The “New Thirty Years War” in the Middle East – A
Western Policy of Chaos?
By Steven MacMillan
August 15, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "NEO
" -
The
Middle East has been in a state of chaos for years now, with each
passing year bringing a new wave of instability, carnage and human
suffering to the people of the region. From Afghanistan to Iraq,
Libya to Syria,
Western foreign policy has directly caused or exacerbated much of
the chaos we see in the region today and has contributed to a
growing trend of instability.
A pertinent question of our time however is whether
this instability and destabilization is a result of inept strategy
by Western nations, or a calculated strategy by the West to
intentionally create chaos, balkanize nations and increase sectarian
tensions in the region?
The “New Thirty Years War”
Certain
individuals within the US establishment have been drawing the
comparison between the Middle East today and the Thirty Years War in
Europe in the 17th century, with
Prof. Larry Goodson of the US Army War College being one of the
latest individuals to make the comparison. Even though the parallels
between Europe and the Middle East are by no means exact, it has
become somewhat of a talking point within Western geostrategic
circles.
The
Thirty Years War is a complex historical period, pertaining to
numerous wars and conflicts fought by an array of power blocs for a
variety of reasons. According to the
Encyclopædia Britannica: “Although the struggles that created it
erupted some years earlier, the
war is conventionally held to have begun in 1618, when the
future Holy Roman
emperor
Ferdinand II, in his role as king of
Bohemia, attempted to impose Roman Catholic absolutism on his
domains, and the
Protestant nobles of both Bohemia and
Austria rose up in rebellion.”
The war
quickly spread to embroil the majority of Europe’s major powers who
either believed there was an opportunity to conquer neighbouring
powers or were drawn into the conflict by a force invading their
lands, and is regarded by historians as one of the most destructive
periods in European history. Villages, towns and cities were raped
and pillaged by mercenaries who were fighting for different power
blocs, devastating the European continent.
The
Thirty Years War was brought to an end when a series of treaties was
signed in 1648 known as the Peace of Westphalia, establishing a new
political order in Europe in the form of co-existing sovereign
states (although some historians dispute the significance of
Westphalian sovereignty). James Bissett, the former Canadian
Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, described the
Westphalian system in a
2007speech as laying “down
the basic tenets of sovereignty—the principle of territorial
integrity and of non-interference in the affairs of national states…
The Westphalian order has frequently been violated, but age has not
diminished the principles themselves.”
In July
of 2014, the former director of policy planning for the US
Department of State and the President of the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR), Richard Hass,
compared the Middle East of today to 17th century
Europe, in his article “The
New Thirty Years War”.
Hass proclaims that the Middle East will likely be as turbulent in
the future unless a “new local order emerges”:
“For now and for the foreseeable future – until a new
local order emerges or exhaustion sets in – the Middle East will be
less a problem to be solved than a condition to be managed.”
As I reported a year ago, this “new local order” may
be in the form of a
Middle Eastern Union.
Fragmenting the Middle East
Ubiquitous evidence indicates that there is an agenda
by at least some strategists within the US to destroy the nation
state and balkanize the region into feuding rump states,
micro-states and mini-states, which will be so weak and busy
fighting each other that they will be unable to unify against
foreign colonial powers – most notably Western multinational
corporations. After a prolonged period of destruction and chaos in
the region, the people of the Middle East may be so weary of the
horrors of war that they will accept a Western imposed order as a
means of ending the fighting, even though the very same Western
forces have been responsible for creating much of the intolerable
chaos.
The strategy of balkanization can
be traced back to at least the early 1990’s, when British-American
historian Bernard Lewis wrote an article published in the 1992 issue
of the CFR’s publication, ‘Foreign Affairs’, titled:Rethinking
the Middle East.
He envisages the potential of the region disintegrating “into a
chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and
parties.” Even though Lewis writes in his article that this is only
one “possibility” of many other possibilities, it is starkly similar
to the situation that we see in countries such as Iraq and Libya
today:
“Another possibility, which could even be precipitated by
fundamentalism, is what has of late become 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 national identity or overriding
allegiance to the nation state.”
