The British Great Game:
Past and Present

Speech by Hussein Askary to LaRouche Youth Movement Cadre School in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 30, 2007 (for other presentations click here).

After the presentation a question and answer period followed (mp3-fil of questions and answers).

For those who don’t know me, I am Hussein Askary. I came from Sweden yesterday. I am a Swedish-Iraqi citizen, and have been working with the movement of Lyndon LaRouche for the past eleven-twelve years.

You remember the last time I was here in Copenhagen (February 2006), for a similar meeting, Denmark was also on the world political map actually, but it was for the wrong reason then. It was at the time of the Prophet Mohammed cartoon crisis which threw Denmark into the fires of international geopolitics. But I think even then you did a great job, and that was reflected actually in many Arabic newspapers and websites, which I found a bit later. They were writing: "The Danish LaRouche movement defends Prophet Mohammed". That was one reason why things calmed down, because all the info we got on Jyllands-Posten, CEPOS, the Neo-cons’ involvement George Shultz and their plan to throw Denmark into the Geopolitical game. That expose was translated by us and sent out to people in the Arab world and that helped people to calm down and think rationally about what was behind this campaign. So, actually the Danish Schiller Institute made a great service to defuse a real clash of civilization.

So, it was a terrible thing that happened to Denmark, but with your fight then, and now again, the few people in Denmark have done something historic. As Lyndon said the other day, usually history is changed by a handful of people, individuals who use their creativity and their sovereign creative mind to change history. Look at all those Danish parties, what are they doing these days. But the Schiller Institute, and the LaRouche Movement with a very few people, and hopefully it will just grow and grow, They are changing the situation. This should be the beginning, they are making history.

Actually I wanted to follow on what Tom [Gillesberg] said, and those who missed Tom’s very good presentation will miss a bit of what I will talk about. Let that be their punishment, those who were not here this morning.

Now the issue is the British. And we get a lot, also LaRouche has gotten a lot of crap over the years, for saying it’s the British, the British, the British. And people say "why the British?", you know, "don’t you see the Americans doing this or that, Why you only attacking the British?" Well there is a reason for that. It is not just a bluff. It is not just a crazy reason, because it is about history. This is how history been shaped for good or bad by the fight between the British and what LaRouche defines as the American System, the humanist republican system against the oligarchic system.

Mark Burdman’s immortal contribution

But before I get to that, I actually wanted to remember a very good friend of us, a great and beautiful individual soul, Mark Burdman. Maybe some of you had known him before. He passed away on July 8, 2004. He was a longtime member of the LaRouche movement and as Mary [Burdman- his wife] writes here in a republication of a speech Mark gave in New York in 1982 in a conference titled, "Heinrich Heine, A Birthday Tribute", after two years of his stay in Germany at the time, because he worked and died in Germany actually. He, as his wife says, represents everything good about what it means to be an American Jew. And I had actually had my first real experience with an American Jew. Muslims are usually very paranoid about Jews. But with Mark it was totally different. The few times I was in Germany working with him, I developed a very good relationship and he opened my eyes actually to what is the problem with the "British Empah". So I want to remember him by quoting from his speech in 1982, and I think he was as young as many of the people here he was at the time, and the issue is still the same. He says under, Statecraft and Beauty:

And that is the issue. The issue is the fight between beauty and ugliness, the beauty of the human creative soul and the ugliness of the bestiality of the Hobbesian idea, which is exactly what the British Empire represents. And the thing is.. The problem with this type of discussion we have today is that people now forget about the British Empire, which is something I confront the whole time. People in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere say it is America, which is the problem. And, as we have seen from Tom’s presentation, there is a different American tradition than what we see today is presented, but the problem is that the British have been able to manipulate, exactly as Venice was manipulating everybody around the crusades, with the idea of divide and conquer, the idea of manipulating religion, the idea of corrupting political leaders into submitting to British plans, or to Venetian plans. And I give you one example, on when LaRouche says Cheney is British, people freak out and say, "no he is the Vice President of the United States of America, what are you talking about?" Well he is not talking about his passport. He is talking about his intentions. And indeed, even practically, he is a British agent. There are other people who represent the ugly idea of a bestial, Hobbesian man, and the idea that history is shaped by the struggle for power, a struggle between powers regardless of any principles or morals. I want to give you an example of such a person.

