International Solidarity Movement

BREAKING: At 3.25pm today, Wednesday 28th October, another young Palestinian man—still not identified— was shot in cold blood in the Hebron neighborhood of Tel Rumeida. The incident, witnessed by human rights observers from the International Solidarity Movement walking in the street near the Gilbert Checkpoint, saw him get shot from 2 meters away by Israeli forces. An eyewitness from ISM, who would like to be identified as Orion, for security reasons, stated: “I am 100% sure he was unarmed. I saw the two soldiers creeping slowly along the road outside our apartment window with their guns cocked, so I looked down the street to see why. I saw an unarmed man walking normally towards the soldiers and suddenly they shot.

At least 12 shots were fired and he died almost immediately at the scene due to wounds sustained on his arms and torso.

There was no commotion at the site prior to the incident. Another ISM witness stated “It was just like last night, when they shot Hammam Said. Everything was quiet and suddenly we heard many shots outside our apartment. I am sure he was unarmed and they murdered him for no reason, just like Hammam”

Minutes prior to the incident, a policewoman was overheard at the Shuhada Street checkpoint 56 saying on her radio “he looks like a good one, shoot him.”

Our deepest gratitude to Vanessa Beeley for her brave work on behalf of oppressed people in the Middle East and elsewhere. Source: https://www.facebook.com/vanessa.beeley?fref=ts

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what’s left

By Stephen Gowans
ANNALS OF LIBERAL TREACHERY

Hezbollah: A potent force in Mideast politics, and a disciplined, well respected popular army that many nations would be happy to command.

In a speech delivered in the southern suburbs of Beirut on October 23, 2015, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, a resistance organization rooted in Lebanon’s Shia community, presented a description of US imperialism that largely comports with that of secular leftwing anti-imperialists in the West.

Hezbollah was established in the early 1980s to end Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. With Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, and a subsequent Israeli incursion in 2006 repulsed by Hezbollah fighters, the resistance organization remains on the qui vive against future Israeli aggressions. It is now assisting the Syrian Arab Army in its death struggle against extreme sectarian Sunni Islamists, among them ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra. These al-Qaeda offshoots pose an existential threat to the Shia community in Lebanon, explaining why Hezbollah has chosen to enter the conflict.

Lebanese Hezbollah fighters stand next to a mock rocket under a poster of Hezbollah’s leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah with arabic words reading:” To let you know, July (2006 war) was a picnic,” during a demonstration to protest Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, in the southern market town of Nabatiyeh, Lebanon, on Saturday Jan. 10, 2009. Nearly 20,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of the market town of Nabatiyeh in a rally organized by Hezbollah.

The following (in italics) is a distillation of Nasrallah’s remarks [1].

The United States wants the Middle East to be under its political, military, security, economic and cultural domination.

Washington uses Israel as a tool to promote this agenda.

Israel depends for its existence on the United States. If the financial, economic and military support that Washington grants Tel Aviv stops, Israel will cease to exist.

The victims of Israel are the Palestinians and the Lebanese, both of whom have suffered occupation and massacres at Israel’s hands.

Blame for Israeli actions, then, lies more with Washington, Israel’s master, than with Netanyahu and his terrorist army.

Therefore, Palestinians and Lebanese are the primary victims of the US domination project in the Middle East.

US foreign policy is aimed at plundering the region’s oil, gas and riches. It is driven by the owners of oil and weapons companies, not by human rights organizations.

Indeed, all of Washington’s talk about human rights and democracy is meaningless. The biggest dictatorships in the region are sponsored by the United States. These dictatorships violate human rights and disdain elections (a reference to US allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain).

US allies in the region are nothing but local administrations headed by a king or a president answerable to Washington. The decisions of war, peace, foreign policy and markets are in the hands of their master, the United States.

The punitive aspects of US foreign policy are aimed at anyone who refuses to submit to US domination, which is to say, refuses to become local extensions of the US government (and by implication, of the large oil and weapons companies that dominate it.) He who takes his own decision on the basis of his country’s interests is unacceptable to the United States.

For example, all of Washington’s hostility to Iran is traceable to the latter’s wanting to be a free and independent country that owns and controls its own economy and preserves the dignity of its people. This rejects US hegemony and therefore is unacceptable to Washington.

