August 17, 2006
Bush’s New Middle East
By Jed Babbin
It’s been three years since Saddam’s fall and three days since the cease-fire took hold in Lebanon. From the former, President Bush proclaimed a new Middle East would rise in which democracy would prove an irresistible force that would spread and eradicate terrorism and despotism. From the latter, Iran’s Amadinejad and Syria’s Assad have both announced the birth of a different “new Middle East,” in which Mr. Bush’s version was more hallucination than vision. The region has changed, Assad said, “”because of the achievements of the [Hizballah] resistance.” The facts on the ground compel the conclusion that Assad’s assessment is closer to the truth than Mr. Bush’s, and Ahmadinejad’s intent will cast the region into the fire.
Little signs are scattered all over. Iran’s “Holocaust Cartoon” exhibition. The Saudi government press agency warning President Bush against linking Islam with fascism. Those, and many others like them, can be shrugged off as Middle Eastern politics. But what we – and the Israelis – cannot shrug off are the events that demonstrate the ground truths that have changed in the Middle East, and in the West some of the worst have been reaffirmed in the West. On the Arab side, the changes are significant.
Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah has done what no other Arab leader has before: he has withstood Israel’s military might, losing many men and much equipment but not an inch of ground. For years, he had been the member of a very select club, a state-sponsored terrorist whose organization beleaguered Israelis occasionally and cohabited with UN “peacekeepers” on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Now, after a month of war, he is the de facto ruler of Lebanon, setting the terms for UN agreements, and the acclaimed hero of the Middle East. As a column in the Saudi government-sponsored daily “Arab News” said, “The Lebanese resistance’s month-long stand against the region’s mightiest army has earned it praise in the Arab world and raised hopes of a possible change in pro-Israeli Western policies. It has energized the Arab street and is being viewed as a cause for celebration despite the incredible toll the war has taken on Lebanon.” Already the Palestinian Hamas terrorist organization-cum-political party has proclaimed its admiration of Nasrallah’s methods, and is working hard to emulate them. Other than Iran’s Ahmadinejad, there is no more prominent figure in the Islamic world. Among terrorists, even bin Laden stands in Nasrallah’s shadow. And Nasrallah’s principal enemy, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is diminished in direct proportion to Nasrallah’s enhancement.
Olmert’s indecisiveness – which achieved a level hitherto unknown outside Old Europe – mistook hope for a foundation stone of policy. Olmert hoped that Hizballah could be demolished by air power even though he hobbled it with rules of engagement that guaranteed the Hizballah forces would escape. He hoped that his military would bring him plans to win easily, without the loss of many Israeli troops and without inflicting many civilian casualties. But Olmert never had a plan to win or a clue of what it would take to do so. Olmert’s bitter experience is new to him, but as old as Caesar to military historians. Hope is not a policy, and wishing doesn’t win wars. Which is not to say that apocalyptic visions can’t come true.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the biggest winner of all, his power in the Middle East now secure against Israeli intervention. Ahmadinejad engineered the Israeli-Hizballah war to divert the West’s attention from his nuclear weapons program at the July G-8 summit. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Not only is the Iranian nuclear weapons program off the West’s agenda, Israel has lost a war: not even to Iran itself, but to Ahmadinejad’s subordinate.
Abandoned weapons and the other detritus of combat discovered in destroyed Hizballah positions proves redundantly that Iran was the source of most of the weaponry that Hizballah used to considerable effect against Israeli troops and armor. The Tuesday Daily Telegraph reported Israel was “humbled by arms from Iran.” Ahmadinejad — reclaiming the spotlight from Assad — said Hizballah “hoisted the banner of victory” over Israel and defeated plans “to create the so-called new Middle East … a Middle East that would be under the domination the U.S., Britain and Zionists.” The Iranian leader created a small war and directed it to a conclusion that reduces his adversaries – America and Israel – to penitents at the UN’s table. He is immeasurably emboldened to take the next step against Israel and America. That step – be it a larger war against Israel or another small war designed to bring America to battle but not conclusively — to test us as he just tested Israel – may happen at any time. And we seem unable to even grasp the reality of what has just happened.
Israel’s failure to break Hizballah’s hold on the Lebanese government was exacerbated by the failure of the Bush administration to hold the line it set when the war began. The president said over and over that any cease-fire would have to be predicated on a settlement that precluded Hizballah from continuing as a state-within-a-state in Lebanon. The Monday cease-fire does nothing of the sort. In fact, it accomplishes the opposite.
In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Secretary of State Rice wrote of the Lebanese UN deal was a “path to lasting peace.” But her idea of a path to lasting peace is much at odds with reality. She wrote that UN Resolution 1701 was a defeat for Iran and Syria, that it imposes an international arms embargo to prevent Hizballah from rearming, and a new UN force with a “robust mandate” will help the Lebanese government impose its sovereignty in the southern part of its territory. Rice’s explanation parallels that of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who declaimed that the UN deal would, result in a “change in the rules of the game” between Israel and Lebanon, and that the UN cease-fire resolution “can lead to the real change in the Middle East that we have all been waiting for.” For both Rice and Livni, a more complete detachment from reality would be very hard to craft.
Neither America nor Israel have grasped the simple fact that the Lebanese government is held captive by Hizballah and as long as that condition lasts Lebanon will allow Syria and Iran to fund, arm, and reinforce Hizballah. The restoration of the status quo ante bellum that President Bush said we would prevent has occurred. And then, by agreeing to the French-imposed, Arab-demanded terms of the UN resolution, the situation has been materially worsened.
From America’s and Israel’s actions, a clear message was sent to the state sponsors of terrorism: neither the United States nor its allies are at all serious about defeating and disarming terrorists. The scope of victories the West can achieve over terrorists is defined by the limits of what the Arab League will insist upon in the UN. All the West’s military might is powerless against a highly motivated, well-funded and well-trained adversary who refuses to stand and fight on the conventional battlefield. The only reason this is true is because we are too irresolute to match the enemy’s determination to win. We — and the Israelis — choose to not apply the force we have in a manner that will achieve the effect we say we desire. Pardon me, but this is where I came in. In 1973.
Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration. He is a contributing editor to The American Spectator and author of Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States (with Edward Timperlake, Regnery 2006) and Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think (Regnery 2004).
© 2000-2006 RealClearPolitics.com All Rights Reserved
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_new_middle_east.html
The ‘New Middle East’ Bush Is Resisting
By Saad Eddin IbrahimWednesday, August 23, 2006; Page A15
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may be quite right about a new Middle East being born. In fact, their policies in support of the actions of their closest regional ally, Israel, have helped midwife the newborn. But it will not be exactly the baby they have longed for. For one thing, it will be neither secular nor friendly to the United States. For another, it is going to be a rough birth.
What is happening in the broader Middle East and North Africa can be seen as a boomerang effect that has been playing out slowly since the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001. In the immediate aftermath of those attacks, there was worldwide sympathy for the United States and support for its declared “war on terrorism,” including the invasion of Afghanistan. Then the cynical exploitation of this universal goodwill by so-called neoconservatives to advance hegemonic designs was confirmed by the war in Iraq. The Bush administration’s dishonest statements about “weapons of mass destruction” diminished whatever credibility the United States might have had as liberator, while disastrous mismanagement of Iraqi affairs after the invasion led to the squandering of a conventional military victory. The country slid into bloody sectarian violence, while official Washington stonewalled and refused to admit mistakes. No wonder the world has progressively turned against America.
