US Army Contemplates Redrawing
Middle East Map
to Stave Off Looming Global Meltdown In a little-noted article printed in
early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and
leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph
Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are
extremely disturbing.
Ethnically Cleansing the
Entire Middle East
Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the
Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible
for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be
fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavor designed to correct past
errors. Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more
peaceful Middle East, he observes, but then adds wryly: Oh, and one other
dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing
works.
Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping
reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic
cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists
that unless it is implemented, we may take it as an article of faith that a
portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own. Among his
proposals are the need to establish an independent Kurdish state to guarantee
the long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the humanitarian
sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from
Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria
and Japan.
He chastises the United States and
its coalition partners for missing a glorious chance to fracture Iraq, which
should have been divided into three smaller states immediately. This would
leave Iraqs three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might
eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a
Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. Meanwhile, the Shia
south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of
the Persian Gulf. Jordan, a US-Israeli friend in the region, would retain its
current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part,
the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as
Pakistan. Iran too would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan,
Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the
provinces around Herat in todays Afghanistan. Although this vast imperial
program could be impossible to implement now, with time, new and natural
borders will emerge, driven by the inevitable attendant
bloodshed.
As for the goals of this plan, Maj.
Peters is equally candid. While including the necessary caveats about fighting
for security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy, he also mentions
the third important issue -- and for access to oil supplies in a region that is
destined to fight itself.
The whole thing sounds disturbingly
familiar, especially to those who have read the musings of then Israeli Foreign
Ministry official Oded Yinon.
Keeping the World Safe
for
Our Economy
Despite trying to dress up his vision
as an exercise in attempting to selflessly democratize the Middle East, in a
contribution to the quarterly US Army War College journal Parameters almost a
decade ago, he acknowledged with some jubilation that: Those of us who can
sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar -- professionally,
financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a
minority. This minority will inevitably conflict with the vast majority of the
worlds population. For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot
manage or effectively interpret, life is nasty, brutish ... and
short-circuited. In every country and region, these masses who can neither
understand the new world, nor profit from its uncertainties
will become the
violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate
neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. The coming clash, then, is not
really about blood, faith, ethnicity, at all. It is about the gap between the
haves and the have-nots. We are entering a new American century, he says, in a
veiled reference to the Bush administration Project of the same name founded in
the same year he was writing. In the new century, we will become still
wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite
hatreds without precedent.
In predicting the future course for
the US Army, Maj. Peters argues that: We will see countries and continents
divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. In
this context, he says, we in the United States will continue to be perceived as
the ultimate haves, and therefore, terrorism will be the most common form of
violence, along with transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions,
border conflicts, and conventional wars. Meanwhile, in defense of its
interests, the US will be required to intervene in some of these contests.
And then he sums it all up in one tidy paragraph:
So whats prompted Maj. Peters
decision to air his vision for the Middle East in the Armed Forces Journal at
this time in the wake of the latest Middle East crisis? A number of critical
developments.
Source: Imminent Global
Crises Converge
According to an American source with
high-level access to the US military, political and intelligence establishment,
Western policymakers are in no doubt that the world faces the imminent
convergence of multiple global crises. These crises threaten not only to
undermine the basis of Western power in its current military and geopolitical
configurations, but also to destabilize the entire foundations of industrial
civilization.
The source said that the latest
petroleum data indicates that global oil production most likely peaked two
years ago. This is consistent with the findings of respected geologists such as
leading oil depletion expert Dr. Colin Campbell, who in the late 90s predicted
that world oil production would peak in the early 21st century. We have come to
the end of the first half of the Oil Age, said Dr. Campbell, who has a
doctorate in geology from the University of Oxford and more than 40 years of
experience in the oil industry. Similarly, Kenneth Deffeyes, a geologist and
professor emeritus at Princeton University, estimates the occurrence of the peak
near the end of last year.
The source also said that leading US
financial analysts privately believe that a collapse of the global banking
system is imminent by 2008. Although the warning is consistent with the public
findings of other experts, this is the first time that a more precise date has
been estimated. In a prescient analysis drawing on highly placed financial
sources, US historian Gabriel Kolko, professor emeritus at York University,
concluded in late July that:
The source also commented on the
danger posed by rapid climate change. Although most conventional estimates
suggest that global climate catastrophe is not due before another 30 odd years,
he argued that the multiplication of several tipping-points suggested that a
series of devastating climatic events could be triggered within the next 10 to
15 years. Once again, this is consistent with the findings of other experts,
most recently a joint task-force report by the Institute for Public Policy
Research in the UK, the Center for American Progress in the US, and the
Australia Institute, which said in January last year that if the average world
temperature rises two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature
prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, it would trigger an
irreversible chain of climatic disasters. In its report, the task force
says:
The source also revealed that US
generals had repeatedly war-gamed a prospective conflict with Iran, but
consistently found that the simulations predicted an absolute nuclear
disaster, from which no clear winner would emerge. The scenarios gamed were so
dismal, he said, that the generals briefed administration officials to avoid
such a war at all costs. However, the source said that the Bush administration
is ignoring the fears of the US military.
In this context, it would seem that
the musings of Maj. Peters issue less from a concerted confidence in US power,
than from a sense of growing desperation and unease as the political, financial
and energy architecture of the global system is increasingly fragmenting under
the weight of its own inherent instability. Despite the seeming gloominess of
the situation, however, there is clearly fundamental dissent about the current
trajectory of American and Western policy at the highest levels of power. The
source remarked that humanity is on the verge of a precipice, and either well
all just drop off the edge, or well evolve. Im not sure what that new human
being might look like, but it will clearly have to involve a completely new set
of ideas and values, a new way of looking at the world that respects life and
nature.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry. He teaches courses in International Relations at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he is doing his PhD studying imperialism and genocide. Since 9/11, he has authored three other books revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric of the War on Terror: The War on Freedom, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about his research on international terrorism. ///// JIMedia: Memurnikan Tanggapan Umum Melalui Penyebaran Ilmu dan Maklumat ////////////////////////////////// Nota: Kandungan mel ini tidak menggambarkan pendirian rasmi Pertubuhan Jamaah Islah Malaysia (JIM) melainkan yang dinyatakan sedemikian. Berminat menjadi ahli JIM? Sila isi borang keahlian "online" di: http://www.jim.org.my/, dari seksyen "BORANG Online". Langganan : Hantar E-mail kosong ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsub : Hantar E-mail kosong ke [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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