Turkish Forum

Category: Iran

  • Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ‘Greater Middle East’?

    F. William Engdahl, February 5, 2011
    Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as “creative destruction.”

    The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.
    Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.
    No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. Noone can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.
    What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

    To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder sounding “New Middle East.”

    As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.2

    The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.
    Egypt rising?

    The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

    Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.
    Washington ‘soft’ revolutions

    The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as “spontaneous” as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

    They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.3

    At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009.

    The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.
    April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.
    According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, “Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process.”4

    Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.5

    Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood.

    ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.6 Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

    Kefaya—Pentagon ‘non-violent warfare’

    Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to “enough!”
    Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED)7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means “enough!”

    Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as “non-violence as a method of warfare.”8

    The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.
    The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood.9 Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

    Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.10

    RAND and Kefaya

    No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was “sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.”11

    A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.
    In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:
    “The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.
    However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country.”12

    RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name “swarming,” the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.13

    Washington and the stable of “human rights” and “democracy” and “non-violence” NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated “spontaneous” nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:
    “The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions.“14

    The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other “reform” movements:
    “The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

    “Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers. “15

    As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the “RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.
    The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes “research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements.“16

    In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another “human rights” Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in USsponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month “fellowship” organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.17

    Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring “democracy” and “liberal free market” economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.
    Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

    If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since the Tunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.
    Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to “spontaneous” popular regime-change uprisings.
    The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.
    The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order.18

    As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA“19

    The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998.20

    The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.
    NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.
    The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,
    “NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States.”21

    Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED.22

    In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated “Islamic radicalism” with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term “broader Middle East” for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,
    “The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end… We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow…”23

    The US Project for a ‘Greater Middle East’

    The spreading regime change operations by Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.
    The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
    That policy recommendation was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon.24

    Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky. By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch war hawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.
    Greater Middle East orthographic projection

    Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

    In May 2005, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of “spreading democracy” to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant “the establishment of a USMiddle East free trade area within a decade.” 25

    Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership.” Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for “an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

    The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, “a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each.” 26

    The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.

    Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, “besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife.“27 It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

    Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

    Will it work?

    At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a USdominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

    It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, “The Israeli calculation today is that if ‘Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ‘If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region.” 28

    The Washington strategy of “creative destruction” is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

    1 DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011, accessed in www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA is open about its good ties to Israeli intelligence and security agencies. While its writings must be read with that in mind, certain reports they publish often contain interesting leads for further investigation.

    2 Ibid.

    3 The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose Egyptian President Nasser, www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. According to the late Miles Copeland, a CIA official stationed in Egypt during the Nasser era, the CIA allied with the Muslim Brotherhood which was opposed to Nasser’s secular regime as well as his nationalist opposition to brotherhood pan-Islamic ideology.

    4 Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt’s April 6 Movement?, February 1, 2011, accessed in http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm

    5 Ibid.

    6 Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, January 31, 2011, accessed in .

    7 National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, accessed in http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africahighlights.

    8 Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, March 1, 2007.

    9 Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, pp. 3-9

    10 Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), accessed in http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya

    11 Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.

    12 Ibid.

    13 For a more detailed discussion of the RAND “swarming” techniques see F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.

    14 Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.

    15 Ibid., p. 50.

    16 Ibid., p. iii.

    17 Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, January 29, 2011, accessed in https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-protest-movement-in-egypt-dictators-do-not-dictate-they-obey-orders/22993

    18 George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 January 1991. In the speech Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order…”

    19 Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.

    20 National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, accessed in

    21 Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8, 1993, accessed in .

    22 National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, accessed in http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report.

    23 George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, October 6, 2005,accessed in http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html.

    24 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, accessed in www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

    25 George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, White House, 9 May 2003.

    26 Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn’t Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 4, 2004, accessed in https://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world

    27 Ibid.

    28 William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, accessed in http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/

    http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Creative%20Destruction%20Washington%20Style.pdf

  • Turkish president arrives in Tehran

    Turkish president arrives in Tehran

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul has arrived in Tehran on a four-day official visit to discuss a whole range of topics with ranking Iranian authorities.

    Abdullah Gul

    The Turkish president was received by Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi upon arrival at Mehrabad International Airport Sunday afternoon, reported IRNA.

    Gul’s trip comes at the invitation of his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    An official welcoming ceremony is scheduled to be held for the Turkish head of state on Monday morning.

