Part
II: Divide and rule:
the US-Israeli quest for a new regional order
“The Iraqi
situation cannot be separated from the Palestinian issue. Our failure in
dealing with the Iraqi situation means our failure in dealing with the
Palestinian issue. [This war] will give them [the Israelis] the ability to
completely surround the [Arab] resistance and will lead to the final solution;
that is, a peace imposed by the Israelis, which is rejected by us all. And this
could lead to the partition of Iraq in order for Israel to gain legitimacy in
the region. When Israel would be surrounded by smaller nations, divided, Israel
will gain then its legitimacy politically and socially. So when we are talking
about the Iraqi situation, let us not forget our brothers in Palestine, and let
us not forget the legitimate rights of the peoples in Syria and Lebanon.”[31] -Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad to the Arab League two weeks before the 2003 Iraq war
The Israeli-American goal is “the drawing of a new map
for the region. [Partitioning Lebanon, Syria and Iraq would leave Israel
surrounded by] small tranquil states. I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom
will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There
will be small ethnic and confessional states. In other words, Israel will be
the most important and strongest state in a region that has been partitioned
into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This
is the new Middle East.”[32]
Hezbollah
Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in an interview with Seymour Hersh in 2007
The idea of
balkanising the Middle East has deeper roots than the current era of
imperialism under the guise of the fraudulent “war on terror.” The carving up
of the Arab world was brought up for the first time in NATO strategist circles
by British-American historian Bernard Lewis. Lewis - a British military
intelligence officer during the Second World War, advocate of the clash of
civilisations theory, longtime supporter of the Israeli right and, you guessed
it, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) - wrote an article as far
back as 1992 called “Rethinking the Middle East,” published in the CFR’s own Foreign
Affairs. In it, he predicted the “lebanonisation” of the Middle East:
“Most of the states of the Middle East - Egypt is an
obvious exception - are of recent and artificial construction [sic][33] and are
vulnerable to [“lebanonisation”]. If the central power is sufficiently
weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real
sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state.
The state then disintegrates - as happened in Lebanon - into a chaos of
squabbling feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties.”[34]
According to
Lewis, American policy is mainly aimed at preventing adversarial regional
hegemony (whether in the form of multilateral pan-Arabism or in the form of one
strong regional power) that would establish monopolistic control over the
Middle Eastern oil reserves. The US does not pursue this policy of
“lebanonisation” in a classical imperial fashion, hints Lewis, but instead by
invigorating Islamic fundamentalism, as religious opposition groups are the
only ones that have at their disposal a network outside the control of the
state.[35] Hence, just like Zbigniew Brzezinski would advocate for playing out
the newly-created weak states in Central Asia and the Caucasus region and the
ethnic minorities residing in them against each other in order to maintain
American hegemony over Eurasia five years later,[36] Lewis laid out a model for
American domination by divide and rule over the Arab world.
But there is
another player involved, however, one that would benefit even greater from the
disintegration of Syria and Iraq, who happen to be two of its main adversaries.
The tactic of breaking up existing Arab states into small and inter-fighting
weakened microstates was described in detail for the very first time not by an
American or European strategist, but an Israeli one. Oded Yinon, a journalist
with a past in the country’s Foreign Ministry, published an article called “A
strategy for Israel in the nineteen eighties” in the journal of the World
Zionist Organisation in 1982, in which he argued that in order for his country
to become an imperial regional power, it must affect the division of all
existing Arab nations into microstates based on ethnicity or religion.
According to Yinon:
“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces
serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria,
Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The
dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique
areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in
the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states
serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance
with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present
day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a
Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its
northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan.
[...] Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is
guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more
important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short
run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. [...] Every
kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will
shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into
denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into
provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is
possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities:
Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the
Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi
confrontation [1980-1988] will deepen this polarization.”[37] (emphasis added)
Ironically,
according to Yinon, “this state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and
security in the area in the long run.”[38] Of course, he means that weakened
Arab enclaves in a state of perpetual warfare with one another will bring
“peace and security” only to Israel. Interestingly, some analysts have pointed
out that the area Yinon wanted balkanised roughly coincides with “Greater
Israel,” which, according to Theodor Herzl, extends all the way from the Brook
of Egypt [i.e. the Nile] to the Euphrates.”[39] Indeed, just as biblical
references are often used in legitimising the colonisation of Palestine,
Zionist mythology might one day strengthen Israel’s imperial claims over the
Arab world as well. This is not to say that Israel seeks to annex large parts
of the Middle East, but rather that it wants to establish a new regional order
in which the Zionist state asserts control over an ethnically and religiously
diverse Arab world.
