The “Bernard Lewis plan”, as it came to be known, was a design to fracture all the countries in the region – from the Middle East to India – along ethnic, sectarian and linguistic lines. A radical Balkanisation of the region. A retired US Army officer, Ralph Peters, followed up by producing the map of how a ‘Balkanised’ Middle East would look. Ben Gurion too had a similar strategic ambition for Israeli interests.

Lewis’s influence however, went right to the top: President Bush was seen carrying articles by Lewis to a meeting in the Oval Office soon after September 11, and only eight days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis was briefing Richard Perle’s Defence Policy Board, sitting next to his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. At that key meeting of a board highly influential with the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the two called for an invasion of Iraq.

Lewis seeded too the broader idea of a backwards-looking Muslim world, seething with hatred against a modernising and virtuous West. It was him, and not Samuel Huntington, who coined the phrase ‘clash of civilisations’ – implying further, that Islam and the West are embroiled in an existential battle for survival.

Through the Evangelical prism of today’s policy-makers, such as Pompeo and Mike Pence, this dark prognostication has metamorphosed from a civilisational ‘clash’ into the cosmic battle of good and evil (with Iran particularly pinpointed as the source of cosmic evil in today’s world).

This is the key point: Bringing regime change to Iran – the primordial threat, in Lewis terms – was always a Lewis fantasy. “Should we negotiate with Iran’s ayatollahs?” Henry Kissinger asked him on one occasion; “Certainly not!” came Lewis’ uncompromising retort. The overall stance that America should adopt to the region was presented in a nutshell to Dick Cheney: “I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power”. This Orientalist advice naturally applied ‘in spades’ to Iran and its ‘Ayatollahs’, Lewis held: “The question we should be asking is why do they neither fear nor respect us?”.

Well, now, inspired by his intellectual hero (Lewis), Pompeo, together with Richard Perle’s PNAC colleague, John Bolton, seem to be itching to try it, using the Lewis recipe of ‘hitting Iran between the eyes with a big (sanctions) stick’.

We have been here before. The US did not just leaf through Lewis’ books, as it were; it has been acting on it for decades. As early as the 1960s, Lewis had published a book which picked up on the potential vulnerabilities, and therefore the potential use, of religious, class, and ethnic differences as the means to bring an end to Middle Eastern states.

Seymour Hersh, writing in 2008, reported that:

“Late last year [2007], Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations …

“Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq … since last year. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the CIA, and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature”.

And such operations just expanded further – as the present head of CIA, Gina Haspel, has confirmed, she is shifting Agency resources to focus on Russia and Iran. And the US has been assiduously planting its military bases at points that abut on Iran’s ethnic minorities.

So what is the ‘end game’? Is it US election hype, and intended principally for domestic consumption? Is it just to contain and weaken Iran? Is it to force Iran to negotiate a ‘better’ JCPOA? Or is it to trigger regime change?

Well, it looks like this: Pompeo has refused to renew two key US sanctions waivers (besides the various oil waivers). These two waiver-refusals look very much like the veritable ‘smoking gun’ – pointing to Pompeo and Bolton’s true intent. One withdrawn waiver is for Iran’s export of low enriched uranium, and the other retraction is for the export of ‘heavy water’ from the Arak reactor.

The point is that under the JCPOA, Iran is not permitted to accumulate either substance beyond 300 Kilos and 300 litres, respectively. So Iran is compelled by the Accord to export any potential surplus which might breach these limits. The former goes to Russia (in return for raw yellow-cake), and the latter is stored in Oman.

Let us be very clear: There is absolutely no nuclear benefit to Iran from these exports. They serve only the interests of those who are signatories to the JCPOA. They are JCPOA ‘housekeeping’ items – i.e. they serve only those who advocate non-proliferation of nuclear-related materials. The export is envisaged by the Accord, and is demanded of Iran.

If these exports represent precisely the working of the nuclear agreement, why then would Pompeo refuse to renew the waivers to such a structural component to non-proliferation? They are of no economic significance per se.

The only answer must be that Pompeo and Bolton are trying to corner Iran into a breach of the JCPOA: They are deliberately trying to provoke non-compliance by Iran, and are effectively forcing Iran to proliferate. For, if these substances cannot be exported, Iran will be obliged to accumulate them, in breach of the JCPOA (unless the UNSC dispute procedure embedded in the JCPOA, rules otherwise).

But pushing Iran into a formal breach opens many possibilities for Bolton to provoke Iran further, and perhaps even to taunt it into providing the US with its casas belli for flattening Iran’s enrichment facilities. Who knows?

