AN EIR STRATEGIC STUDY
Blair and U.S. Accomplices
Push Anti-Islam Crusade
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On March 6, Lyndon LaRouche addressed a private gathering of prominent local figures in Berlin, Germany [see transcript of his opening remarks]. The subject of his remarks was the so-called "Iran crisis." After reviewing the actual strategic crisis, posed by the intersection of the Anglo-American drive to provoke a needless military confrontation with Iran—to trigger an all-out war against the entire Islamic world, and the end-phase breakdown of the post-Bretton Woods "globalized" floating-exchange-rate speculative financial system—LaRouche concluded on a note of great optimism, that challenged his immediate audience and reverberated overnight in policymaking circles around the world:
"So, finally, one thing to consider: Here we have a great threat to humanity, a great threat represented by the policies of Cheney, Jack Straw in London, and so forth. How should we deal with this? The problem is that we find that our politicians are impotent—and I deal with politicians in the United States, I can tell you about their impotence. And many of them are my best friends! So, how do you get politicians, who behave with impotence, to suddenly find the strengths within themselves, to make the strategic decisions on which great endeavors of this type depend? Because, if you can, if you can mobilize the political forces, and mobilize the people around such political leaders, for these kinds of projects, they will not tolerate something like this threat to Iran, right now! They will not tolerate this threat to humanity. It's because people have become sophists: They sit back and say, 'You've got to go along, and put up with this. You've got to accept this.' Because they have no confidence, no courage. And they have no confidence and no courage, because they have no perspective, and they do not understand the efficiency of love for mankind as the greatest political force in world history, for the greatest things.
"You fight Cheney by mobilizing people around objectives, which mobilize people with an idea of the beauty of the future before us. In that case, they find the courage to fight, just like the person who fights in warfare to save their nation. They fight, and risk their lives, for the future of humanity. They fight because they want to do something good with their lives: Give them something good. Give them some care for other people. Give them care for strangers in different countries. And they will rise with courage to deal with these kinds of problems."
This Strategic Study
LaRouche's remarks in Berlin, which followed, by several days, an even more exhaustive exchange with an international audience at a day-long Berlin seminar hosted by EIR, form the core of the strategic study that follows. In a series of policy memos drafted in the past days, supplementing his remarks at the two Berlin events, LaRouche underscored that there is no "Iran crisis" per se. There is an "Iran incident," provoked by the British government of Tony Blair and his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and greatly abetted by the Washington, D.C. Bush Administration circles of Vice President Dick Cheney, Acting United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, and others, with the aim of provoking the Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington-labeled "Clash of Civilizations," modeled precisely on the medieval Crusades against Islam, that sank European civilization into an extended Dark Age of disease, famine, and perpetual war.
LaRouche warned, in no uncertain terms, that any military action against Iran, ostensibly triggered by Iran's efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability that is years off into the future, would unleash a global form of asymmetric warfare, which would be impossible to contain once it erupted. This fact is known to the financier circles behind Blair, Straw, and Cheney. Their goal is nothing less than instigating just such a global Hobbesian conflict, to wipe out the last vestiges of sovereign nation-states from the planet, and impose the ultimate "globalization" dictatorship by a private oligarchy of "property holders" of the strategic raw material and agro-industrial wealth of the planet.
Lavrov Speaks for Russia
At the same time that LaRouche was spelling out the present crisis conjuncture, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was weighing in with his own assessment of the looming confrontation of civilizations, and spelling out the Russian government's efforts to halt the madness. In frank and honest terms, Lavrov highlighted Russia's history, including its own lapse into ideological seduction during the Bolshevik/Communist epoch, and its more positive legacy as the "bridge" between European and Asian cultures and civilizations.
Lavrov published a pair of signed articles, made available through the Russian Foreign Ministry, on the eve of his arrival in Washington, D.C. on March 6, to lead Russia's efforts to thwart the Anglo-American-instigated showdown with Iran. As part of EIR's historic role as a publication-of-record on the pressing strategic issues of the day, we publish below, in full, the text of the two Lavrov analyses, as background to this strategic study.
As this issue of EIR goes to press, fault lines have emerged in and around the United Nations Security Council, with three of the Permanent Members—Great Britain, the United States, and France—pressing for an immediate deadline-confrontation with Iran; and the remaining two Permanent Members, Russia and China, arguing for a diplomatic solution, which is already in process of being forged.
