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From the Vol.1,No.1 issue of Electronic Intelligence Weekly

The Bush Administration Confronts Depression and War

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill spent last week sparring with U.S.Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan, over which of them could publish the more preposterous lies about the non-existent recovery of a collapse-stricken U.S. physical economy. However, other U.S. decision-makers,in both the Bush Administration and the Congress, were reacting to the onrushing depression by initiating seismic changes in U.S. trade and infrastructure policy. In a belated response to the grave collapse of the U.S. physical economy, President Bush announced, on March 5, that he would impose 30% import tariffs on most categories of steel.

This dramatic development came in response to the cumulative effect of decades of free trade and globalization. Over the past five years, 31 American steel companies had filed for bankruptcy, over 40,000 unionized steelworker jobs had been lost, and steel prices had reached a 20-year low, virtually assuring the near-term extinction of the entire industry.

Faced with the choice between the final demise of the U.S. steel industry, or a return to policies of "fair trade," President Bush--for whatever reason--chose the latter. The effect was titanic. As Lyndon LaRouche wrote, in a policy statement--"The Tariff Itself Is Not Europe's Problem," which appears in this inaugural issue of Electronic Intelligence Weekly--"On balance, this portends what will probably become, rather suddenly, the most portentous, systemic shift in worldwide economic policy in thirty years."

Meanwhile, within the United States, President Bush's actions catalyzed an already ongoing effort by some members of Congress to roll back the decades of disinvestment in America's basic infrastructure:

*Senator Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) introduced a proposal to vastly increase Federal government spending on Amtrak, aimed at rebuilding America's dying passenger rail system.

*A bill is being finalized in House-Senate conference that will replace the disastrous 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, with a minimum pricing safety-net, and will place some restrictions on the big food cartels, which have nearly wiped out the family farm sector.

*Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is promoting legislation to establish government regulation of categories of over-the-counter derivatives.

*In a signal of broad bipartisan recognition of the accelerating crisis of unemployment, both the House and the Senate, in a 48-hour period, passed identical "stimulus packages," long on benefits for unemployed workers, and short on the GOP-promoted tax breaks for the super-rich. On Saturday, March 9, President Bush signed the measure, the instant it reached his desk.

Internationally, the Bush tariff announcement was greeted by howls of protest and threats of trade war. That sudden, reality-driven paradigm shift in U.S. policy will create a major crisis in a Europe which, as of this moment, remains officially committed to the suicide pact known as the present form of the Maastricht agreements. This act by the President and members of the U.S. Congress, will likely doom the World Trade Organization.

A Rude Awakening in Afghanistan

At the same time that the Bush Administration was confronting the existential crisis of the domestic steel industry this week, the military situation inside Afghanistan was taking a not-surprising turn for the worse.

Since the time the bombing campaign against Afghanistan had been first launched, in October 2001, Lyndon LaRouche has warned, repeatedly, that the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces would not be defeated by such methods. In fact, during the autumn-winter U.S.-led offensive. The United States's adversaries had simply staged the same kind of temporary, strategic fading into the background which had been so successful against Soviet forces earlier. They had abandoned their urban fixed positions, and had taken up positions in the countryside, to prepare for a renewed springtime offensive. Any student of the British 19th-century experience in Afghanistan, and the identical 1980s Soviet experience, could have predicted, as LaRouche did, the kind of developments which unfolded in Gardez this past week.

So, in a series of interviews on Friday, March 8, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the Pentagon is all too aware that the battle over the future fate of Afghanistan is in the early stages. He forecast one to two more weeks of fighting in the Gardez region, and acknowledged that the conditions for similar protracted conflict with the "Afghansi" forces exist in almost every part of the country. Meanwhile, U.S. General Tommy Franks reacted, in a memorable slip of the tongue, by referring to Afghanistan deaths of U.S. servicemen as counted among the losses suffering in a continuing war in Vietnam.

The Issues of Israel and Iraq

The dramatic turn in Afghanistan may prove to be an argument in support of those forces in Western Europe, Russia, the Arab world and the United States, who are dead-set against a major U.S. military operation aimed at the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, an operation that would, in fact, trigger the "Clash of Civilizations" global religious war, promoted by Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, and Bernard Lewis. In recent days, the drumbeat for a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had reached such a crescendo, a crescendo of propaganda from certain British and U.S. pro-war quarters who have sought to create the impression that the question on the table appeared to be not whether the war against Iraq would commence, but when.

