The First Step Toward A Solution Is Facing The Origin Of The Problem--
May 20, 2021
I've been fighting against fundamentalism for a good part of my life, whether of the Christian, Jewish or Muslim variety. Mainly that was a function of my disgust with the hypocrisy and lies which alienated me throughout my upbringing, and which later became a deeper philosophical opposition.
As a child I was told by relatives and friends that if I or any other Jew married a non-Jew, we were considered dead, and our families would say the Kaddish prayer for the dead if we did. Religious Judaism and I did not get off on the right foot. I saw this not as a revered tradition to be defended, but a relic of an age of backwardness, parochialism, prejudice, and a perversion of the concept of "Jewish survival". Some will call me a Jewish anti-semite or self hating because I reject religious Judaism. I stopped caring about that many years ago, and live guilt free when it comes to my beliefs. Any religious doctrine or theological concept which to me represents systemic injustice, I cast out. Eugenics is evil, whether practiced by Nazis, Royalty, Mormons, the Amish, Muslims or Jews.
My study of history led me to conclude that religious fundamentalism was a synthetic and deployable strategic weapon, intended to create division and conflict by "gamemasters" who had a vested interest in profiting from conflict. Not simply financial profit but also geo-strategic machinations over raw materials, trade routes, port access, and control of culture. In thinking about this it is worth revisiting the operations of the colonial powers over centuries to instigate armed conflicts between tribes, ethnic groups, religious groups, and to create border conflicts, in which they supplied weapons to both sides of these conflicts. This was how they maintained control, the old technique of "divide and rule". These Imperial strategies are at the center of the current Middle East crisis, and have ruled the region for well over a Century.
If you are ready to "turn off" because this sounds like a conspiracy theory, feel free to private message me and have a conversation. I'm not out to "eat anyone's lunch", so don't hesitate to reach out. I would remind folks who reject the existence of conspiracies that it is only 156 years since the United States formally abolished Slavery, and only 24 years since the world's last colonial possession gained their sovereignty. (Hong Kong) These systems, and the people who enforced them did exist within our lifetimes, and continue to exist in modified forms today. There was never a positive benefit which derived from Slavery or Colonialism. Anyone who argues to the contrary is a liar and apologist for Empire, and should anyone try to debate me on this, I will eat their lunch.
In light of the current Middle East crisis, I think a little reflection is in order, which might not seem to be the standard way in which people come at it. I tend to draw upon my own memories and experience and take a more personal view.
In the 1980's I raised a lot of money for publication of a book and Intelligence background report which documented the role of British Intelligence (the infamous "Arab Bureau") in fostering and deploying "Islamic Fundamentalism" in Iran, and their orchestration of the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini's "Dark Ages" regime to power in the events of the late 70's. Their purpose was to derail the progress towards modernization and development in Iran under the otherwise corrupt regime of the Pahlevi Shah. We circulated this report to the intelligence community, policy makers, military leaders active and retired, and concerned citizens. We did not consign ourselves to watching Ted Koppel while history was unfolding around us.
Without going into great detail, there was a strategy brought into the Carter White House which was called "The Bernard Lewis Plan", which was promoted both by Kissinger and his Democratic sidekick, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski later renamed this strategy "The Arc of Crisis". The essence of it was rooted in the British Empire's "Great Game", a geopolitical jockeying for position related to their control of the Indian subcontinent, the world's oil producers, and the shipping access or "choke points" associated with that production.
To be concise, the scientific and technological progress under the Shah, (who remember was a staunch ally of the US, whose family was restored to the Peacock Throne by a CIA/ British backed Coup against Mossadegh, who was in process of nationalizing Gulf Oil and BP) was considered a strategic threat to US and British interests, as well as military threat to Israel. Iran intended in the 60's to pursue the peaceful use of Nuclear power, which was a deal breaker. Pakistan likewise, in a break with US policy which led to the assassination of Pakistani PM Ali Bhutto in 1977. In that sense, the development of Nuclear power which had been promoted by the US under Eisenhower and Kennedy as a necessity for Third World development, became a "casus belli" under the influence of Kissingerian geopolitics and balance of power strategy.
Additionally, Iran shared a border with our then adversary the Soviet Union. If you can pull up a map circa 1980 of the Eurasian heartland, and the subcontinent of Asia, you will notice the obvious fact that most of the Southern tier of the Soviet Union were Islamic Countries, with the exception of US sometime ally Pakistan, also an aspiring Nuclear power. The "Arc of Crisis" which Brzezinski concerned himself with were those mostly landlocked Islamic Republics of Central Asia which he considered the vulnerable Southern flank of the Soviet Union.
