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A BLOODY BORDER PROJECT
by Kim Petersen
Dissident Voice, CA
June 5 2007
Zionist-Imperialist Dogma from the Armed Forces Journal
The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there's
one Iraq, or three Iraqs.
¨C John Bolton1
To keep them all at each other¡¯s throats is American policy.
¨C John Pilger
Assume some Arab, European, or Russian official papers or thinkers
would propose to redraw the map of Turtle Island or partition the
United States because of the danger it represents to the rest of
the world. Likeliest, such groups would be scorned as interfering
outsiders and told to tend to boundaries in their own¡backyard.
It is axiomatic that the borders of Turtle Island are artificial,¡±
and their functionality depends on who is doing the appraising. The
question is: do the borders need to be redrawn? Also, while anyone
has the right to pontificate on whatever topics swirl around in his
mind, what kind of reaction would an outsider expect for fiddling
with artificial¡lines outside his home region?
Ralph Peters is an ex-intelligence officer of the US military who
apparently possesses the ego to front for such a project. He has put
his name to a scheme for redrawing of the borders of the Middle East
and farther afield.2 It should not be assumed that Peters took the
initiative personally, as the design is consistent with the issues
of the American empire in its Zionist phase. Peters, therefore, is
but one spokesperson from among the many acolytes of hyper-imperialism.
As an agent of militarist imperialism, Peters is a pro-war agitator
who openly espouses his prejudices.3 That the platform for his racist
verbiage is the Armed Forces Journal (AFJ) serves as evidence of the
hyper-imperialist program. AFJ, a part of Gannett Company, describes
itself as the the leading joint service monthly magazine for officers
and leaders in the United States military community. Founded in 1863,
AFJ has been providing essential review and analysis on key defense
issues for over 140 years. AFJ offers in-depth feature coverage
of military technology, procurement, logistics, strategy, doctrine
and tactics.¡±
The June 2006 AFJ article by Peters provides insight into the evolving
military doctrine of US imperialism.
While Peters asserts, The most arbitrary and distorted borders
in the world are in Africa and the Middle East,¡he concedes that
these borders were drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had
sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers). Peters omits his
own backyard: Turtle Island. Even the invaders¡designation applied to
the continent¡North America smacks of a similar gross injustice than
undergirds Peters¡thought: that newcomers might ignore the Original
Peoples and name the continent after a migrating kinsman.
This is intentional because Peters has a very precise agenda and that
is the conquest of the Middle East through cumulative partitions and
drawings of maps.
It is diversionary to criticize the conditions elsewhere. On Africa¡¯s
borders, Peters states: they continue to provoke the deaths of
millions of local inhabitants.¡Borders cannot be tried in a court
of law. Therefore, those who drew up or enforce such borders bear
responsibility for those millions of deaths? Who are the people who
drew up the borders and who are the powers they represent?
Peters claims that the unjust borders in the Middle East generate more
trouble than can be consumed locally.¡This is a strange and nebulous
language. Locally? Is he writing as a Westerner concerned about
problems caused domestically by overseas borders, or is he stating that
borders drawn by western imperialists are harming Middle Easterners? If
the latter, then that would seem a matter for Middle Easterners to
decide for themselves unless they ask for outside assistance.
Peters opines that the Middle East's comprehensive failure¡± includes
cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious
extremism.¡Peters makes disparaging statements about the region without
offering insight as to why such a failure came about and what keeps
it in place. Historically, the decline of the region is linked with
the beginning of western imperialist and Zionist infiltration. Being
on the losing end of conquest is not conducive to success, cultural
expansion, and moderation.
Peters¡arrogant solution is to redraw the map to redress the wrongs
suffered by the most significant cheated population groups.¡How does
he identify the most significant cheated¡ population groups? By what
authority does Peters decide on redressing wrongs? Peters¡entitlement
to redress wrongs¡and draw up his new maps derives illegitimately
from his connection to US imperialism. Would anyone in the Middle
East suggest that someone from among the people who committed the
initial wrongs¡in drawing up the awful¡and dysfunctional borders¡be
self-appointed to redraw them? Would Americans accept self-appointed
outsiders redrawing the borders of the United States? Self-interested
outsiders do not have a legitimate right to finagle the borders of
other countries. Legal convention holds that this must be determined
by the peoples of the region, in accordance with the United Nations
Charter-recognized right of self-determination.