Against this declining moral standing, President Bush made something of a comeback in the first year of his second term. He shifted his foreign policy rhetoric from a “war on terrorism” to a war of ideas and a struggle for liberty and democracy. Through much of 2005 it looked as if the Middle East might finally have its long-overdue spring of freedom. Lebanon forged a Cedar Revolution, triggered by the assassination of its popular former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. Egypt held its first multi-candidate presidential election in 50 years. So did Palestine and Iraq, despite harsh conditions of occupation. Qatar and Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf continued their steady evolution into constitutional monarchies. Even Saudi Arabia held its first municipal elections.
But there was more. Hamas mobilized candidates and popular campaigns to win a plurality in Palestinian legislative elections and form a new government. Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt achieved similar electoral successes. And with these developments, a sudden chill fell over Washington and other Western capitals.
Instead of welcoming these particular elected officials into the newly emerging democratic fold, Washington began a cold war on Muslim democrats. Even the tepid pressure on autocratic allies of the United States to democratize in 2005 had all but disappeared by 2006. In fact, tottering Arab autocrats felt they had a new lease on life with the West conveniently cowed by an emerging Islamist political force.
Now the cold war on Islamists has escalated into a shooting war, first against Hamas in Gaza and then against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel is perceived in the region, rightly or wrongly, to be an agent acting on behalf of U.S. interests. Some will admit that there was provocation for Israel to strike at Hamas and Hezbollah following the abduction of three soldiers and attacks on military and civilian targets. But destroying Lebanon with an overkill approach born of a desire for vengeance cannot be morally tolerated or politically justified — and it will not work.
On July 30 Arab, Muslim and world outrage reached an unprecedented level with the Israeli bombing of a residential building in the Lebanese village of Qana, which killed dozens and wounded hundreds of civilians, most of them children. A similar massacre in Qana in 1996, which Arabs remember painfully well, proved to be the political undoing of then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres. It is too early to predict whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will survive Qana II and the recent war. But Hezbollah will survive, just as it has already outlasted five Israeli prime ministers and three American presidents.
Born in the thick of an earlier Israeli invasion, in 1982, Hezbollah is at once a resistance movement against foreign occupation, a social service provider for the needy of the rural south and the slum-dwellers of Beirut, and a model actor in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics. Despite access to millions of dollars in resources from within and from regional allies Syria and Iran, its three successive leaders have projected an image of clean governance and a pious personal lifestyle.
In more than four weeks of fighting against the strongest military machine in the region, Hezbollah held its own and won the admiration of millions of Arabs and Muslims. People in the region have compared its steadfastness with the swift defeat of three large Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967. Hasan Nasrallah, its current leader, spoke several times to a wide regional audience through his own al-Manar network as well as the more popular al-Jazeera. Nasrallah has become a household name in my own country, Egypt.
According to the preliminary results of a recent public opinion survey of 1,700 Egyptians by the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldun Center, Hezbollah’s action garnered 75 percent approval, and Nasrallah led a list of 30 regional public figures ranked by perceived importance. He appears on 82 percent of responses, followed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (73 percent), Khaled Meshal of Hamas (60 percent), Osama bin Laden (52 percent) and Mohammed Mahdi Akef of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (45 percent).
The pattern here is clear, and it is Islamic. And among the few secular public figures who made it into the top 10 are Palestinian Marwan Barghouti (31 percent) and Egypt’s Ayman Nour (29 percent), both of whom are prisoners of conscience in Israeli and Egyptian jails, respectively.
None of the current heads of Arab states made the list of the 10 most popular public figures. While subject to future fluctuations, these Egyptian findings suggest the direction in which the region is moving. The Arab people do not respect the ruling regimes, perceiving them to be autocratic, corrupt and inept. They are, at best, ambivalent about the fanatical Islamists of the bin Laden variety. More mainstream Islamists with broad support, developed civic dispositions and services to provide are the most likely actors in building a new Middle East. In fact, they are already doing so through the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, the similarly named PJD in Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine and, yes, Hezbollah in Lebanon.
These groups, parties and movements are not inimical to democracy. They have accepted electoral systems and practiced electoral politics, probably too well for Washington’s taste. Whether we like it or not, these are the facts. The rest of the Western world must come to grips with the new reality, even if the U.S. president and his secretary of state continue to reject the new offspring of their own policies.
The writer is an Egyptian democracy activist, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo, and chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082200978.html
THE ANTI-IRANIAN FRONT: EGYPT, SAUDI ARABIA, AND JORDAN
Ayellet Yehiav*
The following article was adapted from a lecture presented at a GLORIA Center conference entitled “After Lebanon: A New Middle East?,” made possible by the generosity of Mr. Joel Sprayregen.
This article discusses the coalition of the relatively moderate Arab countries–Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, and Jordan–and how they have dealt with the threat of the Shi’a axis.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan regard the Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah triangle (as voiced through the press, and not from the regimes themselves) as a sort of axis of radical policy, the muqawamah–the “Shi’a storm” as King Abdallah of Jordan dared call it–or as a group that strives for an Islamic Middle East. Such terms were being applied to this axis even before the Lebanon War of the summer of 2006. The Arab countries were aware of Iran, the ambitious giant that rose up from the East, at least since Ahmadinejad’s election as president, but they consciously chose to ignore this. In the accord from the March 2006 Arab summit in Khartoum, the only reference to Iran was, as in the past, the demand to return the three islands over which there is dispute between Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
It appears there was a conscious decision not to deal with the threats of the Shi’a axis and to avoid confrontation with Iran. Following the events of last summer, including the abduction of Gilad Shalit followed by the kidnapping of two more Israeli soldiers in the north of Israel, and then the war in Lebanon, it appears that the leading Sunni Arab countries were dealt a blow. It finally became clear to them that the Arab collective was beginning to fall apart. The Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian axis, which once determined the decisions of the Arab summit by concluding matters ahead of time and thus preventing disagreement, simply broke down and slowly dissipated. It appeared that a vacuum was created, but this was not really the case.
This vacuum was filled by other forces, forces that in the eyes of the leading Arab countries in the world were external: The United States with its invasion of Afghanistan and then the coalition in Iraq is one; Turkey, with its eyes on Europe, but also seeing itself as a mediator in the region clearly has interests in northern Iraq and its border with Syria; Israel succeeded unilaterally to dictate matters in the region, for example, the disengagement plan, which the Arab states did not like at all; and of course Iran–which is also not part of the Arab world–under Ahmadinejad, who since his election has not missed a single chance to voice revolutionary rhetoric, which is perceived by some leading Arab countries as the revival of the export of the Islamic Revolution.
Therefore, every reference to what goes on in the region or in response to the Sunni countries refers first and foremost to Iran’s hegemony in the region and its potential power. This creates a sort of dichotomy in the region that is unifying. The common denominators of all of these countries are:
The perception of the threat posed by Iran and its allies, whether the threat is real or whether simply perceived.
The importance each country attributes to the Iranian nuclear issue; viewing the Iranian nuclear campaign as a way to achieve hegemony, involvement, and security in the region.
Urgently calling together–and the key word here is urgent–the countries defending themselves against the challenge of a new representation of the regional narrative. This does not only refer to events, but also to the perception of the region and its future.