The issue of a 2002 launching of general war against Iraq is inextricably tied to the escalating conflict between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. During the past week, despite mounting internal opposition within Israel itself, the Israel Defense Forces have been conducting a deadly campaign of terror against the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In one shocking incident, which is only typical of the reasons Israel cannot hope to win the present irregular war, Palestinian snipers shot and killed seven Israeli soldiers posted inside the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the top generals of the IDF are caught in a bind. They know, on a certain level, that they cannot win the present irregular warfare. The virtual Sharon dictatorship, trapped in the viritual strategic bunker he has built around himself, is ideologically incapable of making peace with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Sharon's state of mind was typified when he told reporters, this past week, that his military objective was to simply kill as many Palestinians as possible. He flaunted the vastly increasing body count among innocent Palestinian civilians.

Sharon's operation is conducted with full awareness that such tactics are a virtual carbon-copy of the tactics, employed by the Nazis against the Warsaw Ghetto, as documented by Nazi General Juergen Stroop himself, in reports studied by Israeli military planners. The Israeli military policy of practice is to follow the example of Stroop, in destroying electricity and water supplies, bombing ambulances, and waging every form of psychological terror against the Palestinians, in order to induce a panicked mass exodus from Palestine, across the river into Jordan. Such a move by Israel, is intended to result in the collapse of the Jordanian Hashemite Kingdom of King Abdullah II, and would threaten the overthrow or assassination of every Arab leader, associated in any way with the United States' current Middle East policy.

To assure American and European support for his schemes of mass-expulsion, Sharon is convinced that he must provoke a general Middle East war by the late spring. For this reason, there is heavy pressure from Sharon's allies inside the U.S. Executive and Congress for a spring assault on Iraq, rather than waiting for the U.S. preparations which could not be completed prior to autumn this year. Meanwhile, the United States now finds itself so bogged down in Afghanistan, that, to even contemplate a full-scale invasion of Iraq at this time, would be reckless.

This Sharon war-drive has created a policy dilemma for the Bush Administration, which is itself deeply divided over Mideast policy. A war-hawk faction, centerd around Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, and the entire neo-conservative Zionist Lobby apparatus, is attempting to woo their intended dupes with the worthless promise, that a full-scale American military invasion of Iraq, will install a client-state regime recruited from an emigre cocktail-circuit collection of less than dubious staying power, even if enthroned by U.S. military force.

Meanwile, as you may read in the accompanying in-depth report, the New York Council on Foreign Relations has weighed in, in favor of a U.S. military invasion of Iraq, involving nearly half a million soldiers, to pre-assure the Arab world that, this time, the United States will not quit until the job is done. The danger is that the Bush Administration, and also the Democratic Party leadership, is so honey-combed with a density of fanatics dedicated to the promotion of a "Clash of Civilizations," that these circles might convince the President to ignore all the warning signs and plunge, head-first, into a kind of world war from which civilization might not return for generations yet to come.

During the past 72 hours, the cumulative impact of Russian, European, and Arab opposition to an Iraq war, combined with a growing domestic U.S. upsurge in "outside the Beltway" opposition to the "dump Saddam" campaign, has apparently catalyzed a new swing of the pendulum in the Bush Administration's policy. Whereas, at the beginning of the week, war on Iraq appeared to be a foregone conclusion, there is now a renewed behind-the-curtains battle underway over if and when an Iraq attack should be launched. As this issue of Electronic Intelligence Weekly goes to press, Vice President Dick Cheney is departing on an 11-nation Mideast tour. A week ago, his mission was to twist the arms of a reluctant Arab world into support for a U.S.-led military invasion to overthrow Saddam. Neither that effort, nor its outcome are clear-cut at this time.

The LaRouche Factor

It is in this upsurge of converging world crises, that governments and leading political factions in many parts of the world are turning, openly or covertly, to LaRouche for policy guidance.

For example, this past week, notable publications in Italy and Macedonia highlighted LaRouche's role in exposing the role of madmen such as Brzezinski, Huntington et al. in the background of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. On Friday, March 8, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who now heads the powerful Expediency Council, delivered the weekly prayer, and cited Lyndon LaRouche by name as the only leading international political figure from the United States with the courage to say that the Sept. 11 attacks were part of an internal coup d'etat attempt, aimed at driving the United States into support for a war with the 1.4 billion Muslims living in the world today.