Peters identifies many cheated¡population groups, such as the Kurds,
Baluch and Arab Shia and many other numerically lesser minorities
but he failed to mention the cheated¡majority. While living in the
Middle East, the present writer became distinctly aware of a feeling
expressed among many Arabs that they are one people.4 Imperialists and
Zionist-colonialists have killed the realization, if not the dream,
of a pan-Arabia for the time being.
Peters finds that one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a
reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by
the dying Ottoman Empire.¡Armenia has its own state. More important
is the ongoing genocide that Peters omitted: that being perpetrated
against the stateless Palestinians. The return of their territory
would go part way to redressing the haunting wrong[s]¡(in addition
to dispossession, murder, impoverishment, and humiliation) that
Zionists and their international (active or through silent complicity)
accomplices have committed against the Palestinians.
Peters proclaims the only way to a°more peaceful Middle East¡± is
through changing the geographical makeup of the area; the area
stretches beyond the Middle East to Pakistan. It is, in fact, a
redrawing of much of the Muslim World the world between Christian
Europe and Hindu India. As a purely intellectual exercise this may
be fine, but this is more than mental gymnastics for Peters. It is
a blueprint of the hyper-imperialist plan for the Muslim World.
Peters asks readers to accept that international statecraft has
never developed effective tools short of war for readjusting faulty
borders.¡This assertion is deceptive. There are dispute resolution
institutions that have been effective¡in mediating border disputes:
among them third-party diplomacy, the Law of the Sea Convention, and
the International Court. While effective¡is a subjective adjective,
one example is the 1992 settlement of the maritime boundary dispute
between Canada and France around the islands of St. Pierre and
Miquelon in the International Court of Arbitration. Peters points
to the mental effort to grasp the Middle East's organic frontiers¡±
as revealing the enormity of the task we face and will continue to
face.¡Who is this we¡that Peters is referring to? Why should anyone
be concerned about difficulties that outsiders face in their mission
to tamper with the borders of overseas states?
Peters decides to let readers in on a°dirty little secret from 5,000
years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.¡That it works is largely
irrelevant. It is a rather pathetic secret,¡but perhaps it is better
to call ethnic cleansing¡what it is: genocide.5 That genociders
achieve their insidious aims is no secret; it is just conveniently,
for some, seldom mentioned. On Turtle Island it would mean that all
non-indigenous inhabitants must confront the fact that they are living
on land that has been partially or completely wiped of its Original
Peoples and that geographical entities such as Canada and the United
States came into existence through genocide. Another little mentioned
fact: while the slain cannot be resurrected, it is possible to undo
the territorial on-the-ground facts created by genocide. The crimes
committed by ancestors and perpetuated by subsequent generations are
not forgotten facts. It just requires the obdurate will to bend with
the present population to remember and atone.
Peters steers toward the border issue most sensitive to American
readers.¡According to Peters, this is the borders of Israel. Why
is the Israeli border most sensitive¡to American readers? Are
non-readers i.e., non-military to be distinguished from AFJ readers
i.e., military? What about the US¡own borders? If Americans are
not sensitive to the US border, then why is the US building a Wall
along its Mexican flank (that will obstruct access to territory that
Mexico also a creation of European colonialists was violently forced
to cede: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah,
and Wyoming)? Also, why do border disputes exist with its friendly
white neighbor to the North; e.g., Seegaay (Dixon Entrance) and the
Northwest Passage?
Peters asserts that if Israel desires reasonable peace with its
neighbors,¡it will have to settle for its pre-1967 borders but with
essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns.¡Why does
Peters choose pre-1967? Why not choose pre-1948 or even much before
that? Why should European Zionists have any reasonable¡claim to any
land in historic Palestine? Peters does not discuss the legitimacy
of Israel's existence. Yes, he has acknowledged that ethnic cleansing
works. Unquestionably, the seizure of another people's homeland can be
achieved and enforced for a period of time. Does that make such seizure
legitimate? Does international recognition of a fact-on-the-ground
then make it legitimate? If an entity is illegitimate, can it then
have legitimate security concerns? All the states in the neighborhood
of Israel know their only legitimate neighbor is historical Palestine.
