Step Back from the Brink—Join International Mobilization for Trump, Putin, Xi Emergency Summit

Following the dozen or more ballistic missiles launched from Iranian soil which hit two U.S./Iraqi bases in Iraq early Wednesday morning (at the same 1:30 a.m. hour in which Soleimani was assassinated last Friday morning), President Donald Trump tweeted, just a few hours later: “All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.” One hour after that, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif issued his own tweet: “Iran took & concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens & senior officials were launched. We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.”

Yesterday morning, Trump’s White House address continued his characterization of Iran, since Ayatollah Khomeini took over in 1979, as the leading terrorist force in the world. But he also observed that “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.” Moreover, he said, “ISIS is a natural enemy of Iran. The destruction of ISIS is good for Iran, and we should work together on this and other shared priorities.”

There is much that is not known about the secret diplomacy over the past days which created this unique situation, in which an attack by Iran on U.S. forces in Iraq is resulting in a relative easing of tensions, and possibly further efforts at a peaceful solution. Various intelligence sources suggest that Pakistan has helped intervene between the U.S. and Iran, others suggest it was Qatar, still others Oman, while President Vladimir Putin has been directly engaged with all sides. In any case, President Trump is maneuvering between war-mongering advisers, both in the military and in his own administration, to use the crisis moment to achieve his broader intention—to get the U.S. forces out of the Middle East and end the perpetual warfare, as he insisted in his campaign and has ever since.

But the world is not out of danger. The British and their assets in the U.S. are furious at the demise of the Wahhabi (Sunni) terrorist operation known as al-Qaeda, created in the 1980s in Afghanistan by MI6 and Jimmy Carter’s CIA to fight the Soviets, who had intervened to support a friendly government under attack from Islamic jihadists. This Mujaheddin morphed into al-Qaeda, and, together with American and European air power, brought down the nationalist, anti-terrorist governments of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, and intended to do the same to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. While the secular governments in Iraq and Libya were “successfully” destroyed and turned over to competing radical Islamic gangs, the Russian intervention under Vladimir Putin put a halt to the process in Syria. When Trump came to power, he essentially joined Putin in targetting al-Qaeda and its offshoot ISIS, ending the “regime change” policy of the British and the Bush and Obama Administrations.

The British response is now clear: To play on what they perceive as Trump’s weakness regarding Iran, to drag him into a war with the Shi’a jihadists in Iran, a far more powerful nation than Iraq, Libya or Syria, and one which has just conducted military exercises with Russia and China.

Here is where the LaRouche genius is required. There is no solution to this crisis within Iran, or even within the Middle East as a whole. The geopolitical thinking dominating the imperial age is intended to trap the United States in a zero-sum, divide-and-conquer framework, in which the obvious solution is not even visible: End the age of empire altogether. Restore the republican thinking of the Peace of Westphalia—unite the “opposing blocs” created by the Empire, to act upon the fundamental truth about the nature of mankind: That the creative powers of the mind are what actually defines the human race, not his race, religion, ethnicity, nor any other secondary divisions.

Therefore, the Schiller Institute has called for an international day of action on Wednesday, January 15, for all institutions and individuals of good will, of all nations, to voice their full support for the call issued by Helga Zepp-LaRouche this week for an emergency summit among Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping, immediately, to address the danger of war. It has been the stated intention of all three of these leaders that Russia, China and the United States can and must join forces, to restore the Westphalian system of sovereign nation states. Only British imperial thinking has prevented the realization of this urgent and world historic task.

Today, the alternatives are stark: geopolitics and war, or Westphalian sovereignty and peace through development. In the age of thermonuclear weapons, every citizen must act to make the right choice. See “Helga Zepp-LaRouche Statement on the Assassination of Qasem Soleimani.”