Among these different attitudes toward this group of countries, many different political science definitions can be applied, but unfortunately none of these definitions suit the countries defending themselves against this threat. The first definition is “axis,” or mihwar in Arabic. We often mention the axis of the radical countries–the Shi’a axis (though Syria is not Shi’a)–but does a moderate axis exist? Egypt and Jordan negate this possibility of a unified axis in the region, as the two countries disapprove of the axis policy. What is interesting is that the Saudis remain quiet, as the Saudis are not big talkers when it comes to policy exposure.
The second definition is “camp” or “front.” This definition does not exist in the Arabic press; rather it refers to “saf,” or a “line,” which of course brings up the perception of “wahdat al-saf”–Abd al-Nasser’s unification line. In this case, those trying to find a “wahdat al-saf,” a unification line, can forget about it. There is no such unification. This isn’t an alliance nor is it a bloc. Once we examine the characteristics of this joining or coalition, matters will be clearer.
A “front,” the definition we reach by compromise, better describes the situation. This is an opposition coalition of like-minded countries. One could call it the “moderate coalition.” I am purposely emphasizing the terminology, because, in my opinion, it represents the fragility of this joining or coalition versus the Shi’a cohesiveness.
This is not just a definition. There is also ambiguity in determining where this group belongs, because this coalition was created with the consultation between the Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians on the eve of the Rome Conference on July 26, 2006, in order to find a solution to the war in Lebanon. Apparently, this was nothing more than a consultation. They became an axis–at least in the eyes of those who wanted this–in response to the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah axis, but under different circumstances. We also see such a group but with additional players, in the form of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
The GCC is made up of six countries in the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. One could also talk about an “Arab Quartet” consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This usually appears in the context of the international quartet’s refusal to answer Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt’s request to first make them observers in the international quartet and eventually to allow them to play a much greater role in the quartet.
In addition to the issue of who belongs to this coalition, there are many built-in problems. As I mentioned previously, there is first and foremost a negative common denominator–their cohesiveness is low. Moreover, their decisiveness is well-measured, particular, and cautious. They are very hesitant. They lack almost any regional institutional framework. There are many differences among the countries and they lack clear leadership. Sometimes the Saudis lead, and sometimes the Egyptians lead. Though it is often claimed that everything is coordinated, this is not the case; it is simply a role-playing game.
There is also a much more serious problem here, the lack of trust among the countries. Egypt, for example, has a hidden agenda in being part of this coalition; it wants to improve its status and regain influence. Jordan is seeking a substitute for its loss of strategic depth following Iraq’s collapse; and Saudi Arabia wants to become a leader of the region once again. The Saudis were in this position for a while during the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, when the summit adopted a Saudi initiative that then became an Arab initiative.
These countries also have completely conflicting interests, or at least competing interests. The differences are not in the nuances, but rather in their perceptions. For those who want an example, this is displayed in their behavior in regard to Lebanon. For Egypt, for example, Lebanon was never a priority. The most important thing for Egypt was regional stability, not having Syria dragged into the conflict, and maintaining Egyptian mediation on the Palestinian issue. Saudi Arabia on the other hand, sees Lebanon as a very high priority; it has ties with the Hariri family, financial investments in the country, and the religious conflict certainly bothers the Saudis more than it does Egypt.
In light of the aforementioned facts, we must seriously question whether this coalition, this joining, this front for a specific and very objective goal is ad hoc or whether it will prove durable, will overcome its shortcomings, and will survive in the long-term. The more important question is whether this coalition will succeed in demonstrating new energies, which are lacking in the conduct of each of the countries that make up this coalition. Yet another problem that should be taken into account is if this decisiveness is adopted and they display the required energy and cohesiveness, whether or not the leaders of these three countries–Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia–or the countries that join them under the various guidelines that I mentioned have the courage to stand up against their publics. One of the main problems they are up against is the Arab public, which the leaders view as an obstacle.
Aside from naming babies after him, I will mention another indication of Nasrallah’s popularity. During Ramadan, it is very common to eat dried fruit, and there are many different kinds of dates. The best type of date in the Egyptian market was called “Nasrallah” and the slightly less superior type of date was called “Ahmadinejad.” An additional, more scientific indication was a survey conducted in mid-August 2006 by the Ibn Khaldoun Center headed by Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim. Approximately 2,000 people were asked to rate the popularity of 80 Arab figures (This doesn’t reflect the beliefs of everybody in Egypt, but this is certainly gives some indication.). Nasrallah was voted the most popular, receiving 82 percent; Ahmadinejad received 73 percent; Khalid Mashal received 60 percent; bin Ladin 52 percent; and Muhammad Mahdi Akef, head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, received only 45 percent. Where do all those who do not have an Islamist agenda place? Far, far behind.
There is an opening or opportunity, but it is unclear to what degree the leaders of the moderate countries will be wise enough to take advantage of this. This opportunity was clearly revealed following the Iranian fervor in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s execution. There is great anger in the Arab world toward Iran, even among the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and Egypt, because they felt the Iranians pushed for and inspired Saddam’s hasty execution, particularly on the first day of the Id al-Fitr.
Finally, it is impossible not to note the central U.S. role in this coalition of moderate countries. According to the leaders, Iran doesn’t just pose a threat to their stability and the stability of the region, but also sabotages the image of moderate Islam that those countries have attempted to project to the outside since September 11.
The moderate leaders were busy for too long trying to prevent the “al-Qa’idaization” of Islam. Suddenly, they are now finding themselves in a situation in which they must prevent their own “Hizballahization.” The six plus two coalition: the GCC countries, plus Egypt and Jordan is a coalition that would not have been created without American backing. The Americans pushed for some sort of bloc that could be relied upon.
The moderate countries would be very interested in being not only the United States’ stick toward Iran and toward Iran’s allies in the region, but also to present a positive agenda, to be a carrot for a certain purpose, if you will; and they do not hide this. This was already expressed in the second meeting of the six plus two countries with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Cairo in October 2006. Their goal is to encourage as much contact as possible between Israel and the Palestinians and to urge the peace process on the Palestinian side and press them to reach solutions–the sooner the better, and not necessarily according to the Road Map.
They feel this urging will not only serve to prove their abilities to produce something positive, but will also signal to Syria that “you played the wrong game, and now you are out of the game.” Meaning, if Syria wants to be integrated in the peace process, it had better think twice about its connections with Iran. How successful will this process be? Egypt, at least, thinks that it can influence and draw in Syria more than Iran, but under no circumstances does Egypt think Syria can be cut off from Iran, only that Syria’s world perspective might become more balanced.
*Ayellet Yehiav is a Middle East expert and is a director at the Center for Political Research in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2007/issue1/jv11no1a2.html
Sheikh Hamad bin Jabr al-Thani was in Tehran this week to call for a diplomatic solution. “We should realize that the stability of the region is very important and instead of using force, a solution should be found through talks,” he said.
Last week, Iran asked Saudi Arabia to help ease tensions through a letter delivered by Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani to Saudi King Abdullah from Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. According
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to an unnamed Saudi official, Iran would like key regional US ally Saudi Arabia to “help bring opinions together”.
But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice passed through Riyadh in confrontational form as she concluded a tour of US allies in the region. She shot down Saudi attempts to intercede between the two antagonists by announcing that “there is no need for mediation” between Iran and the United States and demanded that “Iran needs to respond to the requirements of the international community” as a whole.
