2006: Lt. Col. Ralph Peters' Balkanized 'New Middle East'

[TonyGosling]

[TonyGosling]

“Greater Israel” and the Balkanization of the Middle East: Oded Yinon’s “Strategy for Israel”
By Adeyinka Makinde
Global Research, July 30, 2018
https://www.globalresearch.ca/greater-israel-and-the-balkanization-of- the-middle-east-oded-yinons-strategy-for-israel/5649059

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Oded Yinon, whose 1982 paper for Kivunim (Directions) entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, is often used as a reference point for evidence of an Israeli aim to balkanise the surrounding Arab and Muslim world into ethnic and sectarian mini-states, was recently interviewed. He discussed the notoriety of the document which came to a wider audience a few years later after it was translated into English by Israel Shahak.

But while Yinon down plays the specific application of his paper to actual geopolitical events, the ideas posited in his article have arguably formed an enduring central policy plank of the Zionist state; balkanisation having been a necessary condition first in creating the modern state of Israel, and thereafter as a means of ensuring its survival and maintaining its military dominance in the Middle East.

The theme of balkanisation has always formed an essential part of the rationale of Political Zionism. The refusal by Sultan Abdul Hamid II of Theodor Herzl’s offer of £150 million (sterling) as a down payment towards the Ottoman national debt in exchange for a charter enabling Zionist settlement in Palestine meant that the early leaders of Zionism would in due course redirect their efforts in seeking a means of creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.

A necessary precondition of this would be the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, and a step towards favourably positioning Zionist aspirations in the event of the liquidation of that empire came with the agreement struck during the First World War between the Zionist movement and the British government. The Balfour Declaration and the implementation of the Sykes-Picot accord created the basis through which the goal of securing a future Jewish state within the territory designated as a British Mandate could be focused.

After the establishment of Israel in 1948, a national policy of weakening Arab and Muslim states, balkanising them, or keeping them under a neo-colonial state of affairs has persisted. The prevailing logic was and always has been that any stable, nationalist government in the Arab world poses an existential threat to Israel. For instance, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was vehemently against President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to grant Algeria independence.

Setting communities against each other with the aim of weakening ‘national spirit’ and balkanisation was at the heart of the policy of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan when it came to Lebanon, Israel’s northern neighbour. As Moshe Sharett, an early Israeli prime minister recorded in his diaries, both men were keen to exploit the differences between the country’s Muslim and Maronite Christian population. They also desired the creation of a Christian state. In a letter written to Sharett in February 1954, Ben-Gurion stated the following:

Perhaps … now is the time to bring about the creation of a Christian state in our neighbourhood. Without our initiative and our vigorous aid this will not be done. It seems to me that this is the central duty, or at least one of the central duties, of our foreign policy … We must act in all possible ways to bring about radical change in Lebanon … The goal will not be reached without a restriction of Lebanon’s borders.

Ben-Gurion had wanted Israel’s northern border to extend to the River Litani. This was made clear through the plans submitted to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 by the representatives of the Zionist movement. The water resources provided by the Litani, the River Jordan, and the Golan Heights were considered to be essential prerequisites for the sustenance of the inhabitants of a future Jewish state.

For his part, Dayan, who served as army chief of staff during the 1950s, envisaged that Israel could groom a Christian military officer who would declare a Christian state in the southern part of Lebanon, out of which the region south of the River Litani would be ceded to Israel. This is evidenced by an entry into Sharett’s diary dated May 16th, 1955:

According to Dayan the only thing that is necessary is to find an officer, be he just a major. We should either conquer his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population. Then, the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel.

Dayan’s hope for a surrogate militia would come to pass in the 1970s with the creation of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), which did the bidding of Israel in its battles with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and other sources of resistance to Israeli power. In 1979, the leader of the SLA, Major Saad Haddad, a renegade officer of the Lebanese Army and a true life incarnation of what Sharett referred to as the “puppet” desired by Dayan, would even proclaim an area controlled by his group as ‘Independent Free Lebanon’.

While the SLA is now defunct, the leaders of Israel continue to covet parts of south Lebanon. It remains an important factor behind Israel’s goal of destroying Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia which forced the withdrawal of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) from south Lebanon in 2000, and which repelled the IDF’s incursion into south Lebanon in 2006.