In this volatile situation, LaRouche has urged calm, particularly on the part of the United States. Iran has recently elected a new government, and there are clearly factional differences within Iran's ruling circles, that have yet to be resolved. Russia and China have taken a constructive approach to settling the issue of Iran's nuclear energy needs, an approach centered around international guaranteees to provide Iran with the enriched fuel to run its nuclear power plants, produced through a joint Russian-Iranian venture, housed on Russian soil. There is good reason to believe that the good-faith efforts of Moscow, with the backing of Beijing, and with a stand-down of the confrontational approach of London and Washington, can succeed, over the next weeks and months, in resolving all outstanding issues.
The alternative, as LaRouche warns, is Hell on Earth.
Three Dimensions of the Present Crisis
On March 9, LaRouche was interviewed, live, on Talksport Radio in Britain, by James Whale. In that interview [see full transcript], LaRouche spelled out the three dimensions of the present global crisis:
On Iran, the first of the three overlapping crises, LaRouche described the plan of attack: "What we're talking about, essentially, is an aerial attack on the territory, by an assortment of forces, coming out of places like Offutt Air Force Base in the United States. That's not a 'go,' yet. But that is what's being talked up from the Cheney side of things.
"Now, from my view, we've got ourselves into a mess, because Iran had just had an election. They have internal complications which they have to sort out, as people do after any election, and this was the wrong time to push them.
"Where, in the meantime, we already had an option, which is an agreement of Russia and China, in this area. And this thing, which ElBaradei of the relevant agency is dealing with, can work. We're very close to a successful conclusion on this. It may take a little more time, a little more patience, a little more talk, because we're dealing with various factions in Iran and you have to take that into account. But we have a safe exit from this, which fortunately is being provided to Europe, in particular, by the intervention of Russia, which actually has the backing of China, essentially on this, in the United Nations aspect.
"On our side, in the United States, this is absolutely insane. We already have a mess in Iraq, which is beyond belief. There is no exit from an extension of this conflict to Iran which we could manage. There are some people who are desperate. And I think Mr. Straw, Jack Straw and company, have been playing the game of the old Arab Bureau fellow, Bernard Lewis, with this war against Islam thing. The essential thing here, when you go down to the bottom line, is we are catering to a global war against Islam. Back to the Crusades, or back to the religious warfare of 1492-1648, that sort of thing."
LaRouche next addressed the recent Bush trip to India, which added a further dimension to the crisis:
"We are now at a point, where we're going to reverse the past 30 years' trend toward curbing nuclear power. We have a vast problem in raw materials, including the reliance on fossil water, which we're running short of. It's a global problem of fossil water. Therefore, we're going to have go to high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors, between the ordinary use of say, 120 to 200 MW, or 800 MW for producing hydrogen-based fuels. We're going to have to synthesize, with the aid of high-density nuclear power, many of the things, including freshwater supplies, that we need as a human species.
"Therefore, what the United States did, in this very foolish way with India, was to blow wide open, the question of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has been kicking around in various forms since the 1950s. We're now at a point, we've opened the jar, and we're now going to have to decide what kind of a nuclear policy we're going to have, which is a change, which allows us to use nuclear power on a large scale, to remedy many of the physical economic problems, which have now become close to desperate, or will become desperate in the coming generation or so."
And finally, LaRouche addressed the imminent blowout of the global financial system: "We're looking at something else which is much bigger, which is coming down on us now: It hovers around this Japan business of the carry-trade problem. A blowout of the Japan carry-trade, in one degree or another, will trigger a lot of things which are ready to blow in the financial system. We're looking at one of the biggest potential financial crises in all modern history, and we're going to have to deal with it. And this is a diversion from the fact that we need new forms of cooperation, to reorganize a bankrupt monetary-financial system, and to get economies, physical economies, actually moving again."
It is, LaRouche warned, the intersection of the Anglo-American efforts to launch a new Crusade against Islam, triggered by the Iran showdown; the further destabilizing contrast of that provocation against Iran, to the U.S. nuclear cooperation with India; and the imminent global financial tumult—taken as a whole—that defines a civilizational crisis that requires the ultimate diplomatic patience and wisdom to avert disaster.
That is where the world stands at this moment, and that is why the documents that follow are must-reading for all serious citizens on this precarious planet.
