THE NEW MIDDLE EAST: BLOOD MAPS.

  The Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.

 The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East.Authors Note: The map shown above was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006). This map of a “New Middle East” was, named “Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look”, and was published in the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.

Peter’s book is insightful and frightening at the same time, it offer’s a rare glimpse into the American Military Industrial Complex and the mindset of it’s present elite leadership, as pertain’s to global hegemony and specifically Middle Eastern hegemony: “International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.

The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam, but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia [Muslims], but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.

Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.

Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosphorus and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected”. 

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphatically declared  during a press conference that “What we’re seeing here in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East and not going back to the old one.”

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a revealing book entitled:  “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives”. The book is an authentic insider’s take on the Anglo-American worldview, particularly that of the ruling hierarchy of the Western government’s and specifically, the American government it’s military elite and it’s varied intelligence apparatus, their department’s “top-people”, as pertains to global Anglo-Western hegemony and in particular Anglo-American and Anglo-European hegemony in the Middle East.  Brzezinski famously said: “Hegemony is as old as mankind”. Here then is Brzezinski in his own words:

“In Europe, the Word “Balkans” conjures up images of ethnic conflicts and great-power regional rivalries. Eurasia, too, has its “Balkans,” but the Eurasian Balkans are much larger, more populated, even more religiously and ethnically heterogenous. They are located within that large geographic oblong that demarcates the central zone of global instability (…) that embraces portions of southeastern Europe, Central Asia and parts of South Asia Pakistan, Kashmir, Western India, the Persian Gulf area, and the Middle East.

The Eurasian Balkans form the inner core of that large oblong (…) they differ from its outer zone in one particularly significant way: they are a power vacuum. Although most of the states located in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East are also unstable, American power is that region’s meaning the Middle East’s ultimate arbiter. The unstable region in the outer zone is thus an area of single power hegemony and is tempered by that hegemony. In contrast, the Eurasian Balkans are truly reminiscent of the older, more familiar Balkans of southeastern Europe: not only are its political entities unstable but they tempt and invite the intrusion of more powerful neighbors, each of whom is determined to oppose the region’s domination by another. It is this familiar combination of a power vacuum and power suction that justifies the appellation “Eurasian Balkans.”

The traditional Balkans represented a potential geopolitical prize in the struggle for European supremacy. The Eurasian Balkans, astride the inevitably emerging transportation network meant to link more directly Eurasia’s richest and most industrious western and eastern extremities, are also geopolitically significant. Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest  The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy, and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.

Access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interests, rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations, and fuel international rivalries.The situation is made all the more volatile by the fact that the region is not only a power vacuum but is also internally unstable.

The Eurasian Balkans include nine countries that one way or another fit the foregoing description, with two others as potential candidates. The nine are Kazakstan [alternative and official spelling of Kazakhstan] , Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia—all of them formerly part of the defunct (Soviet Union), as well as Afghanistan.

The potential additions to the list are Turkey and Iran, both of them much more politically and economically viable, both active contestants for regional influence within the Eurasian Balkans, and thus both significant geo-strategic players in the region. At the same time, both are potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts. If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable, while efforts to restrain regional domination by Russia could even become futile”. 

Adeyinka Makinde is a London based lecturer in law with a research interest in Intelligence and Security matters , he wrote an essay that was posted on the Global Research website, I will include excerpts from his essay which, bolsters my claims made previously: “This essay puts the present focus on the crisis in Iraq caused by the ISIS insurgency in the context of the historical and contemporary forces that have shaped and are still shaping the conflict in Iraq and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa).

It falls in line with a policy overseen by the United States which is predicated on the re-drawing of the Middle Eastern map i.e. balkanization and of ‘managing’ a series of manufactured conflicts which are ultimately designed to protect America’s access to the natural resources of the region.

This overarching policy accommodates a confluence of interests that cater to the hegemonic aspirations of the state of Israel, Saudi Arabia & the Sunni Gulf States and Turkey. It pits the

United States and these allies against the Shia Crescent led by Iran whose allies are Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon”.

Two key points contended here are:

1.The present crisis derives from the decision to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein on a false premise and that the overriding motivation of the influential neo-conservative group within the Bush administration was to destroy Iraq to benefit the state of Israel.

2.The present crisis is an extension of the war against the Syrian government of Bashar Assad which was manufactured by outside powers for the following ends:

§  To destroy a government with an anti-Israel stance.

§  To replace the minority Alawite government of Assad with a Sunni one which would comply with Saudi, Qatari and Turkish plans to build a natural gas pipeline from the Gulf to Turkey which would supply Europe with natural gas.

§  Destroying Alawite power in Syria would weaken Iran (and break its link with Hezbollah in Lebanon); the Iranians being the current existential threat to the Israeli state that Saddam and Nasser once were. The Shi’ite Iranians are the chief competitors of the Sunni Saudis for influence in the Middle East and of course the Iranians do not follow the dictates of Washington.

Evidence is provided of Israel’s historical and continuing motivation to break up Arab states and to stimulate turmoil via the policies of David Ben-Gurion and successive Israeli leaders as well as by reference to policy papers such as the ‘Yinon Plan’(1982) and the ‘Clean Break Document (1996).

Evidence is provided of the United States motive in fomenting sectarian conflicts and supporting extreme Islamic groups as has occurred in Libya, Syria and Iraq. It is based on maintaining American economic and military hegemony and is outlined in a policy paper funded by the US Army and produced by the RAND Corporation entitled ‘Unfolding the Future of the Long War: Motivations, Prospects and Implications for the U.S. Army” (2008). “Further, the recent announcement by the Obama administration of plans to go to Congress to raise monies for the anti-Assad opposition, confirm the on-going stratagem of attempting to permanently cut off the supply routes from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The demarcation between ‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’ nations in the Middle Eastern and North African world is long established regardless of administration, although the most overt expression given to a long term plan remains the document formulated by the neo-Conservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s.

This called for the systematic overthrow of a select number of regimes adjudged to be hostile to the “interests and values” of the United States.

The removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq formed the initial phase and this was to be followed by countries including Sudan, Libya and Syria, with Iran serving as the finale.

While the neo-Conservative influence on the administration of George W. Bush favoured intervention using the direct resources of the United States military, the present administration favours the path of effecting destabilisation through a technique of supporting a cast of dissidents involved in the prosecution of asymmetric warfare.

These belligerents ironically have tended to consist of Sunni extremists cut out of the same cloth as al-Qaeda; of which ISIS is a product”.  The following will offer unassailable “visual proof”, of US and ISIS/ISIL collaboration. Given the overwhelming evidence presented, there is every indication that the US, will create the “conditions”, for a war with Iran in the furtherance of their “national interest’s”, as described by  Adeyinka Makinde