*August 31, 2006 at 08:09:08*
US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Map to Stave-off Looming
Global Meltdown
<http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_nafeez_m_060831_us_army_contemplates.htm>
/by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed <http://www.opednews.com/author/author2152.html>/
http://www.opednews.com
In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces
Journal <http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899>, 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 endeavour 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 "Iraq's 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 today's Afghanistan." Although this vast imperial
programme 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
<http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005345.html>.
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
<http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/97summer/peters.htm>
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 world's 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
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_Century>
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:
"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our
lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the
globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and
economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de
facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our
economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a
fair amount of killing."
So what's prompted Maj. Peter's 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 <http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=2714>,
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 <http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko07262006.html>, US historian
Gabriel Kolko, professor emeritus at York University, concluded in late
July that:
"All the factors which make for crashes – excessive leveraging, rising
interest rates, etc. – exist... Contradictions now wrack the world's
financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who
endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both
crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions
and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of
capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious
crises."
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
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0124-11.htm> 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
<http://www.americanprogress.org/climate>, the task-force says:
"The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for
example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets
(which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 meters over the
space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean
circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of
the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source
of carbon."
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 we'll all just drop off the edge, or we'll evolve.
I'm 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.blogspot.com
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed <http://nafeez.blogspot.com> is the author of The
London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry
<http://www.independentinquiry.co.uk>. 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
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0930852400/102-7273774-9419348?v=glance&n=283155>,
Behind the War on Terror
<http://www.amazon.com/Behind-War-Terror-Strategy-Struggle/dp/0865715068/ref=pd_sim_b_4/102-7273774-9419348?ie=UTF8>,
and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism
<http://www.amazon.com/War-On-Truth-Disinformation-Terrorism/dp/1566565960/ref=pd_sim_b_1/102-7273774-9419348?ie=UTF8>.
In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about
his research on international terrorism.
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