Greater Mideast:
Trigger for War, or New Development Era
Dec. 1—With each passing day, the danger of escalation to global thermonuclear war is growing, starting from the powder-keg of Southwest Asia. NATO officials are surveying the terrain in Turkey to decide where to station U.S. Patriot III missiles, which could be used to create a "no-fly" zone in Syria; France, the U.K., and other countries have recognized the new Syrian National Coalition as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people—even though neither the Syrian people nor the government were consulted and even some key rebel groups reject it; the U.S. is threatening that Iran has to "cooperate" on the nuclear power issue by March—or else.
In this context, the Schiller Institute's conference near Frankfurt, Germany, on Nov. 24-25, was an especially important effort to reverse the trajectory toward war. Titled "A New Paradigm for the Survival of Civilization," it was keynoted by institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, whose speech we published last week, along with a videotaped presentation by Lyndon LaRouche.
Zepp-LaRouche described the centuries of imperial manipulation behind the crises in Southwest Asia, and summarized the Schiller Institute's intention: "What we propose concretely is an economic development plan for the entire region of Southwest Asia.... Rather than this area becoming the cockpit of the thermonuclear destruction of the planet, we should make it one of the most prosperous and well-developed regions of the world."
In this issue, we publish several speeches from the panel on "The Greater Middle East: Trigger for World War III or for the Beginning of a New Era": by the Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Germany, Ali Reza Sheikh Attar; by EIR's Hussein Askary; and by Ghoncheh Tazmini of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies in Lisbon.