It is important to note that the intellectual, if not moral, justification for the balkanisation has come from many position papers produced by Israel-friendly (many would argue Israel-First) neoconservative think-tanks and other right-wing organisations, which have supported the idea of breaking up the Arab Muslim lands of the Middle East and North Africa. These include those disseminated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Rand Corporation. A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a document prepared in 1996 by the Israeli-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and presented to Binyamin Netanyahu during his first tenure as prime minister, called for Israel to “contain, destabilise, and roll back” a number of states including Syria and Iraq.

The Arab-Israel War of 1973 and Its Legacy
Allied to the intellectual justification is the use of military force to practically effect such balkanisation. This has come through using the United States, over which the the Israel lobby has continually had a decisive influence, as either the main protagonist in military actions such as the invasion of Iraq, or as the overseer of covert operations geared towards destabilisation as has been the case in the Syrian conflict.

In January 1998, members of PNAC wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to remove “Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.” This forceful plea was followed by the passage in Congress in October that year of the Iraq Liberation Act which made it official US policy to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was always understood that the termination of the rule of Saddam’s Baathist Party would run the risk of fracturing the Iraq state into three component parts as Yinon’s paper suggested: A Sunni, a Shia and a Kurdish mini-state.

Israeli politicians including serving prime ministers have at times openly petitioned US presidents to destroy Arab and Muslim countries perceived as threatening Israel’s security. For instance, in January 2003, when the invasion of Iraq was brewing, Ariel Sharon called on President George W. Bush to also “disarm Iran, Libya and Syria”. Also, Binyamin Netanyahu has since the 1990s been actively calling on the Americans to intervene in Iran, another state with a heterogenous mixture of cultures and religious sects, which is viewed as inherently vulnerable to efforts geared towards destabilisation and dismemberment.

Iran formed a central part of the ‘Bernard Lewis Project’, a proposal contrived by the neoconservative academic in 1979, which argued the efficacy behind the West pursuing a policy aimed at dividing the countries of the Middle East along ethnic and religious lines. By encouraging groups such as the Kurds, Lebanese Maronites, Azerbaijani Turks and others to seek autonomous rule, Lewis envisaged an ‘Arc of Crisis’ which would spill over into the Soviet Union. Lewis’ project encompassed the breaking up of Turkey and Arab states such as Iraq and Syria since the creation of a Greater Kurdistan would necessitate this.

The usefulness of Lewis’s worldview to the cause of Israel was explicitly acknowledged by Binyamin Netanyahu who, in eulogising Lewis when he died in May 2018, said that “we will be forever grateful for his robust defence of Israel.” Lewis, whose influence in the corridors of Washington has remained strong over the decades, supported the White House and Pentagon planners of the invasion of Iraq, a conflict which Netanyahu admitted in 2008 “benefited” Israel.

Oded Yinon unsurprisingly singles Lewis out for praise in his interview.



Lewis’s influence on US foreign policy was apparent in the doctrine of the ‘New Middle East’ unveiled by the then serving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in July 2006. The aim of securing change through the fomenting of violence and disorder hinted at the ‘Arc of Crisis’ rationale posited in 1979, with the neutralising of the ‘Shia Crescent’, consisting of Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah being the centre of focus. The ultimate objective of balkanisation was alluded to in a map (see below) prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, a retired US Army officer which was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006. It depicted a redrawn Middle East map which included a Kurdish state, the creation of which is a present priority for the state of Israel.



To the perpetual Israeli goals of weakening and destabilising Arab and Muslim states must be added the objective of acquiring more land for the state through territorial conquest, a notable example of which was the annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights in 1981 after it had been taken by the Israeli Defence Force during the war of 1967. The conflict of 1967 was a war of conquest prosecuted by right-wing ‘hawks’ who had seized control of prime minister Levi Eshkol’s cabinet with the aim of completing the task of acquiring land which had not been taken from the Arabs during the War of 1948. One of the most important aspects of this reach for ‘Greater Israel’, in which Israel conquered territory that tripled its size, was the desire to capture Jerusalem.

