Photograph Source: Anthony Crider – CC BY 2.0

The Neocon logic for needing to defeat Iran and break it into ethnic parts

Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the Neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.

What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.

The 1970s saw much discussion about creating a New International Economic Order (NIEO). U.S. strategists saw this as a threat, and since my book Super Imperialism ironically was used as something like a textbook by the government, I was invited to comment on how I thought countries would break away from U.S. control. I was working at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, and in 1974 or 1975 he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and Turkic Azeris were others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.

Three decades later, in 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.

Fast forward to today

Most of today’s discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably (and rightly) focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic presently reshaping the international economy has been the attempts of Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control (with trade with Russia already heavily sanctioned). As will be described below, the war in Iran likewise has as an aim blocking trade with China and Russia and countering moves........

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