The discussion was, when Feride [Gillesberg] asked me to do this presentation, about the British Great Game, because this is how they consider the issue. It is a game and the powerful and smart win. And all the geo-politicians have the same mindset, this British mindset. One such person who is useful to use is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the U.S. National Security Advisor. He is American. But why did LaRouche refer to him some time ago as a British? Even If he is not directly a British agent, he is an agent of influence. I have read his book "The Grand Chess Board", how to play everyone against everyone, in the Eurasian continent exactly as Britain have done. And he is full of praise for the British empire. Now, if this guy is not agent, who is? In this part of his introduction, he wrote:

"For the next century, until World War I, Great Britain exercised global maritime domination as London became the world's principal financial and trading center and the British navy 'ruled the waves'. Great Britain was clearly paramount overseas, but like the earlier European aspirants to global hegemony, the British empire could not single-handedly dominate Europe. Instead, Britain relied on an intricate balance-of-power diplomacy and eventually on an Anglo-French entente to prevent continental domination by either Russia or Germany."

He goes on: "The overseas British Empire was initially acquired by through a combination of exploration, trade, and conquest. But it also derived a great deal of its staying power from the perception of {British cultural superiority… Cultural superiority, successfully asserted and quietly conceded, had the effect of reducing the need to rely on large military forces to maintain the power of the imperial center. By 1914, only a few thousand British military personnel and civil servants controlled about 11 million square miles and almost 400 million non-British peoples."

He goes back to balance of power and says: "Even Great Britain was not a truly global power. It did not control Europe but only balanced it."

You have to look beyond the sophistry, beyond the cold words. It was this "balance of power" and this kind of British diplomacy, of pitting one European nation against the other, which gave us WWI and WWII with millions of people dead and civilization almost collapsed. But then, you listen to these words it sounds like an academic discussion.

So the British with the so-called diplomacy, balance of power and cultural superiority dominated hundreds of millions of people and many nations. Actually, he [Brzezinski] gives this map here, which is exactly the opposite of this [Eurasian Landbridge map], where the British flag is all over the seas. See the contrast between this one and this one. This is where the British want to exhibit their power, but here they want to play the Great Game and "divide and concur", the so-called balance of power. This is Brzezinski.

So what he says is sophistry. This is the kind of sophist use of words to justify world wars. And in order to justify what he says what the American role should be, which is to follow the British model. Now Brzezinski, although he has recently made some interesting interventions, attacking the Iraq war policy, he is still one of the most prominent anti-Russian figures inside the U.S., and he considers Russia the arc enemy of the U.S. But this is the type of thing you have this type of people who are American by name but they are full of admiration for the British and the methods of the British Empire.

Another such example is Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, in a speech he gave in 1982, the same year as our friend Mark gave his speech in New York, in the London Royal Institute for International Affairs, or Chatham House. He never concealed where his sympathies and loyalty lie.

"All accounts of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War and in the early postwar period draw attention to the significant differences in philosophy between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill reflecting our different national histories. America considered wars an historical aberration caused by evil men or institutions. Britain had seen aggression take too many forms to risk so personal a view of history; she had her eyes on the postwar world and sought to gear wartime strategy toward forestalling Soviet domination of Central Europe. Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order toward which American idealism has always tended. The British undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic…."

"The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never before practiced between sovereign nations. In my period in office, the British played a seminal part in certain American bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union—indeed, they helped draft the key document. In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department."

Now, you tell me what a British agent is?

So, what Brzezinski calls British cultural superiority, is not cultural superiority, because the British did not make it into being a major power without brutal force. People say the British are smart. Yes, they are smart, but there are examples of their use of extremely brutal methods to destroy their adversaries.

There are certain examples that I can take. We have the slave trade to begin with, which the British participated in. There is the opium war against China where they bombed China into accepting the exports of opium.

