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Iraq: American plans for partition of the country

Viktor Mikhin, April 30

New Eastern Outlook collage 36In world politics same as in normal life, there is a saying: “There are always loose ends from any weave”. Now it seems to be directly applicable to the American rulers, who having lost the sense of proportion and decency are revealing the true purposes of their “democratic” actions and military interventions. In this case, it applies to US Vice President Joe Biden, whose new notorious report Sectarian War in Iraq Draws the Map of Three Regions outlines a plan for dividing this country into three parts. But even before Joe Biden was appointed Vice President of the United States, he as a senator proposed a plan to divide Iraq into three regions. During recent years, Washington’s actions contributed to the deterioration of the situation in Iraq after the military intervention. And now, whilst implementing the plan for the country’s partition, Biden strongly justifies his project by the “escalation of the civil war” in Anbar province, the creation of armed formations of the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” in central Iraq, and the ongoing conflict between Iraq’s central authorities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) regarding their joint budget and oil exports.

Biden’s statement is quite symptomatic and strong, and it puts an end to all Iraq-related plans previously announced by Washington. After all, it seems like only yesterday the American political instigators were accusing Saddam Hussein’s regime of the presence of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons, close links with the terrorist organization of Al-Qaeda and its leader, the paid CIA agent Osama bin Laden. It seems like only yesterday the then US Secretary of State, bold General Colin Powell, spoke from the UN high rostrum brazenly assuring the entire world community of the criminal acts of Saddam Hussein and demonstrating some tubes with a fictional Iraqi biological weapon. It is not surprising that thanks to these actions the bold general subsequently went down in history as a conman who tried to scam the whole world and (for some time) succeeded at it. But in the end, these intricacies of lies from the White House were uncovered, and the whole world discovered the true criminal plans of Washington.

Now, after the American brutal aggression and cruel occupation of Iraq, the latter no longer exists as a state. American neo-strategists have been seeking to destroy not only the Iraqi statehood, but also the entire infrastructure, to incite some groups of the Iraqis against the others by pumping in money and weapons and dividing the Iraqi people on religious, geographical and historical grounds, thus generating anger and enmity between the Sunnis, the Shi’ites and the Kurds, who previously coexisted peacefully. This is an example of the fact that where there are American interests, the Washington hawks “know how to normalize the situation”.

Senator Rand Paul, who is a likely candidate for the US presidency from the Republican Party in the upcoming presidential elections in 2016, has claimed that Dick Cheney, who served as United States Vice President in the George W. Bush administration, was the main driving force behind the armed aggression against Iraq. Rand Paul accused Dick Cheney of choosing the events of 11 September as a pretext for an attack on Iraq and the subsequent occupation of the country in order to ensure profits for the company called Halliburton, which he headed at the time. The senator stressed that the attack and the occupation of Iraq under the pretext that it had weapons of mass destruction, which the country never had, was one of the great failures and high-budget decisions of the George W. Bush administration and caused a lot of criticism both in the United States and other countries.

In the end, as a result of the unleashing of a war, despite all the efforts of the poorly trained American politicians, they failed to turn Iraq into a beacon of Jeffersonian democracy, but the country’s oil exports surged to a 30-year high. The war in Iraq occurred for many reasons, but, according to The Washington Post, it’s high time to admit that one of them, if not the main one, is to allow Iraqi oil free access to the market through the skilful influence of private enterprises on everything that hampered supplies. At present, the global energy giants have already skilfully ensured their firm grip on all huge oil and gas supplies in the country. In particular, the key economic interest of the energy sector is in the fact that Iraq should rapidly develop its oil deposits and export the “black gold” in a rapid and uninterrupted manner to the West.

And the above becomes pretty obvious if you recall that some time ago the American media widely spread the map of the so-called Greater Middle East. It had been commissioned by the current rulers of the US and developed by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, who also prepared “scientific justification” for the new partition of a whole region of the world, primarily in the interests of Washington. “The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East,” says this ardent apologist for the American reformatting of the Middle East. “Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East – to borrow from Churchill – generate more trouble than can be consumed locally. While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone – from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism – the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.”

It will be interesting to see what Iraq will look like after this partition, or, as Joe Biden stated, after it is divided into three parts. The middle part of the present-day Iraqi territory from Baghdad to the west will become part of the state called Sunni Iraq, which will also receive part of the Syrian territory. The inhabitants of this state will be the Sunni Arabs, who have already lost the reins of power in Iraq and, therefore, the huge oil revenues. There is no oil or any other mineral resources here, so it looks like the Sunnis have been assigned by Washington the role of a trans-shipment trade point between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. It is possible that Baghdad will become a new banking centre if the Sunnis turn out to be good at commercial transactions. However, it takes a long time, so initially Sunni Iraq will have to endure a precarious existence and its inhabitants will be recalling the old days, when they quite successfully ruled the whole of Iraq on behalf of the Turks and then on behalf of the Baath party.

According to the plans of the global strategist John Biden, four parts in the north – the Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish and Iranian – will form a state called Free Kurdistan, the Kurds’ dream that they have cherished for many centuries. As is known, presently there is Kurdish statehood only in the territory of Iraqi Kurdistan. Besides, in the 1920s, in the territory of Turkish Kurdistan for 3 years there was the breakaway Republic of Ararat, and in 1946 in the territory of Iranian Kurdistan, there was the short-lived Mahabad Republic.

It should be noted that the Kurds very much like the idea of the creation of Greater Kurdistan, that is, an independent state encompassing the entire territory of ethnic Kurdistan, and as a first step – granting the other parts of Kurdistan the same status as the one presently enjoyed by broadly autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. As they believe in the White House, by all parameters, it will be a new powerful and rich country with a population exceeding 30 million people. There are all necessary prerequisites for the creation of such a state – one territory which is rich in oil and other mineral resources; one people who have for centuries been fighting for their freedom; one language for all (which is comprised of many dialects).

However, there is evidence that the Americans give most attention to creating in the south the large and powerful Shiite Arab State, with a territory reaching Baghdad. This state, like a lobster, will embrace with its claws the Persian Gulf coast from the north and south, including the territories of Iran and Saudi Arabia with Shiite population. But the fact is that most of the oilfields are located on the Saudi and Iranian coasts. If you also add to them the significant deposits of “black gold” in the current Iraqi south, in that case the Shiite Arab State will, probably, occupy the top position in the world in terms of reserves, and oil and gas production.

Another question is: how are the relations between the new state and Washington going to develop in the future, and what is Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s reaction going to be like? But it looks like the Americans have already solved this question – whereas in the past they constantly threatened Tehran, recently Washington has set a course for certain warming towards Tehran believing that later on it will be easier to “explode” and split Iran from within. Washington is already using a dismissive tone towards Riyadh, thus showing that it disregards this state and the other ones that will be created on the Arabian Peninsula in the future. It is quite clear that, if the Shiite Arab State is created, its future rulers will be grateful to Washington for such a rare opportunity; moreover, the Pentagon will take care of this rich country’s defense and uninterrupted supplies of oil.

On 30 April later this year, the next elections to the parliament and the provincial councils of Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk will be held, with all political parties and the Iraqis paying a lot of attention to them and hoping for a better future. However, this is congruent with neither the current realities nor the Machiavellian plans of the Washington hawks regarding Iraq, as the “world architect” Joe Biden has yet again announced his plans for the partition of Iraq.

Viktor Mikhin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences; exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.