In a little-noted article printed in early August in the
Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for
officers and leaders in the United States military community, early
retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US
strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.
Ethnically Cleansing the Entire
Middle East
Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the
Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was
responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the
Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial
endeavor designed to correct past errors. "Without such major boundary
revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East," he
observes, but then adds wryly: "Oh, and one other dirty little secret
from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works."
Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping
reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve
massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a
genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, "we may
take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the
region will continue to be our own." Among his proposals are the need
to establish "an independent Kurdish state" to guarantee the
long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the
humanitarian sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: "A Free Kurdistan,
stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most
pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan."
He chastises the United States and its
coalition partners for missing "a glorious chance" to fracture Iraq,
which "should have been divided into three smaller states
immediately." This would leave "Iraq's three Sunni-majority provinces
as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a
Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater
Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn." Meanwhile, the Shia south of old Iraq
"would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the
Persian Gulf." Jordan, a US-Israeli friend in the region, would
"retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi
expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would
suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan." Iran too would "lose a
great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the
Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces
around Herat in today's Afghanistan." Although this vast imperial
program could be impossible to implement now, with time, "new and
natural borders will emerge", driven by "the inevitable attendant
bloodshed."
As for the goals of this plan, Maj.
Peters is equally candid. While including the necessary caveats about
fighting "for security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy",
he also mentions the third important issue -- "and for access to oil
supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself".
The whole thing sounds disturbingly
familiar, especially to those who have read the musings of then
Israeli Foreign Ministry official
Oded Yinon.
Keeping the World Safe… for Our
Economy
Despite trying to dress up his vision as
an exercise in attempting to selflessly democratize the Middle East,
in a contribution to the quarterly US Army War College journal
Parameters almost a decade ago, he acknowledged with
some jubilation that: "Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize,
and apply relevant knowledge soar -- professionally, financially,
politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a
minority." This minority will inevitably conflict with the vast
majority of the world's population. "For the world masses, devastated
by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is
‘nasty, brutish ... and short-circuited.'" In "every country and
region," these masses who can neither "understand the new world", nor
"profit from its uncertainties … will become the violent enemies of
their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and
ultimately of the United States." The coming clash, then, is not
really about blood, faith, ethnicity, at all. It is about the gap
between the haves and the have-nots. "We are entering a new American
century", he says, in a veiled reference to the Bush administration
Project of the same name founded in the same year he was
writing. In the new century, "we will become still wealthier,
culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite
hatreds without precedent."
In predicting the future course for the
US Army, Maj. Peters argues that: "We will see countries and
continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century
economic trends." In this context, he says, "we in the United States
will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves," and therefore,
"terrorism will be the most common form of violence," along with
"transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border
conflicts, and conventional wars." Meanwhile, "in defense of its
interests", the US "will be required to intervene in some of these
contests." And then he sums it all up in one tidy paragraph:
There will be no peace. At any given
moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts
in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the
headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and
ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces
will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our
cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
So what's prompted Maj. Peter's decision
to air his vision for the Middle East in the Armed Forces Journal
at this time in the wake of the latest Middle East crisis? A number of
critical developments.
Source: Imminent Global Crises
Converge
According to an American source with
high-level access to the US military, political and intelligence
establishment, Western policymakers are in no doubt that the world
faces the imminent convergence of multiple global crises. These crises
threaten not only to undermine the basis of Western power in its
current military and geopolitical configurations, but also to
destabilize the entire foundations of industrial civilization.
The source said that the latest
petroleum data indicates that "global oil production most likely
peaked two years ago." This is consistent with the findings of
respected geologists such as leading oil depletion expert
Dr. Colin Campbell, who in the late 90s predicted that
world oil production would peak in the early 21st century. "We have
come to the end of the first half of the Oil Age," said Dr. Campbell,
who has a doctorate in geology from the University of Oxford and more
than 40 years of experience in the oil industry. Similarly, Kenneth
Deffeyes, a geologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University,
estimates the occurrence of the peak near the end of last year.
The source also said that leading US
financial analysts privately believe that "a collapse of the global
banking system is imminent by 2008." Although the warning is
consistent with the public findings of other experts, this is the
first time that a more precise date has been estimated. In a prescient
analysis drawing on
highly placed financial sources, US historian Gabriel
Kolko, professor emeritus at York University, concluded in late July
that:
All the factors which make for crashes
-- excessive leveraging, rising interest rates, etc. -- exist...
Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing
consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like
myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as
immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who
have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we
should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises.
The source also commented on the danger
posed by rapid climate change. Although most conventional estimates
suggest that global climate catastrophe is not due before another 30
odd years, he argued that the multiplication of several
"tipping-points" suggested that a series of devastating climatic
events could be "triggered within the next 10 to 15 years." Once
again, this is consistent with the findings of other experts, most
recently a
joint task-force report by the Institute for Public Policy
Research in the UK, the Center for American Progress in the US, and
the Australia Institute, which said in January last year that if the
average world temperature rises "two degrees centigrade above the
average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial
revolution", it would trigger an irreversible chain of climatic
disasters. In its
report, the task force says:
The possibilities include reaching
climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West
Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise
sea level more than 10 meters over the space of a few centuries), the
shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf
Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from
a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon.
The source also revealed that US
generals had repeatedly war-gamed a prospective conflict with Iran,
but consistently found that the simulations predicted "an absolute
nuclear disaster", from which no clear winner would emerge. The
scenarios gamed were so dismal, he said, that the generals briefed
administration officials to avoid such a war at all costs. However,
the source said that the Bush administration is ignoring the fears of
the US military.
In this context, it would seem that the
musings of Maj. Peters issue less from a concerted confidence in US
power, than from a sense of growing desperation and unease as the
political, financial and energy architecture of the global system is
increasingly fragmenting under the weight of its own inherent
instability. Despite the seeming gloominess of the situation, however,
there is clearly fundamental dissent about the current trajectory of
American and Western policy at the highest levels of power. The source
remarked that "humanity is on the verge of a precipice, and either
we'll all just drop off the edge, or we'll evolve. I'm not sure what
that new human being might look like, but it will clearly have to
involve a completely new set of ideas and values, a new way of looking
at the world that respects life and nature."
Nafeez Mosaddeq
Ahmed is the author of
The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry. He teaches
courses in International Relations at the School of Social Sciences
and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he is
doing his PhD studying imperialism and genocide. Since 9/11, he has
authored three other books revealing the realpolitik behind the
rhetoric of the War on Terror:
The War on Freedom,
Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for
Iraq and
The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism.
In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about
his research on international terrorism.
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