Thierry Meyssan's article “Who is after Iraq” is extremely interesting. Meyssan brilliantly reveals the springs of modern international politics and diplomacy, exposing the role of special services. His first article “How the CIA put Nicolas Sarkozy President of France” made a lot of noise in its time, which caused its author a lot of trouble. Because of her, Thierry Maysan was forced to leave France, emigrating to the Middle East. Hopefully, now that the French authorities have launched criminal proceedings against his antagonist, unfair accusations will be dropped from Meyssan and the talented French publicist will finally be able to return to his homeland.
Thierry Meyssan, of course, has a sharp and penetrating mind, but the overuse of conspiracy sometimes leads the author. Of course, international conspiracies exist, but their end results are sometimes extremely far from the original ideas of the authors. In sociology there is the concept of “heterothelium”, introduced by the ingenious American scientist of Russian origin, Pitirim Sorokin. Its meaning lies in the fact that in the course of the implementation of a large-scale sociopolitical process, its results may not be at all those that its authors expected.
The idea of dismembering sovereign states in the Middle East, indeed, has long been bred by American strategists. Her conductor in 80 – 90-s of the last century was the well-known orientalist Bernard Lewis, who at the beginning of the two thousand years was one of the main advisers to the George W. Bush administration on Middle Eastern issues. American journalist Jacob Weisberg writes that "his views had the strongest intellectual influence on the solution of the issue of invading Iraq in 2003 year."
In 1979, B. Lewis for the first time presented his plan for political reformatting of the Middle East to the influential world structure - the Bilderberg Club. The goal of the plan was to counter the regime of Khomeini, who came to power in Iran as a result of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of the year, and the Soviet Union, which carried out the introduction of troops into Afghanistan in the same year. Khomeini’s opposition was supposed to be along the lines of stirring up Shiite-Sunni contradictions and supporting the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement. Opposition to the Soviet Union was conceived through the creation of a “crisis arc” suitable directly to the Soviet borders. Since in the Soviet Union a secular and atheistic regime dominated, which suppressed religion, the support of fundamentalist regimes and movements was thought of as the best means of Soviet penetration into the Near and Middle East.
The weakening of national states in the Middle East was conceived in this strategy as “balkanization” along the lines of religious, ethnic, and clan faults. In 1992, he published in the American journal Foreign Affairs, the organ of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (Counsil of Foreign Relations), an article entitled “Rethinking the Middle East.” In it, Lewis proposed a new map of the Middle East region. As is evident from this map, the Anglo-American scientist plans to split off the territories inhabited by Druze and Alawite from Syria, making them independent mini-states; Establish a dwarf Maronite state in the relevant districts of Lebanon; create an independent Kurdistan in the regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, populated by Kurds; to separate the areas of Iraq inhabited by Shiites, to create an independent state there; create an independent Arab state in Iran, in the province of Khuzestan, in whose territory most of the Iranian oil fields are located; to dismember Pakistan by separating the independent Baluchistan and uniting the Pashtun districts lying on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border into one state. In many ways, Lewis's concepts influenced the decision of the Bush administration to invade Iraq, after which the brave GI had to go victoriously through Damascus, Arabia and Tehran (the real men go to Tehran).
However, the global economic and geopolitical situation in 2014 was fundamentally different from that in 1992 and even in 2002. The American Empire entered a period of steady decline. Despite the demands of neoconservative hawks from the US Congress, such as Senator McCain, direct US military intervention in Iraq is currently impossible. American public opinion will be extremely negative about such a decision. According to a survey conducted by the Bloomberg agency, 58% of Americans categorically object to direct armed intervention by American forces in the Middle East. By the way, the same percentage of respondents believes that the American superpower is in a period of decline and will no longer be able to act alone as a world arbiter. All this contrasts with the brave June speech of US President Barack Obama at West Point, during which he said that he "believes in American exclusivity with all the fibers of the soul."
It remains, however, still the possibility of waging war with the hands of allies - the so-called proxy wars. But the trouble is that the Americans will soon be left with no sincere allies and strong partners in the region. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the pillars of American politics in the region were Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Turkey, as Maysan correctly writes, has remained at the broken trough. There are no more resources left to become the flagship of the Arab revolutions. Even few people remember the revolutions themselves. Plus a new boil in the soft Turkish underbelly in the form of a strengthened Kurdish quasi-state. Israel is extremely dissatisfied with the ambivalent stance of the Americans in the negotiations on an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. And the negotiation process itself is more dead than alive. Egypt in the short term will not give up US military aid, but is trying to balance its receipt by partnership with Moscow and Riyadh. But exactly the Egyptians will not obediently follow all Washington instructions. The recent betrayal of the best ally of Mubarak, the Egyptian generals will not forget and will not forgive.
There remains Saudi Arabia - the most reliable satellite to date. The al-Saudi royal house is mortally afraid of Iran and so far sees Washington as the only guarantor of security. In addition to the 6th fleet The United States and mutual military obligations play an important role in the fact that the Saudi elite holds its capital mainly in American banks. The Americans have not yet been able to completely break with the Saudis and arrange subversive operations against them. In this case, Washington completely loses control of the Persian Gulf, and, consequently, of oil flows to Europe and China. Moreover, a period of turbulence in Saudi Arabia is inevitable, but not for external, but for internal reasons. Globalization has reached such a level at which the preservation of not even feudal, but archaic society in a single relatively prosperous reserve is not possible.
The Middle East faces two dangerous prospects (which can be combined with each other). The first is the large-scale Shiite-Sunni war, which inflames the entire region. The second is the creation of an extremely aggressive jihadist state on the territory of Arabia and part of the lands of Syria and Iraq. The latter, having oil fields, will no longer depend on foreign sponsors and will become completely uncontrolled. This can be prevented only through the creation of a multilateral security system, but without the discrediting of the United States.