What about the border-defined legitimacy of Palestine's neighbors.
Since the Middle East carve up was a colonialist enterprise based
on deceit, it stands to reason that such lines drawn by outsiders
deserve and receive little respect from the local inhabitants.6
Peters writes the most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust
lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence
of an independent Kurdish state. Either Peters is using strange
artistic license for an otherwise serious topic or just what is not
clear. Land is neither just¡or unjust. The Kurds do not have their
own internationally recognized geopolitical state, but they do have
a homeland. The Kurds are not a homogeneous people, although they
share many traits. In the entire history of the Middle East (except
when Stalin carved the Kurdish state of Mahabad out of Iran, which
lasted about eight months) Kurds never formed any political state in
their existence. Then, if the Kurds never formed a state, how could it
be possible to form a state taken out of many other states without
war? Since the Kurds alone could not defeat the armies of Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Turkey, then foreign powers would be needed to do
this. But why would any power aid the Kurds without a quid pro quo? In
addition, most of the Kurds in those countries are integral parts of
their respective societies, including the state most repressive of
Kurdish rights: Turkey. How then would one define the boundaries of
scattered communities?
How to rectify this glaring injustice? Peters calls for the
partitioning of Iraq, which Peters describes as a°Frankenstein¡¯s
monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts.¡Writing
colleague B.J. Sabri utterly and compellingly refuted this ahistoric
nonsense of Peters that serves as a pretext for the US impose
a division on Iraq.7 The fueling of inter-confessional tensions
could sophistically furnish the excuse imperialists seek to slice
Iraq into more manageable minor states. It will not furnish the
Zionists-imperialists with a legitimate right to carry out such
partitioning, though.
Presumably, that is why the case of the stateless Palestinians
is not the°most glaring injustice¡for Peters. If a state and its
borders can be imposed through violent force on a region, then it
is a just land? If so, this appears to be a sure-fire recipe for a
never-ending cycle of realizing states and demarcating their borders
through violence.
Of course, to the extent that self-determination is a legitimate and
just right, then the Kurds should have this right as other peoples do.
Peters does not stop with a Free Kurdistan (in what way does he mean
free; does he also mean free from American and Zionist tampering?). He
envisions a just alignment¡where three Sunni-majority provinces in
Iraq form a truncated state. Simply writing just¡does not make it so.
Peters¡notion of a just alignment¡includes a landlocked Syria.
What is just¡about that? Lebanon would expand northward and Jordan
would expand southward into Saudi Arabia, which Peters calls an
unnatural state.¡Peters calls for Saudi Arabia to suffer¡dismantling.
Lebanon is a geographic entity that France, sympathetic to entreaties
from the Maronite community of the Ottoman sanjak of Mount Lebanon,
carved from Greater Syria. Mount Lebanon was a predominantly Christian
enclave with a substantial Druze component. The Maronites, however,
pressed for a Greater Lebanon, even though they would no longer be
a majority. The French appeased the Maronites¡demands in 1920. This
is why Syria has never acknowledged or exchanged ambassadors with
Lebanon. Today, Lebanon is predominantly Muslim and Maronites are
scrapping for waning power. Peters¡mind-boggling solution to this is to
completely deprive Syria of its coastline and expand Lebanon farther
north! The Maronite minority would be even further diluted. This
would appear to serve no one's interest in the region. So who does it
serve then? It serves western imperialist interests (and to a lesser
extent the interests of Sunni rulers). It is part of the grand scheme
risibly referred to as the War on Terrorism. A war cannot be fought
against an abstraction, but Peters¡redrawing of borders is a more
honest representation of what the War on Terrorism is really about:
divide et impera (divide-and-conquer).
Lebanon is not an easy target, though. Hizbollah has turned back
Zionist-imperialist aggressions on Lebanese soil. Imperialists,
however, seek to garner political influence with corrupt Lebanese
officials and isolate Hizbollah. Hence, the current Israeli and western
support for the weeping prime minister Fouad Siniora and machinations
to secure a military airbase in northern Lebanon8, which would serve
as a strategic springboard in redrawing the Middle Eastern map.
Like Lebanon, Jordan is a colonialist creation. The Hashemites of
Jordan, especially under the dictatorship of King Abdullah, are
downright neighborly with Zionists and firmly obedient to western
imperialists.
