“This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking,” writes Khalil Nakhleh. “Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme. This theme has been documented on a very modest scale in the AAUG publication, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach. Based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former Prime Minister of Israel, Rokach’s study documents, in convincing detail, the Zionist plan as it applies to Lebanon and as it was prepared in the mid-fifties.” In regard to Iraq, the late Israel Shahak adds: “The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the ‘best’ that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: ‘The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part’ (Ha’aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.”
It may be old, but it is finally, with the eager assistance of no shortage of Congress critters on both sides of the supposed dividing aisle, finally coming to fruition.
Strangely, we are told Bush—that is to say his neocon handlers—oppose this grand idea, not exactly new but recycled as such. “But the measure, attached to the 2008 defense budget, runs against US administration policy to keep Iraq united and would likely face a veto if it reached Bush’s desk.” Of course, this hardly matters, as Iraq is well on the way to fragmentation, thanks to the neocon invasion and engineered stirring up of its fractured ethnic minorities.
Instead, this idea comes from Democrats. “The proposal to breaking up Iraq into decentralized regions came from Senator Joseph Biden, who heads the chamber’s foreign relations committee and is running for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination… Biden has long championed the federal plan, saying it would give Iraq’s main groups ‘breathing room in their own regions’ and speed up a US troop withdrawal.” Joe likes to champion himself as an “honest broker,” when in fact he is a lickspittle for AIPAC. “In my 34-year career, I have never wavered from the notion that the only time progress has ever been made in the Middle East is when the Arab nations have known that there is no daylight between us and Israel,” Joe told the Forward earlier this year. Or put another way, you can’t slip a piece of paper between Joe and the Jabotinskyites, or can you tell them apart, thus the old plan, mentioned above, is dear to his heart, as it was to the hoary planners of Israeli policy mentioned by Oded Yinon back in 1982.
Of course, the neocons are spot on with Biden, although it does not look good for the current Iraq policy, certainly a mirage at best, as we are told the neocons want a “united Iraq,” supposedly a semblance of normality between the bombed out hospitals, electrical grids, and countless assassination and death squad victims, all of it the direct responsibility of Bush and the neocons.
Surely, come the “election” of Hillary next year, Biden’s “plan” will be adopted and the neocons will get what they and the Israelis wanted all along.