[Salon] Ambassador Chas Freeman: Not War, But Leadership - Guest Post

Ambassador Chas Freeman: Not War, But Leadership by Dennis Speed (EIRNS) — Dec. 18, 2024 Ambassador Chas Freeman gave an interview to Berliner Zeitung published Dec. 15, one of Germany’s leading newspapers. Ambassador Freeman, who knows as much about the American relationship to China as any living diplomat, told the truth “as he sees it.” “We’ve incentivized the Chinese to improve their science and technology, to expand trade relations with the Global South; we’ve driven them into the arms of the Russians, and we’re driving them to forge alliances in the Middle East that will roll back American influence in the region.” Even more importantly, he said of Russia and Ukraine, “Firstly, Kiev and Moscow must agree on the border. Secondly, the minorities in Ukraine must be granted the right to live out their own language and culture. This right is guaranteed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and was also enshrined in the Austrian State Treaty of 1955…. A neutral Ukraine that would be independent, prosperous and democratic and act as both a buffer and a bridge between Russia and the rest of Europe would be an important achievement to work towards.” In contrast, the Ukrainian assassination of Gen.-Lt. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Defense Forces (NBC) in Moscow yesterday should be seen as the latest episode in the continually escalating NATO/Russia conflict. “A high-ranking general in the Russian armed forces and his assistant have been killed in Moscow by Ukraine’s security service, a Ukrainian source has told the BBC.” Although, according to the BBC, the Ukrainian SBU security service characterized Kirillov as “responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons,” their concern—and that of NATO—was probably exactly the reverse. Kirillov, a highly public figure, had become known in the West for his reports, in the first months of the war, regarding NATO and the United States operating bioweapons laboratories throughout Ukraine. In a March 17, 2022 briefing on Ukraine’s bio-labs, Kirillov, more accurately termed the head of the Russian Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, presented documented evidence to the effect that (in Kirillov’s words) “in no uncertain terms … components of biological weapons were being created in Ukraine with direct U.S. involvement and financing.” Kirillov’s significance may have been of particular concern to those that are now re-visiting, from various standpoints, the story of the 2013 chemical attacks in Syria, a country identified in the RAND Corporation’s 2019 report, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground” as a secondary theater of military-strategic operations against Russia. Syria, in an echo of similar events 100 years ago, is being dismembered as part of a “Great Game” that “Greater Israel’s” Benjamin Netanyahu has been warned by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov not to play. “I would like to warn certain ‘hotheads’ in West Jerusalem against being intoxicated by opportunities.” There of course can’t be a Great Game without the Brutish—er, British—playing a leading role. Now another member of the British Powell family has “held forth.” Hugh Powell, who was the deputy national security adviser for former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2013 (and is referred to by a British publication as the “scion of Britain’s greatest diplomatic family,") is claiming that Syria’s dismemberment should have happened 11 years ago. “2013 was an opportunity to help crack (Syria) well before Hezbollah and Russia came to its rescue,” Powell said on a Dec. 12 podcast. “And with Assad gone we had a good chance of installing a power-sharing government in Damascus that might well have prevented the hidden expansion of ISIS.” Powell, in his remarks about 2013, of course, did fail to note, that the Anglo-American intelligence services were funding ISIS, as Seymour Hersh had covered in 2007, in his New Yorker story, “The Redirection.” “The ‘redirection,’ as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran…. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. … The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador) Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While [Condoleezza] Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, ‘The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.’)” What we are hearing, when the Powells speak is the voice of “continuity of imperial governance.” That is the real way that British—and most American—foreign policy, especially for Southwest Asia, has been shaped since the 1970s. Once the Trilateral Commission’s Zbigniew Brzezinski got his hands on the national security adviser tiller in the Jimmy Carter Administration of 1977-81, the British Crown’s “Bernard Lewis Plan,” re-branded for naive American palates as “the Brzezinski Islamic Fundamentalism Card policy” was implemented. The Afghanistan war against Russia of 1979; the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988; Operation Desert Shield/Storm of 1990-91, and all of the rest of the wars that followed, were all part of the Great Game, what the ever-original Brzezinski called “The Grand Chessboard.” It is all war on Russia, and Asia, including China. But this is not the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, or the early 21st century. Now, China, Russia, India, and many other nations are not what they were then. Colonialism is over, one way or the other. And as the world witnesses the public rift in the American Presidential process, with war escalating day by day despite the objections of the incoming Administration, the terrifying realization that America, which is now attacking the nation of Russia with long-range missiles, is clearly not being run by sane people, must not paralyze us. Instead that realization can and must be used to give us the courage to act to take back the government now, not on January 20. Ambassador Freeman, who also spoke at the Dec. 7-8 Schiller Institute Conference, “In The Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven, All Men Become Brethren!” and supports the dialogue initiative by Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche for a New Security and Development Architecture, shows what all Americans can choose to do, to come to the aid of their country, and the world.