This release appears in the July 6, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Why Israel Would Now
Lose a New Middle East War

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

June 23, 2001

The following statement by issued by Lyndon LaRouche's Presidential campaign committee, LaRouche in 2004:

If Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were to use his scheduled meeting with President George W. Bush, Jr., as a license to unleash new levels of warfare in the Middle East, the virtually inevitable outcome would be the ultimate extinction of the state of Israel. This is my strategic estimate, and that of many important strategic thinkers in Europe. It is also the fear expressed by a growing number of influentials and others, walking in the footsteps of the martyred Prime Minister Rabin, inside Israel itself. Bush's actions to block such an effect, might not be sufficient by itself; but, were he to take such action, he would have a decisive margin of support for the same effort within Europe, and elsewhere.

Obviously, Israel has the military means to win a so-called conventional, or nuclear war, in the Middle East, but only if the conflict were limited to regular warfare. Even in the not-unlikely prospect that Sharon's likely extremist successors would launch nuclear warfare, that would not save Israel, but ensure its earlier disintegration.

The danger to Israel, were it to launch such a war, would remind strategists of the way in which guerrilla warfare against Napoleon's forces in Spain, created the "second front" at Napoleon's back in the west, which facilitated his crushing defeat in the east. Israel could not outlive a protracted state of general chaos accompanied by irregular warfare, in the Middle East region. Such states of "unconventional warfare" can not be resolved by purely "conventional means." This danger becomes most acute when irregular warfare comes into being in the form of religious warfare. As religious and kindred forms of ethnic warfare practiced by Hitler, so, religious warfare of the type still being proposed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and their circles, is the most deadly and wicked threat to civilization among all modes of warfare. It is a holocaust which enflames the forest in all directions, once the torch is thrown.

Can such a slow-burn obliteration of the state of Israel be prevented? It is the general opinion, around much of the world, that the only force likely to bring a stop to Sharon's escalation, would be action from President George W. Bush, Jr.

If President Bush were to fail to warn Sharon and Sharon's backers in the circles of the Washington Post's Katie Graham, against any launching of expanded military operations in the Middle East region, Bush's failure to intervene against Sharon's imminent launching of escalated warfare, and to intervene in the most forceful and effective way, would virtually ensure that the entire Middle East, and much more, blows up in the Bush Administration's face. Under conditions of an onrushing world-wide financial collapse, such an eruption of chaos in the Middle East would have incalculable qualities of chain-reaction effects worldwide.

If Bush would act now, before Sharon returns to Israel from his new U.S. visit, he would be assured of effective assistance from continental Europe, and others. Inside the U.S., especially in the Congress, there must be the widest possible mobilization of bi-partisan action to persuade the President to adopt and implement such a war-blocking strategic assessment.

The Treaty of Westphalia as Precedent

No competent historian or other strategic analyst, either in Europe or the U.S., will deny that, since Sharon's sponsorship of the provocation against the site of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, the present situation in the Middle East has been degenerating, largely through Sharon's actions, into a generalized religious war, which threatens to spread early and widely, into the Middle East as a whole.

The precedent to be remembered is the way in which Europe as a whole was plunged into what some British historians have once named a virtual "little dark age," through the religious wars of the interval 1511-1648. In such a situation today, the precedent of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, is the only sane policy to be projected by the U.S., that in concert with our partners in Europe.

We must remember, that the assassination of the Wallenstein who was seeking a peaceful solution with the Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus, resulted in a prolongation of the ongoing religious war more horrible than anything of the preceding period.

Today, for the Middle East, the only available short-term solution, is a revival of the Oslo Accords, but, this time, without World Bank and other sabotage allowed to prevent the launching of the general development of basic economic infrastructure which provides the only concrete basis for initiating a durable peace among the peoples of the region as a whole.

It is a time when all responsible officials in the U.S.A. and Europe, will be studying, and embracing the model of the Treaty of Westphalia as the model for the policies of the U.S.A., Europe, and others toward the present threat of a prolonged, virtual new dark age throughout the Middle East as a whole, and who knows what might lie beyond that. As for Israel, we must save it from the follies of Sharon, even despite its present government.