Washington launches proxy wars against those countries that seek to become independent and strong. The United States is waging a proxy war in the Middle East on everyone who refuses to submit to US domination. The proxies are the extreme sectarian Sunni Islamist jihadists, or takfiris, (including ISIS and the Nusra Front, both progeny of al-Qaeda, and the latter now reframed deceptively by US propagandists as “moderate” rebels.) The real leader and coordinator of the takfiris is the United States, assisted by its regional allies (a reference to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.)

Today, Washington tells us that we will either be slaves of the United States or it will besiege us and send suicide bombers.

The ongoing war is not for the sake of reforms, democracy, human rights, elimination of poverty or countering ignorance, but for subjugating those who reject the United States’ hegemonic ambitions.

Nasrallah calls Israel “an executive tool in implementing US hegemony” in the Middle East. This calls to mind an observation made by the Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi: “To many Arabs, Israel is the beachhead of US imperialism in the Middle East and its executor,” a not unreasonable understanding given the evidence.

[Click image for best resolution]

Nasrallah describes US foreign policy as predicated on a universalist model of US leadership that leaves little room for other countries to define and follow their own path. At least one person close to US foreign policy acknowledges that this view is accurate. Ana Montes, who on the eve of 9/11 was the top Cuba analyst at the Pentagon, denounced US foreign policy for having “never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice,” [2] paralleling Nasrallah’s complaint that Washington is unwilling to allow Iran to “be a free and independent country” that owns and controls its economy and preserves the dignity of its people, and that it punishes countries “that seek to become independent and strong.”

Montes struggled unsuccessfully to understand why Washington continued “to dictate how the Cubans should select their leaders, who their leaders cannot be, and what laws are appropriate in their land,” as much as many Syrians must struggle to understand, in Washington’s insistence that their president step aside, why the United States dictates how they should select their leaders and who their leaders cannot be.

“Why,” Montes wondered, “can’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for over two centuries?”

And why can’t Washington let Syria and Iran do the same?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he answer, from Nasrallah’s analysis, is clear. Neither Syria nor Iran, anymore than Cuba, can be allowed to own and control their own economies because this conflicts with the aspirations of the corporate elite that dominates policy-making in the United States.

Troubled by the absence in Washington of “tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others”, Montes followed her conscience. She fed Cuban authorities intelligence on the eavesdropping platforms that US spies had secretly installed in Cuba to help undermine Cuba’s right to make its own journey.

For her efforts to impede an injustice, she was sentenced to almost 25 years in prison for espionage. She has been called “the most important spy you’ve never heard of” [3] but is also among the most important prisoners of conscience you’ve never heard of, and one Amnesty International, a purported champion of prisoners of conscience, won’t touch. This simply adds to the tally of lapses on the side of US imperialism that the compromised human rights organization has become infamous for, including:

• Criticizing Wikileaks for leaking US secrets; [4]

• Propagating without evidence the claim that Iran has a nuclear weapons program; [5]

• Disappearing US sanctions against North Korea—the most comprehensive and longstanding program of economic warfare ever carried out in human history–in a report on the country’s “crumbling health care system.” Instead, Amnesty attributed North Korea’s health care difficulties solely to decisions taken by Pyongyang, roughly equivalent to blaming the death of numberless Iraqi children during the 1990s on Saddam Hussein, and not the US-led sanctions regime; [6]

• Appointing US State Department official Suzanne Nossel to the post of executive director of Amnesty International USA, a woman who supported the illegal US invasion of Iraq as well as a military option to coerce Iran into relinquishing its right under international law to process uranium for peaceful purposes; [7]

• Confining its criticism of US military aggressions to the question of whether they are conducted in compliance with the rules of war and not whether they are initiated in violation of international law. [8] This prioritizes the concept of jus in bello (justice in how a war is conducted) and fails to address altogether the concept of jus ad bellum (the justness of a war), a strategy which spares Amnesty from calling out the most egregious crimes of the United States and its allies, since Washington’s wars, and those of its subalterns, almost invariably fail to meet jus ad bellum standards;

• Calling for an international arms embargo on the Syrian government but not on the rebels who are supplied by the United States and its allies, among which is Saudi Arabia, a human rights abomination. [9]

Amnesty’s head Salil Shetty continues AI’s long history of liberaloid mushy collaboration with the empire.