“She [Rice] is a smart, attractive and articulate woman who exudes confidence and integrity and is sent out by her bosses to lie, frighten, twist the truth and exaggerate,” said Charles W Naas, a retired American career diplomat who was posted in Tehran shortly before the US Embassy and dozens of diplomats were seized by a group of revolutionary students in 1979 and held for 444 days.
With tensions mounting as the US adds to its forces in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian military is responding with a three-day military exercise testing its Zalzal and Fajr-5 missiles in the desert southeast of Tehran. Last week, Russia completed delivery of 29 advanced TOR-M1 surface-to-air missile defense systems to Iran. They can strike airplanes, helicopters and incoming cruise missiles and have been deployed around Iran’s nuclear facilities in central Iran, according to European diplomatic sources in Tehran.
“If the [US] administration does anything military with respect to Iran in the context of its effort to assist its rather forlorn surge [in Iraq], it would likely take the form of pinpricks – say, a quick jab at some target just over the border, hot pursuit for a few kilometers into Iran – but nothing like the contingency plans for massive, wide-ranging air strikes related to the ongoing nuclear impasse,” said Wayne White, a veteran State Department intelligence analyst.
A US task force led by the aircraft carrier John C Stennis is on its way to the Gulf, where it will join another carrier. Analysts point out that the two carriers would have a combined capacity to launch around-the-clock bombing raids. The Pentagon is reportedly considering hitting 24 targets to degrade Iran’s nuclear capability and potential for striking back, in case diplomacy fails to resolve the crisis surrounding the Iranian nuclear program.
“An air campaign against Iran of this magnitude would almost certainly include efforts to knock out potential Iranian retaliatory capabilities in the Gulf, such as Iran’s array of coastal anti-ship missiles,” said White. “Perhaps one new point of emphasis was how difficult such a confrontation could be to end once initiated.”
With tension mounting, the Iranian military shot down a US pilotless spy plane last week, according to Seyed Nezam Mola Hoveyzeh, an Iranian lawmaker. The parliamentarian gave no exact date of the incident and no further details, but added that “the United States sends such spy-drones to the region every now and then”.
A source familiar with the security situation on Iran’s borders added that the downing of pilotless US spy-planes is common, but neither side is willing to publicize it. The Pentagon carries out overflights to prompt the Iranians to turn on their radars and expose their positions to electronic tracking.
“Most actions require extensive lead time, usually for unglamorous activity like logistics,” said James Spencer, a Middle East expert specializing in defense and security issues. “Contingency plans usually therefore take the form of identifying a vague concept of operations, and consequently troop numbers, logistic requirements, timelines etc. When the politicians suddenly have their brilliant idea, the file can be opened and the flesh put on the prepared bones with more thoroughness than haste.”
In an e-mail titled “Pieces in place for escalation against Iran”, retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner listed the arrival of US military hardware to the region and noted that “the pieces are moving. They’ll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.”
Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA26Ak03.html
Under the Veil of Ideology: The Israeli-Iranian Strategic Rivalry
Trita Parsi
June 9, 2006
(Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States [Yale University Press, forthcoming].)
When Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” in October 2005, the world appeared to be light years away from the end of history. It seemed that ideologues had once more taken the reins of power and rejoined a battle in which there could be no parley or negotiated truce — only the victory of one idea over the other.
Even before Ahmadinejad pulled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s poisonous anti-Israel rhetoric from the dustbin of history, the tense relations between Iran and Israel were often seen as one of history’s last ideological clashes. On one side was Israel, portrayed as a democracy in a region beset by authoritarianism and an eastern outpost of Enlightenment rationalism. On the other side was the Islamic Republic of Iran, depicted as a hidebound clerical regime whose rejection of the West and aspiration to speak for all Muslims everywhere were symbolized by its refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
The Israeli-Iranian confrontation is far more complex than this ideology-based understanding would indicate, however. Exclusive focus on the mudslinging between the two countries has come at the expense of a deeper understanding of the strategic nature of their conflict. That the conflict is strategic is underscored by the fact of past Iranian-Israeli cooperation. Prior to the overthrow of the Shah, the conventional view in both countries was that non-Arab Iran and Israel — both surrounded by a sea of innately hostile Arabs — enjoyed a natural alliance. Indeed, as long as Iran and Israel faced common Arab threats, they forged close clandestine security ties that survived the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It was not just the Shah who traded and cooperated with the Israelis; Khomeini had his fair share of Israeli dealings as well.
But since the fall of the Shah, and especially beginning in the 1990s, the mutually condemnatory rhetoric issuing from Iran and Israel has blinded most observers to a critical common interest shared by these two non-Arab powerhouses in the Middle East: the need to portray their fundamentally strategic conflict as an ideological clash.
“DEATH IS AT OUR DOORSTEP”
Since late 1992, Israel has pursued a policy of seeking Iran’s international isolation. In particular, according to a former Israeli ambassador in Washington, decision makers in Tel Aviv viewed the prospect of a US-Iranian rapprochement as a threat, since improved relations between Washington and Tehran could come at the expense of Israel’s strategic weight in the region.[1] Ironically, the shift against Iran took place under the Labor government headed by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, two leaders who only a few years earlier had initiated the attempts to improve relations between the US and Khomeini’s Iran that culminated in the Iran-contra scandal.The inflammatory rhetoric employed by Rabin and Peres was unprecedented. Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, accused Iran of “fanning all the flames in the Middle East,” implying that the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was rooted in Iran’s meddling rather than in the shortcomings of Israel and the Palestinians.[2] In January 1993, Prime Minister Rabin told the Knesset that Israel’s “struggle against murderous Islamic terror” was “meant to awaken the world which is lying in slumber” to the dangers of Shiite fundamentalism. “Death is at our doorstep,” Rabin concluded of the Iranian threat, though only five years earlier he had maintained that Iran was a strategic ally.[3] Israeli politicians began painting the regime in Tehran as fanatical and irrational. Clearly, they maintained, finding an accommodation with such “mad mullahs” was a non-starter. Instead, they called on the US to classify Iran, along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as a rogue state that needed to be “contained.”
IMMUNE TO DETERRENCE
Initially, the American establishment was skeptical of Israel’s change of heart with regard to Iran, though the Israelis advanced the same argument they do today, namely that Iran’s nuclear research program would soon afford the black-turbaned clerics access to the bomb. “Why the Israelis waited until fairly recently to sound a strong alarm about Iran is a perplexity, unless the answer is no more complicated than that the Iranian nuclear potential has grown to a worrisome point,” Clyde Haberman of the New York Times wrote in November 1992. Haberman went on to note: “For years, Israel remained willing to do business with Iran, even though the mullahs in Teheran were screaming for an end to the ‘Zionist entity.’”[4] Eventually, however, the mad mullah argument stuck. After all, the Iranians themselves were the greatest help in selling that argument to Washington.From the Israeli perspective, rallying Western states to its side was best achieved by emphasizing the alleged suicidal tendencies of the clergy and Iran’s apparent infatuation with the idea of destroying Israel. As long as the Iranian leadership was viewed as irrational, conventional tactics such as deterrence would be rendered impossible, leaving the international community with no option but to have no tolerance for Iranian capabilities. How could a country like Iran be trusted with missile technology, the argument went, if its leadership was immune to dissuasion by the larger and more numerous missiles of the West?