    President Gul is to hold official meetings with senior Iranian authorities and discuss the promotion of Tehran-Ankara cooperation plus pressing regional and international issues.

    The Turkish president is also slated to visit the Iranian cities of Isfahan and Tabriz during his trip.

    On the eve of his Tehran visit on Saturday, the Turkish president told IRNA that he would be accompanied by a host of Turkish investors and businessmen during the trip.

    The Iran-Turkey Joint Economic Cooperation Commission is also planned to be formed during the trip, he added.

    He described Iran and Turkey as two regional heavyweights, which “treat each other with mutual respect.”

    “Common borderlines between the two countries have not changed since 1639 and this is a unique example in the world,” he went on to say.

    “Various issues including political, economic, and cultural issues will be brought up between the two sides in this trip,” he further explained.

    Press Tv

  • Standoff at Tahrir Sq.

    Standoff at Tahrir Sq.

    by Kutluk Ozguven

    29 January 2011

    The rules of the game have been simple: Police trumps protesters. Masses trump police. Army trumps masses. If the army stands back, you have a revolution (Iran 1979, Romania 1989, Tunisia 2011), if not, then bloodshed (Hungary 1956, China 1989, Algeria 1992). I don’t recall any popular uprising successful over a fully functioning armed force determined to go all the way. That is why armed forces are always considered as backbones of corrupt dictatorships.

    This weekend we shall see if the Egyptian armed forces, which the latest Wikileaks leak as US believes it to be unhappy, at least in the mid-ranking officers, but probably higher, will open fire to stop the masses or the masses will blink, or it will give way to the people. Egyptian army is a conscript army and there is no part of the Egyptian society that may be counted on apart from the westernised elites, whose children do not operate tanks during military service. The news is that the Egyptian army are already mobilised into urban areas and taken control of strategic points.

    Egyptians I came to know during a series of visits for international projects were a very kind people, members of a polite and civilised nation, well known among the other Arabs with their humour and taking things lightly. This nation of gentle farmers has been easy to manage by foreign soldiers (the Hyksos, Ptolemeans, the Mamluke, Ali Pasha troops) or domestic warlords, perhaps exact opposite of Chechens or Afghans. They are patient, soft-spoken, happy in the face of any event, and cultured. In short, any megalomaniac tyrant’s dream population.

    They have gone through a westernisation process predating Turkey, and a secularisation process of 50 years under socialist dictatorship. Save occasional and sensational terror incidents, there is no history of popular uprising or even any active political formation, except for the elitist Muslim Brotherhood, structured in 30s as a Muslim answer to Freemasonry, who wouldn’t even entertain the idea of going on the streets with sweaty youngsters. Americans and Israelis are all over the country, to the degree that five star Cairo hotels put on Hebrew-language TV channels for their guests from their northeastern neighbours. It has highest number of Internet access in the region with 20 million users and more advanced in some software technologies than, say, Turkey.

    Therefore, one wouldn’t expect a popular uprising overthrowing one of the most entrenched dictators of the world. Most well-informed experts, political commentators or social analysts certainly did not expect that the events would have gone out of control to this degree where it is becoming more and more unlikely that Mubarak will survive. When he unplugged the Internet less than a day ago, I recalled another ridiculous caricature, Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham cancelling Christmas. He could have blocked social networks and slowed down the e-mail, but that would be too sophisticated to epitomise this wily little people who see it their birth right to enslave tens of millions of human beings. Which explains the situation better than any verbose expertise: it is the tyranny of stupid, primitive, incompetent minds over masses much more sophisticated and much deeper than them.

    When one sees all these Middle Eastern or Central Asian rulers and their small social segments whom they depend upon to man their security forces or financial institutions, one cannot help but be only deaf to any economic analysis. Despotism is always a disaster for economy because meritocracy is not allowed and accountability does not exist. The small clique of rulers milks the real productive people and eventually kills their productivity long before they would expire naturally. This leaves society weak and inefficient. If we add to the two factors the global financial system, which get the lion’s share of the bounty and only leaving crumbs to the visible rulers, it is obvious that the dictatorship is not a long term stable solution. Either the nation is annihilated from within or without, or it throws its rider. The last military period in Turkey, 1997-2002, is a good accelerated example to despotic cronyism, when the rampant economy of 1997 was brought to bankruptcy in four winters. Imagine that being practiced 30 years or 50 years.

