-on-warning problem, which invites an attack from an enemy power (cf. SAS 49/15). He therefore called for reducing the nuclear triad to bombers and submarines. ICBMs “aren’t necessary -- they’re not needed. Any reasonable definition of deterrence will not require that third leg.” The former head of the Pentagon also criticized the program of the U.S. and NATO to install “Aegis-ashore” ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems in Romania and Poland, which triggered some of Putin’s nuclear saber rattling. “There is literally no justification for it. The reasons they give for it don’t stand up.” Perry also believes it was “stupid” for the United States to cut off military-to-military communications with Russia as a response to the 2014 Ukraine crisis. “That’s the time when you need your military-to-military relations most of all,” he commented. In short, a frontal attack on Obama’s strategic policy. German Parliament Votes to Join  Illegal Air Attacks in Syria By a vote of 445 to 146 on Dec. 4, the Bundestag approved participation in the U.S.-led “international coalition” that is launching air attacks in both Syria and Iraq, purportedly against ISIS targets. These operations have not requested by the Syrian government, nor have they been authorized by the UN Security Council, and are thus a strictly illegal act of war in violation of international law. Germany is to provide “non-combat support,” involving reconnaissance jets, a tanker plane, and a frigate, along with up to 1,200 troops, at the request of the French government. Helga Zepp-LaRouche is very wary of the entire intervention, given the unclear goal of the German government. As she pointed out in her speech in Tokyo (cf. above), military actions alone will only lead to a quagmire. “If terrorism is to be permanently eradicated and the refugee crisis overcome, the operations against ISIS must take into account its decentralized structures in many countries, but military means are not sufficient. What is needed is real development!” “A comprehensive reconstruction program for all of Southwest Asia and Africa must be put on the agenda. Only if young people, and especially the young men, have the perspective of a future, the chance to raise a family, to become scientists, doctors or architects, can the environment for the recruitment of jihadists be dried out.” And that, she stressed, involves extending the New Silk Road to the Middle East, and to Africa. Chinese Scientists Working Abroad  Looking to Return According to a white paper released on Nov. 25 by science publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Chinese scientists living abroad are flocking back to China. Based on interviews and a survey of more than 1,700 Chinese researchers, NPG concludes that “China’s long-lamented ‘brain drain’ has become a ‘brain boomerang’, with the vast majority of Chinese scientists planning to return quickly to China after a period overseas.” NPG, which publishes Nature , Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft , estimates that “85% plan to return within 5 years.” This, states the white paper titled Turning Point: Chinese Science in Transition, reflects a “greater confidence in the country’s future.” They note as well that China’s “increased efforts to attract, develop, and retain talented researchers are also securing greater numbers from abroad.” China has waged an active recruitment campaign, offering a variety of incentives to Chinese-born scientists who return home, as part of their plan to create a “knowledge-based”
economy. Another reason highly qualified researchers are leaving Europe and the United States in particular is the severe budget cuts in R&D in those countries. Wall Street Journal Author Impressed  with China’s Silk Road Project The approach to ending war and religious fundamentalism through in-depth mutual economic development, long the hallmark of our newsletter and of the Schiller Institute, was recently echoed by Andrew Browne of the Wall Street Journal, in an article titled “Can Beijing Sell Silk Road as a Marshall Plan against Terror?” Browne suggests that the West should join China in the New Silk Road as the necessary means to provide development for the Islamic world, and as the only way to bring peace to the region. “In the aftermath of the Paris massacre,” Browne writes, “a question worth asking is whether China can get the West to work with it on a network of highways, railways, power stations and industrial parks stretching all the way to Europe. The Silk Road Economic Belt represents the most significant economic proposal any country has put forward to help stabilize chaotic parts of the world. Moreover, it’s backed by hard cash: China is putting its $3.5 trillion of foreign-exchange reserves behind the effort to kick-start growth and create jobs in Muslim areas.” Browne notes that the initiative is crucial to defending China from the Islamist terrorists threatening the country’s vulnerable western flank, while being “twinned with an equally sweeping concept, the Maritime Silk Road, that’s meant to have a similarly transformative economic impact along sea routes from China to Europe via Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.” While bombing will not wipe out the current Islamic State, he writes, China’s plan could be comparable to the Marshall Plan launched by the United States in the post-war period. Rolling back the “economic despair that sustains Muslim extremism” is a vision that should bring together China and the U.S., Browne suggests, both of which are challenged by terrorism. African Leaders Demand Water Transfer for Lake Chad Now On the sidelines of the COP21 conference in Paris, African countries confronted CO2-obsessed Western leaders with the need to develop Africa, starting with water transfer projects. In a meeting of twelve African leaders with French President Hollande on Nov. 30, both the Niger President Mahamadou Issofou and the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari forcefully posed the issue of revitalizing Lake Chad to reverse the process of impoverishment which has caused mass migration and the proliferation of terrorism. “It is not an accident that Boko Haram originated in [the region of] Lake Chad,” Issofou said. “This lake is dying, this lake is disappearing and we are heading toward a major catastrophe.” His Nigerian counterpart asked developed countries to make strong financial commitments for a water transfer project from the Congo basin to the Lake Chad basin. No fewer than five million people living in the Lake Chad basin countries, he said, have been displaced by the depletion of the lake, leading to increased social conflicts, high rates of migration and cross border movements.”Nigeria has a large population of over 170 million people and in some parts of Northern Nigeria, a farm that used to belong to 10 people now belongs to over 100 people. They have no other place to live and no land for cultivation,” he said.