The Israeli strategy was to ensure that the world — particularly Washington — would not see the Israeli-Iranian conflict as one between two rivals for military preeminence in a fundamentally disordered region that lacked a clear pecking order. Rather, Israel framed the clash as one between the sole democracy in the Middle East and an illiberal theocracy that hated everything the West stood for. Cast in those terms, the allegiance of Western states to Israel was no longer a matter of choice or real political interest.
PAYING LIP SERVICE
Ironically, Iran too preferred an ideological framing of the conflict. When revolution swept Iran in 1979, the new Islamic leadership forsook the Pahlavi regime’s Persian nationalist identity, but not its yen for Iranian great-power status. Whereas the Shah sought suzerainty in the Persian Gulf and parts of the Indian Ocean, while hoping to make Iran the Japan of western Asia, the Khomeini government sought hegemony in the entire Islamic world. The Shah’s means for achieving his goal were a strong army and strategic ties to the United States. The Ayatollah, on the other hand, relied on his brand of political Islam and ideological zeal to overcome the Arab-Persian divide and to undermine the Arab governments who opposed Iran’s ambitions.
Throughout the 1980s, when Iran’s strategic interest compelled it to cooperate with Israel in order to repel the invading Iraqi army, the Khomeini government sought to cover up its Israeli dealings by taking Iran’s rhetorical excesses against Israel to even higher levels. In 1981, for instance, Ayatollah Khomeini introduced the ritual of observing an al-Qods Day — Jerusalem Day — during Ramadan precisely to pay lip service to the Palestinian cause at the same time that his regime was scheming to buy arms from the state it denounced as the “occupier of Jerusalem.”
The more Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership pressed the Iranian regime to live up to its promises to the Palestinians, the more Khomeini used his rhetorical weapons to cover up the fact that Iran refused to take any concrete measures against Israel.
The Iranian-PLO honeymoon turned sour from the very outset. Arafat and his entourage of 58 PLO officials showed up in Tehran uninvited on February 18, 1979, only days after the victory of the revolution.[5] Though the revolutionaries were caught off guard, several Iranian officials greeted Arafat at the airport and provided the Palestinians with high-end accommodations at the former Government Club on Fereshteh Street in northern Tehran.[6] Hours after arriving, Arafat held a two-hour meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini. Much to Arafat’s surprise, Khomeini was quite critical of the PLO and lectured the Palestinian leader on the necessity of dropping his leftist and nationalistic tendencies to get to the Islamic roots of the Palestinian issue.[7] The two revolutionaries did not meet again. Arafat quickly understood that Islamic Iran would lend the Palestinians only verbal and rhetorical backing. The significant Palestinian investments in the Iranian opposition to the Shah — primarily in leftist groups such as the Mojahedin-e Khalq — would simply not yield a high return.[8] In spite of his anti-Israel rhetoric, for instance, Khomeini decided against a request to send Iranian F-14 fighters to Lebanon, where the PLO was then battling the Israeli army alongside Syrian and Lebanese allies, indicating yet again that Iran did not intend to take an active role on the Arab side against Israel beyond its verbal condemnations of the Jewish state.[9] Thus, the Iranians showed little interest in extending practical support to the Palestinians even before Arafat and the Arab states (except Syria and Libya) threw their weight behind Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. US diplomats in Iran took note of Khomeini’s tense relations with the PLO. A confidential memo sent to Washington from the US Embassy in Tehran in September 1979 noted that “Iran enthusiastically and unreservedly supports the Palestinian cause,” but that “relatively little is said about the PLO itself.”[10]
Iran’s policy “was to avoid getting entangled in the Palestinian conflict,” explained Mahmoud Vaezi, a former Iranian deputy foreign minister. Iran’s “moral duties” overshadowed strategic considerations during the first years after the revolution, he added, preventing Iran’s enmity toward the Arabs from translating into a full-blown Iranian alliance with Israel.[11] Yet the revolutionary regime’s ideology and lurid rhetoric successfully veiled its pursuit of realpolitik. “INSULT TO ISLAM”
After the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf war, the strategic considerations that had put Iran and Israel on the same geopolitical side evaporated. Soon enough, absent any common foes, Israel and Iran found themselves in a strategic rivalry for the ability to redefine the regional order after the decimation of Iraq’s military might. But it was clearly not possible to rally the Arab Muslim masses to Iran’s side for the sake of Iran’s power ambitions. Again, Iran turned to ideology to conceal its true motives, while utilizing the plight of the Palestinian people to undermine the Arab governments who were willing to partake in the Oslo process of the 1990s.
So Iranian speechwriters took the lead in inveighing against Israel’s “never-ending appetite for Arab lands,” its oppression of the Palestinians, its disregard for UN Security Council resolutions and the “insult to Islam” embodied that its continued occupation of Jerusalem. Indeed, until this day, the rhetoric of Tehran preaches that its struggle against Israel is not about geopolitical gains or even about Iran itself, but rather about justice for the Palestinians and honor for Islam.
With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cast in these terms, and fearing a backlash from their own populations, pro-Western Arab rulers have to tread carefully so as not to come across as belittling the announced goals of Tehran. In the eyes of many Arab states, the power of Iran’s rhetoric has made public opposition to Iran equivalent to acquiescence in or even approval of the Israeli and US stance on the Palestinian issue. Indeed, anti-Iranian statements such as Jordanian King Abdallah’s warning of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran through post-Saddam Iraq into Lebanon or Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s denunciation of Iraqi Shiites as Iranian loyalists have been poorly received by the Arab public. Tehran’s pro-Palestinian reputation is one reason why.
TWO CAMPS IN TEHRAN
Ahmadinejad’s reinvigoration of anti-Israel rhetoric beginning in 2005 must also be seen in the context of Iran’s larger conflict with the US, in particular the nuclear standoff that is pushing the conflict to its climax. In November 2005, an intense debate took place in Tehran over the new president’s invocation of Khomeini’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map. The international backlash had taken Tehran by surprise and angered the nuclear negotiators, who argued that such language was undermining their fine-tuned balancing act that sought simultaneously to avoid referral to the Security Council and to defend Iran’s right to uranium enrichment.
The Ahmadinejad camp forcefully argued that Iran should enlarge the conflict and make Israel a critical and visible part of the international debate. Viewing Iran’s nuclear program in isolation only benefited the West. Only by expanding the scope of the issue could Iran find the necessary levers to defend its position. At a minimum, the Ahmadinejad camp argued, a cost should be imposed on Israel for having made the Iranian nuclear program a subject of grave international concern and for having convinced Washington to adopt a no-enrichment policy.
While less radical elements in the Iranian government agreed on the necessity of putting Israel on the defensive and enlarging the conflict, they strongly differed as to the best way to achieve those objectives.
According to a senior Iranian official, people close to Ahmadinejad favored putting into question issues Israel had managed to settle over the last two decades: Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist, the reality of the Holocaust, and the right of European Jews to remain in the heart of the Middle East. Such an approach, they argued, would resonate with the discontented Arab street and reveal the impotence of the pro-US Arab regimes, who would be in equal parts pressured and embarrassed.
