Wexler cancels talk with PLO official
By Larry Lipman
Palm Beach Post Washington Bureau
Saturday, March 10, 2007
WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler has cancelled a meeting with the chief Palestinian representative in Washington in response to an e-mail critical of a prominent pro-Israel lobbying organization.
Wexler, a Democrat from Delray Beach who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the e-mail sent by Afif Safieh to several congressional offices Friday "is reprehensible and does nothing to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East."
Safieh, who met with several House members this week as head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Washington office, was scheduled to meet next week with Wexler.
In his e-mail, Safieh criticized the America Israel Public Affairs Committee - commonly known as AIPAC - for what he called the organization's "maximalist and belligerent lobbying techniques" in support of a tough stance against Iraq and Iran, and what he said were AIPAC's "constant attempts to neutralize" America's effort to reach a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
Wexler said in a statement that Safieh's comments were "false, wrong and set back the Palestinian cause.
"Instead of attacking AIPAC, Mr. Safieh should explain how a Palestinian unity government led by the terrorist organization Hamas, whose stated goal is to destroy Israel, is in the best interest of the Palestinian people or peace in the region," Wexler said.
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Showing posts with label foreign ploicy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign ploicy. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
Er....Yo
© Steve Bell 2007
steve.bell@guardian.co.uk
How Bush saw the light and changed foreign policy
March 2 2007: Aggressive - and ineffective - approach abandoned in favour of diplomacy.
'Rice has pushed Cheney out of the driving seat'
---
Bush About Face About Deception
Same old, same old.
It's still about "containment", the strategy that has become dangerously destabilising worldwide.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
‘Quartet’ Corners PLO, Hamas Into Critical Options
Feb 6, 2007
By Nicola Nasser
In Washington on February 2, the Middle East Quartet of peace mediators promised the Palestinian people more of the same devastating status quo, perpetuating their 40-year old Israeli occupation, prolonging the international siege imposed on them, exacerbating their internal divide, and thus cornering them into a situation that they can only shake off either through civil war or unconditional surrender to the U.S.-backed Israeli-dictated fait accompli, unless their national sense of accountability could prevail to make mutual compromises into national consensus.
The Quartet statement read to reporters by the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon boils down to promising them only more of what the U.S. former president Jimmy Carter recently summed up: “In the last six years there has not been one day of good faith, substantive negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians, not one day.”
“Recognizing the critical need to end the Palestinian/Israeli conflict,” the Quartet pledged to support efforts to put in place a process with the goal of ending the occupation that began in 1967 and creating an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security with Israel, and reaffirmed its commitment to a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338,” the statement said.
It was a positive introductory comprehension of the end goal, which Ki-moon and his co-mediators – the High Representative for European Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Russian and German counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- immediately shot in the feet by the “road map” they adopted to reach that goal.
They failed to incorporate any reference in their statement to the UN Security Council resolution 1515, which commits them and the international community to the so-called two-state solution, although it was a non-binding resolution because it wasn’t adopted according to Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
Then they evaded any time-tabled commitment to reviving the peace process. True they “welcomed” the 23 December summit of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli premier Ehud Olmert and their trilateral meeting with Rice, scheduled for February 21, but the upcoming meeting according to the Quartet will be only a “dialogue” and to Rice’s on record statements will be “informal.” The Quartet’s pledge “to give active follow-up to these meetings and to remain closely engaged” sounded hollow and meaningless.
The Quartet also “noted the continuing importance of the Arab Peace Initiative,” which envisions an all-comprising and comprehensive solution for the conflict with Israel, but failed to suggest an international peace conferences, some dubs as Madrid II -- a key demand by the Arab League, the PLO and Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel has rejected both the Arab Initiative and the conference idea.
The international mediators “called for continued international assistance to the Palestinian people,” and “encouraged … the development of the Palestinian economy,” but, in obvious self-contradiction, did not lift the Israeli and U.S.-led siege imposed as a collective punishment on the PA and people.
Hypocritically, “the Quartet called for Palestinian unity,” but fomented the Palestinian divide by urging donors to selectively “focus on preserving and building the capacity of institutions of Palestinian governance,” while at the same time maintaining the diplomatic, economic and political isolation of the democratically elected Palestinian government and ignoring Russian, Qatari and British parliamentarian demands to engage the PA government shortly ahead of their meeting.
Similarly, “the Quartet expressed its deep concern at the violence among Palestinians,” but failed to commit its U.S. member to refrain from fueling the violence with money, training and weapons to one side of the infighting in a declared pledge to oust an elected government or coerce it into accepting the Israeli preconditions to lift the siege.
Then the Quartet concluded with reiterating “its call for the Palestinian Authority Government to commit … to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations,” ignoring the fact that the PA government, regardless of whether led by Fatah or Hamas, is an institution mandated according to Oslo accords to manage the Palestinian apolitical autonomy and is only an administrative tool of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the political authority who sets the PA’s terms of reference and still committed to the aforesaid “principles,” a strict commitment pressuring it into the brink of civil war.
Palestinian Options
The disappointing outcome of the Quartet meeting rules out any early resumption of “formal” peace talks, leaves the Palestinian people and leadership divided on the verge of civil war under the pressures of both the occupation and siege, thus leaving the divide with only one option: Individual and collective dialogue to review the deadlocked and futile peace process as well as the yet un-delivering violent and non-violent resistance, which both have almost reached a standstill.
Palestinian pollster Khalil al-Shikaki in a surveyed analysis dated February 1 (www.pcpsr.org) concluded that President Abbas has four options to break through the Palestinian impasse: 1) to form a national unity government, 2) to organize early presidential and legislative election, 3) to fire the Hamas-led Palestinian government and form an emergency one, and 4) to resign. Al-Shikaki ruled out the last three options as counterproductive to the “Palestinian vital interests” and could lead to more infighting. However his preferable first option could not “completely end the siege and boycott in a short period.”
The only breakthrough left is mutual compromises. According to al-Shikaki, Hamas’ flexibility in dealing “positively” with the Quartet’s three conditions to “respect” the signed accords, recognize Israel as a “fait accompli” and agree to an open-ended truce makes the first option “viable.” The Fatah-led PLO has yet to reciprocate by giving priority to national consensus more than to the Israeli-drafted and Quartet-adopted three conditions. Palestinian national unity will lead in the end to break through the siege.
All sides of the Palestinian divide, the Israeli Occupying Power and the world community should adapt to the fact that the 40-year old monopoly of Palestinian decision-making by Fatah came to an end on January 25, 2006, when Hamas broke into the role of a principal decision-maker by a landslide electoral victory that empowered it with dominant executive and legislative powers, and sooner or later the Islamic Resistance Movement will gain a parallel dominance in the PLO, a democratically-clinched right that Hamas in its defense has tactically contributed to the ensuing bloody power struggle.