    It is true that the 2011 Domino events stem from people wanting to get rid of the despotic cronyism, with them seeing that it is no more to mind one’s own business anymore as there is no business being left. And this is why analysts keep calling them secular uprisings, emphasizing the difference between Iran, Algeria, Hama or others. But this distinction comes out of their own mental compartmentalisation rather than the field. There is no separation between three elements that are in force here: people’s dignity, economic development and return to Islam. In the middle-east, or any once-have-been Islamic nation, the three are inseparable.

    Economic development is impossible without a level playing field and risk taking, bold, free, entrepreneurial players and accountable refereeing. That is impossible without popular social consent and social contract without privileged classes, aristocracies and caste systems. Perhaps in Hindu society, or in Confucian society. But not where Islam had been the source of social order with its egalitarian principles, holistic justice concept and personal freedoms. Once the verses of the Quran are practiced at some point by any society, it can never have another long-term working social system. That is why in any free election in the Middle East at any given time, Muslim-leaning parties have always won without exceptions. Therefore however secular the protests might have been, if there will be political freedom, reversal of de-Islamisation will be part of it.

    This is why many in the Middle East look towards the Turkish experiment. Without oil and natural sources, and to confess, with little ingenuity, by simply doing things as they should be done, Turkey turned from the military-dominated status to a richer, functional democracy managed by Muslims.

    The Tunisians, Jordanians, Algerians, Yemenis and Egyptians want this, no more. The talk of Turkey without oil is doing well with a free society, with secularised and religious people coexisting under a religious president, with none of the pretentious extravaganza is the greatest fairy tale to Arab ears. A fantastic dream which had been once ruled out as absurd. They just want the same. But when they get it, as they will, another fairy tale that was once ruled as absurd, will inevitably roll on: the cooperation and eventual unity of these independent states.

    If the troops on the Tahrir Square open fire, the process will only be delayed. But not stopped.

  • America and the rise of middle powers

    America and the rise of middle powers

    US foreign policy is stuck in a cold war mindset of imperial dominance. It’s time to listen to allies like Turkey and adjust

    • Stephen Kinzer
    • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 January 2011
    Barack Obama is listening toTayyip Erdogan attentively
    President Barack Obama, with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The US would do well, argues Stephen Kinzer, to foster closer ties with its longstanding Nato ally Turkey, a Muslim country with a strong democratic tradition, more reliably opposed to extremism than other US partners like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

    The dramatic rise of Turkey in the councils of world power was one of the main geopolitical developments of 2010. Iran‘s emergence as a serious regional power was another. They are harbingers of what will be one of the main trends of global power in coming decades: the rise of middle powers.

    This era is an exciting one for rising countries. Their drive to assert themselves, though, poses an inevitable challenge to powers accustomed to dominating the world, chiefly the United States.

    One of the immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of great powers. Those that survive are the ones that adapt as the world changes. Thus far, however, the US shows little sign that it is willing to accommodate the rise of middle powers. American leaders are frozen into denial and caught in a straitjacket of policies shaped for another era. Unless they can become more nimble, the US risks losing both global influence and domestic prosperity.

    In the Middle East, Washington is pursuing policies shaped to fit a cold war security environment that no longer exists. Saudi Arabia and Israel have been America’s closest partners there for the last half-century. Yet Saudi society has nothing in common with western societies, and some long-term Saudi security interests, like promoting radical Islam around the world, run counter to western interests. Israel gives signs of careening toward self-destruction, taking steps that undermine the regional stability that is its only guarantee of long-term security.

    Alliances and partnerships produce stability when they reflect realities and interests. In the Middle East, the US should stop acting as if it, alone, knows what is best, and instead, seek a Muslim partner. Turkey is the logical choice. It is a longtime Nato ally and booming capitalist democracy, and has unique influence around the Islamic world.

    Turkey has been urging the US to change its approach to Iran by abandoning its policy of threats and sanctions. It suggests an approach based on rational self-interest rather than emotion: offer unconditional talks, not limited to the nuclear issue but aimed at a “grand bargain” that would recognise Iran’s new role and give it a stake in regional security. India has recently made this same appeal to Washington. Yet the US, locked into outdated paradigms, continues on steady course even as global conditions change.