While Amnesty was critical of the human rights record of apartheid South Africa, it alone among human rights organizations refused to denounce apartheid itself. [10] The organization also refused to condemn the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia [11], even though it was an exercise in imperial predation that denied the rights of many innocent Yugoslavs to life, security of the person and employment. Amnesty excused its inaction on grounds that it is not an antiwar organization, as if war and human rights are not often inextricably bound. But Amnesty’s most egregious service to the propaganda requirements of US foreign policy came in 1991, when the rights group released a report in the run-up to the Gulf War claiming that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies from incubators. This was a hoax, perpetrated by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, orchestrated by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton [manufacturers of warmongering lies like these should have long been held accountable as common criminals of the worst sort, instead of allowed to thrive as a respected ordinary communications industry—Eds.], which had been hired to launch a propaganda campaign to galvanize public support for a US war on Iraq. When US President George H.W. Bush appeared on television to announce that he was readying for war on Iraq, he had a copy of the Amnesty report in his hands. [12]

Hypocritical to a fault, Washington promoted human rights in the 1980s as a cudgel with which to wage an ideological war against the Soviet Union. It has been used since to extend the war to countries that refuse to submit to Washington’s hegemonic ambitions. Is it not predictable that a Western-based human rights organization, which apparently sees nothing amiss in appointing a former US State Department official to head its US branch, should take center stage in prosecuting this ideological battle?

The United States and its allies are, according to the preferred narrative—and one largely supported by Amnesty—champions of human rights whose aggressions abroad are aimed at enemies of human rights, and therefore, are valid, and even laudable. The idea that US foreign policy is inspired by human rights, as Nasrallah shows, is complete nonsense. An accurate description of the instrumental role played by human rights in US foreign policy is provided by a senior US State Department official: “The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass (on human rights), whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.” [13]

The Amnesty-ignored prisoner of conscience Ana Montes remains defiant, despite her decade and a half of incarceration in the highest security women’s prison in the United States. “Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in,” Montes says, “but some things in life are worth going to prison for.” [14]

How pathetically weak-kneed and addled is the imperialist-friendly Amnesty against the honest analysis and courage of Ana Montes; how contemptible is its collusion with imperialism against the defiance of Nasrallah and the countless other opponents of the international dictatorship of the United States and the bankers, billionaire investors, oil companies and weapons manufacturers in whose service it operates and who hold sway over it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN GOWANS is a prominent Canadian social justice activist and geopolitical analyst. He is the founding editor of What's Left. 

N O T E S

1. “Zeinab Essa, “Sayyed Nasrallah vows from Sayyed Shudadaa Complex: We’re to defeat ‘Israel”, US-Takfiri scheme,” Alahed, October 24, 2015.

2. Montes statement, October 16, 2002, The Centre for Counter-Intelligence and Security Studies, The Ana Belen Montes Case, , Latinamericanstudies.org, Studieshttp://www.latinamericanstudies.org/espionage/montes-articles.pdf

3. Jim Popkin, “Ana Montes did much harm spying for Cuba. Chances are, you haven’t heard of her,” The Washington Post Magazine, April 18, 2013.

4. John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya, “WikiLeaks founder on the run, trailed by notoriety”, The New York Times, October 23.

5. Joe Emersberger, “Debating Amnesty about Syria and Double Standards”, MRZine, July 6, 2012.

6. Stephen Gowans, “2010 Amnesty International botches blame for North Korea’s crumbling healthcare,” what’s left, July 20, 2010.

7. Emersberger.

8. Daniel Kovalick “Amnesty International and the Human Rights Industry,” counterpunch.org, November 8, 2012.

9. Emersberger.

10. Francis A. Boyle and Dennis Bernstein, “Interview with Francis Boyle. Amnesty on Jenin”, Covert Action Quarterly, Summer, 2002. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=4573

11. Alexander Cockburn, “How the US State Dept. Recruited Human Rights Groups to Cheer On the Bombing Raids: Those Incubator Babies, Once More?” Counterpunch, April 1-15, 1999. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005098.html

12. Boyle and Bernstein.

13. Craig Whitlock, “Niger rapidly emerging as a key U.S. partner,” The Washington Post, April 14, 2013.

14. Popkin.

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Part IIA
By Andrew Korybko

Russian missiles. The Russian Federation is now the military backbone of the Coalition of the Righteous .