However 12 months on, the unity government has failed the national bilateral and multilateral dialogue as well as Islamic and Arab mediation efforts, including Qatari, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Islamic mediators; several ceasefire agreements have so far collapsed on the security approach. The latest Saudi Arabian good offices are also expected to stumble on the same approach, which foiled previous similar efforts.
Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, chaired by Abbas in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Sunday, suspended a three-day session in waiting for the outcome of the Mecca-hosted talks between Abbas and Hamas’ leader Khalid Misha’al on Feb. 5, but warned the PLO will go for the Hamas-rejected presidential and legislative election in June if the two leaders failed to agree on a unity government based on the Quartet’s three conditions, which practically will sooner or later doom the outcome, because Hamas views its subscription to the Quartet’s agenda as a carte blanche for the Quartet, Israel and the PLO to resume their 15-year old counterproductive and futile so-called “peace process.”
The PLO and Fatah leadership insists on Hamas accommodating the Quartet conditions as a Palestinian obligation to lift the siege, which Hamas says was only tightened after its electoral victory and was in place before that as a mechanism to pressure the PLO into accepting the comatose former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon-initiated long-term interim arrangement of a transitional Palestinian state on 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both Hamas and the PLO have recently unequivocally rejected this Israeli unilateral plan. The Quartet’s silence or vague stance on the arrangement and their promised “informal” revival of high-level Israeli – Palestinian “dialogue” should provide enough common ground for a PLO-Hamas consensus.
The deadlocked peace process, the paralysis of the PLO and PA institutions, the inability of the Palestinian presidency and government alike to rule the autonomous 42 percent of the Israeli-reoccupied West Bank or the militarily-besieged Gaza Strip, the zero sum situation where the Palestinians have neither an “armed struggle” nor popular non-violent resistance save for seasonal symbolic expressions and where the erosion of public trust in both leading movements, according to latest Palestinian public surveys, threatens to render the Palestinians leaderless, all have locked the Palestinian national liberation movement in its current impasse.
The ensuing divide has led to bloody street battles that embroiled both the Fatah and Hamas security executive forces in a militia-style power struggle in mutual self-destruction, taking down with them what government institutions the PA has built since 1993, including public services infrastructure like power stations, universities and police and intelligence stations, especially in Gaza Strip - - as this mission was left for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the West Bank - - amid mounting and widening popular outrage, security chaos exacerbated by the crushing economic siege, popular loss of hope deepened by the Quartet’s latest unpromising meeting, helplessness of Arab and Islamic brothers who are too preoccupied to rush for rescue with the several battle fronts opened by turn once by the U.S. and then by Israel.
All these and other factors are creating the ideal environment to look for survival in a new anti-occupation uprising that might sweep away also the autonomy and both protagonists who are wasting their energies in a struggle over who manages the Palestinian prison, according to the Palestinian-Arab Israeli MP, Azmi Bishara, in a recent article.
However, joining of the Oslo political institutions by Hamas, accompanied by the two-year old strict commitment to a unilateral truce, was an indirect declaration of a change in course and tactics that confused the movement’s declared strategy among supporters because of the contradiction between rejecting the Oslo status quo and being incorporated into its institutions, let alone being embroiled in bloody power struggle over who leads them.
Similarly, the dead end the negotiations with Israel has reached, the meager results the negotaitions have produced, the insistence of the PLO on holding the Palestinian self-determination hostage to the whims of the Israeli-U.S. good faith and its determination to commit Hamas to the same futile course – which deprived the PLO even of the limited autonomy it was offered on an interim basis until July 1997, provided a “legitimate” PLO cover to slicing Jerusalem off the occupied territories and isolating it as inaccessible for Palestinians, and doubled the colonial Jewish settlers to more than 450.000 since 1967 -- have eroded the PLO’s credibility.
Salam Fayyad, the former PA Finance Minister and a founder of the new Third Way political party alongside Hanan Ashrawi who are both incumbent MPs, described the current status quo to the Seventh Annual Herzliya Conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 24: “The nature of relations today between Israelis and Palestinians has reached levels of micromanagement, where Israel is involved in the minute details of the lives of Palestinians. It is important to remember that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ruled by military orders – not by politics, logic, or reason – but by military orders with (Israel’s) “security” dictating the rules of the game.” To hell of course with Palestinian security!
Both sides have all the compelling reasons to backtrack and bend on individual as well as collective reviews of the status quo.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
By Nicola Nasser
In Washington on February 2, the Middle East Quartet of peace mediators promised the Palestinian people more of the same devastating status quo, perpetuating their 40-year old Israeli occupation, prolonging the international siege imposed on them, exacerbating their internal divide, and thus cornering them into a situation that they can only shake off either through civil war or unconditional surrender to the U.S.-backed Israeli-dictated fait accompli, unless their national sense of accountability could prevail to make mutual compromises into national consensus.
The Quartet statement read to reporters by the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon boils down to promising them only more of what the U.S. former president Jimmy Carter recently summed up: “In the last six years there has not been one day of good faith, substantive negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians, not one day.”
“Recognizing the critical need to end the Palestinian/Israeli conflict,” the Quartet pledged to support efforts to put in place a process with the goal of ending the occupation that began in 1967 and creating an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security with Israel, and reaffirmed its commitment to a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338,” the statement said.
It was a positive introductory comprehension of the end goal, which Ki-moon and his co-mediators – the High Representative for European Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Russian and German counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- immediately shot in the feet by the “road map” they adopted to reach that goal.
They failed to incorporate any reference in their statement to the UN Security Council resolution 1515, which commits them and the international community to the so-called two-state solution, although it was a non-binding resolution because it wasn’t adopted according to Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
Then they evaded any time-tabled commitment to reviving the peace process. True they “welcomed” the 23 December summit of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli premier Ehud Olmert and their trilateral meeting with Rice, scheduled for February 21, but the upcoming meeting according to the Quartet will be only a “dialogue” and to Rice’s on record statements will be “informal.” The Quartet’s pledge “to give active follow-up to these meetings and to remain closely engaged” sounded hollow and meaningless.
The Quartet also “noted the continuing importance of the Arab Peace Initiative,” which envisions an all-comprising and comprehensive solution for the conflict with Israel, but failed to suggest an international peace conferences, some dubs as Madrid II -- a key demand by the Arab League, the PLO and Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel has rejected both the Arab Initiative and the conference idea.
The international mediators “called for continued international assistance to the Palestinian people,” and “encouraged … the development of the Palestinian economy,” but, in obvious self-contradiction, did not lift the Israeli and U.S.-led siege imposed as a collective punishment on the PA and people.
Hypocritically, “the Quartet called for Palestinian unity,” but fomented the Palestinian divide by urging donors to selectively “focus on preserving and building the capacity of institutions of Palestinian governance,” while at the same time maintaining the diplomatic, economic and political isolation of the democratically elected Palestinian government and ignoring Russian, Qatari and British parliamentarian demands to engage the PA government shortly ahead of their meeting.