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Lake Chad used to cover 26,000 square km large back in 1963. Today, it is only one tenth of that figure. Replenishing it to the 1963 level, to provide for the over 30 million people living around the Lake, can only be done through water transfer from the Congo River Basin, which has abundant water and is separated from the Chad basin by a watershed at the border between Chad and the Central African Republic. A proposal drafted by the Italian engineering firm Bonifica over thirty years ago emphasizes that it would only need divert 5% of the Congo River water, building a canal that crosses the Congo tributaries and carries the water per gravity to Lake Chad. Such a canal would also constitute a much needed transport infrastructure for central Africa, running from the Great Lakes region up to the Lake Chad basin. The plan has been disregarded in the past decades by western opposition to great projects, and by environmentalist organizations such as the WWF. However, several factors, including mass migrations, the growth of the terrorist threat and the efforts of the BRICS to develop Africa, have revived interest . French President Holland did pledge two billion euros, but that is a totally insufficient sum. New Plasma Technology Developed  That Treats Nuclear Waste More Quickly As a spin-off of its magnetic fusion research, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has developed a low- temperature plasma process to separate the elements contained in nuclear waste. The process has been designed specifically to treat the stored, highly radioactive material, largely plutonium, that has been left over from nuclear weapons production. But it is naturally applicable to the spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors as well. The process, called plasma mass filtering, is described as more efficient and less costly than chemical separation, which is what is used now in countries that reprocess spent fuel (which does not include the United Sates). The material is heated and ionized, creating a plasma, and then put into a centrifuge, or a rotating filter, where the individual elements are subjected to the influence of electric and magnetic fields, which differentially affect the ions. The lighter elements (generally, the non-radioactive ones, such as aluminum) are separated from the heavier, radioactive ones. The separation takes place based on atomic mass, without regard for the chemistry. This greatly lowers the volume of material for long-term storage. “The interesting thing about our ideas on mass separation is that it is a form of magnetic confinement, so it fits well within the Laboratory’s culture,” says Nat Fisch, one of the scientists developing the process at the Laboratory. He describes the process as “differential magnetic confinement” because “some species are confined while others are lost quickly,” separated out through centrifugal and magnetic forces. One might expect the environmentalist, anti-nuclear organizations to lobby strongly for funding for this promising project. But that’s unlikely. Background:  ISIL as a Product of the Bestial World “Order” The terrorist attacks which have become almost a daily occurrence in large parts of Southwest Asia and North Africa, carried out by people who claim to be fighting for Islam, are now becoming reality in Europe and the United States as well. In fact, as the overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world recognize, Islamic State and the other jihadi groups
“have hijacked the Muslim faith” . And they have exploited the political and social conditions created by illegal wars, economic sanctions, and geopolitical manipulations, carried out mainly by the dominant western powers. Just recall the “jihadist” militancy that Anglo-American-Saudi intelligence services created as their tool during the Afghan war 1980-1989, which was then reinforced through the invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003 and of Libya in 2011, and through the current horrendous war on Syria fomented and backed by such allies of Europe and the U.S. as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. This geopolitical “tool” has now turned into a plague that is threatening all civilization with its nihilistic, satanic view of man as a blood-thirsty beast, but it continues to be used, including to destabilize Russia and China, through respectively Chechen rebels and Uighur militants, both of whom are now actively involved in the war in Syria. It is not an exaggeration to state that the bestiality demonstrated by ISIL mirrors the ideology of “clash of civilizations,” put forth by such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, which claims that different cultures and religions are irreconcilable and condemned to war with one another. Such Western ideologues and politicians such as Dick Cheney and Tony Blair share with ISIL the tendency to dehumanize their victims as individuals and groups. It is no coincidence that many of the top Iraqi military leaders of Islamic State were imprisoned and tortured by U.S. and British forces in the most unspeakable, humiliating way in such infamous locations as Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca. That is where the leader of ISIL, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself, was incarcerated by the U.S. forces in Iraq in 2004. These prisons, like other CIA-run prisons around the globe, became the recruiting grounds and brainwashing centers that produced a new generation of mass-killers, who, exactly like their prison-guards and torturers, regarded anyone who was not on their side as less than human, and more like an animal or an insect which could cold-be bloodedly crushed, maimed or burned. The ideological and theological roots for this kind of bestiality and irreconcilability do not exist in the true Islamic traditions, as EIR’s Hussein Askary explains in a recent article. It was created through the political manipulation of a specific line of thought that was marked by the Fourteenth-Century cleric Taqi Al-Din Ibn Taymiyyah, the key source of inspiration for the Saudi Wahhabi movement. He also inspired Mohammad AbdulWahhab, the major ally of the Al-Saud family in the Arabian Peninsula in the 18th century. The British Empire then took this Wahhabi-Saudi duo and created out of them the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Without such British support and protection, Saudi Arabia would never have existed. Without the continued British control of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. protection of the Anglo-Saudi power since the end of WWII, there would never had been “jihadist terrorism”, nor Al-Qaeda or ISIL. Breaking the British-Saudi-Obama alliance is key to solving the existential crisis in Southwest Asia today.