So how do Iran’s ethnic minorities fit into the picture? (The majority of the Iranian population is Persian, estimated at between 51% and 65%. The largest other ethno-linguistic groups are: Azerbaijanis (16–25+ %), Kurds (7–10%), Lurs (c. 7%), Mazandaranis and Gilakis (c. 7%), Arabs (2–3), Balochi (c. 2%) and Turkmens (c. 2%)). These groups are ‘the material’ that the US hopes to turn into armed secessionists and anti-Iranian insurgents, under the CIA ‘train and assist programmes’. When this programme was mooted in 2007, there was considerable dissent both within the US Administration (including coming from Secretary Gates and General Fallon, who both rejected the questioned the merit of such thinking). As Seymour Hersh noted:

“A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr said. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic.

“The US is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the US is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said.

“[However], you can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population”.

And as Professor Salehi-Isfahani at Brookings has shown, the poorest elements of Iranian society have been somewhat protected from the harsh economic impact of sanctions (more than the middle class), so that one might rightly conclude that Iran can weather the economic siege.

Yes … but … ‘We have been here before’, in another important way:

Iraq and ‘Curveball’ (the codename for the Iraqi agent of German intelligence, who provided false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction); the Iraqi exiles who assured the Americans they would be welcomed in Baghdad as ‘liberators’ with their path strewn with flowers and rise; and ‘Team B’ (the alt-intelligence unit, established by then Vice-President Cheney to provide ‘like-minded’ intelligence reporting that countered that of the CIA, and supported Cheney’s world view). The outcome from America’s disconnect to the realities of Iraq was, of course, a disaster.

Here we are again, with history seemingly repeating itself: The former ‘Team B’ is now no longer a unit implanted in the DOD, but is a network of former intelligence officials of some sort, acting together with embittered Iranian exiles – fishing within the MEK and the jaundiced exile community, and then ‘stove-piping’ their findings into the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies think-tank, and into the White House – shades of Chalabi and the Iraq Saga, all over again.

It is the old, old intelligence story: Start with deep orientalist prejudices and pre-conceived opinions about the nature of ‘the other’; Convince yourself that no ‘modern’ man or woman would support the ‘Ayatollahs’; And guess what? You find what you wanted to see: That Iran is on the brink of “immanent collapse”; that the minorities are poised to rise up against the overbearing Persian élite; and that American intervention to remove this hated ‘regime’ would be welcomed ‘with flowers and rice’.

It is nonsense, of course. But the capacity to self-delude is sufficient, in itself, to start wars.

The US history of the original ‘Team B’ serves as a grim warning: Cheney did not like, or trust, what the formal Intelligence services were saying. So he set up an ‘Alt-Intelligence Service’ (Team B) of ‘like-minded’ analysts who ‘found’ what he wanted to see about Iraq (and Russia).

Trump, precisely because of his experience with the Deep State, does not trust the top echelon of US services – and hence, is known to read little of what they produce. He too, does not see them as ‘like-minded’ for their globalist outlook on the world, and generally disdains their opinions (preferring those with a more like-minded zeitgeist). There is real vulnerability here.

Whilst it is true that Trump in the past days has acknowledged that Bolton wants to get him “into a war”, and has expressed concern that, as the Washington Post notes, “Bolton has boxed him into a corner, and gone beyond where he [Trump] is comfortable”, Trump’s prejudices on Iran run deep, and are being continually fed by others – including family – and not just by Bolton.

Mostly, Trump acts in foreign policy as a New York real-estate mogul, with care only for ‘the deal’ and his image, and with zero emotional or moral engagement. This is probably true too, for US involvement in Syria and Afghanistan. But is this so for Iran? Might Iran be the exception – precisely because it stands in the way of Trump’s ‘legacy project’ – of actuating ‘Greater Israel’ (otherwise known as the Deal of the Century)?

Bolton may have been mildly rebuked by Trump over getting it wrong on Venezuela, but it might be that Pompeo and Bolton are pushing at a half-open door when it comes to Iran.

(The imagination fails at the thought of George W. Bush ever actually reading a book)

Not only was none of this ludicrously excessive outpouring of praise and acclaim justified, but no countervailing voices were allowed in the ranks of the Orwellian MSM, or MainStream Media in the United States.

Until he was past his mid-fifties and close to the age when most academics retire or have run out of steam, Lewis was a marginalized and even widely despised figure in British academia. His only serious academic work on the Middle East had been on the Tanzimat Reform program in Ottoman Turkey in the first half of the 19^th century. A strong supporter of Israel, he does not appear to have set foot in any major Arab nation during at least the 30 years from 1950 to 1980. Nor did he seriously study or respect the work of those who did. His knowledge of the detailed political and economic developments in emergent Arab nations was nonexistent. He based his assessments of the region on travels there during the 1930s, well before World War II. When I studied Modern Middle East history at the London School of Economics in the mid-1970s, serious scholars of the region regarded him as a clown.