Similarly, “the Quartet expressed its deep concern at the violence among Palestinians,” but failed to commit its U.S. member to refrain from fueling the violence with money, training and weapons to one side of the infighting in a declared pledge to oust an elected government or coerce it into accepting the Israeli preconditions to lift the siege.
Then the Quartet concluded with reiterating “its call for the Palestinian Authority Government to commit … to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations,” ignoring the fact that the PA government, regardless of whether led by Fatah or Hamas, is an institution mandated according to Oslo accords to manage the Palestinian apolitical autonomy and is only an administrative tool of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the political authority who sets the PA’s terms of reference and still committed to the aforesaid “principles,” a strict commitment pressuring it into the brink of civil war.
Palestinian Options
The disappointing outcome of the Quartet meeting rules out any early resumption of “formal” peace talks, leaves the Palestinian people and leadership divided on the verge of civil war under the pressures of both the occupation and siege, thus leaving the divide with only one option: Individual and collective dialogue to review the deadlocked and futile peace process as well as the yet un-delivering violent and non-violent resistance, which both have almost reached a standstill.
Palestinian pollster Khalil al-Shikaki in a surveyed analysis dated February 1 (www.pcpsr.org) concluded that President Abbas has four options to break through the Palestinian impasse: 1) to form a national unity government, 2) to organize early presidential and legislative election, 3) to fire the Hamas-led Palestinian government and form an emergency one, and 4) to resign. Al-Shikaki ruled out the last three options as counterproductive to the “Palestinian vital interests” and could lead to more infighting. However his preferable first option could not “completely end the siege and boycott in a short period.”
The only breakthrough left is mutual compromises. According to al-Shikaki, Hamas’ flexibility in dealing “positively” with the Quartet’s three conditions to “respect” the signed accords, recognize Israel as a “fait accompli” and agree to an open-ended truce makes the first option “viable.” The Fatah-led PLO has yet to reciprocate by giving priority to national consensus more than to the Israeli-drafted and Quartet-adopted three conditions. Palestinian national unity will lead in the end to break through the siege.
All sides of the Palestinian divide, the Israeli Occupying Power and the world community should adapt to the fact that the 40-year old monopoly of Palestinian decision-making by Fatah came to an end on January 25, 2006, when Hamas broke into the role of a principal decision-maker by a landslide electoral victory that empowered it with dominant executive and legislative powers, and sooner or later the Islamic Resistance Movement will gain a parallel dominance in the PLO, a democratically-clinched right that Hamas in its defense has tactically contributed to the ensuing bloody power struggle.
However 12 months on, the unity government has failed the national bilateral and multilateral dialogue as well as Islamic and Arab mediation efforts, including Qatari, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Islamic mediators; several ceasefire agreements have so far collapsed on the security approach. The latest Saudi Arabian good offices are also expected to stumble on the same approach, which foiled previous similar efforts.
Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, chaired by Abbas in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Sunday, suspended a three-day session in waiting for the outcome of the Mecca-hosted talks between Abbas and Hamas’ leader Khalid Misha’al on Feb. 5, but warned the PLO will go for the Hamas-rejected presidential and legislative election in June if the two leaders failed to agree on a unity government based on the Quartet’s three conditions, which practically will sooner or later doom the outcome, because Hamas views its subscription to the Quartet’s agenda as a carte blanche for the Quartet, Israel and the PLO to resume their 15-year old counterproductive and futile so-called “peace process.”
The PLO and Fatah leadership insists on Hamas accommodating the Quartet conditions as a Palestinian obligation to lift the siege, which Hamas says was only tightened after its electoral victory and was in place before that as a mechanism to pressure the PLO into accepting the comatose former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon-initiated long-term interim arrangement of a transitional Palestinian state on 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both Hamas and the PLO have recently unequivocally rejected this Israeli unilateral plan. The Quartet’s silence or vague stance on the arrangement and their promised “informal” revival of high-level Israeli – Palestinian “dialogue” should provide enough common ground for a PLO-Hamas consensus.
The deadlocked peace process, the paralysis of the PLO and PA institutions, the inability of the Palestinian presidency and government alike to rule the autonomous 42 percent of the Israeli-reoccupied West Bank or the militarily-besieged Gaza Strip, the zero sum situation where the Palestinians have neither an “armed struggle” nor popular non-violent resistance save for seasonal symbolic expressions and where the erosion of public trust in both leading movements, according to latest Palestinian public surveys, threatens to render the Palestinians leaderless, all have locked the Palestinian national liberation movement in its current impasse.
The ensuing divide has led to bloody street battles that embroiled both the Fatah and Hamas security executive forces in a militia-style power struggle in mutual self-destruction, taking down with them what government institutions the PA has built since 1993, including public services infrastructure like power stations, universities and police and intelligence stations, especially in Gaza Strip - - as this mission was left for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the West Bank - - amid mounting and widening popular outrage, security chaos exacerbated by the crushing economic siege, popular loss of hope deepened by the Quartet’s latest unpromising meeting, helplessness of Arab and Islamic brothers who are too preoccupied to rush for rescue with the several battle fronts opened by turn once by the U.S. and then by Israel.
All these and other factors are creating the ideal environment to look for survival in a new anti-occupation uprising that might sweep away also the autonomy and both protagonists who are wasting their energies in a struggle over who manages the Palestinian prison, according to the Palestinian-Arab Israeli MP, Azmi Bishara, in a recent article.
However, joining of the Oslo political institutions by Hamas, accompanied by the two-year old strict commitment to a unilateral truce, was an indirect declaration of a change in course and tactics that confused the movement’s declared strategy among supporters because of the contradiction between rejecting the Oslo status quo and being incorporated into its institutions, let alone being embroiled in bloody power struggle over who leads them.
Similarly, the dead end the negotiations with Israel has reached, the meager results the negotaitions have produced, the insistence of the PLO on holding the Palestinian self-determination hostage to the whims of the Israeli-U.S. good faith and its determination to commit Hamas to the same futile course – which deprived the PLO even of the limited autonomy it was offered on an interim basis until July 1997, provided a “legitimate” PLO cover to slicing Jerusalem off the occupied territories and isolating it as inaccessible for Palestinians, and doubled the colonial Jewish settlers to more than 450.000 since 1967 -- have eroded the PLO’s credibility.
Salam Fayyad, the former PA Finance Minister and a founder of the new Third Way political party alongside Hanan Ashrawi who are both incumbent MPs, described the current status quo to the Seventh Annual Herzliya Conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 24: “The nature of relations today between Israelis and Palestinians has reached levels of micromanagement, where Israel is involved in the minute details of the lives of Palestinians. It is important to remember that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ruled by military orders – not by politics, logic, or reason – but by military orders with (Israel’s) “security” dictating the rules of the game.” To hell of course with Palestinian security!