We had actually one of the important events, which LaRouche refers to very often. And, this is what they did in Sudan. Lyn refers to Chinese Gordon who was the British governor of Khartoum, General Charles Gordon. The Sudanese organized a movement, which was religious in character, but they wanted to end the British occupation. So they went and defeated the British garrison and killed this guy, the Chinese Gordon. He was, called Chinese Gordon because of his great achievements in the opium war in China where he killed a lot of people, so he got his name from that. But, then the British organized a major military campaign with a huge army lead by General Kitchener who went from Egypt and organized an Egyptian army too, and went to destroy the Made army, the army organized by Al-Mahdy. Al-Mahdy had already died, and the people had built a big mosque and dome over his grave. So, anyway, there was no balance between the two military forces, and the British just massacred 60,000 members of the Made army who were ill-equipped, and the British just ran them over. But, what they did actually, and this shows you how this British "cultural supremacy" works.

This is a book by Winston Churchill. It is called "My Early Life", and he talks about when he became an officer at young age, and he was very proud to be on that expedition. Actually, Churchill got the Nobel Prize in literature later. The Swedes gave it to him. Not the Nobel Prize for Peace, because that was too much to swallow, but literature prize. And one of Churchill's literary works they cite for why he was considered such a "literary genius" is his description of these battles in Sudan, Afghanistan, the Boer War and so on. And, in this book, he describes in a very graphic and disgusting way how they were massacring these people, and then describes how the officers lived in the camp drinking Champaign and eating great food on the river bank of the Nile.

But in his own drawing of the battle, you see they did not bomb the city itself, because the battle was outside the city. But what they bombed was actually Al-Mahdi’s tomb, the mosque where the Made was buried, so they concentrated their fire on the mosque after having killed all those Sudanese fighters just to crush the morale and the cultural pride of the Sudanese people.

Actually, according to one story, they went into the tomb of Al-Made and cut off his head, because somebody wanted to take the head of Al-Made as a present to the queen or king of England. So it became a major crisis and scandal in Britain when it came to the press, because it was so disgusting so someone took the initiative and threw the head into the waters of the Nile. That is the kind of cultural superiority, the British wanted to exercise.

That is not the only place they did such cultural things, In 1903, they went all the way up to temples of the Tibetans and committed massacres against Buddhist monks, 700 of them shot in the back as they were fleeing from the British. 700 dead in just four minutes outside the temple of Gyantse. They Tibetans had done nothing against the British. Just that they were allegedly receiving a Russian emissary, an ambassador coming there to meet the Dalai Lama.

And that is what the classical Great Game was about. Because when the British had taken over India in the 18th century and Russia was expanding they made sure that the Russians would never (see map) here, that the British don’t want them down here in India.

Central Asia was ruled by tribal chiefs who were leftovers after the collapse of the Silk Road. So these were very primitive, small city states. But, there the name "great game" comes from, this intelligence game which the British were calling it themselves. One of these officers who was actually killed by one of the chieftains in somewhere here in central Asia had called it the Great game. The idea was to make sure that the Russians don’t expand southwards, and therefore they had to send their intelligence agents in order to organize all the tribes along the southern border of Russia to prevent the Russians from building alliances and expanding into there.

So they called it a game, the story is … I am not going to give read all these books for you, you should do it yourselves, but I will just give you an idea about how immensely the British had very carefully worked through these operations to cultivate agents in every part of the world. But, when these things fail they use brutality not the cultural superiority.

So what Brzezinski talks about in terms of British superiority is in fact their use of the kind of intelligence operation to get agents. But also when they fail, they can crush their adversaries brutally. So, the whole British great game, which originally was the Venetian method of "divide and concur", was based on getting one power against the other.

Tom went through the whole description of the Eurasian Landbridge and the cooperation between the US with, specifically, Russia. But, also throughout the whole period from the US civil war where you had Lincoln and American System representatives like Henry Carey launching the project for building the transcontinental railway as part of strategic defense policy. The idea of the "American system of Political economy" was spreading throughout that period into Russia, with the influence of Mendeleyev and his collaboration after his visit to Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. The whole idea of the American System was spreading through economic development of infrastructure. You had Friedrich List in Germany for example. Actually Henry Carrey’s books where translated into Swedish already in the 1870s. So the influence of the American System was enormous.

