Plans for Redrawing the Middle East

Overlapping of Anglo-American-Israeli Agenda

The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who coined it as a 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 US 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 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, Great 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 that “[w]hat we’re seeing here [Israeli attacks on Lebanon and country’s resultant destruction], in a sense, is the ‘birth pangs’ of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we [the United States] do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.” 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

Condoleezza Rice’s speech on the “New Middle East” had set the stage. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon further 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…”Anglo-American occupied Iraq, particularly Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to be the preparatory ground for the balkanization and finlandization 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.

Read More: Redrawing the Middle East – Sir Mark Sykes, imperialism and the Sykes-Picot agreement

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 US influence into the former Soviet Union and the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia.

Many Russian and Central Asian scholars, military planners, strategists, security advisors, economists and politicians consider Central Asia vulnerable and “soft under-belly” of the Russian Federation.

It should be noted that in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives’, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan), and, to some extent, both Iran and Turkey.

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.

Although the map does not officially reflect the Pentagon doctrine, it seems to be based on several other maps, including older maps of potential boundaries in the Middle East extending back to the era of US President Woodrow Wilson and World War I. This map is showcased and presented as the brainchild of retired Lieutenant-Colonel (US Army) Ralph Peters, who believes the redesigned borders contained in the map will fundamentally solve the problems of the contemporary Middle East.

It should be noted that Lt. Col. Peters was last posted to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the US Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and US foreign policy.

Ralph’s 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 that Lt. Col. Peters is revealing and putting forward what Washington DC 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 … [b]ut the unjust borders in the Middle East … generate more trouble than can be consumed locally. While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone … 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. 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.”

Necessary Pain

Besides believing that there is “cultural stagnation” in the Middle East, Ralph 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 Ms 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”.

The overhaul, dismantlement and reassembly of the nation-states of the Middle East have been packaged as a solution to the hostilities in the region, 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. Iraq is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American strategy of “divide and conquer.”

Amongst the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of genuine democracy that the US and British foreign policies have 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 US has no problems with because they are firmly aligned 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 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.

“Eurasian Balkans” and the “New Middle East” Project

The following are important excerpts and passages from former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives”. Brzezinski 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,” and that “[i]f either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable.”

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:

1. “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.

2. 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 unstable, American power is region’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 neighbours, 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.”

3. 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 neighbours, 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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. 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 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.

Why Plans for Redrawing the Middle East will Fail?

The name Greater Middle East Project was first used by the administration of George W. Bush, the 43rd US president, and was discussed during the G-8 summit in 2004. However, it wasn’t a new concept; on the contrary, it was just a new name for an old, long-term project that first began in the late 19th Century.

The project extended to Morocco in the west, Pakistan in the east, the Black Sea coasts of Turkey in the north, and Yemen in the south: In other words, the most volatile, or “the most tampered, the most provoked and most easily-ignited region of the world,” scene to countless wars, conflicts, military coups, separatist moves, terror and instability.

Another important thing about the region is that it houses the largest, most central and most strategic part of the Islamic world.

Although the implementation and publicisation methods have varied from time to time, neither the essence nor the true goal of the project has ever really changed. Since the beginning, its main purpose, determined by certain “deep states” of Western countries, has been to prevent an Ottoman-style union and alliance between the regional countries and peoples, thus ultimately preventing a Union of Islam.

Surely, the hopes of obtaining control over the natural resources and natural wealth of the region came as an added bonus. Furthermore, the prospect of getting astronomical deals for certain arms dealers, due to relentless wars and conflicts, wouldn’t hurt either.

By the end of the 1800s, after the Ottoman administration made a deal with the German Deutsche Bank to extract oil in Mosul and Kirkuk, the British immediately built an indirect partnership with the same Germany establishment in order to be a part of the Middle East oil scene.

The fastest developing country of the era, the USA, was soon to follow. In other words, the eyes of the West suddenly turned to the rich oil sources in the Middle East, just as the Ottoman Empire was struggling to stay alive.

Britain and France parcelled out the former Ottoman lands in the Middle East, marking the first official and wide-scale step towards the Great Middle East Project. Following that, the project was implemented gradually until today, despite countless revisions, modifications, improvements and changes.

The decision passed by the US Congress in 1957, widely known as the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” but originally called “Preserving the Peace and Stability in the Middle East” had the same approach to the Middle East as today’s the Greater Middle East Project.

In fact, the phrase “new world order” used by former US president George H W. Bush in a press conference in August 1990, was nothing other than a fresh attempt to familiarise the public with the Greater Middle East Project.

The Clash of Civilisations, the famous work of Samuel P. Huntington, a political analyst and a former adviser to US Department of Defence, in the journal Foreign Affairs, also laid the philosophical foundations of the ongoing Greater Middle East Project. This piece, published in 1993, was later turned into a comprehensive book shaped around the same ideas.

Indeed, that year, the said “New Middle East” concept and the detailed map of this new Middle East surfaced. Besides many other happenings in the region, it was followed by the Arab Spring that pushed many Arab countries into an era of relentless turmoil. Undoubtedly, the Arab Spring marked another serious step towards the realisation of the map.

Many Western “deep states” believe that they are getting closer to achieving the map that has been their dream for centuries now. However, one thing is certain: dreams and covert plans do not always go as planned. The history is full of sinister plans that took a lot of effort to build, but went awry nevertheless.

It is entirely possible that more challenges are ahead for the Middle East. Yet, the complete sundering of the Islamic world and a subsequent prevention of the Islamic Union is not to be found in destiny. There might be difficulties and problems, but the map that will come out of it is likely not going to be one the certain “deep states” have been hoping for.