More moderate voices in Tehran strongly opposed this approach, due to the difficulties they predicted it would cause for Iran’s nuclear diplomacy. They favored former President Mohammad Khatami’s tactic of invoking the suffering of the Palestinian people and Israel’s unwillingness to make territorial concessions, but avoiding hot-button issues such as Israel’s right to exist and the Holocaust. Taking the rhetoric to such levels, they argued, could backfire and turn key countries like Russia and China against Iran. Though the regime did not reach a full consensus, much to Ahmadinejad’s frustration, a decision was made that no Iranian official would be permitted to repeat the venomous Holocaust remarks. That decision stood for a couple of months until it became clear that the West was in retreat.
LOOKING FOR THE EDGE
What was conspicuously absent from the internal debate in Tehran, however, was the very ideological motivations and factors that Iran uses to justify its stance on Israel. Neither the honor of Islam nor the suffering of the Palestinian people figured in the deliberations.
Rather, both the terms of the debate and its outcome were of a purely strategic nature. Both camps aimed at giving Iran the initiative in the confrontation with the US and Israel, rather than see Iran suffer the fate of Iraq, where from 1991 until the invasion Washington remained largely in firm control of events. Both Ahmadinejad and his major rival, National Security Council Adviser Ali Larijani, believe that Iran cannot make headway by playing nice with the Bush administration. In their view, Iran committed a mistake when it accepted suspension of uranium enrichment for two and a half years during negotiations with the Europeans.
The Ahmadinejad and Larijani camps further concur that Iran is better off taking the initiative to put its adversaries constantly in a defensive position. Iran should force the West to adopt a defensive position, rather than defend itself against the never-ending array of Western initiatives.
Whether agreeable or not, whether effective or not, the ideological pronouncements emanating from Ahmadinejad and other Iranian regime figures are an effect, rather than a cause, of Iran’s strategic orientation. Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s description of Iran as a “dark and gathering storm casting its shadow over the world” in his May 24, 2006 speech to Congress should not be taken at face value. There are distinct echoes of the Rabin-Peres approach in his further admonition: “A nuclear Iran means a terrorist state could achieve the primary mission for which terrorists live and die: the mass destruction of innocent human life.” Nevertheless, for now, both Iran and Israel seem to (mis)calculate that portraying their struggle in ideological and apocalyptic terms will provide them with a critical edge against each other in their efforts to define the order of the Middle East to their own benefit. Then again, those entangled in hegemonic struggles always do.
Endnotes
[1] Interview with Itamar Rabinovich, Tel Aviv, October 17, 2004.[2] Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 43.
[3] Washington Post, March 13, 1993.[4] New York Times, November 8, 1992.
[5] Nader Entessar, “Israel and Iran’s National Security,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 27/4 (Summer 2004), p. 5.[6] Interview with Abbas Maleki, former Iranian deputy foreign minister, Tehran, August 1, 2004.
[7] Telephone interview with Nader Entessar, January 25, 2005. Ibrahim Yazdi, foreign minister in Iran’s first revolutionary government, informed US Embassy staff that Khomeini had appealed to the PLO to adopt an Islamic orientation and replicate the methodology of Iran’s non-violent revolution. The Iranians argued that an Islamic orientation would increase the prospects of a Palestinian victory and would disable Marxists and radical elements among the Palestinians. Bruce Laingen to Department of State, October 1979. Available through the National Security Archive. [8] Behrouz Souresrafil, Khomeini and Israel (London: Researchers, Inc., 1988), p. 46.
[9] US Embassy in Tehran to Department of State, late September 1979. Available through the National Security Archive. [10] US Embassy in Tehran to Department of State, September 30, 1979. Available through the National Security Archive.[11] Interview with Mahmoud Vaezi, Tehran, August 16, 2004
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060906.html
Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, November 18, 2006
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“Hegemony is as old as Mankind…” -Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor
The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was credited by the Western media for coining the term) in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the “Greater Middle East.”
This shift in foreign policy phraseology coincided with the inauguration of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term and conceptualization of the “New Middle East,” was subsequently heralded by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height of the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon. Prime Minister Olmert and Secretary Rice had informed the international media that a project for a “New Middle East” was being launched from Lebanon.
This announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American-Israeli “military roadmap” in the Middle East. This project, which has been in the planning stages for several years, consists in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.
The “New Middle East” project was introduced publicly by Washington and Tel Aviv with the expectation that Lebanon would be the pressure point for realigning the whole Middle East and thereby unleashing the forces of “constructive chaos.” This “constructive chaos” –which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region– would in turn be used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.
New Middle East Map
Secretary Condoleezza Rice stated during a press conference that “[w]hat we’re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we [meaning the United States] have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.”1 Secretary Rice was immediately criticized for her statements both within Lebanon and internationally for expressing indifference to the suffering of an entire nation, which was being bombed indiscriminately by the Israeli Air Force.
The Anglo-American Military Roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech on the “New Middle East” had set the stage. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon –which had been fully endorsed by Washington and London– have further compromised and validated the existence of the geo-strategic objectives of the United States, Britain, and Israel. According to Professor Mark Levine the “neo-liberal globalizers and neo-conservatives, and ultimately the Bush Administration, would latch on to creative destruction as a way of describing the process by which they hoped to create their new world orders,” and that “creative destruction [in] the United States was, in the words of neo-conservative philosopher and Bush adviser Michael Ledeen, ‘an awesome revolutionary force’ for (…) creative destruction…”2
Anglo-American occupied Iraq, particularly Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to be the preparatory ground for the balkanization (division) and finlandization (pacification) of the Middle East. Already the legislative framework, under the Iraqi Parliament and the name of Iraqi federalization, for the partition of Iraq into three portions is being drawn out. (See map below)
Moreover, the Anglo-American military roadmap appears to be vying an entry into Central Asia via the Middle East. The Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are stepping stones for extending U.S. influence into the former Soviet Union and the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia. The Middle East is to some extent the southern tier of Central Asia. Central Asia in turn is also termed as “Russia’s Southern Tier” or the Russian “Near Abroad.”
Many Russian and Central Asian scholars, military planners, strategists, security advisors, economists, and politicians consider Central Asia (“Russia’s Southern Tier”) to be the vulnerable and “soft under-belly” of the Russian Federation.3
It should be noted that in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The Map of the “New Middle East”
A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been causally allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the “New Middle East.”
MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
HYPERLINK “http://www.globalresearch.ca/images/harita_b.jpeg”Map: click to enlarge
Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).
Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.
This map of the “New Middle East” seems to be based on several other maps, including older maps of potential boundaries in the Middle East extending back to the era of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and World War I. This map is showcased and presented as the brainchild of retired Lieutenant-Colonel (U.S. Army) Ralph Peters, who believes the redesigned borders contained in the map will fundamentally solve the problems of the contemporary Middle East.
The map of the “New Middle East” was a key element in the retired Lieutenant-Colonel’s book, Never Quit the Fight, which was released to the public on July 10, 2006. This map of a redrawn Middle East was also published, under the title of Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, in the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.5
It should be noted that Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the U.S. Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and U.S. foreign policy.
It has been written that Ralph Peters’ “four previous books on strategy have been highly influential in government and military circles,” but one can be pardoned for asking if in fact quite the opposite could be taking place. Could it be Lieutenant-Colonel Peters is revealing and putting forward what Washington D.C. and its strategic planners have anticipated for the Middle East?