The war of 1948, while often posited in Zionist historiography as a defensive war, had been waged to seize as much land as could be taken in excess of what had been provided under the vitiated United Nations Partition Plan. An important part of that campaign was Plan Dalet, which sought to expel Arabs from key areas so as to ensure a Jewish majority in all territories which would be controlled by the nascent Jewish state.

That Israel at its inception was a belligerent power intent on extending its borders and its sphere of influence cannot be denied. Just ten days after the declaration of Israel’s independence, Ben-Gurion said the following at a meeting of the general staff of Haganah, the precursor of the IDF:

We must immediately destroy Ramie and Lod. … We must organise Eliyahu’s brigade to direct it against Jenin in preparation for the Jordan Valley … Maklef needs to receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, with the aid of bombing Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. … Yigal Allon must attack in Syria from the east and from the north. … We must establish a Christian state whose southern border will be the Litani (River). We will forge an alliance with it. When we break the strength of the (Arab) Legion and bomb Amman we will eliminate Trans-Jordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.

While Yinon claims in the interview that Israel does not require more territory, which he links solely to the capacity it has of protecting its existing borders, this is contradicted by the creeping colonisation of the West Bank, considered in Zionist belief to be that part of the ‘Land of Israel’ known as Judea and Samaria. Arab settlements continue to be constricted into small, increasingly non-contiguous entities that many have referred to as akin to apartheid-era ‘Bantustans’. The stringent blockade of Gaza and the intermittent war and military strikes on the territory appear designed to make living conditions so unbearable and hopeless as to convince Gazans to pack their bags and migrate. And if acquiring neighbouring land is not explicitly mentioned, the quest to create additional territory by stealth through the creation of security ‘buffer zones’ on its borders with Syria and Lebanon is real enough.

But just how much more of the ‘Promised Land’ Israel would wish to acquire is an issue not openly discussed in contemporary times. Yinon smirked at the tendency of articles on his paper to reference a map of the Zionist ‘Land of Israel’ (see below) in its maximalist borders extending from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River. Indeed, the claim that Israel continues to seek these borders is one which Zionists point to as a ‘conspiracy theory’.



Belief in Israel’s maximalist borders, which have a biblical origin, was taken up by many in the modern Zionist movement. It was explicitly referred to in the emblem of the Irgun terror group. However, since the creation of Israel, most hardline Zionists have been content to publically refer to securing what they term the sovereign right of the Jewish people to what was the western part of the British Mandate of Palestine, with the Palestinian Arabs entitled to the land east of the River Jordan, that is, the modern state of Jordan. However, until Israel formally declares where it considers its final borders to be, fears that it wishes to acquire more land will legitimately persist.

In the interview, Yinon claims that his plan has never really been implemented by any Israeli government, save for the adoption of some of his ideas by Israeli military intelligence (AMAN) during the present Syrian conflict. An obvious manifestation of this has been the medical and logistical support given by Israel’s military to jihadist militias fighting the Syrian Arab Army near the Golan Heights.

It is clear that the largely jihadist insurgency in Syria which aimed to bring down the secular-nationalist government of Hafez al-Assad has been overseen by the United States as a means of aiding Israel’s geopolitical goals. The objective of American-sponsored balkanisation was clear from a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document which noted that a declaration of a Salafist principality in the eastern part of Syria would serve the interests of the internal and external opposition to the Assad government. With most of the jihadists defeated by the Syrian Arab Army in concert with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, this goal has been continued by American and Israeli support for Kurdish militias in that part of Syria.

The deliberate and calculated intervention in the affairs of the Arab world is something which Yinon is content to admit is unnecessary given the artificiality of the states which are the product of imperial draughtsmen. That was the criticism levelled at his paper by Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, who questioned the wisdom of working towards the dissolution of such countries if the initial analysis is that they will eventually fall apart.

Moshe Sharett warned against Ben-Gurion and Dayan’s plan to “transform” Lebanon because of what he correctly claimed would be “an adventurous speculation upon the well-being and existence of others”. The corpses of the victims of attempts in recent times to reshape the Middle East testify for that.

