Have the U.S. and Its Allies Intentionally Balkanized Syria Into Smaller Regions?

[KoKo]

(Interesting history and maps at article link)
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How the West Uses Islamic Extremists to Topple Enemies

by Washingtons Blog - July 14th, 2014, 1:30am
Have the U.S. and Its Allies Intentionally Balkanized Syria Into Smaller Regions?

BBC reports that – in 1957 – the British and American leaders approved the use of Islamic extremists and false flag attacks to topple the Syrian government:

Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive “regime change” in another Arab country… by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.

Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbours, and then to “eliminate” the most influential triumvirate in Damascus.

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Although historians know that intelligence services had sought to topple the Syrian regime in the autumn of 1957, this is the first time any document has been found showing that the assassination of three leading figures was at the heart of the scheme. In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus.

***

Mr Macmillan ordered the plan withheld even from British chiefs of staff, because of their tendency “to chatter”.

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Driving the call for action was the CIA’s Middle East chief Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt.

Kermit Roosevelt had a proven track record in this sort of thing. According to the New York Times, he was the leader of the CIA’s coup in Iran in 1953, which – as subsequently admitted by the CIA - used false flag terror to topple the democratically elected leader or Iran.

BBC continues:

More importantly, Syria also had control of one of the main oil arteries of the Middle East, the pipeline which connected pro-western Iraq’s oilfields to Turkey.

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The report said that once the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military intervention. Syria had to be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments,” the report says. “CIA and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

MORE with INTERESTING MAPS at:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/07/how-the-west-uses-islamic-extremists-to-topple-enemies/

[The Magistrate]

1. The Map In That Article Is A Good One, Ma'am

It is about where the actual lines ought to be, if one were to have a map reflecting ethnic and religious realities.

Part of the problem with the breathless tone of articles like this is that there are no 'countries' in the Middle East, at least not as we are used to thinking of nation-states in Europe. With the exceptions of Turkey and Persia and Egypt, there are simply a mass of colonial districts, first under the Ottomans, and then under several Western powers. These district boundaries were drawn up deliberately to create populations with internal tensions, so that rebellion by one group might be checked by loyalty of another, locally, without too much need of troops from a central authority, which could take quite a while to arrive in the pre-modern period. The boundaries created by the Western powers followed this practice, where they were not set by military action ( the northern boundaries of Saudi Arabia today mark where the English halted ibn' Saud's northward drive, intended to establish him as King of all Arabs, in the early 1920s ), or were not designed to isolate a favored minority ( such a the division of Lebanon from Syria, intended to maintain a Christian state on the coast ). There really is not a need for much outside intervention to break up these artificial entities, they have no real stability of their own, and small prospect of enduring through the long haul.

[awoke_in_2003]

2. an excellent post, as usual. nt

[KoKo]

5. Map was main reason for post....but Kermit Roosevelt/CIA...

Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 07:22 PM - Edit history (1)

was a bit of info that points out....that "We" are not innocent. And we shouldn't discount opinions here because it "Is" supposed to be a Dem Political Discussion Group. imho..., anyway.

And...agree about the carving up of the ME...for Centuries...so there's that view that "It's gone on for Centuries" ....so why should we not realize what exists today is fraught with old wars. It's worth it to point out...but there are other intervening factors you left out. That is what we are faced with...even though the history of that area has been war grounds for centuries.

I hear ya'.

Typo about Kermit....Roosevelt not Rockefeller! DUH!

[The Magistrate]

6. There Was a Lot Of Naivite, Ma'am, On Our Side In the Early Years Of The Cold War

We mistook, in the Near East, Ba'athists for socialists, when they were actually modernizing fascists, and we saw the fundamentalist religious leaders of Islam as the same sort of allies we were used to taking reactionary bishops for in Catholic Europe and Latin America. We could probably have cut a decent anti-communist deal with the first wave of Ba'athists, and ought to have understood the clergy in the Moslem world was about as far from our friends as it was possible to be....

[SunSeeker]

3. Whether intentional or not, it is going to happen.

And the sooner it happens, the sooner we will have a chance at peace there. Same applies for Iraq.