Both sides have all the compelling reasons to backtrack and bend on individual as well as collective reviews of the status quo.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Mike Whitney: The ‘Gaza Solution’ and Ongoing War on Islam
As usual, Mike Whitney hits the nail on the head - Bush's so-called 'War on Terror' is none other than an existential war against Islam - the only thing that stands between Zionism and Full Spectrum Global Dominance.
“People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers.
They not only don’t forget; they also strike back.”
--Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate
The central tenet of American foreign policy hasn’t changed since the early 1980s when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summarized our involvement in the Iraq-Iraq War saying, “I hope they kill each other.” Kissinger’s dictum reveals the basic racial and religious odium which animates the current policy and has become the organizing principle for maintaining the global empire.
Now that the Muslim world has been systematically ravaged from the southern-most part of Gaza to the northern tip of Afghanistan, we can see that the application of the Kissinger Doctrine is an effective method for decimating societies where coveted resources are located.
By all accounts, it’s been a huge success.
The policy seems to be working best in Iraq, where provocative counterinsurgency operations have incited a massive sectarian war. The conflict produces an ever-increasing number of civilian casualties many of whom have been killed by other Iraqis. No doubt Kissinger is gratified that his theory is working out so splendidly.
The western media portrays the disaster in Iraq as the natural upshot of years of repression under the former dictator, Saddam Hussein. But, Saddam had nothing to do with the violence which is ripping Baghdad apart. That’s just a way of pacifying the American public so they can go on their Christmas buying-spree without pangs of remorse. In fact, Saddam is no different than America’s other tyrant friends in Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. He simply stood in the way of Big Oil’s dream of direct control of Iraq’s resources and created a likely rival for “good friend” Israel.
The violence in Iraq is entirely America’s doing; just follow the bloody footprints straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There's no need to look any farther.
The Bush team has ignited a firestorm in Iraq which has swept through the capital and countryside; pitting Arab against Arab, and Muslim against Muslim. That was the objective from the very beginning. Now that the violence is spinning out of control and could cross borders into neighboring countries, the grown-up members of the policy-establishment, like James Baker, are getting jittery and want to see a change of direction. Baker isn’t bothered by the death and destruction as long as it is carried out with discretion and doesn’t disrupt other imperial projects in Latin America, Africa, and Central Asia. But Iraq has swallowed American foreign policy whole; leaving Bush little time (or resources) to deal with other urgent matters in the rest of the world.
The military is overextended and bogged down, the situation on the ground is chaotic, and American prestige has taken a beating. The advocates of “creative destruction” have released the genie from the bottle and energized the anarchic forces of regional rebellion. Now, the outcome is anyone’s guess. What is certain, though, is that Bush’s plan for an endless source of cheap gas and security for Israel has taken a ruinous turn for the worse.
Israel has a different perspective on the turmoil in Iraq. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has embraced the neoconservative ideal of “positive instability” and clings to the notion that toppling foreign regimes and disrupting Arab countries improves his chances for regional dominance. In fact, just last week Olmert opined that the war in Iraq has actually been “better for the safety and security of Israel.” Olmert still believes that Israel’s imperial aspirations are fortified by attacking and fragmenting other countries in the Arab world. No doubt, his response comes as no surprise to anyone in the region.
It’s easy to see how the assassination of Lebanese parliamentarian Pierre Gemayel fits perfectly with Olmert’s worldview. If violence breaks out between the various Lebanese groups, then the Christians will serve as a “proxy army” for Israeli interests. What could be better for Olmert? That means he wouldn’t have to restart the 34-Day War and risk the lives of Israeli troops. He could just sit back and watch as his Lebanese neighbors tear themselves apart in a second civil war and hopefully weaken archrival Hezbollah in the process.
No wonder Olmert’s popularity is soaring at 18 percent.
The "Gaza Solution"
American hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Israel’s war in Lebanon are part of a broader plan for remaking the Middle East to meet the needs of American oil corporations, banking giants and Israel. The war on terror provides the thinnest of cover for military operations which are clearly colonial in nature. The Pentagon makes no effort to conceal their overall objectives. In fact, Defense Department’s maps are available to the public which outline the area of the Middle East and Central Asia as CentCom; the central battlefield in the global resource war. What more proof does one need that the entire region is in the gunsights of the Washington warlords?
The most regrettable part of the current conflict is the way in which Muslims have been subject to subtle, but deliberate vilification. This may have more to do with geography than race, but the result is the same. Muslims never appeared on the radar of public opinion before 9-11, now they are regular targets of right-wing, xenophobic tirades and carefully crafted government fear-mongering.
Coincidence?
Not likely.
Bush and Blair have assured us that “this is not a war against Muslims,” but neither has done anything to silence the racist abuse which spews daily from radio talk shows or from the op-ed pages of major newspapers. Tom Friedman frequently uses his column to remind us of the problems which are particular to Islam and which can be easily overcome by simply complying with the diktats of Washington and Tel Aviv. Friedman’s annoying paternalism and prejudice is widely shared in the corporate media where unreflective buffoons are all too eager to blame the victims of occupation, exploitation and corporate vandalism.
If Muslims believe that the war on terror is actually a war against Islam; it’s because all the facts point to that conclusion. Sober leaders in the foreign policy establishment should carefully consider the implications of this strategy before continuing down this path. Waging a culture war against one and a half billion Muslims who occupy the lands where we get our vital resources does not augur well for our long-range interests. America’s economic viability is held together by a webbing of pipelines, tankers, oil platforms and oil facilities. All of these are vulnerable to the attacks of terrorists, guerillas, dissidents or disgruntled enemies of the empire.
Are we prepared to fight them all?
A “war of civilizations”; is the misguided progeny of neoconservative fanatics. Their plan is now writ large across the entire region so everyone can see that the US-Israeli war is actually directed at Muslims alone.
This is a huge mistake for which we all will pay dearly.
The war on terror is the greatest public relations swindle of all time. Just look at a map. We’re not fighting terror; we’re repositioning military assets to control crucial pipeline routes and oil fields. The administration’s objectives are as plain as day to anyone who knows the least bit about landlocked supplies of oil and natural gas in Central Asia and 60 percent of the world’s oil in the Middle East. If American industry controls these reserves they can control China’s growth, maintain US military superiority, and force the world to use the debt-plagued greenback into the next century.
Unfortunately, America’s ongoing aggression requires a scapegoat; an unwitting victim that they can demonize and portray as a imminent threat to U.S. national security.
Muslims.
Now we have Muslim-only gulags scattered across the planet where every imaginable method of torture is employed with complete impunity.
We topple their regimes, shame their women, defile their holy book, train their repressive security forces, incite violence between their religious sects, bomb their cities and mosques, and jail anyone who appears the least bit suspicious.