But after emigrating to the United States in 1974, Lewis found his real calling as a justifier and public ideologist for the forces of aggression and empire, much as Leo Strauss, the patron and founding father of the neoconservatives had done at the University of Chicago decades earlier.

In both cases, each man was able to escape the contempt that superficial and intolerant work had provoked in their original academic environments and they both played to the same eager-to-listen and willingly credulous audience.

The emerging Reagan Republicans, Evangelical Christians and so-called “muscular” anti-communists – in reality usually anti-Russian racists – of the Democratic Party all eagerly danced to Lewis’ intolerant tune. In such circles, his ludicrous distortions and falsehoods went unchallenged. He claimed the success of the Crusaders at the end of the 11^th century proved how weak and ineffectual Islam had become. Yet the Crusader enclave in Palestine survived for less than a hundred years before the great Sultan Saladin effectively annihilated it. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the early 1970s loved his assertion that there was no such thing as Palestinian nationalism. He loved the Turkish past but he hated and despised the Arab present.

Lewis’s rise to eminence in Washington started under in the 1970s through the patronage of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who was also the patron of the first generation of neoconservatives. A quarter century later, by the time of President George W. Bush it was complete

Lewis, though he later tried to claim otherwise, was a central and extremely important figure in the relentless efforts after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to use them as a justification for the US invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq.

 “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us,” he memorably wrote about Arab societies.

The truth was precisely the opposite. Islamic extremism was only marginal throughout the Sunni Arab world before the Bush administration, urged on by Lewis and his fellow neocons, undertook their colossal project of pulverizing one stable society after another in the name of Lewis’s mythical “freedom.”

His incompetence and record of fraudulent claims and false prophecy were legion. In 2002, he claimed Iraqis would “rejoice” when the US armed forces invaded their country. The Iraqi popular insurrection that exhausted the US Army and took thousands of US lives took him completely by surprise.

But facts and common sense were irrelevant and only minor distractions for Lewis and his coterie of True Believers. He made sweeping generalizations which were recognized as absurd by everyone with any first-hand knowledge of the Arab societies of the Maghreb, the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula.

He welcomed the Arab Spring explosion of protests across the Middle East in December 2010 and into the following year as another great opportunity to replace autocratic regimes throughout the region with US-backed democratic regimes.

Instead, the opposite happened. Wherever the Lewis Solution of US military occupation was applied it backfired and produced precisely the opposite results from those he had promised. The rise of Islamic extremism in Iraq and Syria was the direct result of the pulverization both countries by US military power and by the groups Washington armed and financed.

Lewis’s real heritage is clear: It lies in the millions of refugees, the smashed societies, the more than a million dead in Iraq since 2003, the more than 600,000 killed in the wars in Syria and in the continuing specter throughout the region of wars without end.

It would be fitting to imagine him now exposed amid the fires of Hell to the death screams of the myriad victims of the policies he so recklessly, ignorantly and shamelessly advocated for so long.

Alas, I have my doubts.

The draft of the new constitution that was originally pitched to the Syrians by the international community was in fact premised on the idea of granting such status to the “nationalities living in the country.” That manifested itself, for example, in the proposal to establish a bicameral parliament in Syria. Only relatively recently did the Syrian Congress on National Dialogue (soon to convene) begin going by that name. Previous attempts were seen to call it the Congress of Syrian Peoples. But President Assad was firmly against that version from the very beginning. He feels that because of the nature of the local environment in the Middle East, the states there that fly the flag of federalism are inevitably forced to watch their territorial integrity and sovereignty slipping away. It seems to the president of Syria that, by touting federalization, the West is resorting to political and subversive means to achieve the goals it has been unable to attain militarily. For example, without waiting for a final resolution of the matter, the Americans have already urged the Kurds, whose cause they so champion, to unilaterally proclaim the establishment of the Federation of Northern Syria in the territories they occupy. And that’s only the beginning.

History has shown that no federation has been viable in that area and that eventual collapse is inevitable. The Syrians themselves must see a lesson in the story of their own short-lived federation with Egypt, known as the United Arab Republic.