It was the development of the internal parts of Eurasia, which became the major threat for the British Empire. Most known projects, which the British hated most were the Trans-Siberian railway and later the Berlin-Baghdad railway. The building of the Trans-Siberian railway… the British not only had pitted the French against the Germans to contain the Germans but they also collaborated with the Japanese against the Russians.

In 1904, the trans-Siberian railway reached Manchuria, and all kinds of trouble started in that part of world. The British saw that this was greatest threat their maritime control over world trade, and goes exactly against the imperial idea of dominating other nations. And there was a conflict even inside Russia between the patriots and the imperialists. A patriots' notion of his nation's greatness is that it is great from the inside, while the Imperialist's idea is expansion and domination over other nations and territories. And imperialists are usually betrayers of their nations, and agents of foreign powers. And so where some of the people around the Russia Czar during the Russo-Japanese war. The real defense of the nation and was in the development of the nation itself, which was the idea of Sergei Witte who was the advisor to the Czar Nicholas, and the one who pushed the Trans-Siberian railway project. But exactly when the railway is being finished we had the Japanese-Russian war broke out with a Pearl Harbor-type surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur in the far east by the Japanese. The British obviously supported the Japanese in that war. The Russians were dealt a crushing defeat in that war. In 1905, the revolt started inside Russia. Before the war broke out, Witte had been removed from his position near the Czar by the imperialists' intrigues.

But just three years later, the British managed to turn the Russian's around and made them allies. What was the prize the British gave the Russians? half of Persia (Iran), in accordance with the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907.

In the meantime, the British had already taken over Sudan and they actually, they had an interesting confrontation in southern Sudan in the same year 1898, when a French colonial expedition had reached the town of Fashoda in southern Sudan after having crossed Africa from the West on the Atlantic all the way to the East coast of Africa. But when Kitchener, who destroyed Um Durman (Khartoum), heard the news, he took his army down to Fashoda and there was an interesting confrontation with the French. No military clashes. Just a standoff. They ended the confrontation because in France itself you had an enormous crisis breaking out in the military because of the Dreyfus case. It was the case of Jewish French officer who was accused paradoxically of collaborating with the Germans. Interestingly, Jews in Europe were considered pro-German before the Nazis came in the picture. But because of the collapse of the French army leadership, as a result of that crisis, the French decided to go into the British game and signed the Entente Cordiale treaty. That treaty and the British-Russian Agreement meant that the Germans were encircled by pro-British alliances. That is what lead the whole situation into the 1914 World War. And that is where the whole Sykes-Picot arrangement also comes into the game.

Now the British had already the intention to break the Ottoman Empire and stop the German-Turkish collaboration around both transcontinental railway construction and oil development in Iraq (The Berlin-Baghdad railway), which was built around the turn of the century. The British had already considered the Middle East as their sphere of influence and a center for geopolitical control. With the discovery of oil and its importance to fuel both industries and war machines, the Gulf and Southwest Asia, which the British like to call the Middle East, became a center of gravity for the British Empire after India.

But most of that area was under the Ottoman Empire’s control. Now the history books say WWI was about dividing the spoils of the "Europe's sick man", which is the Turkish Empire. That is the kind of fairy tales they tell people in schools.

The issue is that the British had already intended to take over the Middle East. But in order to do that militarily, at a time when both Britain and their allies the French were entangled in a bloody and futile trench warfare on the western border of Germany, they had to enlist every possible force their on their side in the war). So they had to promised every one in the region a piece of land, a state, or whatever, in order to get their physical support in the war against the Turks.

Now the Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret arrangement between the British and the French during WWI. Russia was involved first, but after the Bolshevik revolution in the middle of the war, Russia was no longer part of the Sykes-Picot-Sazanov agreement. Their idea was to divide the Middle East among France, Britain, but even Russia. So they had promised the Russians a piece, and the Italians a piece of the Middle East and they had also promised the Jews a homeland for the Jews through the Balfour declaration, that if they support the British in the war they would give them the right to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. They had, at the same time, promised the Arabs here, the Hashemites, (map) who were under the Ottoman Empire, that they would also get their pan Arab state. They had promised Ibn Saud who was in the eastern part the right to all Arabia where he will have his own state if he supported the British. So the British were promising everyone everything, but their real intention was that they will dominate in the end. Everybody would be fighting with everybody, and they would control all the different parties.

