Sen. Rand Paul Foresees Generations of War with Iran, but Fails To See the Way Out

Jan. 7, 2020 (EIRNS)—Sen. Rand Paul told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night that the “bad advice” President Donald Trump got from his advisers to carry out the assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani has created “unintended consequences” which could lead to war for decades, or even generations in the region. Senator Paul stumbles, however, with his repeated admission that he does not see a way out.

Senator Paul blamed John Bolton for setting up an Iran policy which he ripped as “brain-dead.” No one in their right mind, no naive child, could believe that pulling out of the nuclear deal signed with Iran, applying severe sanctions while giving Iran no way out, and then assassinating one of the country’s generals, would lead to Iran’s “crawling to America” for negotiations, he said with some anger.

Those, like the senator who said we had to kill Soleimani because he was an evil bastard, are thinking like grade school children! Foreign policy is more complex; you have to ask: what happens next? To kill a general of another country is an act of war, Senator Paul warned. In Iran, like any country, there is a mixture of views, but the voices of the moderates and younger people, who want relations with the U.S., have been silenced by the assassination, until revenge is taken, which will set off more retaliation. Diplomacy is dead with Iran, he fears.

Such fatalism as the senator’s is dangerous, however. That is why Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche initiated an international campaign on Jan. 3 around her call for an emergency summit among Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and perhaps Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the crisis in the region. The agenda of the summit must be to reach agreement to cooperate in initiating the urgent reconstruction, industrialization and greening of the deserts of the entire Southwest Asia region. Within such a framework of economic development, those Four Powers can provide Iran and its neighbors sufficient security guarantees to stop the cycle of attacks and retributions which today are leading towards general warfare.