Nor did Libya’s repeated attempts to create a federation with some of its neighbors meet with any success. The efforts to merge Ethiopia and Sudan into a federation – initially backed by the West – ultimately ended once Eritrea and South Sudan won their independence and pulled out. Baghdad’s willingness to grant Iraqi Kurdistan an even higher status than that of merely a constituent region of a federation resulted in Kurdish attempts to secede from Iraq. It took a massive military intervention to put a stop to that. And should Syria take that path, there is even less hope that it might escape such a fate.

The projects to federalize states in that region are tied to the initiatives to completely redraw the borders of those territories. The campaign to alter national boundaries in the “Greater Middle East” really picked up steam with the arrival of the Arab Spring in 2011. The new map of the Middle East that was proposed in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1992 by Bernard Lewis, a professor of Near Eastern Studies and advisor to George W. Bush, has regained its popularity. In 2006, this map was updated by the retired military-intelligence officer Ralph Peters in Armed Forces Journal.

The Lewis-Peters map

The intention of these exercises in “applied cartography” is to strengthen American positions in the region by weakening those national states. To this end, a “Balkanization” of the Middle East was planned along the fault lines of religious, ethnic, and clan divisions. And stirring up the animosities between the Shiites and Sunnis was to play a key role.

Syria at that time was not seriously viewed as a target for those efforts, as it seemed like a rock of stability amidst its restive neighbors. It took almost two years for the “ripple effect” from the Arab Spring to reach Syria. Once the Syrian conflict began, a map surfaced in the media (which let’s call “the Israeli version”) showing the potential breakup of that country once it became a federation.

It featured a powerful Druze sector that was to be carved out on the Syrian-Israeli border. Once Syria’s boundaries were redrawn this way, its Druze population – due to fears of Sunni fundamentalism – would be favorably positioned for an alliance with Tel Aviv, which would offer a permanent solution to the problem of the Golan Heights and give Israel a buffer zone that would greatly shore up its security in the north. In addition, the residents of that entire territory might want to “reunite with their compatriots” inside of Israel. 

However, the war didn’t go that way. The Druze proved completely loyal to Damascus and distinguished themselves with their heroic exploits to defend Syria’s territorial integrity. Nevertheless, the flavor of Israel’s military operations near that border shows that it has not entirely abandoned those notions. Tel Aviv might try again under favorable circumstances. And one circumstance that might fit that bill would be the federalization of Syria under international control.

A “Kurdish version” of Syria’s future national and state configuration was also widely circulated.

It is not difficult to see that at that time the Kurds had not yet even started to dream of the many territories they have now seized with the Americans’ help. The biggest challenge for them was unifying all the Kurdish cantons in the north into a single zone. As a result, despite gaining control over a quarter of Syrian territory – as far west as the Euphrates – the Kurds have by no means resolved the question of their nationhood. The Kurdish-occupied Arab settlements haven’t demonstrated any particular loyalty to Rojava. And the more economically-developed Afrin canton remains cut off from the greater part of the Kurdish stronghold. Outside of Rojava there are still about 250,000 Kurds living in the city of Aleppo (primarily in the Sheikh Maqsood district), a group that includes the most prominent cultural figures and businessmen of Kurdish ethnicity in Syria. Thus the Syrian Kurds’ appetites for new territory have not yet been sated.

If you look at the map of Syria’s ethno-sectarian makeup, it becomes clear that any attempts to demarcate certain federal or administrative zones along ethnic lines can only lead to fierce new clashes in this “war of all against all.”

The main problem is that the various ethnic and sectarian factions are all sprinkled throughout Syria. It is extremely difficult to clearly demarcate their boundaries. The claims of some will collide with the ambitions of others, forming permanent flash points where they converge. Who should own the uninhabited and oil-rich Syrian desert, which makes up half the country’s territory, is a completely open question. This is in fact a much uglier and more complicated version of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. However, this is not the only problem.

Any hypothetical plan to impose a federal system on the country elicits the question: what are the criteria for identifying “the nationalities of Syria” and their right to independence? Given the plethora of sects and movements that exist in Syria, this would be an overwhelming task. For example, the West and the countries of the Persian Gulf have long dreamed of driving the Alawites, the Assad family’s tribe, into the “ghetto” of the province of Latakia. But are they not Arabs and Muslims, like their Sunni brothers? Using that approach, the country could be splintered into dozens of micro-states. Among the Sunnis in particular, one might point to the strong collective identity of the Bedouins as a reason to hand all of the desert over to them, and so on. And that might please some, but not Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

He has renounced ethno-sectarian discord and proposed a completely modern version of a civil Syrian nation that would respect the distinctive traits that distinguish the cultures and civilizations of all the groups living in the country. Assad believes that the problems of Syria’s national and state configuration can be resolved with the help of the ideology of pan-Arabism.