If you take a look at the Sykes Picot agreement. This is how it looks like. They had negotiated before the end of the war that the red zone which is the British zone, the British had already occupied southern Iraq in early 1917 and Baghdad and large parts of northern Arabia in late 1917. The Blue Zone is French (today would comprise Syria and Lebanon, and also part of the Northern Iraq and southern Turkey). Russia would get part of Turkey neighboring the Caucasus region. But then there is this yellow area, the British did not want to discuss the Holy Land, because they had already promised to build a Jewish state their. That was a secret agreement with Jewish leaders in Britain.

They had set up this fantastic picture, but when the war had ended, everybody was revolting and told the British "you promised us to have our state" (That was in 1919-20 when the British were economically bankrupt), like the Hashemites, who were governors of Mecca. They are an old family who were governors in the area, but they helped the British during the war with the hope that they will become rulers of the whole Arab peninsula. Also Ibn Saud had this promise to take all over Arabia and he started demanding his right from the British. So, the British made a very interesting arrangement once again. Also, this time again, behind the back of the French. They took the Hashemites from the western Arabia and they appointed them as kings in an artificially created state called Jordan. One of the sons became kin of Jordan, the other son was imposed on Iraq as the King of Iraq, and one third, the one they wanted to make king of Syria. But Syria was part of the French occupation zone. So it ended up creating a total mess in the whole region. At the same time, they helped the Saudis to take over Arabia. So that part was settled and the Saudis since then have been the close collaborators of the British. So, the game was "divide and concur". They played every group against the other.

By 1919 you had all these revolts in Iraq in Syria and also the Palestinians. So this arrangement actually is still a effective although the different lines are not exactly as they are now, because if look at the map (Map of modern Arab world) This is the current map of the region. And, we see that there are like Iraq, Syria Jordan Saudi Arabia all these countries they are well defined and these were a result of, in a certain way, of the Sykes Picot arrangement. But until today, the British have an enormous possibility to manipulate the different groups in the region. Through the control of the governments and the tribal chiefs, as in the case of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE, they have enormous influence over the leaders there. The reason the British like that kind of political-social setting in these countries, where you have these kings and chieftains, is that it looks like the British oligarchic society. There you have one leader to deal with, who is organized as an agent of influence and is used or threatened by different types of rivalries against the other groups and kings in order to control them.

There are many funny stories we used to read about that after WWI. The whole gulf region was under British control, and in certain cases the different chiefs of the Arab tribes whether the Emirates, Saudis, or Kuwaitis get into quarrels around a piece of land or water source. Then the fight is settled among three or two British officers: one on the Kuwaiti side representing them and one representing the Saudi side and one the Emirate side there are famous agreements where the British actually were on both sides of the negotiations table.

[Tape break]

Our problem is not the British people. The British people are an oppressed people. Listen to their jokes. They can be funny sometimes, but cynical. Jokes of an oppressed people. It is the British Empire, as Lyn says, it is not the people it is a company, like the East India Company. It uses the population of Britain, as we have now, it uses the American army for the sake of maintaining private economic and financial interest.

I have actually, in a certain way, because of the work in the LaRouche movement I got to know a lot of these things. I said Mark opened my eyes to realize what the British Empire was really about, and studying the current history, what they have done in Southwest Asia. But also my direct experience with LaRouche showed me that the British Empire is alive but it uses very subtle mechanisms and methods to rule. As I said, there is something in my family. We had people in the family fighting against the British in the 1920 revolt, on both mother's and father's side, my grand parents. People knew, even if they had military encounter with the powerful British military machine, that the strong side of the British is not the military aspect. In reality the British have in many cases been a military disaster. If you look at Churchill himself the operation in Gallipoli in WWI, where he had responsibility for the Eastern Mediterranean front against the Turks. And he just pushed Australian soldiers into the fire to a certain death. It was a total crazy military adventure, a blood bath. It was the similar thing in WWII when they pulled all the allies away from attacking on the French front into North Africa and southern Italy and delayed the end of WWII by at least more than a year at heavy cost.