Crosspost with Global Research, October 10, 2015 | Oriental Review 8 October 2015

(Please read Part I before this article)

[learn_more] The first part of the article touched upon the defining elements that constitute the paradigm shift created by the Coalition of the Righteous (COR), so it’s time to examine the geopolitical consequences of this game-changing development. Each observation deals either with an analyzed observation or a forecasted scenario, and everyone is integral in understanding the “New Middle East” that’s taking shape under Russian stewardship. The first section addresses the COR crescent between Lebanon and Iran, while the second one looks at the US’ crumbling geopolitical pillars of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.[/learn_more]

The Resistance-Republican Arc Is Reborn

The author wrote about this scenario twice, once back in January and the other earlier last month (butpublished this week), and it deals with the geopolitical resurrection of the Resistance Arc between Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The earliest forecast suggested that Iran could play a stabilizing role in convincing the Kurds to abandon their secessionist desires, while the latest one built upon that idea by highlighting the crucial role that a pro-Resistance Kurdish entity (whether independent or still part of Iraq) would play in fulfilling this scenario. Also, the most recent analysis postulates that with all three entities having the common denomination of Republicanism (be it Secular or Islamic), there’s a certain ideological synergy between them that makes their cooperation all the more natural, and can also lead to the inclusion of Lebanon if it ever truly stabilizes. The COR can thus be seen as the second iteration of the Resistance-Republic Arc, but this time much more strengthened in its geopolitical standing as a result of the Russian Federation’s formal incorporation. In the context of the New Cold War, this makes the coalition the number one military enemy of the US, since it’s the only force that is literally fighting back against its proxies and dedicated to sweeping them and their puppet masters completely out of the geo-pivotal Mideast region.

Kurdistan Makes Its Choice

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ontinuing with the theme of the Kurds’ criticality to any Resistance Arc recreation in the Mideast, it needs to be directly stated that their leaders have made a clear choice in favor of the COR. By going from unipolar clients to multipolar allies, the Kurds have played a major role in ensuring the viability of the coalition and securing its internal unity in the face of terrorist aggression against it. Russia was the kingmaker in having this happen, as its focused diplomatic efforts over the past two months are largely responsible for the Kurdish Pivot. Without this having occurred, then the geopolitical danger of a pro-American Kurdish client state rising out of the coalition’s anti-terrorist campaign would have hung over the multipolar world like the ultimate Damocles’ Sword. Therefore, the Kurds certainly deserve their fair share of credit and should be saluted for bravely rejecting the US’ vision for them and transferring their trust to the COR instead. Washington can’t in the least bit be happy about this, but it’s mostly unable to do anything about it because its Turkish attack dog is mired in an escalating civil war at home and not at all in a position to project large amounts of punitive force across the border (with its latest small-scale ground and air raids being the most it can realistically do for now).

Iran’s Internal Debate Is Over

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he signing of the Iranian nuclear agreement temporarily revealed the internal divisions among the country’s elite, with Western-slurred “hard-liners” decrying it as being full of too many concessions while the so-called “moderates” praised it for its pragmatism. Going further, Iran entered into a brief period of political schizophrenia, courting Western investment at the same time that Ayatollah Khamenei reaffirmed that his country’s stance towards the US remains unchanged. This confusing dichotomy led the author and others to wonder whether or not Western-friendly “moderate” forces had succeeded in secretly assuming power behind the scenes and hijacking Iran’s geopolitical orientation. While some level of political differences still most surely exist in Iran’s upper echelons, the country’s participation in the COR firmly indicates that the “hard-liners” (in reality, the forces that are the most geopolitically pragmatic in Iran) are still calling the shots, which is a huge relief for the multipolar world. Venturing to explain how they pulled out on top, it’s very likely that F. William Engdahl’sexplanation of Russia’s embedded military and technical influence strategically overriding any of the West’s economic temptations is the most accurate reason, and while questions still remain about the impact that Iran’s forthcoming return to the global energy market will have for Russia, that too is likely to have already been addressed by both parties.

