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The
term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was credited by the Western media
for coining the term) in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the
“Greater Middle East.”
This
shift in foreign policy phraseology coincided with the inauguration of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term
and conceptualization of the “New Middle East,” was subsequently heralded by
the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height
of the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli
siege of Lebanon. Prime Minister Olmert and Secretary Rice had informed the
international media that a project for a “New Middle East” was being launched
from Lebanon.
This
announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American-Israeli “military roadmap”
in the Middle East. This project, which has been in the planning stages for several years, consists
in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon,
Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of
NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.
The
“New Middle East” project was introduced publicly by Washington and Tel Aviv
with the expectation that Lebanon would be the pressure point for realigning
the whole Middle East and thereby unleashing the forces of “constructive
chaos.” This “constructive chaos” –which generates conditions of violence and
warfare throughout the region– would in turn be used so that the United States,
Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with
their geo-strategic needs and objectives.
New
Middle East Map
Secretary
Condoleezza Rice stated during a press conference that “[w]hat we’re seeing
here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on
Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’
and whatever we do we [meaning the United States] have to be certain that we’re
pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.”1
Secretary
Rice was immediately criticized for her statements both within Lebanon and
internationally for expressing indifference to the suffering of an entire
nation, which was being bombed
indiscriminately by the Israeli Air Force.
The
Anglo-American Military Roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia
U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech on the “New Middle East” had set
the stage. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon –which had been fully endorsed by
Washington and London– have further compromised and validated the existence of
the geo-strategic objectives of the United States, Britain, and Israel.
According
to Professor Mark Levine the “neo-liberal globalizers and neo-conservatives,
and ultimately the Bush Administration, would latch on to creative destruction
as a way of describing the process by which they hoped to create their new
world orders,” and that “creative destruction [in] the United States was, in
the words of neo-conservative philosopher and Bush adviser Michael Ledeen, ‘an
awesome revolutionary force’ for (…) creative destruction…”2
Anglo-American
occupied Iraq, particularly Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to be the preparatory ground
for the balkanization (division) and finlandization (pacification) of the
Middle East. Already the legislative framework, under the Iraqi Parliament and
the name of Iraqi federalization, for the partition of Iraq into three portions
is being drawn out. (See map below)
Moreover,
the Anglo-American military roadmap appears to be vying an entry into Central
Asia via the Middle East. The Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are
stepping stones for extending U.S. influence into the former Soviet Union and
the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia. The Middle East is to some extent the
southern tier of Central Asia. Central Asia in turn is also termed as “Russia’s
Southern Tier” or the Russian “Near Abroad.”
Many
Russian and Central Asian scholars, military planners, strategists, security
advisors, economists, and politicians consider Central Asia (“Russia’s Southern
Tier”) to be the vulnerable and “soft under-belly” of the Russian Federation.3
It
should be noted that in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and
Its Geo-strategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National
Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an
area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans.
The
Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan,
and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and
Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East
(excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The
Map of the “New Middle East”
A
relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and
Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and
military circles since mid-2006. It has been causally allowed to surface in
public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the
general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle
East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the
“New Middle East.”
Note:
The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was
published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel
of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph
Peters 2006).
Although
the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a
training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This
map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National
War Academy as well as in military planning circles.
This
map of the “New Middle East” seems to be based on several other maps, including
older maps of potential boundaries in the Middle East extending back to the era
of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and World War I. This map is showcased and
presented as the brainchild of retired Lieutenant-Colonel (U.S. Army) Ralph
Peters, who believes the redesigned borders contained in the map will
fundamentally solve the problems of the contemporary Middle East.
The
map of the “New Middle East” was a key element in the retired
Lieutenant-Colonel’s book, Never Quit the Fight, which was released to the
public on July 10, 2006. This map of a redrawn Middle East was also published,
under the title of Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, in the
U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.5
It
should be noted that Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted to the Office of
the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the U.S. Defence Department,
and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on
strategy for military journals and U.S. foreign policy.
It
has been written that Ralph Peters’ “four previous books on strategy have been
highly influential in government and military circles,” but one can be pardoned
for asking if in fact quite the opposite could be taking place. Could it be
Lieutenant-Colonel Peters is revealing and putting forward what Washington D.C.
and its strategic planners have anticipated for the Middle East?
The
concept of a redrawn Middle East has been presented as a “humanitarian” and
“righteous” arrangement that would benefit the people(s) of the Middle East and
its peripheral regions. According to Ralph Peter’s:
International
borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict
upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous
difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and
atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The
most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle
East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble
defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths
of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East —
to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While
the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from
cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism
— the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive
failure isn’t Islam, but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries
worshipped by our own diplomats.
Of
course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority
in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live
intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or
belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The
boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs
suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the
Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia [Muslims], but still fail to account adequately for
Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another
numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed
with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by
the dying Ottoman Empire.
Yet,
for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without
such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.
Even
those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served to engage in
an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment
of national boundaries between the Bosphorus and the Indus. Accepting that
international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war —
for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s
“organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the
difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal,
man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until
they are corrected. 6
“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.
The
overhaul, dismantlement, and reassembly of the nation-states of the Middle East
have been packaged as a solution to the hostilities in the Middle East, but
this is categorically misleading, false, and fictitious. The advocates of a
“New Middle East” and redrawn boundaries in the region avoid and fail to
candidly depict the roots of the problems and conflicts in the contemporary
Middle East.
What
the media does not acknowledge is the fact that almost all major conflicts
afflicting the Middle East are the consequence of overlapping
Anglo-American-Israeli agendas.
Many
of the problems affecting the contemporary Middle East are the result of the
deliberate aggravation of pre-existing regional tensions. Sectarian division,
ethnic tension and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the
United States and Britain in various parts of the globe including Africa, Latin
America, the Balkans, and the Middle East.
Iraq
is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American strategy of “divide and
conquer.” Other examples are Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan.
Amongst
the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of genuine democracy
which U.S. and British foreign policy has actually been deliberately
obstructing. Western-style “Democracy”
has been a requirement only for those Middle Eastern states which do not
conform to Washington’s political demands.
Invariably,
it constitutes a pretext for confrontation. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are
examples of undemocratic states that the United States has no problems with
because they are firmly aligned 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.
The
redrawing and partition of the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean
shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia (Asia Minor), Arabia, the Persian Gulf,
and the Iranian Plateau responds to broad economic, strategic and military
objectives, which are part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda
in the region.
The
Middle East has been conditioned by outside forces into a powder keg that is
ready to explode with the right trigger, possibly the launching of
Anglo-American and/or Israeli air raids against Iran and Syria. A wider war in
the Middle East could result in redrawn borders that are strategically
advantageous to Anglo-American interests and Israel.
NATO-garrisoned
Afghanistan has been successfully divided, all but in name. Animosity has been
inseminated in the Levant, where a Palestinian civil war is being nurtured and
divisions in Lebanon agitated. The Eastern Mediterranean has been successfully
militarized by NATO. Syria and Iran continue to be demonized by the Western
media, with a view to justifying a military agenda.
In
turn, the Western media has fed, on a daily basis, incorrect and biased notions
that the populations of Iraq cannot co-exist and that the conflict is not a war
of occupation but a “civil war” characterised by domestic strife between
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
Attempts
at intentionally creating animosity between the different ethno-cultural and
religious groups of the Middle East have been systematic. In fact, they are
part of a carefully designed covert intelligence agenda.
Even
more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia,
are assisting Washington in fomenting divisions between Middle Eastern
populations. The ultimate objective is to weaken the resistance movement
against foreign occupation through a “divide and conquer strategy” which serves
Anglo-American and Israeli interests in the broader region.
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