Lewis continues:
“The state then
disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling,
feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties. If things
go badly and central governments falter and collapse, the same
could happen, not only in the countries of the existing Middle
East, but also in the newly independent Soviet republics, where
the artificial frontiers drawn by the former imperial masters
left each republic with a mosaic of minorities and claims of one
sort or another on or by its neighbours.”
Speaking at the Ford School in 2013, former US secretary of state
and CFR member, Henry Kissinger, reveals his desire to see Syria
balkanized into “more or less autonomous regions”, in addition to
comparing the region to the “Thirty Years War” in Europe:
“There are three possible outcomes. An Assad victory. A Sunni
victory. Or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to
co-exist together but in more or less autonomous regions, so that
they can’t oppress each other. That’s the outcome I would prefer to
see. But that’s not the popular view…. I also think Assad ought to
go, but I don’t think it’s the key. The key is; it’s like Europe
after the Thirty Years War, when the various Christian groups had
been killing each other until they finally decided that they had to
live together but in separate units.” (from
27.35 into the interview).
Creating a “Salafist Principality”
in Syria
In May of this year, Judicial Watch released a series
of formerly classified documents from the US Department of Defense
and Department of State after the watchdog group filed a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
against the two government agencies. One important document
contained in the release was a 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) report which reveals that the powers supporting the Syrian
opposition – “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” –
wanted to create a “Salafist principality in Eastern Syria in order
to isolate the Syrian regime”:
“Opposition forces are
trying to control the Eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent
to the Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar), in addition to
neighbouring Turkish borders. Western countries, the Gulf states and
Turkey are supporting these efforts… If the situation unravels there
is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist
principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is
exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order
to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic
depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).” (p.5)
The document adds:
“ISI [the Islamic
State of Iraq] could also declare an Islamic State through its union
with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria.” (p.5)
Balkanizing Iraq
Fragmenting Iraq into three separate regions has been the goal of
many within the US establishment since the 2003 invasion of the
country, although NATO member Turkey has vocally opposed the
creation of a Kurdish state in the North. In 2006, a potential map
of a future Middle East was released by
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters
which depicted Iraq divided into three regions: a Sunni Iraq to the
West, an Arab Shia State in the East and a Free Kurdistan in the
North.
Even though the map does not reflect official Pentagon doctrine, it
gives a glimpse into the minds of some of the top military
strategists and corroborates with many other Western voices on the
strategy for Iraq. As geopolitical analyst
Eric Draitser noted
in a recent article for New Eastern Outlook, the President Emeritus
of the CFR, Leslie Gelb, argued in a 2003 article for the
NY Times
that the most feasible outcome in Iraq would be a “three-state
solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in
the south.”
Syria is shown as
still being a unified country in the above map, although this may be
because the Syrian proxy war did not begin until years later. Israel
could also come to occupy more territory in the coming decades.
Different Country, Same Strategy
The same pattern of balkanization and chaos that we
see in Iraq and Syria is also true in Libya. Following the NATO’s
2011 war in
the North
African nation, the country descended into an abyss of chaos and has
essentially been split into three parts, with Cyrenaica comprising
the East of the country, and the West split into Tripolitania in the
Northwest and Fezzan in the Southwest. Libya is now a failed
state which
is devoid of central government and is stricken by tribal warfare,
where rival militias who were once fighting alongside each other are
now battling against one another.
The Iranian nuclear deal could
mark a new beginning for Western geopolitical strategy in the Middle
East, where they would work with regional powers to promote
stability and refrain from military intervention (or intervention
through proxies). Let’s hope this is true, and the West will halt
the plethora of destabilization programs it has engaged in for
years.
But the most probable scenario will be a continuation
of the balkanization strategy that we have all come to expect; until
a “new local order emerges” – an order that will be designed by, and
for, Western interests of course.
Steven MacMillan is
an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor
of The
Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook”.