Their capability is not that. Their capability is to manipulate and create agents of influence. And people don’t see that. The interesting thing about LaRouche is that he sees that as an American. Franklin Roosevelt saw that. He saw how horrible the conditions were in Africa and Asia, conditions created by the British and other colonial powers. He saw for himself what had happened in Africa. And, therefore, he was insisting on the demolishing of the British Empire, first of all, and the French, Dutch and whatever other empires that existed.

And you see this British arrogance in their dealings. Unfortunately, Roosevelt died early. There is one episode, which shows you the way of thinking of Roosevelt for the period after the war and that of Churchill and how they dealt with people from that region. There is this funny and interesting encounter between Franklin Roosevelt and the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz bin Saud during the final days of WWII and that was just before Roosevelt died. The meeting took place in February 1945. He arranged a meeting with King Abdul Aziz secretly after his meeting in Yalta with Churchill and Stalin, to meet the Saudi King in Egypt on Board an American military ship. So, Roosevelt had the idea of developing U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, which was already beginning with the developing of Saudi Arabia's oil production. The British did not want to develop the Saudi oil fields and wanted to keep everybody else also away from these fields, including the Americans. The British thought that their control over Persian and Iraqi oil was crucial for world control, and U.S. dependency on British oil exports. But Roosevelt had a different idea than the British who take everything but give nothing in return. So his idea was that there will be development of Saudi Arabia in return for securing oil supplies to the United States. This was his idea.

But there was also a humane factor about that behavior, because when he met with Abdul Aziz Al Saud, people were telling him that it was against Saud’s religion to smoke or drink alcohol, so he ordered everybody not to serve wine or smoke cigarettes in front of the King. However, Roosevelt was a very heavy smoker. So before he went down taking the elevator to meet with King Abdul Aziz, he took two cigarettes very quickly inside the elevator and then went and met with the King.

Roosevelt had actually had a plan for the situation in Palestine, which he wanted support from Ibn Saud for. He knew that the British had created a disaster there. First of all they promised the Arabs a state, but then also the Jews a state in Palestine, and then the British left the Jews and the Arabs fight it between each other. They did train and arm the Jewish settlers, but then they did not want to solve the problem, because they did not have the intention of letting even the Jews have a state there. Their idea was that after the war the Brits would control the whole area. But Roosevelt had a plan for settling this situation in Palestine after the war and he discussed it with Abdul Aziz Al Saud. He considered the Saudi King a religious personality because of Mecca’s position among Muslims and Arabs.

He also offered Abdul Aziz bin Saud his own wheelchair as a gift, because Abdul Aziz, who was very old and almost invalid at that time, saw the chair and thought it was nice. So Roosevelt offered him the chair as a gift.

Now when Churchill heard about that meeting which took place behind his back, he got totally furious and wanted to have a meeting with Abdul Aziz bin Saud too. But the way Churchill was behaving just shows the British arrogance. Churchill had heard about what took place between FDR and Saud, and he called Abdul Aziz and wanted to humiliate him. His idea was that the Saudi where somehow British subjects. So, he not only smoked his cigar in the face of Abdul Aziz but he was also was serving alcohol on the dinner table, telling the king how he couldn’t even eat dinner if he didn’t take at least two glasses of whisky. But that was just to humiliate the man and crush his pride. This is how this oligarchy works.

After WWII, when Roosevelt had already died and the British took over in collaboration with the right wing in the U.S., there was famous statement attributed to Churchill, which states that, "with British brain and American brawn we will rule the world". This was a statement by Churchill. So, what happened consequently is that the British operations inside the U.S. to recruit and cultivate that kind of agents of influence as I said about Brzezinski and Kissinger who himself had said that he admired the British above the American leaders, because they are more realistic. They have this idea of that might is right. They are more realistic. But the Americans are more idealistic. They wanted to do good and have moral things, but he said in politics there are no such things as morals and principles.