The Friendship Pipeline Returns

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the geopolitical dividends that the War on Syria was supposed to reap for the West and its regional allies was the unviability of the Iran-Iraq-Syria Friendship Pipeline, but with order soon to return to the latter two states, it’s very probable that the project will actually be revived. This is even more so as Western Europe continues to look for a non-Russian energy alternative, especially now that the Turkish-Kurdish War has raised serious questions about the security of the TANAP and TAPlines. Thus, a geo-energy reversal appears to be taking place, one in which TANAP and TAP look unviable while the Friendship Pipeline seems realistic. The windfall of transit revenue that Iraq and Syria would receive for hosting the pipeline could greatly assist with their post-war reconstruction efforts, thus making it a natural economic choice for their leaderships (aside from the loyal commitment that each of them already have in resurrecting the fraternal project). Assuming that the opportunity arises for its physical creation (which is very possible considering that the COR will succeed), this begs the question about how such a large influx of gas on the global market would impact on Russia’s grand energy strategy.

While Russia has decisively entered the Middle East theater, China may soon join her. Photo: Chinese marines honor guard sees off the Varyag, a Russian missile cruiser.

The issue of massive Iranian gas exports threatens to potentially split Russia and Iran in the future more than any other, but in all likelihood, it seems as though Moscow has already thought this through in advance and reached some sort of understanding with Tehran. After all, it’s logical to conclude that once Iraq and Syria return to full stability, Iran would naturally take the lead in suggesting the recreation of the Friendship Pipeline, even more so in the context of the post-sanctions environment it will be in by that time. The pipeline won’t be built right away, of course, and this gives Russia time to flex out its response, which is predicted to be the continued trend of lessening its budgetary dependency on energy exports and diversifying more towards the Asian marketplace. Pair this with the fact that the Friendship Pipeline will export LNG, which thus gives it a very narrow consumer base concentrated mostly in Western Europe, and one can realize how it won’t directly threaten the demand for Russia’s geo-critical Balkan Stream pipeline, thereby avoiding the potential for an unfriendly energy competition between the two Allies. On a final note about this topic, Russia is also primed for expanding its real-sector economic relations via a broad South Eurasian Pivot (which touches into East Africa, too), meaning that its prior relative dependence on energy exports (typically misrepresented, at that) will take on even less of an importance than before as the country engages in new, innovative, and geographically wider methods of spreading its influence.

The Lebanese Lifeline

Hezbollah has played an important role in Syria, and it may now have an even bigger role in the days ahead, albeit in the broader region, inside the Lebanon pivot.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Russian military intervention in Syria has relieved the pro-government ground forces of enormous pressure, and it’s thus made it much easier for them to operate. This opens up the possibility that Hezbollah’s fighters there are no longer needed in the same capacity as before, and could thus return to Lebanon to potentially deal with the domestic crisis there without having much of a negative on-the-ground consequence for the Syrian Arab Army right now. One shouldn’t misunderstand the author at this juncture – Hezbollah played an enormously important role in supporting Damascus in its anti-terrorist missions – but it’s just that Lebanon, the epicenter of the movement, is now facing its own existential crisis that might necessitate the organization playing a key role there in some way or another. Had Russia not directly intervened in Syria, then it would have been much more difficult for the Syrian Arab Army to manage the frontlines had Hezbollah needed to abruptly pull most of its forces out of the country for whatever unexpected reason. Now, however, no such military vulnerability exists in the same sense as it previously did, thus giving Hezbollah more freedom of military maneuverability to save Lebanon without having to make the painful decision of choosing between helping its homeland or Syria.

2006: Israeli soldier tosses grenade into a Hezbollah dugout. Eventually Hezbollah fought the IDF to standstill.