The concept of a redrawn Middle East has been presented as a “humanitarian” and “righteous” arrangement that would benefit the people(s) of the Middle East and its peripheral regions. According to Ralph Peter’s:
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam, but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia [Muslims], but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.
Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.
Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosphorus and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. 6
(emphasis added)
“Necessary Pain”
Besides believing that there is “cultural stagnation” in the Middle East, it must be noted that Ralph Peters admits that his propositions are “draconian” in nature, but he insists that they are necessary pains for the people of the Middle East. This view of necessary pain and suffering is in startling parallel to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s belief that the devastation of Lebanon by the Israeli military was a necessary pain or “birth pang” in order to create the “New Middle East” that Washington, London, and Tel Aviv envision.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the subject of the Armenian Genocide is being politicized and stimulated in Europe to offend Turkey.7
The overhaul, dismantlement, and reassembly of the nation-states of the Middle East have been packaged as a solution to the hostilities in the Middle East, but this is categorically misleading, false, and fictitious. The advocates of a “New Middle East” and redrawn boundaries in the region avoid and fail to candidly depict the roots of the problems and conflicts in the contemporary Middle East. What the media does not acknowledge is the fact that almost all major conflicts afflicting the Middle East are the consequence of overlapping Anglo-American-Israeli agendas.
Many of the problems affecting the contemporary Middle East are the result of the deliberate aggravation of pre-existing regional tensions. Sectarian division, ethnic tension and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States and Britain in various parts of the globe including Africa, Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Iraq is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American strategy of “divide and conquer.” Other examples are Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan.
Amongst the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of genuine democracy which U.S. and British foreign policy has actually been deliberately obstructing. Western-style “Democracy” has been a requirement only for those Middle Eastern states which do not conform to Washington’s political demands. Invariably, it constitutes a pretext for confrontation. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are examples of undemocratic states that the United States has no problems with because they are firmly alligned within the Anglo-American orbit or sphere.
Additionally, the United States has deliberately blocked or displaced genuine democratic movements in the Middle East from Iran in 1953 (where a U.S./U.K. sponsored coup was staged against the democratic government of Prime Minister Mossadegh) to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the Arab Sheikdoms, and Jordan where the Anglo-American alliance supports military control, absolutists, and dictators in one form or another. The latest example of this is Palestine.
The Turkish Protest at NATO’s Military College in Rome
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters’ map of the “New Middle East” has sparked angry reactions in Turkey. According to Turkish press releases on September 15, 2006 the map of the “New Middle East” was displayed in NATO’s Military College in Rome, Italy. It was additionally reported that Turkish officers were immediately outraged by the presentation of a portioned and segmented Turkey.8 The map received some form of approval from the U.S. National War Academy before it was unveiled in front of NATO officers in Rome.The Turkish Chief of Staff, General Buyukanit, contacted the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, and protested the event and the exhibition of the redrawn map of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.9 Furthermore the Pentagon has gone out of its way to assure Turkey that the map does not reflect official U.S. policy and objectives in the region, but this seems to be conflicting with Anglo-American actions in the Middle East and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.
Is there a Connection between Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Eurasian Balkans” and the “New Middle East” Project?
The following are important excerpts and passages from former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives. Brzezinski also states that both Turkey and Iran, the two most powerful states of the “Eurasian Balkans,” located on its southern tier, are “potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts [balkanization],” and that, “If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable.”10
It seems that a divided and balkanized Iraq would be the best means of accomplishing this. Taking what we know from the White House’s own admissions; there is a belief that “creative destruction and chaos” in the Middle East are beneficial assets to reshaping the Middle East, creating the “New Middle East,” and furthering the Anglo-American roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia:
In Europe, the Word “Balkans” conjures up images of ethnic conflicts and great-power regional rivalries. Eurasia, too, has its “Balkans,” but the Eurasian Balkans are much larger, more populated, even more religiously and ethnically heterogenous. They are located within that large geographic oblong that demarcates the central zone of global instability (…) that embraces portions of southeastern Europe, Central Asia and parts of South Asia [Pakistan, Kashmir, Western India], the Persian Gulf area, and the Middle East.
The Eurasian Balkans form the inner core of that large oblong (…) they differ from its outer zone in one particularly significant way: they are a power vacuum. Although most of the states located in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East are also unstable, American power is that region’s [meaning the Middle East’s] ultimate arbiter. The unstable region in the outer zone is thus an area of single power hegemony and is tempered by that hegemony. In contrast, the Eurasian Balkans are truly reminiscent of the older, more familiar Balkans of southeastern Europe: not only are its political entities unstable but they tempt and invite the intrusion of more powerful neighbors, each of whom is determined to oppose the region’s domination by another. It is this familiar combination of a power vacuum and power suction that justifies the appellation “Eurasian Balkans.”
The traditional Balkans represented a potential geopolitical prize in the struggle for European supremacy. The Eurasian Balkans, astride the inevitably emerging transportation network meant to link more directly Eurasia’s richest and most industrious western and eastern extremities, are also geopolitically significant. Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East.
The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy, and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.
Access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interests, rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations, and fuel international rivalries. The situation is made all the more volatile by the fact that the region is not only a power vacuum but is also internally unstable.
(…)
The Eurasian Balkans include nine countries that one way or another fit the foregoing description, with two others as potential candidates. The nine are Kazakstan [alternative and official spelling of Kazakhstan] , Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia—all of them formerly part of the defunct Soviet Union—as well as Afghanistan.
The potential additions to the list are Turkey and Iran, both of them much more politically and economically viable, both active contestants for regional influence within the Eurasian Balkans, and thus both significant geo-strategic players in the region. At the same time, both are potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts. If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable, while efforts to restrain regional domination by Russia could even become futile. 11
(emphasis added)
Redrawing the Middle East
The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up the First World War. In the wake of the the First World War the borders of the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn. This region experienced a period of upheaval, violence and conflict, before and after World War I, which was the direct result of foreign economic interests and interference.
The reasons behind the First World War are more sinister than the standard school-book explanation, the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Economic factors were the real motivation for the large-scale war in 1914.
Norman Dodd, a former Wall Street banker and investigator for the U.S. Congress, who examined U.S. tax-exempt foundations, confirmed in a 1982 interview that those powerful individuals who from behind the scenes controlled the finances, policies, and government of the United States had in fact also planned U.S. involvement in a war, which would contribute to entrenching their grip on power.
The following testimonial is from the transcript of Norman Dodd’s interview with G. Edward Griffin;
We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. And, in that year, the trustees meeting, for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year, in a very learned fashion. And the question is this: Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they conclude that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?
Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country [the United States], than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows [wars] in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as follows: we must control the State Department.
And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly. And finally, of course, the war is over.
At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914, when World War I broke out.
(emphasis added)
The redrawing and partition of the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia (Asia Minor), Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian Plateau responds to broad economic, strategic and military objectives, which are part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda in the region.
The Middle East has been conditioned by outside forces into a powder keg that is ready to explode with the right trigger, possibly the launching of Anglo-American and/or Israeli air raids against Iran and Syria. A wider war in the Middle East could result in redrawn borders that are strategically advantageous to Anglo-American interests and Israel.
NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan has been successfully divided, all but in name. Animosity has been inseminated in the Levant, where a Palestinian civil war is being nurtured and divisions in Lebanon agitated. The Eastern Mediterranean has been successfully militarized by NATO. Syria and Iran continue to be demonized by the Western media, with a view to justifying a military agenda. In turn, the Western media has fed, on a daily basis, incorrect and biased notions that the populations of Iraq cannot co-exist and that the conflict is not a war of occupation but a “civil war” characterised by domestic strife between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
Attempts at intentionally creating animosity between the different ethno-cultural and religious groups of the Middle East have been systematic. In fact, they are part of a carefully designed covert intelligence agenda.
Even more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, are assisting Washington in fomenting divisions between Middle Eastern populations. The ultimate objective is to weaken the resistance movement against foreign occupation through a “divide and conquer strategy” which serves Anglo-American and Israeli interests in the broader region.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is in an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
1 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Special Briefing on the Travel to the Middle East and Europe of Secretary Condoleezza Rice (Press Conference, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C., July 21, 2006).
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/69331.htm
2 Professor Mark LeVine, The New Creative Destruction, Asia Times, August 22, 2006.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH22Ak01.html
3 Professor Andrej Kreutz, The Geopolitics of post-Soviet Russia and the Middle East, Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) (Washington, D.C.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, January 2002).
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2501/is_1_24/ai_93458168/pg_1
4 The Caucasus or Caucasia can be considered as part of the Middle East or as a separate region
5 Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899
6 Ibid.
7 Crispian Balmer, French MPs back Armenia genocide bill, Turkey angry, Reuters, October 12, 2006.
James McConalogue, French against Turks: Talking about Armenian Genocide, The Brussels Journal, October 10, 2006.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1585
8 Suleyman Kurt, Carved-up Map of Turkey at NATO Prompts U.S. Apology, Zaman (Turkey), September 29, 2006.
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&hn=36919
9 Ibid.
10 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives. (New York City: Basic Books, 1997).
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465027261
11 Ibid.
Related Global Research articles on the March to War in the Middle East
US naval war games off the Iranian coastline: A provocation which could lead to War? 2006-10-24
“Cold War Shivers:” War Preparations in the Middle East and Central Asia 2006-10-06
The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean 2006-10-01
The March to War: Iran Preparing for US Air Attacks 2006-09-21
The Next Phase of the Middle East War 2006-09-04
Baluchistan and the Coming Iran War 2006-09-01
British Troops Mobilizing on the Iranian Border 2006-08-30
Russia and Central Asian Allies Conduct War Games in Response to US Threats 2006-08-24
Iranian War Games: Exercises, Tests, and Drills or Preparation and Mobilization for War? 2006-08-21
Triple Alliance:” The US, Turkey, Israel and the War on Lebanon 2006-08-06
The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil 2006-07-26
Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust? 2006-02-22
The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War 2006-02-17
Nuclear War against Iran 2006-01-03
Israeli Bombings could lead to Escalation of Middle East War 2006-07-15
Iran: Next Target of US Military Aggression 2005-05-01
Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran 2005-05-01
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NAZ20061116&articleId=3882
The New Middle East: Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Actually Get It.
“What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing — the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.” Condoleezza Rice in a Press Conference on July 21, 2006.
Madam Secretary, one question please: Will your country claim the newborn if it happens to be the wrong color?
I remember reading about the new Middle East in a document written back in 1996 called “A Clean Break:A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (ACB). It was authored by a group of policy advisors to Israel. Subsequently, nearly all members ascended to influential policy making positions within US government, media, and academic circles and were instrumental in taking the US to war against Iraq under false pretenses. Many of the ACB policies, such as toppling the government of Iraq, are now in full implementation and present new challenges to the global community. The ACB contained six pages of policy recommendations for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The authors of this policy paper included Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser amongst others, who became known as the Neo-conservatives or Neocons for short.
The paper was an outline of what Israel should do to subjugate not just the Palestinians but also everyone else around it. It was written: “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” They also did not like the ” Land for Peace” deal that Israel signed with the its neighbors including the Palestinians and suggested Israel should pursue a different formula based on “Peace for Peace”. This means that they would create a situation on the ground that is so big, using Israel’s military might in order to change the “Land for Peace” formula into a plea to “just please give us peace and take our piece”, or so they thought. Therefore, they would be creating a “New Middle East” once they neutralized Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria by following the new formula for peace. They wrote about : “Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, “New Middle East”
Aha, so this is where I heard what Rice murmured on July 12 2006. It was actually written 10 years before !!!
I believe we are watching these very painful birth pangs. I just don’t think Israel and America will like, or even claim the baby, once it’s delivered. Israel’s attack on Lebanon has accomplished something the Lebanese have been trying to do for over a 100 years….. Unity. For 19 years, the Lebanese fought each other in one of the bloodiest conflicts witnessed in the 20th Century. The Phalanges Kataeb Party fought the people who have now belonged to the Hizbullah and Amal movements for years.
Last night, the Secretary General Karim Bakradoni of the Phalanges Party said that he supports the Government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Resistance, which is a term used solely to describe Hizbullah. We are witnessing a new Middle East, because the Phalanges is the same Party that lined itself up with the Israelis back in 1982 and was rewarded by Israel’s making its Chief, the late Bashire Jumayel, the President of Lebanon. Things are different now. Hizbullah represents close to 35 percent of the population in Lebanon and is represented in all aspects of the government; the military, civil and social organizations in Lebanon. Before it’s all over, and no matter who wins this war, Hizbullah has already won, even if it looses. Its policies will end up making the next Lebanese government’s policy. This is something similar to what happened in Palestine with Hamas. Would the United States like to raise this baby? I think not.
This will strengthen relations between Syria and Lebanon to levels never seen before and, of course, will spill over to other countries in the Middle East who will put pressure on their governments to take a harder position towards Israel and the United States in particular, and the West in general. We will then see new alliances made with regional and continental powers other than the US. We already see a total sympathy with Hizbullah all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood offered to send 10,000 highly trained and equipped fighters to help Hizbullah in Lebanon. If the United States is having a hard time in Iraq, wait until you see Lebanon.
The United States somehow missed its bidding again when it bid on leaders such as the Arab leader who called Olmert, in the first days of fighting, and asked him to fight until Hizbullah is destroyed: Or like the Foreign Minister of an Arab country with no official relations with Israel, at least not public, cut his vacation in Tel-Aviv short because of the war and was forced three weeks later to send a private Jet to pick up his family, who was still vacationing in Tel-Aviv, because Hizbullah threatened to attack Tel-Aviv.
You want a new Middle East? You will get a New Middle East. You will have a Middle East, which sees Israel and the US as the enemy, an enemy to despise and fight, one that will one day be united in its struggle against the new invaders, and colonizers. This time around, Sykes-Picot will not be around to decide on whom rules the pieces. This time around, they will be faced with a New Middle East just like they wanted.
In Kuwait, people took to the streets; the same people who took to the streets in 1992 celebrating the liberation of their country by waving American flags and pictures of George Bush the father. However, today they were burning the American flag and chanting “death to Israel and America.”
America has lost dearly in the Arab and Muslim worlds due to its policies in the Middle East that are biased towards Israel. American interests are being threatened due to this blind support for a state that cannot survive without state terrorism.
Just be careful what you wish for, you might actually get it.
2006 by Hesham Tillawi, PhD
http://heshamtillawi.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/the-new-middle-east-be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-actually-get-it/
