English: Middle East, G8 Greater Middle East and associated areas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Plans for Redrawing the Middle East
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006
in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was
credited by the Western media for coining the term) in 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 U.S. 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 publicly by Washington
and Tel Aviv 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, 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 during a press conference that “[w]hat
we’re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the
Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth
pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we [meaning the United
States] have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle
East [and] not going back to the old one.”1
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
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech on the “New Middle
East” had set the stage. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon –which had been
fully endorsed by Washington and London– have further compromised and
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…”2
Anglo-American occupied Iraq, particularly Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to
be the preparatory ground for the balkanization (division) and
finlandization (pacification) 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. (See map below)
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 U.S.
influence into the former Soviet Union and the ex-Soviet Republics of
Central Asia. The Middle East is to some extent the southern tier of
Central Asia. Central Asia in turn is also termed as “Russia’s Southern
Tier” or the Russian “Near Abroad.”
Many Russian and Central Asian scholars, military planners,
strategists, security advisors, economists, and politicians consider
Central Asia (“Russia’s Southern Tier”) to be the vulnerable and “soft
under-belly” of the Russian Federation.3
It should be noted that in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, alluded
to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski,
calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the
Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central
Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran
and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the
Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.
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. This is a map of a redrawn
and restructured Middle East identified as the “New Middle East.”
MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It
was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a
retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006). Although the map does not
officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training
program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This
map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the
National War Academy as well as in military planning circles. This map
of the “New Middle East” seems to be based on several other maps,
including older maps of potential boundaries in the Middle East
extending back to the era of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and World War
I. This map is showcased and presented as the brainchild of retired
Lieutenant-Colonel (U.S. Army) Ralph Peters, who believes the redesigned
borders contained in the map will fundamentally solve the problems of
the contemporary Middle East.
The map of the “New Middle East” was a key element in the retired Lieutenant-Colonel’s book, Never Quit the Fight, which was released to the public onJuly 10, 2006. This map of a redrawn Middle East was also published, under the title of Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, in the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.5
It should be noted that Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted to
the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the
U.S. Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost
authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and U.S.
foreign policy. t has been written that Ralph Peters’ “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
Lieutenant-Colonel Peters is revealing and putting forward what
Washington D.C. 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 Peter’s:
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. Drawn by
self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining
their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of
millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle
East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be
consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional
borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality
to deadly religious extremism — 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.
Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make
every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and
religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere,
reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as
their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps
accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most
significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and
Arab Shia [Muslims], but still fail to account adequately for Middle
Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another
numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be
redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against
the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.
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. Even those who abhor the topic of altering
borders would be well-served to engage in an exercise that attempts to
conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries
between the Bosphorus and the Indus. Accepting that
international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of
war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the
Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the
extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are
dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop
generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. 6
“Necessary Pain”
Besides believing that there is “cultural stagnation” in the Middle
East, it must be noted that Ralph Peters 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 U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza 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” that Washington, London, and Tel Aviv envision.
Moreover, it is worth noting that the subject of the Armenian
Genocide is being politicized and stimulated in Europe to offend Turkey.7
The overhaul, dismantlement, and reassembly of the nation-states of
the Middle East have been packaged as a solution to the hostilities in
the Middle East, 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 in various
parts of the globe including Africa, Latin America, the Balkans, and the
Middle East. Iraq is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American
strategy of “divide and conquer.” Other examples are Rwanda, Yugoslavia,
the Caucasus, and Afghanistan.
Amongst the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of
genuine democracy which U.S. and British foreign policy has 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 United States has no problems with because
they are firmly alligned 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 in 1953
(where a U.S./U.K. sponsored coup was staged against the democratic
government of Prime Minister Mossadegh) 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.
The Turkish Protest at NATO’s Military College in Rome
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters’ map of the “New Middle East” has
sparked angry reactions in Turkey. According to Turkish press releases
on September 15, 2006 the map of the “New Middle East” was displayed in
NATO’s Military College in Rome, Italy. It was additionally reported
that Turkish officers were immediately outraged by the presentation of a
portioned and segmented Turkey.8
The map received some form of approval from the U.S. National War
Academy before it was unveiled in front of NATO officers in Rome.