If we are not “at war with Muslims,” then why is the concertina wire still stretched around Ramadi, Tal Afar, and Falluja? Why are the Madrasas still being bombed in Northern Pakistan? Why is Abu Ghraib still overflowing with prisoners? Why are Muslim scholars still refused entry into the United States and Muslim civilians kept off airplanes? Why does right-wing radio still flood the airwaves with their racist bile and anti-Islam vitriol?
And why does the United States still stubbornly refuse to condemn Israel’s criminal attacks on the Palestinians, like this month's bombing of Beit Hanoun where an entire family was butchered in their sleep?
Why?
Bush’s plan for Muslims has been clear since he assembled his flagship gulag at Guantanamo Bay and presented it as the main icon of the New World Order. If Bush wants to prove his sincerity, then he should release Gitmo’s inmates and order the facility bulldozed into rubble. It is an abomination that should offend anyone with a trace of decency.
We know Bush’s plan for Muslims, because it is identical to that of his ideological twin, Olmert. They both believe that the final solution to the “Muslim problem” lies in the Gaza Model.
The Gaza Strip is the world’s largest prison camp, containing 1.5 million Palestinians. They are limited in their movements and have no reliable access to food, medical aid, clean water, electricity or employment. They do not control their borders, air space, roads or coastline. And, even though their elected officials have none of the powers that are normally associated with national sovereignty, they have been under constant siege by Israeli forces that aggressively destroy any nationalist movement which operates beyond Tel Aviv’s control.
Israel claims the absolute right to kill, detain, abduct or torture anyone it sees fit without providing any means for a legal defense. They show the same disdain for Palestinian human rights as they do for the 60 separate resolutions passed by the United Nations. Israel does as it pleases.
Nothing about the Gaza “open-air” detention facility is accidental. It’s a model that has been meticulously developed over 39 years to create a permanent state of imprisonment for the “undesirables” who have legal title to the land. If we look across the Middle East into Central Asia, we can see that the same fundamental principles for subjugation are being applied to Muslims throughout the region.
The Gaza Model is the logical corollary of Bush’s war on terror. It provides a means for dealing with the people in resource-rich lands who stand in the way of America’s corporate-political expansion. At its core, it is a strategy for “pacification” through segregation, containment and brutality. These are the grim requirements for America’s continued dominance into the next century.
The war on terror is fueled by belligerence, deception and unrelenting aggression against innocent people in their own countries. It is terrorism pure and simple.
Bush will deny this, but it is true just the same.
Posted in Clash of Civilizations | Imperialism | Islam | supremacism | war | zionism Submitted by qrswave on Wed, 2006-11-29 16:30.
qrswave's blog | add new comment
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/168Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Imperialism and Isolationism
Contrasting Approaches to Foreign Policy
by Jeff Taylor
Imperialists believe that the American government should protect what it considers to be the national interest, even if that means getting involved in conflicts around the globe. They also maintain that it is the government’s duty to spread our political and economic systems to other countries, by force if necessary. In other words, they believe in U.S. leadership of the world. The Federalists were the original American imperialists. Being Anglophiles, they looked to Great Britain as the role model for American foreign policy. Federalists desired strong financial and commercial ties to Europe and an economy based on overseas trade. Power needed to be concentrated in a strong federal government in order to speak with one voice to the governments of other nations. A strong military was needed to protect the interests of American bankers and businessmen. An admirer of Caesar and Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton desired an imperialistic foreign policy for the new nation. In 1799, Major General Hamilton “was a man who dreamed dreams, and in his imagination he was already leading his army into Louisiana, the Floridas and points south. ‘We ought,’ he said, ‘to squint at South America.’” The ideological division in early American public policy is clear: “Hamilton longs for empire, opulence, and glory for the nation, whereas Jefferson seeks virtue, freedom, and happiness for the social individual.” Hamilton was “very opportunistic about international diplomacy” and distrusted “moralizing in foreign policy.” (1)
Isolationists believe that the American government should be predominantly concerned about the needs and desires of its own citizens. They do not believe our government should be potentially involved in every conflict around the globe. They do not believe our government should attempt to control the governments of other nations. In other words, they believe in national self-determination. The Anti-Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were the original American isolationists. They believed in decentralized politics, agrarian-based economics, no standing army, staying out of Europe’s continual bloodshed, and friendship with the people of other nations but non-alliance with those people’s governments. Isolationists are often characterized as provincial bumpkins. This characterization hardly fits the nation’s premier isolationist. Jefferson was a diplomat and a student of language, science, and philosophy. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he nonetheless opposed national involvement in overseas political and military conflicts. Referring to a controversy about the West Indies, in a 1791 letter to an American diplomat, he stated, “If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” In 1799, Jefferson wrote, “I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe; entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance...” In his first inaugural address (1801), President Jefferson urged “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” He held this view throughout his life. (2)
Using the word isolationism to describe Jefferson’s foreign policy is an oversimplification. Setting aside the negative images with which it is saddled due to 70 years of imperial propaganda, the term is still problematic because it does not express the full range of Jefferson’s thought. In addition to the obvious forswearing of entangling alliances, Jeffersonian isolationism involved support for a republic rather than an empire, for national sovereignty, for ethical conduct, for human rights, and for popular control of foreign policy. These five beliefs could be thought of as causes, components, or concomitants of isolationism. Jefferson “vigorously rejected the view that only individuals are bound by a moral code, and that nations are free to act in accordance with self-interest without any restraints.” Writing to James Madison in 1789, he remarked, “I know but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively. He who says I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion but not in the latter.” Despite his belief in the importance of moral conduct in foreign relations, Jefferson was not naive in his view of the world. He had, for example, a realistic assessment of foreign governments. In 1812, Jefferson condemned both the French and British governments for trying to “draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.” Three years later, he called Napoleon “the wretch...who has been the author of more misery and suffering to the world, than any being who ever lived before him. After destroying the liberties of his country, he has exhausted all its resources, physical and moral, to indulge his own maniac ambition, his own tyrannical and overbearing spirit.” He did not, however, have a favorable view of the British government and other opponents of Napoleon. Jefferson condemned the imperialism of all the leading countries of Europe: “The will of the allies? There is no more moderation, forbearance, or even honesty in theirs, than in that of Bonaparte. They have proved that their object, like his, is plunder.” (3)
Isolationism is a problematic word. It is an epithet, it is anachronistic when applied to Jefferson, and it fails to indicate the full range of thought involved. Admittedly, it is a flawed term, but it may be the best term available. Non-interventionism is a non-definition that merely calls attention to another undefined term, the word continentalism never caught on after being proposed by scholar Charles Beard, and neutrality is too vague. To some, isolationism may imply ostrich-like, willful ignorance of the rest of the world, but this was never the case with its most famous practitioners. The isolation is not one of intellect, trade, or travel, but one of entangling alliances, military conflict, and imperial domination. For isolationists, national self-determination for colonies and national sovereignty for America are closely-related principles emanating from a common source: a commitment to democracy, freedom, and decentralization. Isolationism is the foreign policy of traditional liberals. As Robert Morss Lovett noted in 1924 in his Progressive Party statement for the elite journal Foreign Affairs,
It is historically characteristic of governments devoted to conservative measures and the maintenance of the status quo in domestic affairs to develop an aggressive policy in foreign affairs, and similarly for governments whose chief outlook is toward the progressive improvement of existing conditions to seek to disembarrass themselves from the complications of foreign policy. (4)
This progressive tradition was first manifested in power through the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.
