The Danger of a U.S. Strike Against Iran
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
After Dr. Mohammed Selim of Egypt responded to a question concerning the possibility of a military attack by the United States against Iran, Mr. LaRouche added the following comment at EIR's seminar in Berlin, Germany on June 29, 2005:One thing that I've been trying to teach people a long time, about their own minds and other people's minds, is that most people live in a fishbowl kind of situation, where they have a mixture of certain false and relatively true axiomatic assumptions about what is possible. And therefore, they don't mentally live in the real world. They live in a synthetic world, which is composed of working assumptions, some of which are true and some of which are false.
I often cite the case of Frederick the Great at Leuthen, in the battle there: Every assumption would have said, in this case, that the Austrians would have had an overwhelming victory, or Frederick would have had to be routed. But he acted in a way in which the Austrians did not think possible.
Now, there are two ways in which this occurs. One, in which the decision is a sane one, that's made on the basis of, you strategically out-think your opponent, by doing what is rational, when your opponent is blind to a possibility. And that's good strategy. It's also good tactics.
The other case, is another case which came up, as promoted heavily by the RAND Corp., which was promoted in the case, for example, of the idea of what I was concerned about in 1975 in Lebanon. When I was in Iraq, and I knew that we were about to have a civil war explode under Kissinger's premises in Lebanon. So, I told my friends and hosts then in Iraq, that we could expect a breakout of a civil war in Lebanon, started by Kissinger. And this would be the beginning of a general war in the Middle East. And it happened at that time.
And the point was, a so-called "chicken game," which is a standard thinking among some people, especially neo-conservative types in the United States' configuration. If you say something doesn't make any sense, they may do it. If it's insane, they may do it. It's the great bluff. It's the use of, "I am a madman, playing 'chicken' on the highway," in the highways of California, the narrow highways.
And therefore, the danger here is—and it's a danger also from Israel—that some idiot will be deployed to do something absolutely mad: because they don't care. They don't care. The so-called "countervailing factors of risk" will not prevent them from doing something mad. They will do it on the presumption, the same way that somebody did something in New York City on 9/11 in 2001. They didn't have Hermann Göring handy to set fire to something, so they used another device, to create a "Reichstag Fire" effect in order to change the politics of the United States and the world.
Terrorist acts are often of that character. And the mentality of the Israeli right wing and its backers, in the Middle East: They are a terrorist mentality. They will do something for effect, hoping that the sheer horror of what they do, will deter people from an appropriate action, or cause them to launch a flight forward into an even more inappropriate reaction.
