The latest ‘ISIS Crisis” has once again flung the Middle East into a period of chaos and flux, but pay close attention to how the narrative is pushed down the timeline…
There are many side-bar conversations going on right now. The ‘conspiracy crowd’ (aka Alternative Media) – always reflecting credit on the devious all-knowing American elite that most of these commentators pretend to hate – are rushing to tell us that the ISIS onslaught in Iraq “was all planned by the State Department”. The reality may be more complex than this. There are multiple players, and many pieces in play: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan, Israel, US, UK,France, Russia et all - it’s Zbigniew Brzezinski’s the Grand Chessboard on Acid, and highly volatile.
Maybe it was to aid Israel, or to help the Kurds carve out and repossess their nation which the US, with Britain and France “derecognized” and tossed in the garbage can at the Lausanne Versailles-treaty series of conferences in January 1923? Or maybe it was to help oil exploration-development in the south of the former Iraq – with Iran and Russia? America’s two biggest buddies. Expect “Kurdish independence” to emerge from this latest campaign of destabilization in Iraq.
Or maybe it was from the pure pleasure of wasting US taxpayers’ money and doing harm, after spending an approximate $25 billion simply on weapons and training for the el-Maliki regime? Who knows. Who cares, but in any case it was certainly devious and superbly planned.
Planned For Decades
Some prominent alternative media commentators will describe how the dividing Iraq along sectarian-ethnic lines has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon “for at least 10 years”. This argument says Washington wants the outright suppression of the el-Maliki Baghdad regime and all the institutions of the federal government, leading to a process of political fracturing, eliminating Iraq as a country. Of course, you can cite Israel’s very real
Oded Yinon Plan - a plan which appears to be in play right to today.
Regardless of what you think is driving this upheaval, you cannot deny that the religious element is very real now – especially when the economic gap becomes more pronounced. Some conspiracy commentators will still maintain that we should not, however, believe in the talk about the Grand Caliphate of ISIS, nor should we believe that somehow it was the US State Dept that organized the death of Ali, son of Abu Talib in AD 661, and stirred the Shia against the Sunni. Yes, the religious divide exists and western colonial rules recognize this early on and made it a key tool in their divide and rule blueprint. This is the new 21st century version, with a lethal religious zeal.
As for the reasons why the US gave the el-Maliki crowd those $25 billion of weapons and training, that is training how to abandon weapons and how to run, this was only to fool the crowd and to keep America’s military-industrial complex humming. If that doesn’t seem credible or logical to you, this is because you don’t understand the American elite is super-sophisticated, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. If you didn’t know that you are dumb enough to think that ‘Plunge Protection’ stock market management by the same elite is going to come a cropper PDQ.
Direct rule, and indirect rule
The US State Dept and Pentagon have checked through all the history books – dating back to the times of Indiana Jones – and have found that Classic Imperialism always has ‘two-only’ operating modes. Direct rule, and indirect rule. The first means that the ‘Imperial power’ has to have boots on the ground, and civil servants in the administration, running the colonial party.
The second is supposedly more sophisticated – local co-opted elites and players are recruited and brainwashed. Sometimes, as in the el-Maliki case they go flaky and flunk their glove puppet role of running the show while their Imperial masters stay out of sight, but are there all the same. The indirect-rule method is however usually less expensive and dangerous for the Imperialists (and what’s $25 billion in US weapons and training for Baghdad?) but needs time to produce entirely predictable, east-to-please and obedient, zombie-type local elites. Africa is full of them. Why not the Middle East?
Cleans Whiter Than White
The local elites pretty often operate ethnic cleansing, sectarian pogroms, and even full-blown civil wars but they will finally produce good business, for the Imperialists. Inch’allah! Conversely, direct-rule colonialism almost always generates local resistance, needing military intervention to destroy. Ho Chi Minh, for example, warned US President Woodrow Wilson about this very thing in the 1920s – and asked for US help to get rid of French direct-rule colonialism in Vietnam. Wilson ignored him. Later on, the US lost a lot of face – and over 50,000 US servicemen dead and a million Vietnamese – trying to save and replace French colonialism in Vietnam.
The colonial dividend of exploiting local resources and accumulated wealth may however be higher with direct-rule. One reason is this avoids having to share the booty with the local elites, who tend to breed, duplicate and replicate themselves quite fast, but the risks are usually higher.