[KoKo]

7. It's the Biden Plan for Iraq (The Split of the Country)....And "Grand Chessboard" Plan for the ME...

of "Ziggy" Brzezinski who supposedly has Obama's Ear...

Gonna be a hard road that .....We've interfered too much with the wrong people at the wrong times not to have promoted further chaos, death , destruction, miscalculations and continuing screw ups because Corporations/Military Industrial Complex still runs our Foreign Policy. Not seasoned negotiators and folks with REAL diplomatic skills who have any support in our Government these days. Its not Obama's fault but the result of decades of neglect once the Berlin Wall fell.

[Igel]

8. It doesn't matter if Biden planned for the sun to rise on 7/14.

It's one of those things that's going to happen.

Have you considered the unity of the countries in Europe? Italy only united in the late 1800s, when self-identification as Italian trumped self-identification as Calabrese, Sicilian, Tuscan....

Germany only united a bit later, when self-identification as "German," plus some political wrangling, trumped being various other mini-ethnicities.

Spain was united by force and imperialism. There are centrifugal tendencies to pull apart the country, from Catalonia and the Euskara-speaking regions--which we hear about--to Galicia.

Belgium is pretty much already divided, although they've worked out a sort of cohabitation arrangement.

Britain may yet dismember itself. Stay tuned for the September Scottish referendum--it's all about self-identification (and self-interest, apparently, whose projections about which course for Scotland will put more pounds in your wallet). It would seem that the Scots think of themselves almost as much British as Scottish. And some younger Scots think of themselves as "Europeans." That'll never work. It's like all the nonsense from the '70s that we heard--"No, no, we're not Russians or Ukrainians or Tadzhiks, we're Soviets!" Just don't ask an Ivan on the street that question.

France is an instructive country. It's five different regions welded together: Basque (Aquitaine), the langue d'oc regions (often dubbed "Provence", but more than that), Alsace-Lorraine, Brittany (which is Celtic, refugees from Britain), and then the territory that was rightfully part of the Frankish kingdom (a German tribe that conquered the Ile de France). However the public education system in the late 1800s instilled in all students a sense of "Frenchness". The patois, the local dialects, that made up French were basically destroyed--you get the occasional odd word, non-standard pronunciation, but much of the country is French first. Even in the other 4 regions there's still a sense of Frenchness--less strong, with Occitan staging a bit of a revival in the '90s, but even in Basque country Euskara isn't as common and there's not as much terrorism as in Spain. It's the kind of intentionally and intensely assimilationist model that Dewey liked for the US ed system, which made a nation-state out of 5 distinct regions (and a bunch of smaller subethnicities).

Iraq is like Yugoslavia was. It never overcame the tendency to be Sunni Arab or Sunni Kurd or Shi'ite Arab first and Iraqi second. The country--both of them--were working on it, but a strong man in each found it politically expedient to manipulate ethnicities for his own end. Tito and Hussein. Unless the populations feel themselves to be one population they won't hold together.

It's unclear that Iraq was any less united than France was, though. It's just that at some point the French rulers realized that they wanted allegiance to the idea of a single, united France with a French population. The Iraqi rulers regarded the people as subjects to be governed, to be tax-farmed--let them be whatever they are as long as they pay taxes and die in the wars. It's like many of the Muslim rulers' attitudes in SE Europe and Africa. Keep them divided and subservient. If they ever get united, who knows--they may want more power than you're willing to share. The more divisions you can fester, the more individual group leaders have power and maintain divisions to maintain their own power, the greater the power of the central government and the real rulers. Divided = conquered.

National identification can be strong enough to overcome a lot of differences. Switzerland has some pretty intense ethnic rivalries. German, French, Italian, and poor Romansch in Bergun and adjacent regions. Lutheran and Catholic. Completely different traditions and cultures--but they are first and foremost Swiss.

[yurbud]

9. they have negotiation skills--it's the goals that are out of whack.

[yurbud]

4. Does a duck fart underwater?