Hezbollah’s flexibility in now being able to more conveniently transfer units from Syria back to Lebanon will likely help it in better managing the country’s crisis if it escalates and such a need arises. Complementarily to this, Russia has also just announced that it will provide an unspecified amount of military equipment to Lebanon’s armed forces and law enforcement agencies to assist with their anti-ISIL efforts. This stroke of strategic genius will help the country counter any terrorist threat that spills over its borders during the forthcoming Russian-Syrian Liberation Offensive, and it will also serve to bolster the state in repelling any destructive Color Revolution-like Islamist takeover. The lifeline that Russia has thus extended to the Lebanese state might be sufficient enough not only to finally bring some semblance of stability to it, but also to make it a member of the COR. If the latter comes to be, then the Resistance Arc would continue to consolidate itself as the Republican Arc, further highlighting the ideological differences between it and the unipolar-affiliated monarchies to the south. Additionally, Lebanon’s incorporation into the Alliance would help it shake off the influence of pro-Saudi infiltrators that have snuck the Kingdom’s influence into the country and its institutions over the past decade.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. Copyright © Andrew Korybko, Oriental Review, 2015

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Nauseated by the
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by Andrew Korybko

(Please read Part I prior to this article)

Sadat—the great traitor of the Arab nation—confers with his handler, Henry Kissinger. Having turned Egypt into a client state, Washington and the whore media rarely wasted an opportunity to massage hie ego.

Part I expounded upon the theory that Mideast developments can be understood through the prism of four ideologies (and three subcomponents), and now it’s time to test the idea by seeing if it can accurately explain key events in regional history. Those concerning Egypt, Turkey, and Yemen were already addressed, so let’s look at the Arab-Israeli Wars, the Lebanese Crises, the Iraqi War on Iran, and the theater-wide “Arab Spring” Color Revolutions:

The Arab-Israeli Wars

The three conflicts are very interesting to examine through the proposed ideological lenses, since they shed light on the progressive political changes that took place in the Arab countries. The first war was a coalition of Secular Republics and Monarchic Absolutists against Israeli Exceptionalism, and it was waged before the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies recognized the threat that Republicanism posed to their control. At the time, Egypt was still a monarchy too, with recently independent Syria and Lebanon being the only Republics, but they were so early into their modern political development that it wasn’t a factor affecting the Arab Alliance against the common Israeli foe. Arab Nationalism was the regional zeitgeist at the time, so this obviously trumped any considerations of the contradictory political nature of the coalition (if such points were even brought up then).

Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Dayan and his staff during Six Day War, in Jerusalem. Yitzhak Rabin was one of his top aides.

The Six-Day War of 1967 was a bit of a different matter, as Egypt had transitioned into a Secular Republic by then, but the third major participant alongside it and Syria, Jordan, was and still is a monarchy. Again, Arab Nationalism served as the rallying cry, and it was for this all-encompassing reason that the Republics and Monarchies united once more in trying to liberate the Palestinians and crush Israeli Exceptionalism, but yet again, it was a regrettably failed attempt, noble as it was. Jordan, it should be noted, was much more pragmatic at this point than Saudi Arabia, which had already begun viewing Secular Republicanism as a threat to its monarchist control. Jordan had up until then not fallen for the artificial divisions to Arab unity that Israel was trying to stir up, still seeing Arab Nationalism as the primary driver for cooperating with Egypt and Syria in trying to take down the Israeli state, but that was quickly to change by the time the next war came along.

In 1973, it was only the Secular Republics of Egypt and Syria which fought Israel, since Jordan and the other Arab states stayed on the sidelines. The importance of Amman’s refusal to enter the war after it began, despite Israel still occupying its formerly administrated territory of the West Bank, cannot be overstated, since it revealed two important aspects of the changing geopolitical calculus: Israel had broken the bonds of united Arab Nationalism; and Saudi Arabia, the symbolic “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”, did not chastise it for doing so and implicitly supported its decision to stay out of the fight. This showed that an evident rift had emerged between the Secular Republics and the Monarchic Absolutists, in that the latter no longer saw the need to fight against the Israeli Exceptionalists and instead opted to de-facto recognize its existence and peacefully accept this state of affairs.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nother major change in the regional dynamic revealed itself during the war as well, and this was that Sadat was holding secret talks with the Israelis without informing his Syrian allies, who were left completely out of the loop and had to unexpectedly retreat from their military gains after Sadat abruptly betrayed them. Unsurprisingly, Sadat would go on to formally recognize Israel and conduct a peace treaty with it in 1979, signifying the spectacular end of Secular Republicanism’s slow death in Egypt and the country’s unquestionable reorientation from Resistance Bloc member to Western puppet state. As luck would have it, this would be the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which would then take Egypt’s formal place, but it needs to be emphasized that Syria is the only country in the Mideast to continually remain a member of the Resistance and never change its relationship to Israeli Exceptionalism in any shape or fashion.