    Iran bets on Middle East forces like Hamas and Hezbollah, which win elections. The US bets on the Saudi monarchy, the Pharaonic regime in Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, and increasingly radical politicians in Israel. The future will require interest-based partnerships that meet the needs of a new age.

    One could be a “power triangle” linking the US with Turkey and Iran. These two countries make intriguing partners for two reasons. First, their societies have long experience with democracy – although for reasons having to do in part with foreign intervention, Iran has not managed to produce a government worthy of its vibrant society. Second, these two countries share many security interests with the west. Projecting Turkey’s example as a counter-balance to Islamic radicalism should be a vital priority. As for Iran, it has unique ability to stabilise Iraq, can also do much to help calm Afghanistan, and is a bitter enemy of radical Sunni movements like al-Qaida and the Taliban. Contrast this alignment of interests to the dubious logic of western partnerships with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, so-called allies who also support some of the west’s most violent enemies.

    Adroit geo-strategists take new realities into account as they try to imagine how global politics will unfold. In the foreign policy business, however, inertia is a powerful force and “adroit” a little-known concept. Reconceiving entire regions of the world is not a pursuit at which government bureaucrats excel. Yet, this is not all that American leaders must reconceive. The new century requires them to question the assumption – central to American strategic thinking for generations – that that the world is a dangerous place in need of management, and that the United States must do the managing. A better course for the 21st century would be to withdraw from adventures and listen more closely to friends.

    • Stephen Kinzer is giving a series of talks in the UK this week on these themes

  • The Mossad myth

    The Mossad myth

    By keeping anything and everything under wraps, the agency allows the rumor mill about its activities to grind on.

    By Yossi Melman

    Before it was permissible to say the words “Mossad” and “Shin Bet,” they would publish want-ads using euphemisms such as “a state institution …” Ostensibly, times have changed. Both the Mossad and the Shin Bet security service have websites; they can be called by name, and the names of the organizations’ heads are known. The Shin Bet even has a spokesperson, and she has a few assistants.

    It can be assumed that the new Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, who will officially take the reins next week, will consider appointing a spokesperson for his organization. (His predecessors Efraim Levy and Meir Degan thought about such an appointment, but both dropped the idea. )

    Tamir Pardo
    Next Mossad chief Tamir Pardo – Photo by: Moti Milrod

    But openness in these organizations is an illusion. In essence, the Mossad has remained the same “state institution” that takes pains to classify and guard every shred of information relating to it, even if it is not a matter of operational secrecy or particularly sensitive information. The protection of secret and sensitive information is essential and clearly understood, but what the Mossad seeks to censor is information that could harm its image.

    Whatever it does, the Mossad generally enjoys the across-the-board support from nearly all of Israel’s government.

    Utilizing the euphemism “jeopardizing state security” , the military censors almost always ban publication of reports to which the Mossad objects. The courts are generally happy to assent to any request delivered by the Mossad, including issuing gag orders in the presence of one party only; the Finance Ministry does not disclose the Mossad’s budget, and the National Insurance Institute and the Justice Ministry are prevented from disclosing information about labor-related issues concerning the organization’s employees.

    The Prison Service also surrenders to Mossad whims. In the past, security prisoners were incarcerated in its jails in total isolation. There were years when such inmates were called “prisoner X,” and confined to “cell X” in the Ramle prison.”The Third Man,” as Avraham Seidenwerg / Avri Elad was known, and Mordecai Kedar in the 50s and 60s, are prime examples of those dark days in Israeli democracy, in which security prisoners were made to disappear.

    Only a handful of wardens had access to such prisoners, and even they did not know the inmates’ identities. For instance, in the 80s Prof. Avraham Marcus Klingberg, imprisoned on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, was known to the small group of guards in charge of him as “Avraham Greenberg.”

    Ali Reza Asgari
    Ali-Reza Asgari, rumored to be in Israel. – Photo by: Reuters

    The result of this unjustified and undemocratic policy of sealed lips is that rumors periodically circulate about the Mossad, most of them unfounded or inaccurate. The rumors make their way to internet sites overseas or to foreign journalists, quite a few of whom are completely clueless.

    A good example of such rumor spreading is the veteran journalist Gordon Thomas, who wrote a bestseller about the Mossad. His book was classified as non-fiction but it should have been on the fiction shelf, since his stories and articles are full of fabrications, half-truths and baseless claims that even the most ardent conspiracy theorists would have trouble accepting.