Yinon’s claim that an application of the spirit of his strategy has been limited only to the conflict in Syria is patently wrong. The neoconservative-inspired wars waged by the United States on behalf of the state of Israel in Iraq, Libya, as well as the ongoing plans to destroy the Shia Crescent by attacking Iran provide contrary evidence.

The ‘Yinon Plan’ after all merely encapsulates Israeli policy of the past, the present and the future.

This article was first published on the author’s website

[TonyGosling]

Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”
Among the Most Popular Global Research 2017 Articles
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, January 05, 2020
Global Research 18 November 2006
https://www.globalresearch.ca/plans-for-redrawing-the-middle-east-the- project-for-a-new-middle-east/3882

This article by award winning author Mahdi Nazemroaya first published by GR in November 2006 is of particular relevance to an understanding of the ongoing process of destabilization and political fragmentation in the Middle East as well as US war plans directed against Iran.

* * *

“Hegemony is as old as Mankind…” -Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor

The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was credited by the Western media for coining the term) in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the “Greater Middle East.”

This shift in foreign policy phraseology coincided with the inauguration of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term and conceptualization of the “New Middle East,” was subsequently heralded by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height of the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon. Prime Minister Olmert and Secretary Rice had informed the international media that a project for a “New Middle East” was being launched from Lebanon.

This announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American-Israeli “military roadmap” in the Middle East. This project, which has been in the planning stages for several years, consists in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.

The “New Middle East” project was introduced publicly by Washington and Tel Aviv with the expectation that Lebanon would be the pressure point for realigning the whole Middle East and thereby unleashing the forces of “constructive chaos.” This “constructive chaos” –which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region– would in turn be used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.

New Middle East Map

Secretary Condoleezza Rice stated during a press conference that

“[w]hat we’re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we [meaning the United States] have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.”1

Secretary Rice was immediately criticized for her statements both within Lebanon and internationally for expressing indifference to the suffering of an entire nation, which was being bombed indiscriminately by the Israeli Air Force.

The Anglo-American Military Roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech on the “New Middle East” had set the stage. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon –which had been fully endorsed by Washington and London– have further compromised and validated the existence of the geo-strategic objectives of the United States, Britain, and Israel. According to Professor Mark Levine the “neo-liberal globalizers and neo-conservatives, and ultimately the Bush Administration, would latch on to creative destruction as a way of describing the process by which they hoped to create their new world orders,” and that “creative destruction [in] the United States was, in the words of neo-conservative philosopher and Bush adviser Michael Ledeen, ‘an awesome revolutionary force’ for (…) creative destruction…”2

Anglo-American occupied Iraq, particularly Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to be the preparatory ground for the balkanization (division) and finlandization (pacification) of the Middle East. Already the legislative framework, under the Iraqi Parliament and the name of Iraqi federalization, for the partition of Iraq into three portions is being drawn out. (See map below)

Moreover, the Anglo-American military roadmap appears to be vying an entry into Central Asia via the Middle East. The Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are stepping stones for extending U.S. influence into the former Soviet Union and the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia. The Middle East is to some extent the southern tier of Central Asia. Central Asia in turn is also termed as “Russia’s Southern Tier” or the Russian “Near Abroad.”

Many Russian and Central Asian scholars, military planners, strategists, security advisors, economists, and politicians consider Central Asia (“Russia’s Southern Tier”) to be the vulnerable and “soft under-belly” of the Russian Federation.3

It should be noted that in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Map of the “New Middle East”

A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been causally allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the “New Middle East.”

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST



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 Peters:

International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.

The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam, but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia [Muslims], but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.

Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.

Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosphorus and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. 6

(emphasis added)

“Necessary Pain”

Besides believing that there is “cultural stagnation” in the Middle East, it must be noted that Ralph Peters admits that his propositions are “draconian” in nature, but he insists that they are necessary pains for the people of the Middle East. This view of necessary pain and suffering is in startling parallel to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s belief that the devastation of Lebanon by the Israeli military was a necessary pain or “birth pang” in order to create the “New Middle East” that Washington, London, and Tel Aviv envision.

