Iran’s president Ahmadinejad never said Israel should
be "wiped off the map," although Shimon
Peres did say "the president of Iran should remember that Iran can
also be wiped off the map." As Anneliese
Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann note, Ahmadinejad was deliberately misquoted
as part of an ongoing propaganda campaign against Iran by the neocons, in particular
the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), founded by Yigal Carmon,
who served time in Israeli military intelligence, and Meyrav Wurmser, a neocon
that had a hand in crafting the neocon document "A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm" presented to then Israeli president,
Benjamin Netanyahu. MEMRI is known for selectively quoting and distorting Arab
and Muslim news reports and editorials.
Shimon Peres was simply using the distortions of Ahmadinejad’s comments
to make excuses for the long-held Israeli and later neocon plan to not necessarily "wipe
off the map" Islamic countries, but rather reduce them through "Lebanonization," or
balkanization, a plan sketched out by Oded Yinon, an Israeli diplomat attached
to the Foreign Ministry. Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in
the 1980s" document, according to historian Stephen
Sniegoski, "undoubtedly reflected high-level thinking in the Israeli
military and intelligence establishment. The article called for Israel to bring
about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of
ethnic groupings."
Of course, Israel realized it did not have the power or resources to pull
off this massive undertaking. Israeli foreign policy expert Yehoshafat Harkabi
reflected on Yinon’s critique "to impose a Pax Israelica on the
Middle East, to dominate the Arab countries and treat them harshly" and
hoped that "the failed Israeli attempt to impose a new order in the weakest
Arab state—Lebanon—will disabuse people of similar ambitions in
other territories." Sniegoski comments: "Left unconsidered by Harkabi
was the possibility that the United States would act as Israel’s proxy
to achieve this goal," a fact partially realized a decade later when Bush
Senior invaded Iraq and, more than another decade removed, his son finished
the job.
In the wake of Bush Senior’s invasion and merciless attack on Iraqi
civilian infrastructure, octogenarian British "Orientalist" Bernard
Lewis wrote for the premier globalist periodical, the CFR’s Foreign Affairs,
that most "of the states of the Middle East … are of recent and
artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process [balkanization].
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," a miserable and violent condition preferred by the
Israelis and the Straussian neocons (see British
Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations, Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg).
Meanwhile, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s feeble and somewhat absurd letter sent
to Bush through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran—an effort to stave off the
impending destruction and "Lebanonization" of his country—was
received in a predictable fashion. "US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice dismissed Iranian President’s surprise letter to President George
W Bush, saying it did not seriously address the standoff over Tehran’s
disputed nuclear program," reports NDTV. "This letter is not the
place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything
of the sort. It isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing
with in a concrete way," declared Secretary of State Condi
Rice. "Rice’s comments were the most detailed response from
the United States to the letter, the first from an Iranian head of state to
an American president since the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran," ABC
News adds. "She would not discuss the contents in detail but made
clear that the United States would not change its tack on Iran."
In short, the shock and awe campaign against the people of Iran—a beginning
fusillade in the process of balkanizing Iran into several more easily digestible
pieces—is on. Now the question is when this will happen and what the
response will be here in America and across the world. Of course, for the neocons,
this response is hardly important and may be safely ignored, as opponents will
once again be dismissed as a "focus group" (as Bush called those
of us opposed to his invasion of Iraq) and the process of splintering the Middle
East will move forward, closing in on its ultimate goal, as described by Bernard
Lewis, of delivering the Muslim world "into a chaos of squabbling, feuding,
fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."
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