The Lebanese Crises

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ebanon makes for an intriguing case study of the theory put forth in this article, as there are a couple major crises to which it can be applied. The US launched its first invasion of a Mideast country in 1958 when it sent around 14,000 troops to assist the beleaguered government of President Chamoun, which was facing domestic resistance from forces that wanted it to join the United Arab Republic recently formed between Egypt and Syria. Lebanon, on paper, was a Republic, albeit a sectarianist one, which has been at the heart of its instability since its French-imposed creation. The US, wishing to retain influence over its Arab foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean (to complement its Jewish one in Israel), felt compelled to prop up its proxy using a loosely interpreted ‘justification’ from the Eisenhower Doctrine unveiled the year before. This policy stated that the US would assist Mideast states that requested help in repelling armed aggression, especially if this was to defend against anything even remotely associated with communism or the USSR. It was through this flimsy ‘justification’ that the US argued that the oppositionist forces in Lebanon were associated with Syria and Egypt’s United Arab Republic, a country friendly to the USSR, and that the government in Beirut was thus eligible for American military assistance. It was through this manner that the US retained controlling influence over its client state until its follow-up invasion in 1982.

This brings one to the US’ participation in the “ Multinational Force ”, which ironically was composed solely of a small handful of Western countries, that was in Lebanon from 1982-84. As it relates to the ideological spectrum presented in this article, it was an attempt to reinforce a puppet state Republic and prevent the real Republic, Syria (which was present in Lebanon at the time), from freeing its neighbor from external control. Damascus would ultimately be successful after the end of the Lebanese Civil War as a result of the 1991 Defense and Security Agreement Between the Republic of Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic that allowed for the stationing of Syrian military units inside Lebanon. From that time until the 2005 Cedar (Color) Revolution, Lebanon, although still plagued by the domestic difficulties endemic to the sectarianist system, basically functioned as a de-facto member of the Resistance Bloc.

It wasn’t until the US orchestrated the Mideast’s first Color Revolution in 2005 that Syrian troops were forced out of the country and the state reverted back to its general pro-Western orientation (despite resistance from Hezbollah), which incidentally led to the Israeli Exceptionalists launching an embarrassingly failed invasion one year later. Presently, Lebanon is now engulfed in a political crisis that has rendered its government dysfunctional, which runs the risk of drawing valuable Hezbollah fighters out of Syria and back to the home front in the event that the situation turns more serious. It can also cripple the viability of the Beirut-to-Damascus highway on which so much of the Syrian capital depends. Looked at from this perspective, the Dysfunctional State status of Lebanon clearly works out to the advantage of the enemies fighting against Syria’s Secular Republic, thus confirming the ideological nature of Lebanon’s weaponization against Syria.

The Iraqi War On Iran

Iraqi pilots examine map before mission on French Mirage F-1 fighter bombers.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his conflict has clear shades of ideological opposition, pitting a fake Secular Republic against the region’s only Islamic one. Although the US did arm both sides to a certain extent, it obviously favored Iraq, even turning a blind eye towards its use of American-acquired chemical weapons against Iran. This was because Saddam advanced the US’ proxy interests in weakening the fledgling Islamic Republic, fresh from Revolution and thus in a vulnerable position, out of concern that its ideological influence could inspire similar popular movements in the pro-American Gulf Monarchies. Real Secular Republicanism as last practiced only by Syria, while also a potential inspirer for anti-monarchist revolts, was seen as progressively less effective by that time owing to the Wahhabization of Saudi society and their rejection of secularity governance. Instead, should there be any domestic destabilization in Saudi Arabia, it would thus have to exhibit some form of religious affiliation in order to satisfy the preferences of the population, hence the potential appeal of Islamic Republicanism.