Moreover, it is worth noting that the subject of the Armenian Genocide is being politicized and stimulated in Europe to offend Turkey.7

The overhaul, dismantlement, and reassembly of the nation-states of the Middle East have been packaged as a solution to the hostilities in the Middle East, but this is categorically misleading, false, and fictitious. The advocates of a “New Middle East” and redrawn boundaries in the region avoid and fail to candidly depict the roots of the problems and conflicts in the contemporary Middle East. What the media does not acknowledge is the fact that almost all major conflicts afflicting the Middle East are the consequence of overlapping Anglo-American-Israeli agendas.

Many of the problems affecting the contemporary Middle East are the result of the deliberate aggravation of pre-existing regional tensions. Sectarian division, ethnic tension and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States and Britain in various parts of the globe including Africa, Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Iraq is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American strategy of “divide and conquer.” Other examples are Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan.

Amongst the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of genuine democracy which U.S. and British foreign policy has actually been deliberately obstructing. Western-style “Democracy” has been a requirement only for those Middle Eastern states which do not conform to Washington’s political demands. Invariably, it constitutes a pretext for confrontation. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are examples of undemocratic states that the United States has no problems with because they are firmly alligned within the Anglo-American orbit or sphere.

Additionally, the United States has deliberately blocked or displaced genuine democratic movements in the Middle East from Iran in 1953 (where a U.S./U.K. sponsored coup was staged against the democratic government of Prime Minister Mossadegh) to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the Arab Sheikdoms, and Jordan where the Anglo-American alliance supports military control, absolutists, and dictators in one form or another. The latest example of this is Palestine.

The Turkish Protest at NATO’s Military College in Rome

Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters’ map of the “New Middle East” has sparked angry reactions in Turkey. According to Turkish press releases on September 15, 2006 the map of the “New Middle East” was displayed in NATO’s Military College in Rome, Italy. It was additionally reported that Turkish officers were immediately outraged by the presentation of a portioned and segmented Turkey.8 The map received some form of approval from the U.S. National War Academy before it was unveiled in front of NATO officers in Rome.

The Turkish Chief of Staff, General Buyukanit, contacted the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, and protested the event and the exhibition of the redrawn map of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.9 Furthermore the Pentagon has gone out of its way to assure Turkey that the map does not reflect official U.S. policy and objectives in the region, but this seems to be conflicting with Anglo-American actions in the Middle East and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.

Is there a Connection between Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Eurasian Balkans” and the “New Middle East” Project?

The following are important excerpts and passages from former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives. Brzezinski also states that both Turkey and Iran, the two most powerful states of the “Eurasian Balkans,” located on its southern tier, are “potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts [balkanization],” and that, “If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable.”10

It seems that a divided and balkanized Iraq would be the best means of accomplishing this. Taking what we know from the White House’s own admissions; there is a belief that “creative destruction and chaos” in the Middle East are beneficial assets to reshaping the Middle East, creating the “New Middle East,” and furthering the Anglo-American roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia:

In Europe, the Word “Balkans” conjures up images of ethnic conflicts and great-power regional rivalries. Eurasia, too, has its “Balkans,” but the Eurasian Balkans are much larger, more populated, even more religiously and ethnically heterogenous. They are located within that large geographic oblong that demarcates the central zone of global instability (…) that embraces portions of southeastern Europe, Central Asia and parts of South Asia [Pakistan, Kashmir, Western India], the Persian Gulf area, and the Middle East.

The Eurasian Balkans form the inner core of that large oblong (…) they differ from its outer zone in one particularly significant way: they are a power vacuum. Although most of the states located in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East are also unstable, American power is that region’s [meaning the Middle East’s] ultimate arbiter. The unstable region in the outer zone is thus an area of single power hegemony and is tempered by that hegemony. In contrast, the Eurasian Balkans are truly reminiscent of the older, more familiar Balkans of southeastern Europe: not only are its political entities unstable but they tempt and invite the intrusion of more powerful neighbors, each of whom is determined to oppose the region’s domination by another. It is this familiar combination of a power vacuum and power suction that justifies the appellation “Eurasian Balkans.”

The traditional Balkans represented a potential geopolitical prize in the struggle for European supremacy. The Eurasian Balkans, astride the inevitably emerging transportation network meant to link more directly Eurasia’s richest and most industrious western and eastern extremities, are also geopolitically significant. Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.

The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy, and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.