    For instance, he claimed that Monica Lewinsky was planted by the Mossad to entice U.S. President Bill Clinton, and stain his reputation. A few days ago, Gordon Thomas was sure that the new Mossad chief, Pardo, who has yet to take up his position officially, would soon apologize to the British for the Mossad’s alleged use of British passports.

    In order to gauge Thomas’ reliability, suffice it to note that he stated in this report that Pardo served for the past three years as deputy Mossad chief. In fact, Pardo left the Mossad two years ago.

    Claims have recently been made according to foreign reports that the Iranian general Ali-Reza Asgari, former head of the Al Quds division of the Revolutionary Guards and former Iranian deputy defense minister, is in Israel. Asgari disappeared in December 2006 under mysterious circumstances, during a trip to Turkey; since then, there have been a number of media reports suggesting that he sought asylum in a Western country, and relayed important intelligence information to it and to allied intelligence organizations.

    Anyone who knows something about these subjects, and is familiar with relevant precedents, could conclude that the chances of Asgari finding asylum in Israel, or being forcibly brought here, are negligible. Defectors from Arab countries, such as the Iraqi MIG pilot Munir Redfa, or the Egyptian pilot Hilmi Abbas in the 60s, or the KGB station chief Yuri Lomov, who defected to Israel, chose, after being debriefed, to leave and remake their lives in a Western or South American country. The chances of a senior Iranian defector finding asylum here are close to nil.

    The Mossad has neither the interest nor the ability to respond to such rumors. Sometimes it seems as though the organization enjoys rumors that bolster its image, depict it as an omnipotent entity, and thereby indirectly enhance its, and Israel’s, deterrent capability. The extent to which the Mossad’s reputation captivates imaginations globally is reflected by the fact that designers from a well-known international sports shoe company recently called a new brand “Mossad.”

    However, the creation of a mythos and the ignoring of rumors has negative aspects. There are always credulous types who believe inaccurate reports and draw conclusions that could damage Israel in the future.

    It would be better were Israel to realize that in some cases the release information, no matter how inconvenient and painful it might be, is preferable to concealing it and allowing an irresponsible, damaging rumor mill to grind on.

    And now, the movie

    It was only a matter of time. This week the family of Ashraf Marwan, who owns a television channel, announced it would be producing a film and a television series about his life, to be released in 2011. Marwan was a Mossad agent who warned Israel about the Yom Kippur War in 1973, but in recent years former Military intelligence chief Eli Zeira claimed that Marwan was a double agent. Thus, in 2007 he was murdered in London, likely by Egyptian security agents. The family’s aim is to clear Marwan’s name and present him as an Egyptian patriot who misled Israel and fed it false information.

    Some two decades ago, Egyptian television did exactly the same and screened a documentary series about an Egyptian agent who penetrated Israel as a Jew named Jacque Biton. The series presented him as a hero, but in fact, he betrayed Egypt and became a valuable Israeli intelligence agent.

    https://www.haaretz.com/2010-12-30/ty-article/the-mossad-myth/0000017f-e652-df5f-a17f-ffdebac50000, 30.12.10

    [2]

    Iranian ‘Mossad agent’: I was trained in Israel

    Iranian state television shows interview with man who claims he was trained in espionage by Israel and participated in the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Tehran last year.

    https://www.haaretz.com/2011-01-10/ty-article/iranian-mossad-agent-i-was-trained-in-israel/0000017f-eccf-d4cd-af7f-edffb3e60000
    [3]

    Iran claims to have smashed ‘Mossad spy ring’

    Iran claims it has broken up a ‘Mossad ring’ allegedly behind the murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran last year.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8250787/Iran-claims-to-have-smashed-Mossad-spy-ring.html

  • Full: Missing Iranian general may have ‘died in Israeli jail’

    Full: Missing Iranian general may have ‘died in Israeli jail’

    Missing Iranian general may have ‘died in Israeli jail’

    Maryam Sinaiee and Michael Theodoulou

    Last Updated: Jan 2, 2011

    TEHRAN // An Iranian former deputy defence minister, who mysteriously vanished during a trip to Turkey four years ago, may recently have died in an Israeli prison, according to unsubstantiated reports.

    But others insist that Gen Ali-Reza Asgari is alive and living safely in a western country – and argue that Iran is exploiting claims of his death to refute the embarrassing possibility that he defected to West.

