Thesis: The U.S., left and right, has fallen into a trap that will be hard to escape from. A foreign power has infiltrated the decision process. It has replaced justifiable national goals with interests that are incompatible with those goals but further the foreign powers objectives.
That thesis may be too strong, but there are trails, that may explain why it can be a thesis at all.
At the center-left TPM Cafe Larry Johnson states in a sidenote:
The countries in the Middle East genuinely believe that we are encouraging and cultivating the suicide bombers and the break up of Iraq. Why? Because they cannot conceive that a country as large and powerful as the United States could be impotent to deal with this threat. Instead, they are convinced that we have a secret plan we are not sharing with them. They believe that our sincere goal is to create chaos and control the oil resources. They look at me with disbelief and bewilderment when I tell them there is no secret plan and we are as incompetent as they fear.
Johnson thinks the current catastrophe it due to incompetence. He doesn´t believe the Middle Eastern view is correct. "Sorry we can´t do any better."
But there are some serious hints that what is happening in the Middle East is not incompetence, but an intended picture of incompetence with a deliberate strategy behind.
Let’s first check how real that "break up" of Iraq is. Here is a very, very U.S. friendly foreign minister with 30 years of experience in volatile environments:
Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war.
[..] He said he was so concerned that he was carrying this message "to everyone who will listen" in the Bush administration.
…
The prince said he served on a council of Iraq’s neighboring countries – Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran and Kuwait as well as Saudi Arabia – "and the main worry of all the neighbors" was that the potential disintegration of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states would "bring other countries in the region into the conflict."
Saudi Warns U.S. Iraq May Face Disintegration, NYT, Sep. 23, 2005
After talking to the Bush administration and being rejected, Saud al-Faisal is so desperate, that he goes public. This is unprecedented!!!
He is rallying against the Cheney’s administrations Middle East policy in the name of six Iraqi neighbors. He knows what actions the US could take and is not taking. He is asking why.
He may also remember these, not so incompetent, writings:
The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unqiue areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target.
…
In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. [..] Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.
A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon, Feb. 1982, ISBN 0937694568
Saud al-Faisal is an experienced politician. He was already some years into his job when the Yinon/Likut concept was published. He has seen how it evolved. He has also seen how the US administration evolved under several Presidents. He understands America’s situation and goals and has accommodated it for 30 years.
But by now he will agree with another conservative’s, Tom Clancy’s, evaluation of a senior Cheney neocult administration official:
CLANCY: Is he really on our side?
NORVILLE: You genuinely ask that question? Is he on our side?
CLANCY: I sat in on—I was in the Pentagon in ‘01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side? Sorry.
‘Deborah Norville Tonight’ for June 3, Tom Clancy on MSNBC, June 4, 2004
The Cheney administration is not on the side of Saudi Arabia or Iraq. It is not on the side of the United States. As Seymore Hersh cited an alarmed European Sec. State in a recent talk: "These are Trotskiets – in the sense that they believe in permanent revolution."
Permanent revolution = permanent war = permanent profits?
Larry Johnson and most of the commentators and analysts in the United States, for whatever reason, are still not able to make the connection such opposite characters as Tom Clancy and Seymore Hersh can agree on.
There is a handful of permanent revolutionaries in deciding positions in the United States’ administration who do think that a general, major series of wars across the Middle East will benefit their cause. They have, somehow, advanced this cause so far, that further steps seem inevitable, even to people who are not of their mind:
Larry Johnson, in 2005, continues:
In the coming years the United States may face the unsavory prospect of actually having to invade Saudi Arabia to secure and protect its access to oil.
Odit Yeon, 1982, in a paragraph following the one cited above:
The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia. Regardless of whether its economic might based on oil remains intact or whether it is diminished in the long run, the internal rifts and breakdowns are a clear and natural development in light of the present political structure.
The United States – left and right – Repubs and Dems – seem to be in a trap set up by a handful of Cheney administration officials, their political mentors and the Israeli Likut interest expressed in Yinon’s directions. Have all fallen in the above-assumed trap or is there anther explanation?
How can we break this curse?