So after WWII, what happened is that the US gets entangled in all kinds of geopolitical operations in the Middle East. They inherit the Palestinian problem from the British, who had created it. There was already a UN resolution to divide Palestine between a Palestinian-Arab zone and a Jewish zone, which was under discussions for a long time. But on the day of the declaration of that plan, the British just decided to leave the country without prior notice. So they just left the place. They did not say to the UN to come and take over or anything. They just left the place and let the Israelis who were well armed and trained to take over. And that was on June 5 1948 which became the Israeli so-called day of independence. So, they left the whole problem and left, and it is burning to this very day. There has been no settlement, and what happened is that the U.S. takes over this thorny issue, because of the support for Israel inside the U.S. and all the consequent arming and the political support for Israel from inside the US.

But what really happened in the Arab world and in the gulf is exactly what Churchill said, we let the Americans come in with their gunboats, with their heavy military power, and maybe some economic support, but the British will run the economic and finances of the whole gulf region. There are very clear examples like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates where the British completely control the finances. You look at some of the major financial firms in Dubai for example, the whole board of directors are British citizens. The same thing in other countries. So, they are more discreet, but they are more, as is said, smarter than the Americans. So, they let the Americans to play the evil power and they go from the back door and fix all kinds of business.

They also use what came out in this BAE scandal. That was the biggest military deal in the history of the region. But the money from the BAE deal which many of you know the details of by now, that the British were selling Jet Fighters aircraft to Saudi Arabia and all kinds of equipment over a period of twenty years. But in return, the Saudi paid the British in oil. So actually, between the official price of what this material cost and what the British got in oil, as a cost of production for the Saudis. What came out is 160 billion dollars. But the real price was 60 billion for the equipment, so there is a difference in price of what the Brits got in oil, and nobody knows what the 100 billion went for. At least 2 billions can be tracked now to the accounts of Prince Bandar bin Sultan who was the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. since the 1980s when this deal started. But then, there are all kinds of other black operations… where that money went to is still unknown. And therefore, these investigations are very important because the BAE is the core of the type of British private company which represents the British Crown.

So we know that Prince Bandar himself had said that part of that money went for organizing military operations in Chad to kick out the army of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Another part of the money was used in the Afghan war. And that war in Afghanistan in the 1980 against the Soviets is actually like a factory and a very important intelligence operation for everything that have been happening around so-called Islamic terrorism.

This so-called Islamic terrorism was financed through these types of operations, Saudi money with British arms but also with the intelligence control from the British MI6 and elements of the CIA. That takes us back to the old Great Game against Russia. Which Brzezinski himself was instrumental in instigating because he discusses this whole thing about containing Russia, creating the arc of crisis of so-called Islamic states against the atheist Russians or Communists. So, the whole Afghani operation is the origin of all these terrorist groups. And the whole 911 operation is part of this type of privately run operation which are protected by the British government.

We have direct experience in the LaRouche movement with the whole issue of British support for so-called Islamic terrorism in the past 15 years. You see there is direct control from Britain of all kinds of these militant groups and this is the kind of thing they use to intimidate all sorts of regimes that are their clients. They control governments in the region. They have very strong relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and so on and so forth. But they also have, at the same time, control over the opposition against these regimes. This whole stuff about Islamic terrorist groups, all the way to the Chechen groups, they all have their, or had their bases before 911 in Britain. All these operations were run out of Britain, not the US. Even Osama bin Laden himself was using Britain after the Afghan war. He actually moved to Britain and was moving from Britain to Afghanistan and later to Sudan freely. And the British said "well our law allows this kind of things, because these are political dissidents", and there are lots and lots of such groups who are based in Britain. They collaborate directly or indirectly with the British intelligence, like the group that wanted to assassinate Kaddafi in 1996, which we reported about at the time. They were organized by MI6 to kill Kaddafi, and Malcolm Rifkin, who was the Foreign Minister at the time, authorized the operation and signed on the operation, according to a former MI5 officer. And the Libyans had issued an arrest warrant against Bin Laden and his Libyan associate Abu Anas Al-Liby for the Interpol. They wanted Bin Laden arrested in 1996, before Bin Laden became a big thing, because he and this Libyan group were operating out of Britain.

