Strictly Speaking,
There Is No Iran Crisis
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
March 6, 2006
Twice, during recent days, I have been asked to speak publicly, in Berlin, on the subject of an alleged Iran Crisis. Strictly speaking, although there is an "Iran Incident," there is no "Iran Crisis." The actual crisis is best described as "A Crisis on the Global Chessboard," in which there are particular moves on the global board, moves which include the Iran gambit being played by the forces associated with Britain's Blair government and that government's set of particular U.S. accomplices. Those who profess the need to analyze an alleged "Iran Crisis," are simply demonstrating that they are not players in the situation, but are, rather, among those psychological-warfare objects which are being played.
The role of the Iran sector in this London-orchestrated affair, will be catalogued by competent analysts as a continuation of the evolution of what became known as Britain's Sykes-Picot gambits, most notably the role of the Sykes-Picot arrangement in luring Russia's Nicholas II into joining Britain and France in drawing Russia into a fools' alliance with Britain and France against Germany for what became known as World War I. When the matter of the current Iran gambit is located within that relevant historical context, and only then, one begins to understand the present Iran affair with at least a semblance of competent insight into the nature of the global strategic issues involved in that localized gambit.
That is to emphasize, that the targets of "The Crisis on the Global Chessboard" include Russia and China, Russia more immediately. However, the more immediate phase of the British-led game in progress, is the promotion of British Arab Bureau veteran Bernard Lewis's revival of the global anti-Islam strategy which had been the basis for the creation and perpetuation of that medieval imperialist alliance of the Venetian financier-oligarchy and Norman chivalry, known as "The Crusades." What is in progress, currently centered in Blair's and Jack Straw's Liberal Imperialist London, is the creation of that permanent state of warfare and revolution intended to be the organizing principle of a new form of global imperialism, a form currently labeled "globalization." A global, perpetual religious war against Islam, is the British imperial policy adopted currently, for this purpose, by the Blair allies associated with the U.S. Bush-Cheney regime.
The significance of Iran as a targetted locality within the broader, global scheme, is principally two-fold: to trigger a collapse of the present world economy, by creating a devastating, global petroleum crisis within the general region of Southwest Asia, while spreading the forces of chaos, through the Caucasus and Central Asia and Ukraine, to wreck that current revival of Russia's influence with which the government of President Putin is currently associated. Hence, the efforts by Russia's government, to stabilize the situation in and around Iran, are the target of desperate energies currently being deployed globally by the forces of chaos, the Blair government and its accomplices in the U.S. Bush-Cheney government.
The current form of the "Great Game" is premised on the virtual success, since the post-Adenauer, post-Kennedy, and virtually post-de Gaulle middle to late 1960s, of the efforts to wreck both the U.S. economy and Franklin Roosevelt's fixed-exchange-rate, Bretton Woods monetary system, by change to a "post-industrial" orientation among the industrialized nations, and a "free trade" system for the world as a whole. The development of radical versions of the Lockean doctrine of "property" and of Adam Smith's "free trade" doctrine, has created a situation in which private concerts of financier interest rape and dominate existing, nominally sovereign governments: creating thus, already, a virtual condition resembling the medieval ultramontane system then dominated by the alliance of Crusaders with Venetian financier oligarchs.
A collapse of the present financial system would wreck existing governments, including, potentially, that of the U.S.A., thus leaving the principal concerts of "property holders" as the absolute rulers of the entirety of the planet. It is only when the interest of those behind the so-called "Iran Crisis" is defined from the standpoint of that neo-feudalist, current global strategy, that one can judge what interests the financier oligarchs controlling governments such as that of Blair and Straw, will prefer to defend. The worst possible strategic blunder would be made by those who are deluded into believing that the controlling motives of those oligarchical forces are in any sense what normal people would consider rational perceptions of self-interest.
How Supposedly Rational People Are Easily Deceived
Today, as for Pericles' Athens, which plunged itself into the ruin of the Peloponnesian War, the resulting doom was, as Plato emphasized, the corrupting influence of Sophistry on the mind and morals of foolish leading and other layers of the population. Instead of being governed by a quality of reason defined by regard for knowable principles of science, pandering to what are perceived as prevailing trends in popular opinion, especially the opinion predominant among the more powerful social strata, paves the pathway to self-inflicted doom. Such has been the trend in Sophistry among university products of the 1968 U.S.A. and Europe since the riotous events of that year.
Today's compromised leading layers of influence, as in Europe and the U.S.A., reject the existence of those kinds of universal principle we would associate with Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation, and choose prevalent currents of current mere opinion as substitutes for principle. Agreements reached among some such leading currents, then tend to shape the evolution of current history, just as such devices of Sophistry sent Athens to its willful choice of doom in the Peloponnesian War.
In the case of the relevant "68ers," the most conspicuous cause of presently resulting economic and related great failures among the leading nations of Europe and the Americas, has been the way in which anti-labor, anti-farmer, anti-experimental-science trends among the most vocal of the 68ers led to the shift from highly successful producer economies, to presently rotting "services" economies. Worse than the obvious physical collapses which "post-industrial" trends in opinion have produced, is the destruction of the ability of the mind of the typical member of society to think rationally. Now, nearly four decades after 1968, the lurch toward ruin of society which erupted then, has virtually taken over Europe and the Americas, with more broadly radiated effects which now menace the planet as a whole.
This was not a result of some blindly chosen mistakes in policy-trends. These effects experienced today were broadly intentional back then, when the late-1960s shifts in policy-trends first erupted to the surface of great events of that time. Just so, the Sophistry by which those nations are being self-destroyed today, was planted with the intent to produce effects akin to the ruin being experienced today. The Delphic campaign of Sophistry spread among Athenian and other youth during the decades preceding the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War was paralleled, already, by a targetting of the generation born during the approximately 1945-1955 interval, in western and central Europe and in the Americas. The relevant forms of contemporary Sophistry were introduced chiefly in the form of existentialism, such as those systemically irrationalist trends of Bertolt Brecht and the Frankfurt School, under umbrellas such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Dr. Alexander King's 1963 OECD proposal for a (destructive) reform in European education. These modes of corruption, targetting the new-born generation of 1945-1955, were complemented and reinforced by the terrifying effect of "Cold War" moods.
So, today, political and comparable leaders in society will capitulate to policies which they know are wrongful, merely because they have been conditioned to believe that those policies correspond to trends which have become "inevitable." It is therefore said: "We must accept the fact, that we must learn to live with current trends."
Belief in the existence of a specifically "Iran Crisis" is typical of the effects of such expressions of the current influence of modern forms of Sophistry.
The remedy is always to outflank generally accepted trends in opinion, as Frederick the Great once, so famously, flanked a well-trained, superior number of ably commanded Austrian forces. Step outside the commonly shared assumptions of one's time and place, to assume thus, a position overlooking the conventional follies of one's time. Even among my own associates, I have rarely encountered a prevalent opinion which was not ruinous; most of my signal personal achievements have been the result of my resistance to the wrongness of popular assumptions, even among my closest associates.
The idea of an "Iran Crisis" is a case in point.