Noam Chomsky has
called this the “ottomanisation” of the Middle East; that is, the recreation of
the state of affairs that existed prior to the arrival of the European
colonialists but with Israel replacing the Ottoman Empire as the dominant power
exercising hegemony. Chomsky further noted that Israel’s drive for an
Ottoman-style imperial domination over the Arab world has been advocated by
figures in the Israeli mainstream as well, such as Daniel Elazar, president of
the Jerusalem Institute for Federal Studies, and Yoram Peri, former advisor to
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and European representative of the Labor Party.
The former argued that ethno-religious communities, not states, are the natural
form of organisation in the Middle East and suggested as an alternative to the
present-day situation an Ottoman millet system, which was a system in which
each ethno-religious group had its own internal administration but under Ottoman
rule; while the latter observed that a “true revolution” was taking place, in
which Israeli foreign policy is gradually replacing co-existence for hegemony,
as the country is increasingly becoming committed to the destabilisation of the
region. Rather than seeking recognition with the status quo, Peri advocated
that Israel should use its military dominance to expand its borders and to
create a “new reality,” a “new order.”[40]
It is remarkable
that most major Middle East conflicts following the publication of the Yinon
plan served this agenda. In the short run, before 9/11, the US-backed Muslim
Brotherhood insurgency in Syria’s Hama,[41] the Iran-Iraq war[42] and the First
Gulf War[43] all weakened Ba’ath central governance or at least led to outrage
and isolation from the international community, and in the long run, the
post-9/11 Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the
NATO-Gulf-Turkey-orchestrated proxy war on Syria reinforced the minorities
mentioned by Yinon and eventually brought partition into the picture.
Although a
common-held view about the 2003 Iraq invasion is that it was all about oil,
Israeli pressure played a pretty unacknowledged yet fundamental role as well.
In their in depth article called “The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy,”
distinguished American professors John Maersheimer and Stephen Walt have shown
that the central focus of American foreign policy lies not in its own interests
but rather in its relationship with Israel. Writing at the height of the US
occupation of Iraq in 2006, Maersheimer and Walt put forward a myriad of
evidence that Israeli pressure in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was
absolutely crucial in the final push towards Washington’s decision to invade
Iraq.[44] British-Israeli journalist Jonathan Cook further corroborated this
thesis in his eye-opening book Israel and the clash of civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the plan to remake the Middle East, published in 2008. When the US
invaded Iraq, Cook argued, it broke with its traditional policy of rewarding
and punishing strongmen and resorted instead to regime overthrow and direct
occupation. This policy change, which predictably brought sectarian divide with
it, was opposed by the oil industry as well as the US State Department,
however, as both preferred the old tactic of replacing Saddam Hussein with
another US handpicked dictator. Rather than the oil giants, Cook concluded, it
was the Israel lobby that persuaded the neocons that this new policy of
invasion and occupation would be beneficial not only to Israel, but to American
interests, too.[45]
A full month
prior to the invasion of Iraq, senior Israeli officers were already foreseeing
a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq followed by the demise
of Israel’s other enemies, from the PLO’s Arafat to Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, the
ayatollah in Iran, Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad.[46] Just after the US
started military operations in March, Uzi Benziman wrote in the Israeli
newspaper Ha’aretz that “after the war in Iraq, Israel will try to
convince the US to direct its war on terror at Iran, Damascus and Beirut.”[47]
Once Baghdad fell in mid-April, Israeli officials, the Zionist lobby in the US
and pro-Israel American officials started to put pressure on actions against
Syria,[48] and since the outbreak of the war on Syria, many of them have voiced
support for Assad’s extralegal removal from office. In December 2016, Israel’s
right-wing defense minister, Avigdor Liberman, reiterated that the
balkanisation of the Middle East would be vital to Israeli “national
interests:”
“Many of the countries in the Middle East were
established artificially, as a result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and based on
colonial considerations that did not take into account the pattern of
inhabitance and the deep sectarian rifts within the respective societies. Thus,
to genuinely solve the region’s problems, borders will have to be altered,
specifically in countries like Syria and Iraq. Boundaries need to be redrawn
between Sunnis, Shia and other communities to diminish sectarian strife and to
enable the emergence of states that will enjoy internal legitimacy. It is a
mistake to think that these states can survive in their current borders.”[49]
Taking all this
into account, it might be easier to grasp why Ze’ev Schiff, the military
correspondent of Ha’aretz, proclaimed just before Israel’s 1982 Lebanon
war that the best that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq is its
dissolution into three states;[50] or why American-born Israeli journalist
Caroline Glick in 2007 postulated that Israel should wage a preemptive war
against Damascus as a follow-up to Washington’s invasion of Iraq in order to
destroy Syria’s central authority;”[51] or why a leaked 2012 e-mail forwarded
by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed Israel’s welcoming of
a destructive ethnic standoff in the Middle East, because “the fall of the
House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between Shiites and the
majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders
would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies;”[52] or finally,
why Efraim Inbar, an Israeli think tank director, recently expressed his belief
that the destruction of ISIS would be a strategic mistake for his country,
saying that “allowing bad guys to kill bad guys sounds very cynical, but it is
useful and even moral to do so if it keeps the bad guys busy and less able to
harm the good guys.”[53]
Bas Spliet | April 23, 2017
newsbud.com
Notes
PART II
[31] “Arab League summit,” C-SPAN, 01.03.2003,
http://c-span.org/video/?175319-1/arab-league-summit,
57m25 to 59m00.