Isolationism may be an unfortunate term in some ways, but it describes a real, deep, and honorable tradition in American politics. Prior to the 1930s, the ideological underpinning of our approach to the world lacked a distinct label because it was simply accepted as traditional U.S. foreign policy. In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, “As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions...” In 1796, George Washington’s Farewell Address noted, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible....It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world...” The Independence Day speech of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821 indicated that isolationism was still taken for granted 25 years later. Referring to America, he reminded the House of Representatives, “She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings...She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The Monroe Doctrine acted as an isolationist bulwark for many years, until it was corrupted by the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary (1904) and virtually set aside by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The Doctrine asserted,
In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so....It is impossible that the allied powers [of Europe] should extend their political system to any portion of either [American] continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord....It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the [Latin American] parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.
In opposing the annexation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in 1870, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Charles Sumner (R-MA) argued that Caribbean islands “should not be absorbed by the United States, but should remain as independent powers, and should try for themselves to make the experiment of self-government....To the African belongs the equatorial belt and he should enjoy it undisturbed.” Things began to change dramatically in 1898. With the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War, we were well on our way to becoming an empire with extensive political and military ties to the rest of the world. As a result, traditional foreign policy fell into disfavor among U.S. elites and was eventually disparaged by the dismissive term isolationism. Meanwhile, when the word imperialism fell out of favor, it was exchanged for the more euphemistic internationalism.
Jeff Taylor is a political scientist in Rochester, Minnesota.
This essay is adapted from the book Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy (© 2006 by University of Missouri Press).
See: http://www.popcorn78.blogspot.com.
http://www.antiwarleague.com/_mgxroot/page_10668.html
by Jeff Taylor
Imperialists believe that the American government should protect what it considers to be the national interest, even if that means getting involved in conflicts around the globe. They also maintain that it is the government’s duty to spread our political and economic systems to other countries, by force if necessary. In other words, they believe in U.S. leadership of the world. The Federalists were the original American imperialists. Being Anglophiles, they looked to Great Britain as the role model for American foreign policy. Federalists desired strong financial and commercial ties to Europe and an economy based on overseas trade. Power needed to be concentrated in a strong federal government in order to speak with one voice to the governments of other nations. A strong military was needed to protect the interests of American bankers and businessmen. An admirer of Caesar and Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton desired an imperialistic foreign policy for the new nation. In 1799, Major General Hamilton “was a man who dreamed dreams, and in his imagination he was already leading his army into Louisiana, the Floridas and points south. ‘We ought,’ he said, ‘to squint at South America.’” The ideological division in early American public policy is clear: “Hamilton longs for empire, opulence, and glory for the nation, whereas Jefferson seeks virtue, freedom, and happiness for the social individual.” Hamilton was “very opportunistic about international diplomacy” and distrusted “moralizing in foreign policy.” (1)
Isolationists believe that the American government should be predominantly concerned about the needs and desires of its own citizens. They do not believe our government should be potentially involved in every conflict around the globe. They do not believe our government should attempt to control the governments of other nations. In other words, they believe in national self-determination. The Anti-Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were the original American isolationists. They believed in decentralized politics, agrarian-based economics, no standing army, staying out of Europe’s continual bloodshed, and friendship with the people of other nations but non-alliance with those people’s governments. Isolationists are often characterized as provincial bumpkins. This characterization hardly fits the nation’s premier isolationist. Jefferson was a diplomat and a student of language, science, and philosophy. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he nonetheless opposed national involvement in overseas political and military conflicts. Referring to a controversy about the West Indies, in a 1791 letter to an American diplomat, he stated, “If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is, that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” In 1799, Jefferson wrote, “I am for free commerce with all nations; political connection with none; and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe; entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance...” In his first inaugural address (1801), President Jefferson urged “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” He held this view throughout his life. (2)
Using the word isolationism to describe Jefferson’s foreign policy is an oversimplification. Setting aside the negative images with which it is saddled due to 70 years of imperial propaganda, the term is still problematic because it does not express the full range of Jefferson’s thought. In addition to the obvious forswearing of entangling alliances, Jeffersonian isolationism involved support for a republic rather than an empire, for national sovereignty, for ethical conduct, for human rights, and for popular control of foreign policy. These five beliefs could be thought of as causes, components, or concomitants of isolationism. Jefferson “vigorously rejected the view that only individuals are bound by a moral code, and that nations are free to act in accordance with self-interest without any restraints.” Writing to James Madison in 1789, he remarked, “I know but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively. He who says I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion but not in the latter.” Despite his belief in the importance of moral conduct in foreign relations, Jefferson was not naive in his view of the world. He had, for example, a realistic assessment of foreign governments. In 1812, Jefferson condemned both the French and British governments for trying to “draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.” Three years later, he called Napoleon “the wretch...who has been the author of more misery and suffering to the world, than any being who ever lived before him. After destroying the liberties of his country, he has exhausted all its resources, physical and moral, to indulge his own maniac ambition, his own tyrannical and overbearing spirit.” He did not, however, have a favorable view of the British government and other opponents of Napoleon. Jefferson condemned the imperialism of all the leading countries of Europe: “The will of the allies? There is no more moderation, forbearance, or even honesty in theirs, than in that of Bonaparte. They have proved that their object, like his, is plunder.” (3)
Isolationism is a problematic word. It is an epithet, it is anachronistic when applied to Jefferson, and it fails to indicate the full range of thought involved. Admittedly, it is a flawed term, but it may be the best term available. Non-interventionism is a non-definition that merely calls attention to another undefined term, the word continentalism never caught on after being proposed by scholar Charles Beard, and neutrality is too vague. To some, isolationism may imply ostrich-like, willful ignorance of the rest of the world, but this was never the case with its most famous practitioners. The isolation is not one of intellect, trade, or travel, but one of entangling alliances, military conflict, and imperial domination. For isolationists, national self-determination for colonies and national sovereignty for America are closely-related principles emanating from a common source: a commitment to democracy, freedom, and decentralization. Isolationism is the foreign policy of traditional liberals. As Robert Morss Lovett noted in 1924 in his Progressive Party statement for the elite journal Foreign Affairs,
It is historically characteristic of governments devoted to conservative measures and the maintenance of the status quo in domestic affairs to develop an aggressive policy in foreign affairs, and similarly for governments whose chief outlook is toward the progressive improvement of existing conditions to seek to disembarrass themselves from the complications of foreign policy. (4)
This progressive tradition was first manifested in power through the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.
