Imagine for a moment an Arabic political publication puts a map on its cover
advertising a Balkanized United States as a future inevitability. They could give some of the Southwest to Mexico, some of the northeast to Canada, and break up the rest into warring little states. Maybe color in an independent Quebec.
What would be the reaction among American observers?
The above image is part of the propaganda prep-work for a policy aimed at generations of warfare among the peoples of the Middle East. The map above presupposes the deaths of millions. Their fates are presented as a function of their cultures and histories, so as to to avoid any association with US policy. Presenting the map in this fashion banishes in advance the notion that the peoples involved have any choice, or that this map, if it comes to be, will be in large part the self-fulfilling prophecy of US "security planning."
The author, Jeffrey Goldberg, enjoys his present prominence not in spite of, but because he was a leading pimp for the Big Lies of 2002 and 2003.
I hope everyone has seen Radar's excellent 2007 article comparing the happy fates of media figures who were "wrong" (lying) about Iraq, like Zakaria and Friedman, compared to those who told the truth about WMD, the al-Qaeda links and the coming invasion, like Ritter and Scheer.
http://www.radaronline.com/features/200 ... -print.php
GETTING RICH BY BEING WRONG
Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.radaronline.com/features/200 ... iraq_5.php
FEAR MONGER Goldberg
Pre-war position: As Judy Miller pursues freelance projects out in Sag Harbor, doggedly accompanied by the rotting corpse of her career, she likely has much time for rumination. And it's tough to imagine these sessions of thought don't sometimes include spleen toward Jeffrey Goldberg. How did she end up getting screwed by Ahmed Chalabi and the neocons—
metaphorically, of course—while Goldberg, who also demonstrated a remarkable willingness to channel their war-enabling disinformation, managed to keep both his job and his reputation? It's a tough task to argue that his work was any less influential in the pre-war debate than hers, or that he was any less of a go-to guy for the Rumsfeld gang. For instance, when Doug Feith had a hard-on about launching military action against Arab terrorists in Paraguay, who stepped forward and wrote the scare piece? Now we have a big special-ops base! And when Chalabi wanted to disseminate a dodgy tidbit about Saddam having a secret evil plan to kill 100,000 Israelis in a single day with bioweapons, was it not Goldberg who duly pimped it to the New Yorker's million discerning readers? It was indeed.
Goldberg did this, in fact, in his (in)famous 2002 feature "The Great Terror," which helped create the well-worn media portrait of Saddam as a genocidal lunatic with WMDs on hair-trigger ready to exterminate every hamburger-eating, freedom-loving person in the world. Both Bush and Cheney spoke approvingly of the 16,000-word article and singled it out as a good explanation why a war effort was justified. But the "Great Terror" is a J-school nightmare: bad sources, compromised sources, unacknowledged uncertainties, and the whole text spun through with an alarmist rhetoric that is now either laughable or nauseating, depending on your mood. (How did Remnick let this stuff go to print?) Goldberg floated sketchy theories that the dictator was working closely with Al Qaeda and was so irrationally villainous that he was developing a super-duper WMD from wheat mold that, in the author's words, had "no military value [except] to cause liver cancer, particularly in children."
Now. Where else have we seen this map before?
"Ethnic cleansing works." - Ralph Peters
THIS MAP WAS DRAWN UP TO ACCOMPANY A 2006 ARTICLE IN ARMED FORCES JOURNAL BY RALPH PETERS, A NEOCON THEORIST.
Original article:
http://live.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899
Blood borders
How a better Middle East would look
By Ralph Peters
QUOTES:
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.
(MEANING: WHICH IS WHY SELF-INTERESTED EUROPEAN-AMERICANS SHOULD NOW RE-DRAW THE MAP)
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. (...)
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.
(HOW DO BORDERS GET RE-DRAWN IN PRACTICE? DUH...)
(...) As for those who refuse to "think the unthinkable," declaring that boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).
Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.
The map generated sufficient controversy in the Middle East that Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the Saudis to assure them that this was not official US policy.
She talks, but others plan.
My favorite of the Ralph Peters Countries is the generic "Arab Shia State" that happens to incorporate all of the richest oil areas of both Iraq and Iran, and wraps around most of the Gulf Coast, completely surrounding yet bizarrely avoiding the incorporation of Kuwait, the only country left untouched by the plan. The US already owns that piece, of course, and presumably Peters doesn't want to antagonize them.
"Arab Shia State." Do I see an important future ally to the American interest in stability and democracy, blah blah? This Peters -- who I think may qualify under the Nuremberg Principles as a planner of war crimes and genocide just on the basis of proposing this map as the region's better and inevitable future -- he can't even come up with a name for it! That's how much he cares.
The "Clean Break - Securing the Realm" document prepared by Perle and Co. for Netanyahu in 1996.
The PNAC plan for the Middle East, involving all of the key Bush regime figures and top architects of the later Iraq invasion.
Ralph Peters with the above map.
Now Goldberg chimes in, as an "analyst" from the "independent" media.
It's going to happen, and "we" will have nothing to do with it. (Sort of like Yugoslavia?)
They do not keep their idea secret: the ME should be broken up into new, smaller, more manageable states who are at war with each other. The US will attempt to manage this checkerboard, and make sure the units who control the most oil are peaceful and "friendly."
Never mind that this is hubris and it's not going to work. The heart of the matter is that this was always the plan. There may have been a Plan A, to be sure: "they will greet us with flowers," "our grandchildren will sing of our glory."
But failing that, and it has of course failed, here is the Plan B that was on its way all along, from many of the men who made up the original Team B under Bush Sr. at the CIA.
The Iraqi "civil war" is the intended result of US policy in Iraq. It is what Cheney and Rumsfeld expected (surely understanding the greeted-with-flowers scenario as more bullshit to sucker Americans).
The invasion,
the killing of untold thousands by bombing from the air, still ongoing,
the poisoning of the country with depleted uranium,
the destruction of the energy and water infrastructure and cultural treasures,
the torture of civilians and its reception in Iraq, an outrageous affront to their identity and dignity,
the British and presumably American false-flag attacks,
the lies about foreign insurgents and the propaganda construct "Zarqawi",
the likelihood of false-flag attacks on the Iraqi Shia attributed to "Zarqawi" (whether he ever existed or not),
the creation of death-squads in an Interior Ministry known to be infiltrated by Shi'a militias,
the arming of different factions by Saudi and Iranian backers,
the Saddam execution...
all of this was arranged, expected, encouraged, and welcomed by the real US policy.
The idea was always to create a situation in which the Iraqi people kill each other, and then to pretend that "golly gee, we were incompetent and accidentally started a civil war among these crazy ethnic groups we didn't even know existed!"
And as these maps show, it's supposed to go beyond Iraq's borders, break up Turkey and Iran and the rest. A hundred years of war, with 14 gargantuan US bases at its geographic center in Iraq, from which the "forces of order" can intervene and undermine anyone who builds up too much power in any given center.
And the reality: Given this course of murder and hubris, isn't likeliest that within 10 years the US will be driven entirely out of the Middle East, left only with the unsinkable aircraft carrier in Israel?