Speaking recently at a forum in Damascus attended by representatives from Arab countries, the Syrian president proclaimed that pan-Arabism is a conceptual notion of a civilization that includes “all ethnic groups, religions, and communities” and allows them to develop. And the cultural heritages of all of them have made an invaluable contribution to the historical development of pan-Arabism. According to Assad, an attempt was made during the war to impose a false choice on Syria: to either abandon its own identity and kowtow to foreign powers or to become a society of “communities in conflict.”

Paradoxically, the bulk of the opposition groups that take their cues from Riyadh fully agree with the Syrian president’s approach per se. They are also opposed to a federal system being foisted upon the country and make their arguments from a position of pan-Arabism. But Assad views this principle in a more secular light. It should be noted that under pressure from the opposition, the international mediators led by Staffan de Mistura have already altered their version of the future Syrian constitution, no longer referring to the country as the Syrian Republic, but as the Syrian Arab Republic, which still remains the state’s official name. The tensions between the opposition and Damascus have just about been reduced to one thorny issue – the continued hold of Bashar al-Assad and his entourage on the reins of power in that country. But if the pressure to federalize Syria keeps growing, then – who knows? – perhaps it might even motivate the opposition and the government to find a mutually acceptable solution to this issue as well. 

We normally think of colonizers as large countries, and the colonized as smaller and weaker nations. But this is not always the case. Colonization does not require occupation. It merely requires the subjugation of the colonized. With ambition, superior information and calculation, and the right mindset, smaller nations can (and have in the past) colonized and dominated larger and nominally more powerful countries.

India was successfully colonized by tiny Britain in the 18th century. The vehicle for colonization was the East India Company. It was only after the Indian mutiny that Britain acted directly and sent in troops to establish the British Raj. For the next 200 years India was drained of its wealth, its economy was restructured to support England’s needs and global ambitions, and its people militarized to fight and die on behalf of the British crown. The Indian leaders who remained were willing participants in this venture; those who felt otherwise were destroyed or marginalized.

In a similar vein, Israel today is in the process of colonizing the United States, which is vital to its global projection and exercise of power. The steps Israel is taking are visible to all (as was the case with British designs on India) and yet it is remarkably difficult to connect the dots while such a takeover is in process. Or, to do anything about it.

Colonization does not mean total control of everything

It means total control of what matters. The British were interested in Indian wealth, and a standing army of Indians willing to die for their wars. They couldn’t care less about India’s internal petty politics that did not directly or indirectly impact their mission. An effective “divide and conquer” strategy pit Indians against each other and discouraged any kind of coordinated response, or sedition. The British leveraged their “outsider advantage” to objectively collect data with which to calculate and coordinate which Indian princes to support in battles, and which to connive with. Like pieces on a chessboard, Indian leaders exhausted themselves through internal battles, and were prevailed to seek cover provided by the British. Small amounts of leverage can change outcomes (as the Israeli lobby AIPAC has shown, in its path to dominating Congress and regional/local US politics), and over the years the British were able control and align India to the British crown. Less than 10,000 English controlled colonial India, which at that time had a population of 300 million.

It is instructive to note that while there were relatively few white Englishmen, a class of local “brown sahibs” was developed, to actually run things. This elite class was educated in English ways, and rewarded monetarily and through social stature. Britain was too small a country to ultimately matter by itself, but by leveraging India the English could pursue their global ambitions. India was the “Jewel in the (British) Crown”.

Today, Israel has effective control of US policy in the Mideast, and similar goals. Much has already been written about Israel’s control of Congress. Israel is now edging towards control over the US Executive Branch, with both presidential candidates supported by billionaires whose #1 agenda is Israel (Saban and Adelson). The Supreme Court will be one-third Jewish, and justices have community ties and families. As Israel demonstrated through its successful intimidation of Judge Goldstone, jurists are human and everyone has their price.

Israel’s “occupation force” in the US has long included AIPAC as well as the dense network of community organizations at the State and local levels. Through relationships that have been developed over years and with unlimited funds at their disposal, the “Israel Lobby” ensures that votes go the right way, and that opponents are squashed when Israel demands unity. In 2003 at the onset of George Bush’s Iraq war this occupation force was multiplied through the inclusion of Christian Zionists.

Critics of the Israel Lobby are marginalized by whatever means available, including being called anti-Semitic. The Lobby has been effective in securing massive aid packages for Israel even though Israel’s per-capita GDP exceeds that of several European nations. Israeli insiders permeate the US government, and it is US policy that there be “no light” between the countries so that where Israel is concerned there is no debate. Israel’s top priorities are the top priorities of the US. There are of course instances where this does not happen (such as, Iran) but the direction points to a tighter colonial noose in the years ahead.