The Turkish Chief of Staff, General Buyukanit, contacted the U.S.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, and protested
the event and the exhibition of the redrawn map of the Middle East,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan. 9
Furthermore the Pentagon has gone out of its way to assure Turkey that
the map does not reflect official U.S. policy and objectives in the
region, but this seems to be conflicting with Anglo-American actions in
the Middle East and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.
Is there a Connection between Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Eurasian Balkans” and the “New Middle East” Project?
The following are important excerpts and passages from former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives.
Brzezinski also 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 [balkanization],”
and that, “If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the
internal problems of the region would become unmanageable.”0
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:
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.
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 also unstable, American power is that region’s [meaning
the Middle East’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 neighbors, 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.”
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 neighbors, 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.
The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the
next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy
anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between
1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption
occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic
development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration
and exploitation of new sources of energy, and the Central Asian region
and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas
and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North
Sea.
Access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent
objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interests,
rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations, and fuel
international rivalries. The situation is made all the more volatile by
the fact that the region is not only a power vacuum but is also
internally unstable.
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.
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. 11
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. In the wake of the the First World War the borders of the Balkans
and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn. 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 reasons behind the First World War are more sinister
than the standard school-book explanation, the assassination of the heir
to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Economic factors were the real motivation for
the large-scale war in 1914.
Norman Dodd, a former Wall Street banker and investigator for the
U.S. Congress, who examined tax-exempt foundations, confirmed in a 1982
interview that those powerful individuals who from behind the scenes
controlled the finances, policies, and government of the United States
had in fact also planned U.S. involvement in a war, which would
contribute to entrenching their grip on power.
The following testimonial is from the transcript of Norman Dodd’s interview with G. Edward Griffin;
We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie
Foundation began operations. And, in that year, the trustees meeting,
for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed
throughout the balance of the year, in a very learned fashion. And the
question is this: Is there any means known more effective than war,
assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they
conclude that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity,
than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and
discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?
Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed
from the thinking of most of the people of this country [the United
States], than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows
[wars] in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew
where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as
follows: we must control the State Department.
And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do
that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the
diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim
at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a
war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their
minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a
telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly.
And finally, of course, the war is over.
At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call
a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914,
when World War I broke out.
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.
Notes:
1 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Special Briefing on
the Travel to the Middle East and Europe of Secretary Condoleezza Rice
(Press Conference, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C., July 21,
2006).
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/69331.htm
2 Professor Mark LeVine, The New Creative Destruction, Asia Times, August 22, 2006.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH22Ak01.html
3 Professor Andrej Kreutz, The Geopolitics of post-Soviet Russia and the Middle East, Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) (Washington, D.C.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, January 2002).
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2501/is_1_24/ai_93458168/pg_1
4 The Caucasus or Caucasia can be considered as part of the Middle East or as a separate region
5 Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899
6 Ibid.
7 Crispian Balmer, French MPs back Armenia genocide bill, Turkey angry, Reuters, October 12, 2006.
James McConalogue, French against Turks: Talking about Armenian Genocide, The Brussels Journal, October 10, 2006.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1585
8 Suleyman Kurt, Carved-up Map of Turkey at NATO Prompts U.S. Apology, Zaman (Turkey), September 29, 2006.
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&hn=36919
9 Ibid.
10 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives (New York City: Basic Books, 1997).
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465027261
11 Ibid.
NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan has been successfully divided, all but in
name. Animosity has been inseminated in the Levant, where a Palestinian
civil war is being nurtured and divisions in Lebanon agitated. The
Eastern Mediterranean has been successfully militarized by NATO. Syria
and Iran continue to be demonized by the Western media, with a view to
justifying a military agenda. In turn, the Western media has fed, on a
daily basis, incorrect and biased notions that the populations of Iraq
cannot co-exist and that the conflict is not a war of occupation but a
“civil war” characterised by domestic strife between Shiites, Sunnis and
Kurds. Attempts at intentionally creating animosity between the
different ethno-cultural and religious groups of the Middle East have
been systematic. In fact, they are part of a carefully designed covert
intelligence agenda. Even more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments,
such as that of Saudi Arabia, are assisting Washington in fomenting
divisions between Middle Eastern populations. The ultimate objective is
to weaken the resistance movement against foreign occupation through a
“divide and conquer strategy” which serves Anglo-American and Israeli
interests in the broader region.
μέσω Project For A New Middle East « Libya 360° Mirror.
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