So this was directly run out from Britain and that was the time when they also launched a massive media campaign against Saudi Arabia. The same British who were making the weapon deals with the Saudis, and getting billions, tens of billions of dollars, they were sponsoring the same group who said lets overthrow Al Saud. They were political dissidents on political asylum. And British law at the time said that if you organize and finance military operations against another country from Britain and you don’t hurt British interests, then you can do that from inside Britain. So with that kind of stuff they can look liberal on the one side protecting refugees and political dissidents, and have at the same time all kinds of political operations for the destabilization of other countries. But the usual thing like in this case, is that they have control over both sides. So they use the one to hit the other, but then they say to the government in power we are your friends and support you if you behave yourself and have this kind of business. So this is how they function. It is a typical way how the British have managed to get these kinds of agents. The agents maybe themselves say they don’t like the British, but because the British are so flexible, they can work with them. But the Americans who Kissinger says are so idealistic, it is difficult to work with them. The difference is that in the US you have a constitution and accountability. There is congressional insight into the different operations. But in Britain, these institutions are protected. You cannot attack the institutions. It is very interesting thing when even if you tell the truth about an authority or a person in government, you get punished for saying it in public. It is called libel. Because you hurt the reputation of that person and therefore it is almost impossible to tell the truth about what the people in the top do.

Even if you tell the truth about them, you don’t name names. And that is the kind of tyranny they have inside Britain. And they use this kind of intimidation, and have experience with other people and other organizations in the Middle East who were threatened not to publish things by people from EIR or LaRouche himself.

So it is this type of evil ugly oligarchic society which is the source of the power of the British empire. It is these methods that they use to intimidate and crush, and use cultural warfare in order to control other nations. But they usually do it without being seen. And therefore today the real fight is inside the U.S., because the British and what this BAE operation shows, and their control over Dick Cheney is that they want to turn the US into a instrument of the imperial policy of the British Empire. But because there is a constitution in the US and because of the Republican tradition and what Lyndon LaRouche and our movement are doing, maybe this time we will able not only to save the US but also to crush the British Empire, and get rid of the history of the British Empire and all the ideas associated with it, because that does not suit a human society. It is not a system made for real human beings, as Mark Burdman says in the introduction of his paper. This is the system of ugliness, the system which says "the strong, the powerful and mean wins at the end. This is the reality of the world." But that is not a system for real creative humans.

We can take some questions and have a discussions to clarify more some points, which I have not gone through clearly.

But first I want to end with a quote from Mark again, from the closing of his same speech from 1982. Because it is also directly relevant to the Middle East, which we have been fighting there, not only to have peace but development too, which we can discuss a bit more.

Mark discusses the Merchant of Venice and the role of Portia, as not only the heroine of the play but also being the bright light in the darkness of Venice and the breath of fresh air in this terrible Venetian society.

He says:

So these are his words and I think they are relevant today as before when Mark lived. But I think that also, in a certain sense, immortalizes Mark because he was a real fighter and he understood internally how the British and Venetian models functioned.

After the presentation a question and answer period followed (mp3-fil of questions and answers).

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Recommended readings, I made use of in preparation for this presentation:

- Mark Burdman's speech from 1982 was republished in EIR magazine in July 15, 2005. Vol. 32 No. 28

- Countless writings by Lyndon LaRouche and his associates from EIR, can be found on www.larouchepub.com

[The books below are informative, but the reader should use them only as useful instruments]

- "Peace to End All Peace", David Fromkin, 1989.

- "The Great Game", Peter Hopkirk, 1990.

- "The Kingdom: Arabia & the House of Saud", Robert Lacey, 1981.

- "The White Nile", Alan Moorehead, 1960 and later editions.

- "The Blue Nile", Alan Moorehead, 1960 and later editions.

- "A Century of War", William Engdahl.

Not recommended readings:

- "My Early Life: A Roving Commission", Winston Churchill, 1930.

- "The Grand Chess Board", Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1997.

Hussein Askary

From the Cadre School

The Eurasian Landbridge linked to North America via a Bering Strait tunnel

The Ottoman Empire

The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement

The Arabic World today

The British Empire