Isolationism may be an unfortunate term in some ways, but it describes a real, deep, and honorable tradition in American politics. Prior to the 1930s, the ideological underpinning of our approach to the world lacked a distinct label because it was simply accepted as traditional U.S. foreign policy. In his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, “As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions...” In 1796, George Washington’s Farewell Address noted, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible....It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world...” The Independence Day speech of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821 indicated that isolationism was still taken for granted 25 years later. Referring to America, he reminded the House of Representatives, “She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings...She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The Monroe Doctrine acted as an isolationist bulwark for many years, until it was corrupted by the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary (1904) and virtually set aside by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The Doctrine asserted,
In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so....It is impossible that the allied powers [of Europe] should extend their political system to any portion of either [American] continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord....It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the [Latin American] parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.
In opposing the annexation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in 1870, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Charles Sumner (R-MA) argued that Caribbean islands “should not be absorbed by the United States, but should remain as independent powers, and should try for themselves to make the experiment of self-government....To the African belongs the equatorial belt and he should enjoy it undisturbed.” Things began to change dramatically in 1898. With the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War, we were well on our way to becoming an empire with extensive political and military ties to the rest of the world. As a result, traditional foreign policy fell into disfavor among U.S. elites and was eventually disparaged by the dismissive term isolationism. Meanwhile, when the word imperialism fell out of favor, it was exchanged for the more euphemistic internationalism.
Jeff Taylor is a political scientist in Rochester, Minnesota.
This essay is adapted from the book Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy (© 2006 by University of Missouri Press).
See: http://www.popcorn78.blogspot.com.
http://www.antiwarleague.com/_mgxroot/page_10668.html
Monday, November 20, 2006
Even when our foreign policy is benevolent, it appears condescending and exploitative
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
In many ways, I am a captive of my history, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are of theirs
Published: 20 November 2006
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown take up the white man's burden, one in Pakistan, the other in Iraq. How they sacrifice and suffer for the righteous cause only to be knocked down by ungrateful natives abroad and at home.
Hymn for today: sing and hum and honour these worthy descendants of the glorious British Empire:
Onward Christian Soldiers!
On to heathen lands!
Prayer-books in your pockets!
Rifles in your hands!
Take the glorious tidings
Where trade can be won
Spread the peaceful gospel -
With a Maxim gun.
(The 19th-century Liberal MP and radical journalist Henry Labouchere wrote this parody of the traditional triumphalist hymn.)
There I go again, being destructively and cruelly cynical, typical of generations of hacks who can see no good in our elected leaders and their visionary purpose. (With some remarkably loyal exceptions of course.)
Upon touchdown in Iraq, Gordon, looking ultra-masculine in body armour, declaimed with gravitas as he does. He hinted that withdrawal is nigh - within a few months, even - and went on to make generous promises of post-withdrawal aid (£100m) when Iraq is "'running its own affairs". There we have it, confirmation that the Government believes it is time to cut and run, a surrender to anti-war campaigners who want our troops to leave before things get even worse for the Iraqis.
On the same day, Tony was sorting out Pakistan, using that well tested combo of bribes and clever deals. He is doubling the aid to the country and instructs them to use the money to infuse "enlightened moderation" through the land and see to it that propagandist religious madrasas are replaced with good, state education. (Such a pity he can't apply the same common sense to British education policies, but I digress.) That is exactly what we need, diplomatic interventions to help Muslim states revitalise Islam worthy of its peaceful name before it was politicised and corrupted by Ayatollah Khomeni, the Taliban and now al-Qa'ida.
I should be applauding Mr Number One man and Mr Number Two, as Borat would probably describe them. But a noisy buzz has started up in my head, an irritation that has now expanded into full blown rage.
Pacing and swearing, I mutter: there they go again, dictating to the non-Western world as if they own it by right. They trash, bleed and loot Iraq, never apologise, and still grab control of its future. In Pakistan our leaders presume that swarthies will do their bidding because they are easily bought and frightened into submission. The family is quite, quite weary of my recurrent anti-colonial eruptions, and they try to distract me and fail. Saturday is ruined because I can't let go. Even the excitement of The X-Factor fails to dispel the fumes of fury.
My excuse is that in many ways I am a captive of my history, as Blair and Brown are of theirs. Long after hubristic European nations were made to hand back occupied lands and retreat into their small continent, the feeling remained, as it does when a limb is amputated. Those of us who were subjects also harbour the old emotions, and are prone to bristle and chafe when old imperial fantasies surface and new imperial projects are planned. It is in the DNA of collective memory on both sides.
There have always been freethinkers who can break out and question the consensus, but they are rare and getting rarer. Millions of Europeans opposed the war on Iraq, but yet the spirit of European supremacy is alive and busy.
It was best described by William Gladstone when responding to the arrogant Lord Palmerston, who praised and emulated Roman imperialism. Such a Roman, said Gladstone, "was a member of the privileged caste: he belonged to a conquering race, to a nation that held all others bound down by the strong arm of power. For him there was an exceptional system of law; for him principles were to be asserted, and by him rights were to be enjoyed, that were denied to the rest of the world."
You see it everywhere. Or I do, anyway. Consider the churlish, almost offended reactions to the first al-Jazeera English broadcasts this week. For months previously, media folk had been predicting chaos and calamity. Some couldn't at all understand why David Frost or Raageh Omar and other big British TV names would choose to work for the infamous, Eastern station. Money was their only explanation.
The launch was smooth, and was soon followed by a brilliant scoop - in a moment of carelessness, Blair appeared to agree with Frost that Iraq is a disaster. What did our wise media watchers have to say about the impressive start to a station watched and trusted by millions?
Mark Lawson spoke for most and most eloquently. He criticised al-Jazeera for ignoring our Queen's speech and giving time to Gaza and Israel; he was irked that we had to endure the weather prospects in Arabia, and then came to this extraordinary conclusion: "the natural viewer for al-Jazeera will be a creature rare in Britain and almost non-existent in America, someone desperate for submersion in other cultures to the exclusion of their own." Is he serious? Does he really believe the cultures of Britain and the US are still wholly Anglo-Saxon, or are politics and culture still perceived through an old colonial lens even by very excellent liberals?
Although the surging economic might of India and China impresses and terrifies the West, the latter cannot excise its heritage of colonial entitlement. You can't take a step these days without meeting India and China enthusiasts. The other day I was talking to a young woman - only 28, sharp as anything, cool Britannia personified, works for a think tank. She was off to India, then China and was just so, so excited about it.
