Iran Crisis: British Empire
Is Up to Its Old Tricks
by Helga Zepp-LaRoucheMrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the national chairwoman of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party (BüSo) in Germany. This statement, released on Feb. 3, has been translated from German.
If the dramatically escalating crisis over Iran is not immediately overcome, it could reach the point, within a few weeks, of a military strike against Iran by either the Bush Administration or Israel. But Iran is not Iraq. One would have to count on massive counterattacks. The conflict would have the potential of leading to a strategic catastrophe and a collapse of the world financial system.
Yet in order to stop this from happening, it is still possible to find a diplomatic solution, but only if it is understood that the crisis has quite different reasons than those that are being discussed. The crisis over Iran's nuclear program is being manipulated, but also the escalation of violence after the publication of the defamatory cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, is being consciously staged.
And before some contemporary blockheads start to scream and accuse us of spreading conspiracy theories, we should recall how it was that the Iraq War came about. Like Iranian President Ahmadinejad, so in 2002 Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a big monster, who could reach the whole world within 45 minutes with weapons of mass destruction, and with direct connections to al-Qaeda, etc. And today? The Iraq War has become, according to Gen. William Odom (the former head of the NSA secret service), "the greatest strategic disaster" in the history of the U.S.A. The American Congress is investigating the lies that the parallel structures of the neo-cons put into play, in order to obtain the agreement of Congress and the international community for launching the war against Iraq. In Congress there are already efforts under way to conduct impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney.
Dinner With the British Foreign Secretary
When we speak of the "British Empire," we do not mean the territory of Great Britain, but the continuity of the international financial forces, who have their headquarters in the City of London. The role of the British government is, however, not at all concealed: On Jan. 30, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw gave a dinner at his private residence for the four foreign ministers of the other permanent members of the UN Security Council. Straw knew—very much in the tradition of the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Accord of 1916—that Russia and China were against the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) turning over the Iran question to the UN Security Council, since that was to be the way that the U.S.A. and Great Britain ended up launching the Iraq War through their "unilateral" decision and "the coalition of the willing." Straw proposed turning the matter over to the Security Council; U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it should be done immediately, and Straw then came forward with a "compromise": to "inform" the Security Council about the matter now, and then, after the official report of the IAEA, to "turn it over." Russia and China found themselves caught off guard, and agreed to this formulation.
The mention of the word "UN Security Council" led Tehran to reject President Putin's proposal, that Iranian uranium be enriched on Russian territory.[1] When the Iranian President, playing out his role as a figure on the British chessboard, called, for reasons of domestic politics, for wiping Israel off the map, this gave Bush and Cheney the pretext to once again evoke the "military option" against Iran.
George Shultz and the Cartoons
At the same time, the conflict heated up over the defamatory cartoons against the Prophet Mohammed, through their publication in several countries, setting the scene in a dramatic way for the coming miltiary strike against Iran. Among experts in Islam it is undisputed, that the original publication of the cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was a provocation, whose goal was to unleash a "War of Cultures." And who sits on the board of the think-tank CEPOS, which is supported by Jyllands-Posten? None other than George Shultz, the former U.S. Secretary of State and éminence grise of the neo-cons—the mentor of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice.
The flaring of violence against European embassies in the Near East was the work of a few hundred people. Nothing is easier than to wave a "red flag" in front of religious fundamentalists, and one only has to remember the actions of the British Arab Bureau, of Glub Pasha and the Sykes-Picot Accord, to understand how the violence was stage-managed. The Iranian government was also manipulated, believing that limited military strikes would be able to actually strengthen their domestic political position. From such illusions, great wars have often come about.
At the same time, at the Munich Security Conference (formerly called the Wehrkunde Conference), the squad of "usual suspects" from 2002, before the Iraq War, surfaced: Rumsfeld, McCain, and Lieberman—and they made the same bellicose speeches against Iran as they had previously against Iraq. The sole difference is that now Schröder is no longer Chancellor, while Chancellor Merkel does her best to prove that she considers her relationship to the Bush Administration as a priority.
The Results of an Attack Against Iran
The chessboard is set for a great catastrophe. All that is needed now is a trigger—for example, a terrorist attack with "Islamic" handwriting, or "merely" a decision by Tehran to stop trading with dollars on the Iranian oil and gas energy market, but rather in some other currency—and it could very quickly reach the point of military attacks against Iran. Iran could strike back against U.S. and NATO troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, against Israel, and Israel could launch attacks against Iran; the use of nuclear weapons would become rather likely. This would be the beginning of an asymmetrical world war.
A military attack against Iran would not only hit the German export economy in a dramatic way, as several newspapers have remarked, but could lead to a collapse of the dollar and thereby of the world financial system. This could lead automatically to emergency decrees and police-state measures. The masses of the population would be the victims. The big cartels and hedge funds, which now dominate raw materials and energy markets, would consolidate their control. The sovereign nation-state, which normally would be able to defend the common good, would be wiped out by measures of a state of emergency: globalization in the name of "war against terrorism" would be perfected.
It has already been clear for quite some time, that the world financial system has entered the end-phase of its collapse. Is it far-fetched to conclude that those who are steering the crisis know this, and that they see, in an artificially manipulated collapse, the ony way to keep their own control?
Stop Being a Piece on a Chessboard!
Mankind potentially faces a tremendous catastrophe, such as the First and Second World Wars were, but it is not yet too late to find a diplomatic solution, as, for example, President Putin has proposed for Iran's civil nuclear program. However, all participants—all the pieces on the chessboard, so to speak—must stop reacting on the basis of blindly following their emotionally perceived self-interest. That is how they are manipulated, and manipulable.
In hindsight, historians can investigate the complexity of the events that led to a catastrophe. The pre-history of the First World War included over two decades of diplomatic and secret-service manipulation, in which the British Empire played the most important role, seeing its geopolitical interests as endangered. In the case of the Iraq War, the role of secret-service manipulation by the British MI-6 and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans is now under investigation by the U.S. Congress, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell described his speech to the UN Security Council of Feb. 3, 2003 as his "darkest hour," since he had fallen for these manipulations.
Let us also not make the blunder of seeking simplistic, superficial explanations for the Iran crisis. There is simply no military option here. Diplomacy must find a solution.
But a conclusive solution can only be found, if the real reason for this escalation is removed, and that is the systemic crisis of the financial system. The world will only be secure, if the U.S.A. places on the agenda a new financial architecture, a New Bretton Woods system, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. Only when we achieve a new, just world economic order, which puts an end to all forms of imperialism and colonialism, as Roosevelt envisioned at the end of the Second World War, does a lasting peace become possible.
Thus we must construct today a new Atlantic Alliance, with the real America: the America of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King—the tradition that today is embodied in Lyndon LaRouche.
[1] This rejection subsequently changed to a delay in negotiations—ed.
