Chossudovsky on "The Next Phase of the Middle East War"

[JohnyCanuck]

Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization. His most recent book is America’s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005.

The Next Phase of the Middle East War

by Michel Chossudovsky

September 4, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

Israel's war on Lebanon is an integral part of a US sponsored "military roadmap".

The war on Lebanon, which has resulted in countless atrocities including the destruction of the nation's economy and civilian infrastructure, is "a stage" in a sequence of carefully planned military operations.

Lebanon constitutes a strategic corridor between Israel and North-western Syria. The underlying objective of this war was the militarization of Lebanon, including the stationing of foreign troops, as a precondition for carrying out the next phase of a broader military agenda.

Formally under a UN mandate, the foreign troops to be stationed on Lebanese soil on the immediate border with Syria, will be largely although not exclusively from NATO countries. This military force mandated by the UN Security Council is by no means neutral. It responds directly to US and Israeli interests.

SNIP

While the threat of punitive aerial bombardments of Iran's nuclear facilities have been announced repeatedly by the Bush administration, recent developments suggest that an all out ground war is also under preparation.

CONPLAN constitutes only one component of the Middle East military agenda. CONPLAN 8022 does not contemplate a ground war. It posits "no boots on the ground", which was the initial assumption envisaged in relation to the proposed aerial attacks on Iran.

US and Israeli military planners are fully aware that the aerial "punitive bombings" will almost inevitably lead coalition forces into a ground war scenario in which they will have to confront Iranian and Syrian forces in the battlefield.

Tehran has confirmed that it will retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel as well as against US military facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20060904&articleId=3147

[Jackpine Radical]

1. ...so they need to be in office long past 2008 in order to carry it out.

Wonder just what they have in store to make sure they retain power. Suspension of "democracy?" Simple election theft a la 2000, 2002 & 2004? What? Your guess is azs good as mine. You can bet, though, that they have SOMETHING in mind so they can be there to carry out the game plan. It needn't be Bush, of course. They might change sock puppets in 2008, but the forces behind the scenes surely plan to still be pulling the strings forever.

[Jcrowley]

2. That's very interesting

US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Map
to Stave Off Looming Global Meltdown
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
 
In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.
 
Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East
 
Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavor designed to correct past errors. “Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East,” he observes, but then adds wryly: “Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.”
 
Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, “we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own.” Among his proposals are the need to establish “an independent Kurdish state” to guarantee the long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the humanitarian sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: “A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.”

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept06/Ahmed01.htm

Keeping the World Safe… for Our Economy

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899

Blood borders
How a better Middle East would look
By Ralph Peters

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, 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.