The media matters: establishing beliefs and narratives

The colonizer must be a “Sacred Object” above criticism or objective review, and dangerous critics must be either destroyed or marginalized. No Englishman in India spoke of the mother country and its ways with anything other than reverence, even though during periods of the British Raj England was in turmoil. Within England there was a free press and active debate; but this was not permitted in India, about Britain. The only acceptable posture was that of reverence.

Today Israel has a free press, and it is easy to read translations of the Hebrew language press. Israeli commentators compare Netanyahu to Hitler, Israel is called a racist apartheid state based on evidence, and the extreme violence against and ongoing abuse of Palestinians is well documented. But, these same conversations are forbidden in the US. No newspaper would report them, nor are they permitted in polite company. Transgressors are labeled anti-Semitic, whether Jewish or not.

In the US today, boycotts are seen as a permitted non-violent form of free speech. Citizens have the right to boycott whatever they want from wherever they want without risk of penalty. The sole exception is Israel.

Exceptionalism

The British conquests were “for God and country”, and therefore justified. The British were superior, the natives inferior. This setup the moral justification for the mayhem wrought by the British as they colonized Asia and the Mideast. At that time, all men were not born equal, and it took the US Constitution to establish that self-evident fact.

Israel is seeking to revert to those days, by acting as though Arab lives are inferior, and (more recently) promoting Islamophobia to serve their Christian Zionism wing. In 2003, uber Zionist Bernard Lewis posed as “Arab expert” and advised president Bush that the only language Arabs understood was force. This helped to justify the attack on Iraq, as part of a neocon plan to “creatively destroy” the sovereign Arab states in Israel’s neighborhood, to facilitate Israel’s dominance. The Nazis at Nuremberg were shown greater respect than Saddam and his Ba’at leadership, and the contempt for Arabs was in full display.

Today, Israeli Jews are in the process of destroying Palestinian society and erasing Palestinian culture, with impunity. Churches and mosques are both being destroyed, though Israel would prefer to keep the spotlight on mosques, to fan a religious war between Islam on one side, and Christians and Jews on the other.

While the Israeli press records and debates Israel’s bad behavior, Americans are forbidden to publicly debate Israeli behavior critically.

Three Recent Examples:

1/ During the Congressional debate around the Iran deal president Obama had negotiated, Senator Chuck Schumer said he would vote “against”…not because of any independent analysis, but because this is what Netanyahu wanted. In other words, he publically said that he would follow the Israeli prime ministers’ direction, over that of his own president. Because, as he said, he was “guardian of Israel”.

A sitting US senator proclaimed allegiance to a foreign country, and nobody asked him to resign!

2/ The Israeli Prime Minister addresses the full US Congress to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal. When the deal does go through, Israel demands more US aid! And, is likely to get it. One can try various definitions of “blackmail” to see which one fits.

The US president is impotent in dealing with Israel. The so-called “pro Israel lobby” effectively functions like an agent of Israel. The Israel lobby is playing the role of the East India Company, in Britain’s colonization of India.

3/ The Israel Lobby interferes massively in US foreign policy in the region. The “mainstream” media such as NYT spins events to reflect Israel’s views (bureau chiefs are typically Jewish and resident in Israel). The Iraq war cost $1 trillion+ and cost thousands of US lives, created ISIS, and was pushed by the Lobby. Israel benefits from the distraction.

The colonization of the US by Israel is becoming increasingly explicit. It is now increasingly seen as “normal” to have a double standard: one for Israel, another for the rest of the world. The boycott-Israel movement is an example of that: you can boycott anything or anyone, but not Israel. This is true power, and the face of colonization.

counterpunch.org

The article titled «It’s Time to Seriously Consider Partitioning Syria» published recently by Foreign Policy raises serious concerns.

The author writes that the war in Syria has devastated entire cities, the death toll is 470 thousand (there are no reliable statistics to confirm the figure) and 6 million people have become displaced. As a result, religious communities in Syria cannot live together in one state anymore. He believes that Syria should be divided into parts populated by Alawites (for some reason it includes Damascus) and Sunni Muslims. The options include a partition of the country into independent states or forming some kind of loose confederation like Bosnia and Herzegovina. James Stavridis is a four-star Admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. He is an influential person in military and political circles.

The Admiral made public his views on Syria soon after US State Secretary John Kerry referred to plan B in Syria in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 1.

According to the US top diplomat, he will move towards a plan B that could involve a partition of Syria if hostilities continue because the political forces cannot coexist in one state. 