Access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interests, rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations, and fuel international rivalries. The situation is made all the more volatile by the fact that the region is not only a power vacuum but is also internally unstable.

(…)

The Eurasian Balkans include nine countries that one way or another fit the foregoing description, with two others as potential candidates. The nine are Kazakstan [alternative and official spelling of Kazakhstan] , Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia—all of them formerly part of the defunct Soviet Union—as well as Afghanistan.

The potential additions to the list are Turkey and Iran, both of them much more politically and economically viable, both active contestants for regional influence within the Eurasian Balkans, and thus both significant geo-strategic players in the region. At the same time, both are potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts. If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable, while efforts to restrain regional domination by Russia could even become futile. 11

(emphasis added)

Redrawing the Middle East

The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up the First World War. In the wake of the the First World War the borders of the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn. This region experienced a period of upheaval, violence and conflict, before and after World War I, which was the direct result of foreign economic interests and interference.

The reasons behind the First World War are more sinister than the standard school-book explanation, the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Economic factors were the real motivation for the large-scale war in 1914.

Norman Dodd, a former Wall Street banker and investigator for the U.S. Congress, who examined U.S. tax-exempt foundations, confirmed in a 1982 interview that those powerful individuals who from behind the scenes controlled the finances, policies, and government of the United States had in fact also planned U.S. involvement in a war, which would contribute to entrenching their grip on power.

The following testimonial is from the transcript of Norman Dodd’s interview with G. Edward Griffin;

We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. And, in that year, the trustees meeting, for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year, in a very learned fashion. And the question is this: Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they conclude that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?

Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country [the United States], than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows [wars] in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as follows: we must control the State Department.

And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly. And finally, of course, the war is over.

At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914, when World War I broke out. (emphasis added)

The redrawing and partition of the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia (Asia Minor), Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian Plateau responds to broad economic, strategic and military objectives, which are part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda in the region.

The Middle East has been conditioned by outside forces into a powder keg that is ready to explode with the right trigger, possibly the launching of Anglo-American and/or Israeli air raids against Iran and Syria. A wider war in the Middle East could result in redrawn borders that are strategically advantageous to Anglo-American interests and Israel.

NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan has been successfully divided, all but in name. Animosity has been inseminated in the Levant, where a Palestinian civil war is being nurtured and divisions in Lebanon agitated. The Eastern Mediterranean has been successfully militarized by NATO. Syria and Iran continue to be demonized by the Western media, with a view to justifying a military agenda. In turn, the Western media has fed, on a daily basis, incorrect and biased notions that the populations of Iraq cannot co-exist and that the conflict is not a war of occupation but a “civil war” characterised by domestic strife between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

Attempts at intentionally creating animosity between the different ethno-cultural and religious groups of the Middle East have been systematic. In fact, they are part of a carefully designed covert intelligence agenda.

Even more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, are assisting Washington in fomenting divisions between Middle Eastern populations. The ultimate objective is to weaken the resistance movement against foreign occupation through a “divide and conquer strategy” which serves Anglo-American and Israeli interests in the broader region.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya specializes in Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

1 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Special Briefing on the Travel to the Middle East and Europe of Secretary Condoleezza Rice (Press Conference, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C., July 21, 2006).

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/69331.htm

2 Mark LeVine, “The New Creative Destruction,” Asia Times, August 22, 2006.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH22Ak01.html

3 Andrej Kreutz, “The Geopolitics of post-Soviet Russia and the Middle East,” Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) (Washington, D.C.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, January 2002).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2501/is_1_24/ai_93458168/pg_1

4 The Caucasus or Caucasia can be considered as part of the Middle East or as a separate region

5 Ralph Peters, “Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look,” Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899

6 Ibid.

7 Crispian Balmer, “French MPs back Armenia genocide bill, Turkey angry, Reuters, October 12, 2006; James McConalogue, “French against Turks: Talking about Armenian Genocide,” The Brussels Journal, October 10, 2006.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1585

8 Suleyman Kurt, “Carved-up Map of Turkey at NATO Prompts U.S. Apology,” Zaman (Turkey), September 29, 2006.

http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&hn=36919

9 Ibid.

10 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives (New York City: Basic Books, 1997).

11 Ibid.

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