[32] Seymour Hersh, “The redirection,” New Yorker,
05.03.2007, http://newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection.
[33] Contrary to what is often
asserted, Syria is an exception, too. The term Syria dates back to Roman times,
and has been used to describe the area for thousands of years. If Syria is not
a historical state, no state is. The Sykes-Picot agreement was indeed a
colonial endeavour to divide spheres of influence between France and Britain,
but if anything, it did not draw the borders of Syria too large, but rather too
small, as historical Syria included Lebanon and Iskandaron, too. As I pointed
out in part I, the sectarian divisions in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion are
to a large extent a self-fulfilling prophecy as well.
[34] Bernard Lewis, “Rethinking the Middle East,” Foreign
Affairs 71, no. 4 (1992): 116-7.
[35] Lewis, “Rethinking the Middle East,” 107-16.
[36] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The grand chessboard:
American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives (New York: Basic Books,
1997), 123-50.
[37] Oded Yinon, “A strategy for Israel in the
nineteen eighties,” Kivunim, translated by Israel Shahak (Massachusetts:
Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1982), paragraph 26 and 27.
[38] Yinon, “A strategy for Israel in the
nineteen eighties,” paragraph 22.
[39] Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries of
Theodor Herzl, vol. 2 (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), 711.
[40] Noam Chomsky, Fateful triangle: The United
States, Israel, and the Palestinians (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 766-79.
[41] After years of sectarian
attacks, the Brotherhood initiated a last final uprising in Hama around the
time the Yinon plan was published, which at the same time marked its defeat as
a real political force in Syria. The violent crackdown by the Syrian army,
however, was met by international outrage. Just like with the events of Daraa
in March 2011, which sparked the current crisis, the Islamist militants were
backed by foreign countries, and in spite of the fact that the insurrection was
initiated by a Brotherhood’s ambush in which 70 soldiers were slaughtered, the
events are mainly remembered as a government massacre: Tim Anderson, The
dirty war on Syria: Washington, regime change and resistance (Montréal:
Global Research Publishers, 2016), 15-6.
[42] Although the US provided
logistical, intelligence and armaments-support to Iraq in the war, it publicly
condemned Saddam Hussein’s usage of chemical weapons (many ingredients of which
were provide by the US) against Kurdish civilians and Iran, and from the First
Gulf War onwards, it was used to ascribe the brutal character of Hussein’s
rule.
[43] Israel in fact pushed and
lobbied the US both via the diplomatic and covert channels very hard to
initiate an attack on Saddam Hussein. The Israelis even regarded the American
response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as moderate and wanted a harsher policy,
to such an extent that Israeli President Chaim Herzog recommended that the
Americans use nuclear weapons. See Harun Yahua, “Plan for Iraq invasion drawn
up decades ago,” Rense, 10.07.2004,
[44] John Maersheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel
lobby and U.S. foreign policy,” Middle East Policy 13, no. 3 (2006).
[45] Jonathan Cook, Israel
and the clash of civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the plan to remake the Middle
East (London: Pluto Press, 2008).
[46] Aluf Benn, “Background enthusiastic IDF awaits
war in Iraq,” Ha’aretz, 16.02.2003,
[47] Uzi Benziman, “Who would give the go-ahead?”, Ha’aretz,
22.03.2003, as cited in Cook, Israel and the clash of civilisations, 45.
[48] Maersheimer and Walt, “The Israel lobby and U.S.
foreign policy,” 59-60.
[49] Avigdor Liberman,
“Israel’s national security in a turbulent Middle East,” Defense News,
02.12.2016,
[50] Ze’ev Schiff, “the
Israeli interest in the Iraq-Iran war,” Ha’aretz, 02.06.1982, as cited
in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 769.
[51] Caroline Glick, “Fighting
the next war,” Jerusalem Post, 19.04.2007, as cited in Cook, Israel
and the clash of civilisations, 148.
[52] Wikileaks, “H: New intel Syria, Turkey, Israel,
Iran. SID,” Hillary Clinton email archive, http://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12172.
[53] Efraim Inbar, “The destruction of the Islamic
State is a strategic mistake,” BESA Center Perspectives, paper no. 352 (2016).