The idea of dividing Syria, Iraq and other states in the Middle East has been considered by US strategic thinkers since the 1980s. Bernard Lewis, the patriarch of American oriental studies, was the first to suggest it. For many years he has been a member of and consultant to the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Formally an independent think tank, the Council exerts great influence on shaping US foreign policy.  

In «The Roots of Muslim Rage,» an essay published in 1990, Bernard Lewis describes a «surge of hatred» rising from the Islamic world that «becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such». The thesis became influential.

The essay inspired Samuel Huntington, the author of the clash of civilizations hypothesis. Lewis is a widely read expert on the Middle East and is regarded as one of the West's leading scholars specialized in that region. His advice has been frequently sought by policymakers, including the Bush Jr. administration in the early 2000s. Jacob Weisberg, a prominent US journalist, writes that Bernard Lewis was perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In 1979, Bernard Lewis first unveiled his project aimed at reshaping the Middle East to the Bilderberg Meeting in Baden, Austria. The goal was to counter Iran after the Islamic revolution and the Soviet Union with its military deployed to Afghanistan the same year. According to him, the anti-Iranian policy was to include the incitement of an armed Sunni-Shia confrontation and support of the Muslim Brothers movement. The Soviet Union was to be countered by creating an «Arc of Crisis» in the vicinity of its borders. The national states of the Middle East were to be «Balkanized» along religious, ethnic and sectarian lines.

The Lewis project was advanced further after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992 the scholar’s article titled Rethinking the Middle East appeared in Foreign Affairs, the US leading forum for serious discussion of foreign policy and international affairs published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

There he presented a new map of the Middle East. The plan envisaged breaking Syria up into small fragments with the territories populated by the Druze and Alawites separated to become independent mini-states. Lewis wanted to establish new entities: a tiny state on the territory of Lebanon populated by Maronites, an independent Kurdistan comprising the Kurds-populated areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, an independent Shia state in Iraq, an Arab state in the Iranian province of Khuzestan – the major oil-producing region of Iran. The plans also envisaged the creation of independent Balochistan to unite all the Pashtun-dominated areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Bernard Lewis advocated a policy called «Lebanonization». According to him, «A possibility, which could even be precipitated by Islamic fundamentalism, is what has late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization’». «Most of the states of the Middle East – Egypt is an obvious exception – are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity… Then state then disintegrates – as happened in Lebanon – into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties», the scholar wrote.

The main goal of such projects is to prevent the emergence of regional forces able to challenge the hegemony of the United States. That’s what made the US add fuel to the fire of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Washington succeeded in making the war last for eight years. By provoking the hostilities, the US killed two birds with one stone: it prevented Iran from growing stronger and weakened Iraq ruled by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party.

The West launched Operation Desert Storm to keep Iraq weak. In 2003 it concocted a false pretext (the possession of weapons of mass destruction) to occupy Iraq and deprive it of sovereignty. By and large, the same fate awaited Syria.

In 1990 Syrian troops remained in Lebanon as peacekeepers in accordance with the Taif Agreement. The US gave its consent because Damascus took part in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. Besides, the Syrian government of Hafez Assad effectively committed itself not to take hostile actions against Israel. In ten years the situation changed. Damascus launched the policy of strategic partnership with Iran. It supported the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. Washington changed its stance to say the Syrian military in Lebanon was an occupying force. Using the imposition of sanctions as a weapon, the United States made Syria withdraw from Lebanon. In 2011 the US started to undermine the Syria’s national sovereignty.

The most faithful US allies – Saudi Arabia for instance – have no guarantees they will not become part of such plans, for instance Saudi Arabia. Nowadays, the United States does not depend on the oil supplies from the Middle East. It has put an end to the policy of direct confrontation with Tehran. As a strategic partner, Riyadh is not as important as it used to be. It’s hardly a coincidence that US media outlets started to publish maps with Hejaz (a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia) drawn as part of Jordan with the eastern part of the Saudi Kingdom together with South Iraq shown as part of Shia Arab state. Actually, a genuine settlement to the problems faced by the Arab world is something quite opposite from what the United States has to offer.

The partition of the Middle East into tiny powerless states will give rise to new crises accompanied by ethnic and religious cleansing. It will lead to a «war of all against all» (bellum omnium contra omnes) – the term coined by Thomas Hobbs. 

In case of such a war, the small principalities will need someone for arbitration. Washington will offer itself for this role. 

In the future, the creation of large Arab space (Grossraum) may lead the region out of the deep crisis it faces, but that’s a different and a very serious matter to be discussed some other time.

