No One Will Survive World War III:
Prevent the Suicide of Humanity!
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Feb. 4—The fuse is lit for a Third World War: According to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta "believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May, or June." The German media, after months of scandalous silence on this issue, reports that Berlin is afraid that the West could be drawn into a conflict with incalculable consequences. It must be stated more clearly: If Israel carries out a strike against Iran, Iran will launch a counterstrike that, according to its own statements, will also hit American installations; this will then, ultimately, lead to the deployment of British and American military operations against Iran.
That would be just the trigger for thermonuclear war, with the United States, Britain, and NATO on the one side, and Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and other allies on the other. If just a fraction of the available thermonuclear weapons were used, any form of human life on the planet would be extinguished. It is clear to any sane person that only the insane would risk the extinction of the human species in this way.
The Voices of Insanity
Underlying Panetta's concern is the message that Mossad intelligence chief Tamir Pardo brought from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during Pardo's recent visit to Washington. Israel claims that by June at the latest, Iran will have moved its nuclear facilities underground, to bunkers out of reach of conventional weapons. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak had said that Iran was on the verge of "drifting into a zone of immunity," in which it would only be possible for the United States to knock out or seriously damage the Iranian enrichment facilities.
According to informed sources, Pardo's intervention was a direct response to statements by Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, who had warned Israel, during his visit to Tel Aviv over a week before, against conducting a unilateral military strike against Iran. This, after repeated statements from American intelligence agencies that Iran has not had a military nuclear program since 2003. The Voice of America reported on Feb. 3 that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate of October 2011 came to the same conclusion as it did in its 2007 report, namely that Iran is not currently pursuing a military nuclear program.
This assessment is shared by Defense Secretary Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and the former head of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar. Moreover, a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that visited Iran at the end of January, expressed its satisfaction with Iran's readiness to cooperate.
Yet a veritable chorus of speakers at the recent annual Herzliya Conference in Israel called for a war against Iran "before it is too late." Defense Minister Barak and others referred to the report of the IAEA of Nov. 8, 2011, which alleged that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program, but mentioning exclusively Western intelligence sources. Numerous American neocons were listed as speakers at the conference, such as former CIA director James Woolsey; Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the chief propagandists for the Iraq War; and people from the British intelligence community who were conspicuous in the buildup to the Iraq War; they were joined by the head of the green Heinrich Böll Foundation in Germany, Ralf Fücks, and by Cem Ozdemir, the co-chairman of the Alliance '90/Greens party.
Suddenly, even if very late in the game, some in the German political establishment have evidently realized that we are becoming hostages to Anglo-American-Israeli war plans, which could ultimately threaten the existence of Germany. Although the federal government is still pursuing diplomatic solutions, Chancellor Angela Merkel has also repeatedly stressed that the protection of Israel is a "German raison d'état." Wolfgang Kubicki, the Free Democratic Party leader in the Schleswig-Holstein State Assembly, warned that a military strike by Israel against Iran would be a war of aggression under international law. It should be obvious that there is no way out of this dilemma within the existing geometry.
Irregular Warfare Has Already Begun
Irregular warfare already began long ago against Iran. The computer virus "Stuxnet" put the control system of several Iranian nuclear facilities out of order, and set back the nuclear program for months, while also four Iranian nuclear scientist were killed in the past two years, for which Iran blamed Israel and Great Britain. In addition, the strengthened sanctions have dramatically worsened the economic situation in Iran, which, as always, is to the detriment of the civilian population. And since sanctions, if effectively carried out, ultimately lead to military action, it is an illusion to think that sanctions are an alternative to war; they are rather the first step toward it. Horst Teltschik, the former head of the Munich Security Conference, fears that an Israeli military strike against Iran would turn the entire region into a flashpoint—"a nightmare," he said.
The nightmare will be of short duration. An Israeli attack on Iran, which will inevitably lead to retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, and on American and British military installations in the region, will certainly lead to acts of war from this side, and just as inevitably Russia and China will become embroiled in the confrontation, leading inevitably to the use of thermonuclear weapons. Even if only a small fraction of the thermonuclear weapons that are already concentrated in the region on aircraft carriers, battleships, and submarines, were used, the human species will most likely be wiped out.
The dilemma in which Germany finds itself, is dramatically aggravated by the situation in the United States, because President Obama is following in detail the script of the British government, which also called the shots during the Iraq War. Obama has indeed continued, and even escalated, every point of the Bush/Cheney Administration's policies against which he had campaigned in 2008. Among his numerous violations of the Constitution, are his war of aggression against Libya which was not approved by Congress; the targeted assassination of people around the world, including U.S. citizens; the indefinite detention and deportation of people without due process; an excessive government by decree with the elimination of the separation of powers; and the massive use of drones with acceptance of "civilian collateral damage."
At least for the moment, the Democratic Party has completely capitulated and refused to put up a rival candidate against Obama. Given the disastrous spectrum of the remaining Presidential candidates on the Republican side, who just try to outdo one another in militaristic propaganda against Iran, Cuba, and other countries, America finds itself on a course toward a third world thermonuclear war, which ultimately means its own extinction. The recognition of this fact is the reason that American military figures, both active duty and retired, have repeatedly tried to stall this war drive in recent months.
Financial Crash Leads to War Danger
The deeper reason for the threat of a third world war lies, however, not in individual national interests, but in the fact that the global financial system is faced with immediate disintegration. The breakup of the Eurozone is a matter of a few weeks at most; the banking systems of Europe and the United States are hopelessly bankrupt. In addition to the EU500 billion granted by the European Central Bank (ECB) in December 2011, the European banks alone need another trillion euros by the end of February, for a total estimated at €5 trillion by the end of this year. At the same time, the swap agreement between the Fed and the ECB has led to an extensive carry trade, by means of which virtually unlimited liquidity is pumped into the system. The ECB and the Fed have become money-printing machines, a situation which could very quickly turn into a hyperinflationary explosion.
The threat of war is the result of the determination of the British Empire, i.e., the financial forces behind globalization, not to allow Russia, China, India, and other Asian countries to prosper while the trans-Atlantic region collapses.
Germany will only be able to overcome its potentially fatal dilemma if we free ourselves from imperial ways of thinking, which express themselves in Germany in the sentence, "There's nothing we could do anyway."
The reason for war—the economic crisis—can only be overcome if we put a stop to the casino economy. Germany must take the initiative in introducing a two-tier banking system, along the lines of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's Glass-Steagall system, by which commercial banks would provide loans for the real economy, and the estimated $1.5 trillion in outstanding derivatives contracts would be canceled.
The two-tier banking system is just the first step; it must be linked with a return to sovereign control over our own currency—thus a new D-mark—and the replacement of the monetarist system with a credit system (see box), which facilitates the rebuilding of the world economy in cooperation with other sovereign states. We must focus on the common aims of mankind, such as raw material and energy security for the next hundred years, overcoming poverty on Earth, and the colonization of space. For all these things, we need a new science orientation and a vision of how the next stage of development of mankind can look. It means a rejection of any green ideology, whether it be applied to energy policy, Europe, or Russia and Iran.
The slate of six LaRouche Congressional candidates in the United States, French Presidential candidate Jacques Cheminade, the BüSo [Civil Rights Solidarity Movement, the LaRouche party in Germany—ed.], and many allies in many countries stand for this alternative. Join us!
This article was translated from German.
