Rumsfeld on LaRouche

In July, 2001, the newly-elected President, George H. W. Bush, met with President Vladimir Putin. At the time, there was a hard-line push from the neo-cons to dump the ABM Treaty with Russia - so as to begin building missile-defense systems close to the Russian border, and so to pin down a potential Russian response to a first-strike nuclear attack. However, the transparent argument presented to Putin was that the US had to withdraw from the treaty so as to build new ABM systems to counter of the danger coming from "rogue states"such as Iran. Such systems, supposedly, would need to be placed in eastern Europe, so as to protect western Europe. (At one point, Putin attempted to ‘call the bluff’ of this charade about Iran, by offering the United States, a joint ABM system in southern Russia, significantly closer to the Iranian border. The silent response to Putin’s offer was deafening.) Putin was clear then, and has been clear for twenty years, that the US and Russia could collaborate against rogue states, but that ABM systems deployed on the Russian border, against a potential Russian counter-strike, was intolerably destabilizing. In the July, 2001 meeting, Putin offered Bush that Russia would agree to the US leaving the ABM Treaty, if a new treaty dealing with the amount of offensive nuclear weapons were put in place - something Bush evidently found agreeable.

Back in Washington, the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, became concerned that Bush wasn’t fully on board. The two went to Moscow a couple of weeks later to make clear that the US was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty without any new treaty. Rumsfeld’s meeting with Sergei Ivanov, the Defense Secretary, left Ivanov cold. Afterwards, Rumsfeld was allowed to meet with Putin, but to no avail. According to Bolton, Putin countered. "Putin raised the prospect of Russia’s joining NATO, saying, ‘We are being pushed out the system of civilized Western defense.’" Putin hit the nail on the head. Rumsfeld and Bolton indeed meant to push a "Clash of Civilizations," even if it involved thermonuclear saber-rattling.

The Rumsfeld/Bolton message was not being well received. After more than a few hours of such an impasse, the Russians simply dropped the "LaRouche card." General Yuri Baluyevsky, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and the one in charge of negotiations with NATO over missile defense, asked Rumsfeld and Bolton if they knew who had actually originated Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – a real offer for Russia and America to collaborate on a strategic defense, that would render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Evidently, Rumsfeld and Bolton were ignorant, feigned ignorance, or simply froze. The General went on - it was "an economist named Lyndon LaRouche." Message delivered.

Neither Rumsfeld nor Bolton spoke publicly about this intervention until years later, and then they pretended that General Baluyevsky was simply an Internet conspirophile. This is the Russian General in charge of missile defense negotiations, a man who was in no way ignorant of the Reagan SDI offer and of LaRouche’s role in back-channel discussions with the Russian authorities over the SDI. Rumsfeld’s 2011 memoir, "Known and Unknown gave his version: "At a dinner with Ivanov and senior Russian military officials, General Yuri Baluyevsky, then the country's second-ranking military officer, regaled us with a fascinating 'fact' I suspect he may have learned from the internet. The brains behind the U.S. missile-defense system he declared, as if he had unearthed an embarrassing secret, was 'an economist named Lyndon LaRouche.' ... To my knowledge, his influence on the American missile defense program was nil. I made an effort to correct the record for the assembled Russians. But the encounter was troubling. It was not in either of our interests that Russian military leaders should lack such basic knowledge about the United States and the ways American officials think and operate."

Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, Rumsfeld’s internet hound, shortly after this became Putin's First Deputy Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Rumsfeld shocked and awed, i.e., blitzkrieged, the country into a victory that just won't go away.