Iranian child soldiers (‘martyrs’) volunteered to clear mines to open the road to regular units. The war cost over one million lives and is basically forgotten or unknown by most Western publics.

Saddam was a man who offered his services to the highest bidder, somersaulting through alliances and eventually turning on everyone until he was ultimately taken out. For example, although officially of the Baath Party just like then-President Hafez Assad in Syria, Saddam almost immediately created problems with his neighbor due to geopolitical greed disguised as ‘ideological disputes’. In a way, this mirrored the Sino-Soviet falling out that, although based more on real ideological differences than the Syrian-Iraqi case, was also largely due to geopolitical considerations. Although not friendly with Syria, Iraq still had a good relationship with its Soviet ally, this despite Baghdad’s secret relationship with Washington which was predicated on fighting Iran. So at this point, Saddam had turned on his nominal Secular Republican ally and also initiated a war against the Islamic Republic. The end of that stalemated but bloody conflict saw the Iraqi leader falling for nuanced American approval and invading an Absolute Monarchy, Kuwait, which severed his already dismal ties with that ideological bloc of states. Furthermore, it’s what gave the US the ‘convenient’ excuse to turn on its proxy in order to justify an eventual military invasion into the geopolitical heart of the Mideast. For the US, the pursuit of unipolarity is the only ideology it ever consistently adheres to, and its alliance with anything seemingly contrary to this (such as the socialist-leaning and nominally Secular Republic of Iraq) is only a temporary tactic to advance this grand objective.

The “New Middle East” And The Theater-Wide “Arab Spring” Color Revolutions

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ormer American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice joyously proclaimed “the birth pangs of a new Middle East” in the summer of 2006 during Israel’s War on Lebanon, but at the time, it wasn’t particularly clear what she was referring to. The government of Lebanon had just fallen to the region’s first Color Revolution, but the social infrastructure was not yet in place to roll this tactic out region-wide. A certain period of time had to pass in order for the subversive networks to take deeper root and maximize their societal impact, but the surprisingly successful Lebanese test run proved that it was indeed possible to transplant this political technology to the Mideast, thereby earning the greenlight for its theater-wide application in the near future.

The US and Israel also had to coordinate on their response to all possible scenarios, especially given that the Arab world’s largest country and Israel’s neighbor, Egypt, was going to be targeted as well, and the full planning for such a wide-scale contingency operation took time. Finally, the US also had to achieve full operational compatibility with Qatar’s covert Muslim Brotherhood network, since as was mentioned in Part I, this was envisioned to become the basis for the transnational pro-American “Islamic Democracies” that would rise out of the ashes of the overthrown fake Secular Republics and herald in the “New Middle East” that Rice had alluded to half a decade earlier. Furthermore, it could also give the US a strong lever of influence in destabilizing its Monarchic Absolutist allies (except tiny Qatar, which could be pressured in other ways) if the need ever arose.

Thus, as understood through the ideological theory being argued in this article, the “New Middle East” and its associated theater-wide “Arab Spring” Color Revolutions were a major geopolitical gambit by the US to replace the fake Secular Republics (and the last remaining true Secular Republic, Syria) with a new form of ideological governance, “Islamic Democracies”, which would be much easier to manage given their cyclical electoral cycles. Likewise, it could also threaten the Monarchic Absolutists, which if they were ever deposed of via these means, would then create a unified ideological space stretching from North Africa to Turkey and then all the way through the entire Arabian Peninsula, giving the US the possibility to create a civilizational EU-like political structure that it could thenceforth control by proxy.

Suffice it to say, this massive geopolitical construction would work for the direct benefit of the US and the Israeli Exceptionalists, who would then have achieved their vaunted Yinon Plan for the establishment of a series of manipulatable and easily controllable Arab states. Unlike the vision of mid-Cold War Arab Nationalists, this supranational entity would not be directed against Israel, but would be manipulated against Iran, owing to the fact that “Islamic Democracy” as practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood is totally opposed to Islamic Republicanism, which thus gives it something else importantly in common with American and Israeli strategic objectives (aside from being a weak and disorganized mass). Therefore, this Muslim Brotherhood-controlled “Arab Union” would purely be an artificial construct on behalf of the US and Israel and designed to further each of their overlapping geopolitical objectives.

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