So, the Brzezinski plan was for the US and British to foster, fund, and arm Islamic fundamentalist groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to unleash religious conflict and regime change in those countries bordering the USSR for purposes of asymmetric warfare and destabilization. Consequently the US, in conjunction with British Intelligence scooped up the then obscure and exiled Ayatollah Khomeini from his hideaway in France, and gave him a platform for BBC broadcasts in Farsi into Iran, to build an insurrection against the Pahlavi Monarchy. (After the Khomeini regime took American hostages, the US shifted toward an anti-Iran alliance with the Iraq of Sadaam Hussein, our future adversary in a clearly "Orwellian" system of shifting alliances, which was made famous by the Lord Palmerston quote, "England has no permanent allies, only permanent interests". )
Simultaneous with that, Brzezinski assembled with CIA help a group known as "The Base", which was the loosely organized group which included Muslim Brotherhood and Mujahaddeen fighters throughout the Islamic world to engage in conflict with Soviet puppet regimes. The US armed them, financed them off the books, and gave them training. The Arabic name for the group known as "The Base" is Al Qaeda. And the CIA hired the multi-millionaire scion of a Saudi construction firm to head it up, who was named Osama Bin Laden.
In other words, the very terrorist organization with which we have been engaged in war for the last 20 years, the same Iranian regime with which we have been adversaries since 1979, now threatening Israel, conducting proxy war through the Hezbollah militia, were the joint Cold War creations of the US and British, brought into existence and coming back to haunt us like the Frankenstein monsters that they are.
The postscript to this is that Bin Laden the US asset, turned against the US after Desert Storm, when he could not abide by Western Armies violating the holy soil of Saudi Arabia while deployed from there, so he turned his American supplied weapons against us. Also, as we remember, the USSR did not just sit idly by as observers while Western intelligence agencies were running amuck in their backyard. They countered with a full scale invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 in a chess move that was their response to the US/British backed destabilization of the Shah and installation of the Khomeini regime. Bin Laden was throughout the 80's fighting a US proxy war with the Soviets with full backing from this Brzezinski crowd.
Ultimately, Afghanistan became the USSR's "Vietnam", a meat grinder no-win conflict which dragged on, and contributed to the eventual economic drain which led to the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. So, technically you could argue that the "Lewis/Kissinger/British/Brzezinski strategy worked, because we "won" the Cold War.
The question on the table now, if you take a quick survey of the world strategic situation and looking back at all of this, is what did we actually win? And what are we in the process of losing?
Today, the Brzezinski plan is still intact in the form of a slightly modified policy brought in under the Bush 41 administration known as "The Clash of Civilizations", associated with Zbiggy's co-thinker Samuel P. Huntington. The essence of it is that the West needs a new "Feinbild", (enemy image) in the absence of a strategic adversary after the collapse of the USSR and Warsaw Pact military sphere. In other words, atter the collapse of communism, the US needed to find a new boogeyman to fight in order to project its geopolitical will. Therefore it is a scenario piece for endless war with our new adversary, Islam. The underpinning of this argument is the same old geopolitical trash about access to strategic resources and managing scarcity in a world defined by arbitrary limits- limits to energy, food, population growth, "carrying capacity" (a warmed over version of Hitler's "Lebensraum) and a ceiling which capped scientific advance. It is simply another Neo-Malthusian nightmare scenario coming from the same coterie of establishment academic whores. And this has been the operational blueprint the US has worked from since the first Gulf War, brought to us courtesy of Bush 41 and his dominatrix Margaret Thatcher. And so, here we are.
These are issues worth considering if we are seriously looking for solutions to the current crisis, rather than getting into posturing over "whose side are you on". People want to fixate on the lazy arguments about 1948, the UN resolutions after the 6 day war, and want to lump all Israelis or Arabs into their respective baskets without any differentiation, the so-called "Night in which all Cows are black". We are conditioned to thinking in terms defined for us by politicians, media pundits and academics, and pointed toward certain guideposts for rendering judgement. This has proven insufficient and counterproductive, the proof of which is that we are where we are.
Now more than ever, we need to ask difficult questions and employ critical thinking if we are honest and serious about discussing political events, here and abroad. We don't need knee jerk reaction, because we then become a nation of jerks.
(Photo-- Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, with the US ally Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan)