Also, history of the real type (not Indiana Jones) tells us that Imperialism of the direct variety has shrunk to nothing since the 1960s with the post-World War II decolonization of Europe’s empires and Japan’s short-lived empire. It was upstaged by American indirect colonization – or “coca-colonization”. Today’s globalization can be seen as a shift from US coca-colonization to competition from emerging China and India, doing exactly the same thing. Call it Mercantile Colonialism.
The end of the USA’s indirect-empire and late-imperial model is, to be sure, less clear cut and fuzzier-edged than the end of the classic or direct colonization model, but it is happening. Maybe John Kerry doesn’t know this but its sure that ISIS does. Don’t be surprised if ethnic cleansing moves up to high gear in the Middle East.
The ‘Iraqi-Irish Model’
Precedents even exist inside the western developed nations. One clear example is Ireland, where the end of English direct colonization with the 1918-1923 civil war, which killed about 7% – 10% of all Irish then living, firstly caused ethnic cleansing. England retreated to its directly-colonized northeast, called Ulster. The ethnic cleansing – as in Iraq today – is conducted along strict religious grounds.
Direct rule continued in Ulster, to this day, but the economic bang for the buck was never high, and soon dwindled into negative territory – the Ulster colony or province of the UK costs money for UK taxpayers and is a museum of outdated uneconomic sunset industries.
Ethnic Cleansing with Oil
The history lesson is that shifting from direct to indirect rule often causes ethnic cleansing and Ireland gives us a clear example. In the Middle East, firstly the creation of Israel in 1948 caused ethnic cleansing – as longstanding and traditional Jewish communities were rooted out from Morocco to the Gulf. The abandonment of US direct rule in the region – the last outposts being Afghanistan and Iraq – should logically produce the same result, probably on an accelerated basis.
The conspiracy theorists tell us the supposed State Dept-Pentagon gameplan for Iraq needs Shia-Sunni ethnic cleansing and the total elimination of remaining Christian and other non-Muslim minority groups or communities in Iraq. In this case, ethnic cleansing will mean civil war. Whether this could or might harm oil production, transport and refining assets and infrastructures – the only interest of the US and the other external powers – has to be judged as high or very high, especially when the Gulf Sunni-minority petromonrchies are also threatened.
In the Gulf states, the opposition will in no way be only and exclusively from the Shia majorities or large minorities, which are presently disenfranchised. The opposition to autocratic rule can be the Black Flag djihadists anxious to create their
Grand Caliphate - a kind of European Union of believers and therefore not at all like the EU,
right?
The mindboggling claim of the conspiracy theorists is that John Kerry and friends are using the break-up of Communist and Federal Yugoslavia as their model. This is a simplistic comparison, but not very accurate. Among the ethnic-cleansed wreckage, we have the Muslim majority micro-state of Kosovo with its 30% unemployment rate, for adults, 60% for young persons, and its huge net emigration rate – to parasite the social security systems of other EU states. A real victory for divide and rule, but not exactly an
economic victory.
To be sure, Kosovo didn’t have oil – but is the largest exporter of trafficked children and young female prostitutes in Europe. Saudi Arabia stripped of its Shia-majority regions and without oil, could be good for the same thing as Kosovo, and not much else – apart from millions of religious tourists who head to Mecca and Medina every year.
Going further in their madness, the American Right-Wing and Pro-Israeli conspiracy theorists shrug off this likely outcome with claims that “Persophiles” or closet Iran-lovers have always existed, even as moles, inside the State Dept and Pentagon since the times of Jimmy Carter. Iran will now be dusted off and brought up to steam. Once the oil slows down, the new downsized all-Sunni Saudi Arabia, without much oil, would be a
Hibat Allah, or Gift of God – to the d’jihadists. It will move on to only preaching, instead of pumping oil. US officials will no longer need to lick the Saudi boot – but they will need to do their boot licking in
Tehran…
Hillary’s New Iran
Getting just a little nearer to the real world, some conspiracy theorists admit that what finally doomed Iraq was the Arab Spring. Which wasn’t planned by the State Dept, although Hillary Clinton with typical modesty, claims she organized it all in a single afternoon session in the White House Rose Garden.
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