    Gen Asgari travelled to Turkey with his family in late 2006 or early 2007 via Syria, where he had private business interests in trading olives or olive oil. After checking into a hotel in Istanbul, Iran claims he was snatched by Israel’s external security service, Mossad, or the US.

    Since then the trail went mostly dead, although there had been unconfirmed reports he had defected and was living in the United States.

    In recent weeks, however, there was a flurry of Israeli press reports that a “Prisoner X” had committed suicide in an Israeli jail.

    These rumours were picked up by an American journalist and blogger, Richard Silverstein, who has followed the case. He speculated that the unidentified prisoner was probably Gen Asgari – and suggested that he may not have killed himself but was murdered.

    Israeli journalists swiftly countered that Prisoner X was not Gen Asgari.

    Nevertheless, Tehran promptly accused Israel of “state-sponsored terrorism” and on Friday urged the United Nations to help clarify Gen Asgari’s fate.

    In a letter to the UN secreatry general, Ban Ki-moon, Iran’s caretaker foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said: “Without a doubt the release of these reports further strengthens suspicions that Asgari was abducted by the Zionist regime.” Israel, he added, is “directly responsible for his life”.

    Other Iranian officials joined in with cries that “the Zionists have assassinated” Gen Asgari, and dismissed as “totally illogical” any notion that he could have taken his own life.

    Kazem Jalali, the spokesman for the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said that Gen Asgari must have been tortured and killed.

    Other officials said he had been “martyred”. Gen Asgari’s sister, meanwhile, told Iranian state media that he would never have committed suicide.

    Some analysts suggest the Iranian regime has seized on reports of his death because Gen Asgari was due to testify at the special tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. The tribunal is expected to implicate members of the Iranian-backed Hizbollah movement in that murder, which had far-reaching regional repercussions.

    Iran will now attempt to discredit any such testimony by arguing Gen Asgari is dead and that anyone claiming to be him is an imposter, an Iranian friend of his wrote on his blog.

    Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, who lives in Europe, insists that Gen Asghari is living safely in a western country.

    He claims that the general called him for advice after he arrived with his family in Damascus where he had been either on a pilgrimage or a business trip.

    Mr Ebrahimi claims that Gen Asgari acted on his advice to hire a car and flee to Turkey to defect. Once in Istanbul, he asked the UN and US for asylum and finally left Turkey for the US in February 2007. Gen Asgari, he says, later contacted him from Washington DC and Texas.

    “There is no reason why Asgari should have been kept in jail, because he left Iran on his own free will and defected to the West,” Mr Ebrahimi wrote in his latest blog posting.

    When Gen Asgari disappeared in Istanbul, US media lost no time in claiming that Gen Asgari, who had served under Iran’s reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, had fled Iran of his own volition and was providing sensitive information on Iran’s ties to Hizbollah.

    Gen Asgari is said to have been a commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ elite Al Qods force in Lebanon in the mid-1990s.

    The Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, claimed at the time of Gen Asgari’s disappearance that Mossad had orchestrated his defection.

    Politico, a US-based political news website, on Friday quoted an Iranian-American pro-democracy activist knowledgeable about the case insisting that Gen Asgari was never in Israel and the story that he died there – or died at all – is untrue.

    “The news is a complete fabrication and a fantasy,” Pooya Dayanim told Politico.

    Meanwhile, Yossi Melman, an intelligence correspondent for Israel’s daily Haaretz newspaper, wrote this week that Israeli security services should publicly deny the rumours about Gen Ashgari.

    “Anyone who knows something about these subjects, and is familiar with relevant precedents, could conclude that the chances of Asgari finding asylum in Israel, or being forcibly brought here, are negligible,” Melman wrote.

    In March 2007, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported that Gen Asgari, who is in his mid-50s, had been spying on Iran since 2003 when he was recruited on an overseas business trip.

    He fled, it said, with the help of western intelligence agencies when he realised his cover was about to be blown. After being spirited out of Turkey, his first stop was a Nato base in Germany where Gen Asgari, “a very wealthy man”, underwent debriefing, the newspaper said.

    He carried documents disclosing “Iran’s links to terrorists in the Middle East”, but it was not thought he had details of Iran’s nuclear programme, it added.

    via Full: Missing Iranian general may have ‘died in Israeli jail’ – The National.