The Pentagon Plan to ‘Divide and Rule’ the Muslim World

[KoKo]

The Pentagon Plan to ‘Divide and Rule’ the Muslim World
by Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez Ahmed, PhD, is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and best-selling author who tracks what he calls the 'crisis of civilization'. He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

© 2014 Middle East Eye

Capitalising on Sectarianism

According to Dr. Christopher Davidson of Durham University, author of After the Sheikhs: the Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies, the current crisis in Yemen is being “egged on” by the US, and could be part of a wider covert strategy to “spur fragmentation in Iran allies and allow Israel to be surrounded by weak states”.

He suggests that the Yemen war serves US interests in three overlapping ways. It tests whether or not Iran will “ramp up support for Houthis”. If not, then Iran’s potential role “as a reliable, not expansionist regional policeman (much like the Shah) will seem confirmed to the US.”

The war could also weaken Saudi Arabia. Pushing the House of Saud into a “full-on hot war,” said Dr. Davidson, would be “great for the arms industry, [and] gives the US much needed leverage over increasingly problematic Riyadh… If the regime in Saudi Arabia’s time is up, as many in the US seem to privately believe, in the post $100 a barrel era, this seems a useful way of running an ally into the ground quite quickly”.

The Yemen conflict also “diverts global attention from IS [Islamic State] in Levant and the increasingly obvious uselessness or unwillingness of the US-led coalition to act against it”.

Davidson points out that there is precedent for this: “There have been repeated references in the Reagan era to the usefulness of sectarian conflict in the region to US interests.”

One post-Reagan reiteration of this vision was published by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Strategic and Political Advanced Studies for Benjamin Netanyahu. The 1996 paper, A Clean Break, by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Richard Perle – all of whom went on to join the Bush administration – advocated regime-change in Iraq as a precursor to forging an Israel-Jordan-Turkey axis that would “roll back” Syria, Lebanon and Iran. The scenario is surprisingly similar to US policy today under Obama.

Twelve years later, the US Army commissioned a further RAND report suggesting that the US “could choose to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world… to split the jihadist movement between Shiites and Sunnis.” The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan”. Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.

More of Article at:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41438.htm

[leveymg]

1. Scary that the neocon regime change logic of PNAC's "Clean Break" is so mainstream

and has been made into today's reality. Doubly-scary that so few seem to acknowledge that sponsoring regional Sunni-Shia wars across the Mideast was once considered a radical notion.

[2naSalit]

2. I agree

but since the vast GP has been spoon-fed control freak values as a way to bring about something called peace, it now permeates all conversation for all on the far right on the political spectrum.

The question could be: "How do we de-hypnotize our nation?"

[leveymg]

3. The thing is to remind people that the "new normal" isn't either. It has origins in some

very unAmerican notions that it's okay to support religious terrorists and overthrow the governments of sovereign nations with which we are not at war. That thinking comes out of the Cold War experience in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Afghanistan, and the breakup of Yugoslavia - it has become a settled part of US strategy to work with despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to breakup countries that present no real threat to the U.S., even if they have secular elected governments.

Now that we've experienced blowback from our own use of terrorist groups abroad, counter-terrorism justifies an expanding list of crimes and atrocities, including torture and extrajudicial executions of U.S. citizens overseas. That new normal also entails creation of permanent warrantless surveillance, universal profiling, secret courts and militarization of policing.

It's a cycle of escalation that leads to the ultimate crimes against humanity of genocide and nuclear holocaust, which may also be accepted as a new normal.

No, thank you. Expose the origins of destructive behaviors, and challenge their legitimacy.

[2naSalit]

4. Now that

sounds like a viable option regarding how to change what we have going on now. I wish I had a bully pulpit for educational purposes, I'd be there 24/7 until enough people "get it" and mobilize to change how things are and where we are headed currently. I have few ways to do that in my little world, I opted to retreat from large populations because I felt overwhelmed after suffering economic ruin in 2001, still trying to recover while recognizing that it's probably a pipe-dream at this point.

[WillyT]

5. K & R !!!