A while into the conversation she swerved into a cul-de-sac. I paraphrase and distil: "You know we've got to get in there and make sure we don't fall behind. I'm not that worried to be honest. They are great copiers but haven't a clue when it comes to real innovation. I think it's cultural, they can't think for themselves. We always have. I know its not PC, but that's why the West has been so dominant. Think if we play our cards right - get serious about patent enforcement, they will find it hard to beat us, but we need to be in there keeping an eye and some control."
There is a perfectly healthy competitive position that one can take on the changing international economic scene. National interests will always collide with shared global aspirations. But this was something else, it was the ghost of empires past directing the future. And it is everywhere. Or is it my own haunting ghost of imperial subjugation? You tell me.
y.alibhai-brown@ independent.co.uk
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown take up the white man's burden, one in Pakistan, the other in Iraq. How they sacrifice and suffer for the righteous cause only to be knocked down by ungrateful natives abroad and at home.
Hymn for today: sing and hum and honour these worthy descendants of the glorious British Empire:
Onward Christian Soldiers!
On to heathen lands!
Prayer-books in your pockets!
Rifles in your hands!
Take the glorious tidings
Where trade can be won
Spread the peaceful gospel -
With a Maxim gun.
(The 19th-century Liberal MP and radical journalist Henry Labouchere wrote this parody of the traditional triumphalist hymn.)
There I go again, being destructively and cruelly cynical, typical of generations of hacks who can see no good in our elected leaders and their visionary purpose. (With some remarkably loyal exceptions of course.)
Upon touchdown in Iraq, Gordon, looking ultra-masculine in body armour, declaimed with gravitas as he does. He hinted that withdrawal is nigh - within a few months, even - and went on to make generous promises of post-withdrawal aid (£100m) when Iraq is "'running its own affairs". There we have it, confirmation that the Government believes it is time to cut and run, a surrender to anti-war campaigners who want our troops to leave before things get even worse for the Iraqis.
On the same day, Tony was sorting out Pakistan, using that well tested combo of bribes and clever deals. He is doubling the aid to the country and instructs them to use the money to infuse "enlightened moderation" through the land and see to it that propagandist religious madrasas are replaced with good, state education. (Such a pity he can't apply the same common sense to British education policies, but I digress.) That is exactly what we need, diplomatic interventions to help Muslim states revitalise Islam worthy of its peaceful name before it was politicised and corrupted by Ayatollah Khomeni, the Taliban and now al-Qa'ida.
I should be applauding Mr Number One man and Mr Number Two, as Borat would probably describe them. But a noisy buzz has started up in my head, an irritation that has now expanded into full blown rage.
Pacing and swearing, I mutter: there they go again, dictating to the non-Western world as if they own it by right. They trash, bleed and loot Iraq, never apologise, and still grab control of its future. In Pakistan our leaders presume that swarthies will do their bidding because they are easily bought and frightened into submission. The family is quite, quite weary of my recurrent anti-colonial eruptions, and they try to distract me and fail. Saturday is ruined because I can't let go. Even the excitement of The X-Factor fails to dispel the fumes of fury.
My excuse is that in many ways I am a captive of my history, as Blair and Brown are of theirs. Long after hubristic European nations were made to hand back occupied lands and retreat into their small continent, the feeling remained, as it does when a limb is amputated. Those of us who were subjects also harbour the old emotions, and are prone to bristle and chafe when old imperial fantasies surface and new imperial projects are planned. It is in the DNA of collective memory on both sides.
There have always been freethinkers who can break out and question the consensus, but they are rare and getting rarer. Millions of Europeans opposed the war on Iraq, but yet the spirit of European supremacy is alive and busy.
It was best described by William Gladstone when responding to the arrogant Lord Palmerston, who praised and emulated Roman imperialism. Such a Roman, said Gladstone, "was a member of the privileged caste: he belonged to a conquering race, to a nation that held all others bound down by the strong arm of power. For him there was an exceptional system of law; for him principles were to be asserted, and by him rights were to be enjoyed, that were denied to the rest of the world."
You see it everywhere. Or I do, anyway. Consider the churlish, almost offended reactions to the first al-Jazeera English broadcasts this week. For months previously, media folk had been predicting chaos and calamity. Some couldn't at all understand why David Frost or Raageh Omar and other big British TV names would choose to work for the infamous, Eastern station. Money was their only explanation.
The launch was smooth, and was soon followed by a brilliant scoop - in a moment of carelessness, Blair appeared to agree with Frost that Iraq is a disaster. What did our wise media watchers have to say about the impressive start to a station watched and trusted by millions?
Mark Lawson spoke for most and most eloquently. He criticised al-Jazeera for ignoring our Queen's speech and giving time to Gaza and Israel; he was irked that we had to endure the weather prospects in Arabia, and then came to this extraordinary conclusion: "the natural viewer for al-Jazeera will be a creature rare in Britain and almost non-existent in America, someone desperate for submersion in other cultures to the exclusion of their own." Is he serious? Does he really believe the cultures of Britain and the US are still wholly Anglo-Saxon, or are politics and culture still perceived through an old colonial lens even by very excellent liberals?
Although the surging economic might of India and China impresses and terrifies the West, the latter cannot excise its heritage of colonial entitlement. You can't take a step these days without meeting India and China enthusiasts. The other day I was talking to a young woman - only 28, sharp as anything, cool Britannia personified, works for a think tank. She was off to India, then China and was just so, so excited about it.
A while into the conversation she swerved into a cul-de-sac. I paraphrase and distil: "You know we've got to get in there and make sure we don't fall behind. I'm not that worried to be honest. They are great copiers but haven't a clue when it comes to real innovation. I think it's cultural, they can't think for themselves. We always have. I know its not PC, but that's why the West has been so dominant. Think if we play our cards right - get serious about patent enforcement, they will find it hard to beat us, but we need to be in there keeping an eye and some control."
There is a perfectly healthy competitive position that one can take on the changing international economic scene. National interests will always collide with shared global aspirations. But this was something else, it was the ghost of empires past directing the future. And it is everywhere. Or is it my own haunting ghost of imperial subjugation? You tell me.
y.alibhai-brown@ independent.co.uk
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/yasmin_alibhai_brown/article1998888.ece
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”
CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE
November 18, 2006
Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
“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 on an area he 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 AS SEEN ABOVE
Note: The 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
"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 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 heterogeneous. 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
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 US 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.
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 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.
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
“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 on an area he 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 AS SEEN ABOVE
Note: The 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
"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 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 heterogeneous. 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
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 US 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.
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 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.
Notes
1 U.S. State Department; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, What the Secretary Has Been Saying; Special Briefing on the Travel to the Middle East and Europe of Secretary Condoleezza Rice, Washington, DC. July 21, 2006.
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), Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Washington D.C., 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, Basic Books, New York, 1998
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465027261
11 Ibid
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