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A great number of information warfare experts work hard to shape the image of enemy among Europeans. Charlie Hebdo, the Paris-based weekly satirical publication, has a special role to play in this campaign. Its main instrument is anti-religious provocation disguised as freedom of expression. 

Founded in 1970 by left-wing journalists as an outlet of «revolutionary criticism», it folded to be resurrected in 1992 when Philippe Val became its editor-in chief. He is a follower of Zionist Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher with Zionist leanings, who was actively involved in the events in Libya and, then, Ukraine. Since then Charlie Hebdo has been mocking the religious feelings of Muslims and Catholics. 

In 2006 Charlie Hebdo republished several cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. The cartoons had led to widespread anger and violent protests across the Muslim world. Muslim organizations wanted to prevent the publication, but the satirical outlet had influential sponsors. 

Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb) became the chief editor in 2009. He continued the policy of inciting hatred and anti-French feelings among Muslims. The war in Libya was raging. Charb mocked those who suffered as a result of merciless and cynical attacks delivered by NATO. One of his followers has said that Charlie Hebdo became a classic war time media outlet with caricatures mocking the enemies. Charbonnier was candid enough to admit that the edition made its living by publishing a provocation every week. 

In 2011 Charlie Hebdo was attacked for the first time – it was gutted by a fire bomb to cause arson for having run cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Back then the staff put out a new issue with a cover drawing of a bearded, presumably Muslim man kissing a cartoonist. The caption was «Love: Stronger than hate». New caricatures appeared in 2012 and 2013. The publications were condemned by religious organizations and politicians. The editorial policy remained the same to provoke the January 7 night attack by gunmen leaving a dozen people dead, including the editor-in-chief and well-known cartoonists. One of the recent drawings by Charlie Hebdo's editorial director Stephane Charbonnier shows a bearded man with a shoulder gun making the same gesture. Its caption reads: «Still no attack in France?» followed by «Wait, we have until late January to present our wishes».

The cover of the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo features another figure well-known to French readers: Michel Houellebecq. He was the one to depict Islam as «the most stupid religion» and «Islam is a dangerous religion». «Soumission» (Submission) is a novel set in France in the 2022, when, to counter the far right Le Pen, French voters elect a moderate Muslim president. Then the country quickly shifts into a Muslim-like state. The Sharia laws are introduced and Europeans submissively accept the reality. The book hit the shelves the same day – January 7. It had given rise to fierce debate when the angry Muslim organizations said Michel Houellebecq was responsible for inciting Islamophobia and racial hatred. 

The January 7 attack gave rise to immediate and charged reaction in the West. The French political forces were unanimous saying the act was a declaration of war to France and its democratic values, especially the freedom of expression. National unity was the best way to counter «terrorism and barbarity». The position received wide support from the Pope to UN Secretary General. The terrorist act was described as a barbarian crime. Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) shirts and placards expressed the cry of defiance as a wave of coordinated public actions was replicated across the world. 

But nobody in the West has clearly defined the attitude towards the perverse perceptions of freedom of expression that engender irresponsibility threatening human lives and undermining civil peace. 

On January 7 the wave of protest against «barbarian Islamic fundamentalism» was staged the very same way the anti-Islam campaign was orchestrated in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist act in the United States.

Ramazan Osmanov is a Kurdish political scholar. For 15 years he has been studying the implementation of US Greater Middle East policy. According to him, «The Americans spook the world with the terrorist Islamic State and got formal pretext to justify their presence in Syria and Iraq. The caliphate is moving to the Caucasus and Europe to make the world face another Armageddon. At least some forces in the Middle East take up arms and resist but in Europe Islamists have scored a great success. Europeans are like rabbits, they have lost the ability to offer armed resistance. A dozen of seasoned Islamic State warriors are enough to capture a peaceful European city. Believe me! Besides, the Islamists have agents everywhere. Marseille and Brussels have already become Arab cities where police is afraid to intervene». 

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Few of European analysts offer honest and sober assessment of the situation after the Paris massacre. One of them is Tierry Meyssan, a French journalist and political activist, the founder and president of the think tank Réseau Voltaire. In his January 7 article he called the Charlie Hebdo attack «the French September 11». According to him, it was not revenge, but rather a provocation aimed at sparking a European civil war as «the Clash of Civilizations» process is taking shape. The perpetrators knew the action would lead to a split between 6 million of French Muslims and the French non-Muslim population. «We do not know who sponsored this professional operation against Charlie Hebdo, but we should not allow ourselves to be swept up. We should consider all assumptions and admit that at this stage, its most likely purpose is to divide us; and its sponsors are most likely in Washington», concludes Thierry Meyssan.