Stewart Battle- EIRNS - Iran has now caused many of America’s military bases in Southwest Asia to become “uninhabitable.” Credit: CC/Tasnim News Agency/Amin Ahouei
As the Iran War continues to play out, it has revealed
fundamental and irrevocable cracks in today’s global order. Iran
continues to defy the illegal and unprovoked U.S.-Israeli war, launched
at the height of negotiations, with no indication that it is on the
brink of collapsing. Reporting by the New York Times found that
Iran has now caused many of America’s more than a dozen military bases
in the region to become “uninhabitable,” while the economic damage
inflicted by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz seems only to be
just beginning. In addition, simple calculations show that Iran’s
ability to produce offensive attacks on American and Israeli locations
in the region are far outweighed by the costs to defend them, on top of
the declining missile interceptor stocks available, meaning the longer
the conflict goes on the more exposed those nations will be.
But
there is also the moral and civilizational crack emerging, wherein the
self-anointed “defenders of democracy” have resorted to the most brutal
and barbaric methods to accomplish their aims. Lying about diplomatic
negotiations to cover for a preemptive strike; bombing schools,
hospitals, and civilian infrastructure; condoning Israel’s announcement
to give Lebanon the “Gaza treatment” as it begins its ground invasion
there—all while defending the criminal members of the Epstein class. It
is this crack in the perceived legitimacy and morality of the
Western-centered world order that will have the most far-reaching
implications, for years and decades to come.
On March 26, after a
particularly bad day for the oil and stock markets, U.S. President
Donald Trump announced an extension on the pause for strikes on Iranian
energy infrastructure until April 6. He said this, while at the same
time insisting negotiations with Iran are ongoing, and that “they are
going very well.” This is already an unconvincing argument given this
administration’s penchant to use the cloak of negotiations to prepare
military strikes, and the fact that multiple thousands of American
troops are currently on their way to the region, presumably for an
Iranian ground invasion. However, later in the day on March 27, Israel
began a massive attack on Iranian steel factories, power plants, and
nuclear power facilities, in an apparent betrayal of Trump’s extended
moratorium. If Iran perceives this as a new escalation in the war, and
decides to respond in kind by hitting energy, industrial, and nuclear
facilities across Israel and the Gulf States, this conflict can quickly
spiral out of control to a catastrophic level of destruction—up to and
including nuclear war.
After reviewing the current strategic
situation during Friday’s meeting of the International Peace Coalition
on March 27, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said: “This is why we should not just
observe the situation and analyze it... We should escalate the situation
to try to put the alternative on the table.” In reality, today’s crisis
is a manifestation of Samuel Huntington’s evil “Clash of Civilization”
dogma, proposed after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s to
replace the enemy image of Communism with that of Islam. The only
alternative to this depraved view of your fellow man is that proposed by
former Iranian President Khatami’s idea for a “Dialogue of
Civilization,” which he proposed around 2000 in order to create the
basis for peace between all nations on Earth. “It is high time that we
revive this idea,” Zepp-LaRouche said, warning that nuclear-armed madmen
are otherwise bringing the planet toward doom.
This kind of
outlook demands an economic dimension as well—the Oasis Plan of
high-technology water and energy development of the region as a whole.
“In ancient times, this region was the place of the ancient Silk Road,
and at that time it was the hub for connecting the three continents
through trade, exchange of science, of technology, of art, of ideas, of
philosophy. And that is what that region can become again,” she said. We
must increase the chorus of those calling for this kind of peaceful
development as the alternative to endless war.
The cracks which
have opened to expose the moral bankruptcy of today’s ruling elites are
growing wider by the day. Now is the time for a growing chorus of reason
to shift the tide. This topic will be the focus of an upcoming EIR international roundtable event on April 6. Stay tuned.