War Is Realizing the Israelizing of the World

Toward an Occupation Writ Global

by Dan Sanchez,

As Western-driven wars drive the Muslim world ever deeper into jihadi-ridden failed state chaos, events seem to be careening toward a tipping point. Eventually, the region will become so profuse a font of terrorists and refugees, that Western popular resistance to “boots on the ground” will finally be overcome. Then, the US-led empire will finally have the public mandate it needs to thoroughly and permanently colonize the Greater Middle East. It is easy to see how the West’s Military Industrial Complex and crony energy industry would profit for such an outcome.

But what about the West’s most important “ally” in the region? How would Israel stand to benefit?

Tel Aviv has long pursued a strategy of “divide and conquer”: both directly, and through the tremendous influence of the Israel lobby and neocons over US foreign policy.

The famous paper from the early 1980s by the Israeli diplomat and journalist Oded Yinon is most explicit in this regard. The “Yinon Plan” calls for the “dissolution” of “the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula.” Each country was to “fall apart along sectarian and ethnic lines, with each resulting fragment being ”“hostile” to its “neighbors.” Yinon claimed that:

“This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run”

This goal could be realized through fomenting discord and war among the Arabs:

“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.”

Sowing discord among Arabs had already been part of Israeli policy years before Yinon’s paper.

To counter the secular-Arab nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel supported an Islamist movement in the Occupied Territories, beginning in the late 70s (around the same time the US began directly supporting the Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen in Afghanistan). The Israel-sponsored Palestinian Islamist movement eventually resulted in the creation of Hamas, which Israel also supported and helped to rise.

Also in the late 70s, Israel began fomenting inter-Arab strife in Lebanon. Beginning in 1976, Israel militarily supported Maronite Christian Arabs, aggravating a civil war that had recently begun there. In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon, and recruited locals to create a proxy force called the “South Lebanon Army.”

Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982, and tried to install a Christian Fascist organization called the Phalange in power. This was foiled when the new Phalangist ruler was assassinated. In reprisal, the Phalange perpetrated, with Israeli connivance, the massacre of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shiites. (See Murray Rothbard’s moving contemporary coverage of the atrocity.)

The civil war that Israel helped foster rent Lebanon asunder for a decade and a half. It was Lebanon’s chaotic fragmentation that Yinon cited as the model for what he wanted to see throughout the rest of the Arab world.

The US has also long pit Muslim nations, sects, and ethnic groups against each other. Throughout the 80s, the US armed Iraq (including with chemical weapons) in its invasion of and war against Iran. At the very same time, the US was also secretly selling arms to the Iranian side of that same conflict. It is worth noting that two Reagan administration officials involved in the Iran-Contra Affair were Israel-first neocons Elliot Abrams and Michael Ledeen. Abrams was convicted (though later pardoned) on related criminal charges.

This theme can also be seen in “A Clean Break”: a strategy document written in 1996 for the Israeli government by a “study group” led by future neocon Bush administration officials and Iraq War architects. In that document, “divide and conquer” went under the euphemism of “a strategy based on balance of power.” This strategy involved allying with some Muslim powers (Turkey and Jordan) to roll back and eventually overthrow others. Particularly it called for regime change in Iraq in order to destabilize Syria. And destabilizing both Syria and Iran was chiefly about countering the “challenges” those countries posed to Israel’s interests in Lebanon.

The primary author of “A Clean Break,” David Wurmser, also wrote another strategy document in 1996, this one for American audiences, called “Coping with Crumbling States.” Wurmser argued that “tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition” were what truly defined Arab politics. He claimed that secular-Arab nationalist regimes like Iraq’s and Syria’s tried to defy that reality, but would ultimately fail and be torn apart by it. Wurmser therefore called for “expediting” and controlling that inevitable “chaotic collapse” through regime change in Iraq.

Especially thanks to the tremendously effective efforts of the neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC), regime change in Iraq became official US policy in 1998. Then, 9/11 struck while the US Presidency was dominated by neocons (including many Clean Break signatories and PNAC members) and their close allies.

Beginning with the ensuing Iraq War, the Yinon/Wurmser “divide and conquer” strategy went into overdrive.

Following the overthrow of secular-Arab nationalist ruler Saddam Hussein, the policies of the American invaders could hardly have been better designed to instigate a civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shias. The “de-Baathification” of the Iraqi government sent countless secular Sunnis into unemployed desperation. This was compounded with total disenfranchisement when the US-orchestrated election handed total power over to the Shias, and the US backed the most sectarian Shias. And it was further compounded with persecution when the US-armed (and Iran-backed) Shiite militias began ethnic cleansing Baghdad and other cities of Sunnis. All this was the perfect recipe for civil war. And when that civil war came, the US armed forces made reconciliation impossible by completely taking the Shiite side.

Now in neighboring Syria, the US has been fueling a civil war for the past four years by sponsoring international Sunni jihadis fighting alongside ISIS and Syrian Al Qaeda in their war to overthrow the secular-Arab nationalist ruler Bashar al-Assad, and to “purify” the land of Shias, Druze, Christians, and other non-Salafist “apostates.” Key co-sponsors of this jihad include the Muslim regimes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. And key allies and defenders of Assad include such Muslim forces as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran’s Quds Force, and Iraqi militias.

Jihadi-ridden civil wars have also been fomented in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya, the latter following the American overthrow of yet another secular-Arab nationalist ruler.

In these catastrophes we see virtually everything Yinon and Wurmser called for in order to “secure the realm” of Israel. We see Yinon’s “inter-Arab confrontation,” “dissolution,” “fall[ing] apart along ethnic and sectarian lines,” and “hostility” among “neighbors.” And we see Wurmser’s “chaotic collapse” and the smashing of secular-Arab nationalism. It should be noted that Wurmser considered Islamic fundamentalism to far less of a priority as a threat than secular-Arab nationalism, and that the latter should be given no quarter, even for the sake of stemming the former.

But how could being surrounded by such a maelstrom possibly “secure the realm” of Israel? Sheldon Richman posits that:

“Inter-Arab confrontation promoted by the United States and Israel … would suit expansionist Israelis who have no wish to deal justly with the Palestinians and the Occupied Territories. The more dangerous the Middle East appears, the more Israeli leaders can count on the United States not to push for a fair settlement with the Palestinians. The American people, moreover, are likely to be more lenient toward Israel’s brutality if chaos prevails in the neighboring states.”

Moreover, the more dangerous the Middle East appears, the more willing Israel’s ally America would be to invade and occupy it as brutally and permanently as the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

http://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Sanchez/2015/12/21/war-is-realizing-the-israelizing-of-the-world/