Atomization of the Middle East: The Long-term Policy

Commenting on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Justin Raimondo, editor of Antiwar.com, declared “The actual purpose was to blow the country to smithereens: to atomize it, and crush it, so that it would never rise again”. He continues: “When we invaded and occupied Iraq, we didn’t just militarily defeat Iraq’s armed forces – we dismantled their army, and their police force, along with all the other institutions that held the country together. The educational system was destroyed, and not reconstituted. The infrastructure was pulverized, and never restored. Even the physical hallmarks of a civilized society – roads, bridges, electrical plants, water facilities, museums, schools – were bombed out of existence or else left to fall into disrepair. Along with that, the spiritual and psychological infrastructure that enables a society to function – the bonds of trust, allegiance, and custom – was dissolved, leaving Iraqis to fend for themselves in a war of all against all.” As Iraq falls apart into three sectarian states, it is becoming more and more evident that this was the policy all along. It did not happen just because Paul Bremer was a fumbler who overstepped his mandate to begin the atomization process in 2003. As Michel Chossudovsky, president of the Centre for Research on Globalization, in Montreal, points out, the division of Iraq along sectarian-ethnic lines had been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than ten years.

But why we might ask was such a policy devised and who actually devised it? To answer that we have to go back to the 1990s and the laying out of such a strategy for the entire Middle East by the neocons and their Israeli counterparts. In 1996 the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies produced a document entitled a “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. The leader of the group that wrote the document was Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the Pentagon until 2003. The paper set out a plan by which Israel would “shape its strategic environment”, beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein, installing a Hashemite monarchy once more in Baghdad. With Saddam out of the way, the next part of the strategic policy was that Turkey and Jordan would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and “roll back” Syria. The next part of the plan was to wean away the Shia minority in Lebanon from Syria and Iran and reconnect it with the Shias of Iraq.

A second seminal element in the strategic thinking behind the atomizing process was a paper generated by The Project for a New American Century entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. The principal architects of this think-tank were Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, David Wormser and his wife Meyrav. Many of these individuals were also part of the Clean Break strategizing group and all went on to be part of the Bush presidency. In this capacity they became the boosters and architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Just as with the Clean Break document, the strategy outlined by the Project for a New American Century’s seminal paper was the installation of puppets in the countries of the region as a Plan A but then moving on to a Plan B if that failed. The latter plan was the subdivision of the Arab states into smaller controllable entities that were hostile to one another.

In regard to Libya, the Plan B option of atomization has now come into the open. There is open talk of dividing the country into three separate protectorates of Tripolitania, Cyrenica and Fezzan. One might argue that NATO and US architects of the war to oust Colonel Gaddafi had merely regime change in mind. However, it is highly unlikely that the architects of the war did not know the tenuous nature of the national structure in Libya that Gaddafi had held together for decades. In Syria, a similar plan B seems to be in the works as Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently stated it may be “too late to keep Syria as a whole, if we wait much longer”. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute articulated this policy when he said “a future Syria could be a confederation of several sectors: one largely Alawite, another Kurdish, a third, primarily Druse, a fourth made of up of Sunni Muslims and then a central zone of intermixed groups in the country’s main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo”. Finally, the ultimate objective in the Yemen with the US and UK proxy war being prosecuted by the Saudis seems likely to be the atomization of that country.

Divide and rule has been the guiding principle of all colonial regimes in history. Consequently, such a cold-blooded plan to smash all existing Arab countries to smithereens is not so far-fetched. When the Ottoman control of Arab countries was squashed, Britain and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the area into meaningless states to smash Arab unity. This history, however, has to be concealed from the US public in the pretense of our promotion of democracy.

[Ed. note: On March 17 the Associated Press reported that Syrian Kurds were preparing to declare a federal region in northern Syria.]

Michael Drohan is a member of the Editorial Collective and of the Board of the Merton Center

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