The Lead

‘Action, and Action Now’

by Dennis Speed (EIRNS) — Apr. 16, 2024

April 15, 2024 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in two discussions with colleagues on Monday, stressed that, in this potentially catastrophic world situation, it is essential that the proceedings of the Saturday Schiller Institute conference, “The Oasis Plan: The LaRouche Solution for Peace Through Development Between Israel and Palestine and for All of Southwest Asia,” be made available in a condensed format within 48 hours. The United Nations will see discussions in the next days which could prove to be momentous. The Schiller Institute comprehensively presented the Lyndon LaRouche insight, still controversial to many, that a comprehensive physical-economic solution must either accompany, or precede, any efficient proposal for the resolution of the population wars in Ukraine and in the Gaza/West Bank.

This “seismic” conceptual shift must be inserted into the upcoming debate on war or peace that is now occurring, both in the United Nations, and in the streets and homes of the trans-Atlantic world. This can be done by bringing the power of the message delivered by the conference’s 15 presenters, in the form of a condensed format, to Islamic nations, BRICS-Plus nations, to producers of industrial equipment, and to millions of “no future” youth. We must cause a rapid change in outlook in the United States and Europe, a change which has the effect of a policy-shift, and to which the Global Majority can positively respond. Economic development as in, for example, the joint international reconstruction of Gaza, carried out as part of a newly-recognized Palestinian state, would be a revolutionary, but not entirely unprecedented act. Reconstruction after war, including what was done in Germany and Japan after the bitterly fought World War Two, shows that “man can be as big as he wants.”

Some military experts have pointed out that Iran’s response to Israel’s attack on their embassy in Syria, demonstrated that Iran can, in fact, successfully penetrate the vaunted Iron Dome “shield”—even if the United States, Great Britain and other nations join Israel’s defenses. According to these experts, Iran gave Israel and the United States 72 hours advance notice, precisely so that casualties would be kept to a minimum. Iran then used drones to activate the Israeli radar systems; cruise missiles to identify the position of Israeli launchers (by forcing Israel to fire on them); and ballistic missiles to, in fact, hit several sites—two air bases in the Negev Desert, and Israeli air defense sites. “Despite having employed an extensive integrated anti-missile defense system comprised of the so-called ‘Iron Dome’ system, U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries, and the Arrow and David’s Sling missile interceptors, along with U.S., British, and Israeli aircraft, and U.S. and French shipborne anti-missile defenses, well over a dozen Iranian missiles struck heavily-protected Israeli airfields and air defense installations,” wrote former International Atomic Energy Agency Inspector Scott Ritter.

But Ritter’s piece is called “The Missiles of April,” a paraphrase of the title of Barbara Tuchman’s famous study of World War One, The Guns of August. The foolish, inexorable slide into world war in August 1914 had begun more than two decades earlier, and was, as today, denied by the ruling elites as having been “their intention.” But as economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, describing the origins of World War I and World War II (itself a direct outgrowth of the previous world war) said, “The British, in their infinite wisdom, miscalculated.”

The British learned nothing from their mistakes. The same imperial folly which caused them to precipitate the First World War, became even more entrenched at that war’s end, as was seen in the 1919 Versailles Treaty, what Britain’s John Maynard Keynes referred to as “a twenty-year armistice.” The result was 100 million people dead, worldwide, even without the use of nuclear weapons until the very end. Look into the eyes of Tony Blair, or David Cameron, or Boris Johnson, or King Charles. Can anyone seriously believe that a “peace solution” can possibly come from any of these people, or their American stooges?

Only a week ago, on the occasion of the total solar eclipse, millions of people peered, indirectly, into the “eye” of the Sun. For those who were at the respective “ground zero” locations, this took on the character of “a religious experience,” in the words of one doctor who described what had happened. “I don’t ever describe anything that way, but it’s the only thing I can think of that captures the way that it made me and my family feel.” Our task is to intervene, using the Oasis Plan, in such a way as to cause crucial handfuls of people, and then, perhaps, whole nations, to develop the ability to see the human race from the vantage point that many discovered last week. That was the vantage point from which economist Lyndon LaRouche formulated his Oasis Plan.

“Zoom in, as if from an orbiting space-station, upon the past and present ecology of this region of the world’s biosphere. In our imagination, let us watch the long-range historical process, of the melting of the great Eurasian glacier, over the interval from about 19,000 years ago, when ocean levels were approximately 400 feet below those today. Watch the evolution of the Mediterranean region over the following millennia. Watch the later phase of great desiccation of the once rich, desert regions of the Sahara, Gulf, and Central Asia. From the standpoint of that lapsed-time panorama, we are reminded in the most useful way of a fact we already know: that the most critical of the strategic economic factors inside the Middle East region as a whole today, is not petroleum, but fresh water.”

This is the method which the Independent campaigns of Diane Sare and Jose Vega have espoused. It is the method which the Schiller institute Oasis conference advocates. And it is the method that can restore self-government, based on the principle of the General Welfare, to the failed states of the trans-Atlantic world. As LaRouche said, “The content of policy, is the method by which it is made.”