The Third Iraq War has
begun. With it, longstanding neocon dreams to partition Iraq into
three along ethnic and religious lines have been resurrected.
White House officials
now estimate that the fight against the region’s ‘Islamic State’
will last years, and may outlive the Obama administration. But this
‘long war’ vision goes back to nebulous ideas formally presented
by late RAND Corp analyst Laurent Muraweic before the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board at the invitation of then chairman Richard
Perle. That presentation described Iraq as a “tactical pivot” by
which to transform the wider Middle East.
Brian Whitaker, former
Guardian Middle East editor, rightly noted that the Perle-RAND
strategy drew inspiration from a 1996 paper published by the Israeli
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, co-authored
by Perle and other neocons who held top positions in the post-9/11
Bush administration.
The policy paper
advocated a strategy that bears startling resemblance to the chaos
unfolding in the wake of the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ –
Israel would “shape its strategic environment” by first securing
the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Jordan and Turkey would form an
axis along with Israel to weaken and ‘roll back’ Syria.” This
axis would attempt to weaken the influence of Lebanon, Syria and Iran
by “weaning” off their Shi’ite populations. To succeed, Israel
would need to engender US support, which would be obtained by
Benjamin Netanyahu formulating the strategy “in language familiar
to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations
during the cold war.”
The 2002 Perle-RAND
plan was active in the Bush administration’s strategic thinking on
Iraq shortly before the 2003 war. According to US private
intelligence firm Stratfor, in late 2002, then vice-president Dick
Cheney and deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz had co-authored a
scheme under which central Sunni-majority Iraq would join with
Jordan; the northern Kurdish regions would become an autonomous
state; all becoming separate from the southern Shi’ite region.
The strategic
advantages of an Iraq partition, Stratfor argued, focused on US
control of oil:
“After eliminating
Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an
anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the
capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US
geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from
each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the
pro-US forces.
“Equally important,
Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military
presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new
state asking for US protection – and to secure the stability of oil
markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain
direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict
with Riyadh.”
The expansion of the
‘Islamic State’ has provided a pretext for the fundamental
contours of this scenario to unfold, with the US and British looking
to re-establish a long-term military presence in Iraq.
In 2006, Cheney’s
successor, Joe Biden, also indicated his support for the ‘soft
partition’ of Iraq along ethno-religious lines – a position which
the co-author of the Biden-Iraq plan, Leslie Gelb of the Council on
Foreign Relations, now argues is “the only solution” to the
current crisis.
In 2008, the strategy
re-surfaced – once again via RAND Corp – through a report funded
by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command on how to prosecute the
‘long war.’ Among its strategies, one scenario advocated by the
report was ‘Divide and Rule’ which would involve “exploiting
fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them
against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts.”
Simultaneously, the
report suggested that the US could foster conflict between
Salafi-jihadists and Shi’ite militants by “shoring up the
traditional Sunni regimes… as a way of containing Iranian power and
influence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.”
One way or another, the
plan is in motion. Last week, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor
Leiberman told US secretary of state John Kerry: “Iraq is breaking
up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an
independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion.”
P.S. Read the rest of the article, which provides a detailed explanation, authored by Nafeez Ahmed here. The jews who control us... Americans... got us into Iraq by lies and trickery; they keep us there the same way. Who is your favorite beheading actor? Will you get a vaccine for Ebola?