The Sauds pose a greater challenge to hyper-imperialists. Sitting
on top of so much oil, the Sauds have the wealth to hinder western
imperialistic ambitions. Consequently, hyper-imperialists coincide
with Zionist interests that the wealth will have to be divvied up
into smaller allotments.
Why should Saudi Arabia suffer? According to Peters: A root cause
of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal's
[sic] treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. Saudi Arabia
is a police-state¡controlled by one of the world's most bigoted
and oppressive regimes¡that exports its disciplinarian, intolerant
faith¡of Wahhabism far away. Might this, perhaps, be remedied by
exporting non-disciplinarian and tolerant US Christian fundamentalism
to the region? Peters¡worldview mirror reflects what he wants it to
reflect. Peters is adamant. He asserts, The rise of the Saudis [sic]
to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to
happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet,
and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the
Mongol) conquest.¡Is this a prejudice against Saudis or did Peters
intend to confine his remark to the Sauds? And how did the Sauds rise
to wealth and secure that wealth? To make the story very short, in
1945, following the Yalta conference, US president Franklin Roosevelt
held a secret meeting with King Ibn Saud who agreed to provide the US
access to oil in exchange for protecting the monarchy. That agreement
deepened the entrenchment of the Saud family in power.
Peters asks readers to°imagine how much healthier the Muslim world
might become were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council
representative of the world's major Muslim schools and movements in an
Islamic Sacred State a sort of Muslim super-Vatican where the future
of a great faith might be debated rather than merely decreed.¡An
astoundingly radical suggestion: catholicizing Islam.
But even the Vatican represents only the Roman Catholics of
Christianity not all Christians nor all Catholics. Besides, given
that Peters maintains that Sunnis and Shia are involved in internecine
bloodletting, how does he propose to carry out this merger of Muslim
schools and movements? After all the dividing of Muslim lands,
the illusion of solidarity is to be provided by°a sort of Muslim
super-Vatican.¡But why must a sovereign Muslim state cede control of
its territory to other Muslims?
Peters calls for true justice¡which he does not define other than
to suggest that we might not like it. It is an astounding admission
that Westerners are antagonistic to°true justice.¡The implication
is that Westerners pursue a justice that is not true and hence not
justice. But, for Peters, true justice¡involves giving away what is
not his to give. Peters would like to gift Saudi Arabia's coastal oil
fields to the Shia Arabs.¡His intention is to confine the House of
Saud to a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh¡to
deter the Sauds from mischief toward Islam and the world.¡Peters,
as is the case throughout his article, does not give any examples of
this mischief.¡The ultimate goal of Israel via the US is to create a
Shia imperialist dependency and push for war between the two branches
of Islam.
While not absolving the Sauds from any mischief¡they may perpetrate,
there is a generally acknowledged rule of discourse that is
colloquially stated as people who live in glass houses shouldn't
throw rocks.¡That Peters could accuse the Sauds of mischief¡in the
Islamic world and elsewhere while never mentioning the ¡°mischief¡±
that US, western, and zionist imperialists wreak around the world
speaks pointedly to a bias in Peters¡¯ thesis. It is an unmitigated
contradiction that undermines the entire basis of Peters¡thesis. Peters
is proposing US mischief¡guised as true justice¡in lands far afield
from US shores.
Peters¡true justice¡conveniently carves up all the lands that would
make it easier for US imperialists to increase their influence and
control over the Middle East to Pakistan. It is mischief¡that
is belligerent divide-and-conquer. Peters avers otherwise,
asserting that the maps are drawn according to the desires of local
populations and not as we would like them.¡There are many problems
with his assertion. First, maps have been drawn according to the
interests of great powers. Second, local populations did not draw the
Peters¡map. Third, Peters does not reveal how he knows the preferences
of local populations. Fourth, he does not define the parameters of
a local population.
He refers to artificial¡and natural¡states and borders without defining
them. Does a natural¡state exist? Arguably, yes.
But do natural borders exist in perpetuity? Some states are bounded
by rivers, which change course over time. Even island states
(as Atlanteans found out) are prone to the whims of tectonic,
meteorological, oceanic, or, for those so inclined, divine or
extraterrestrial forces. Consequently, to refer to natural¡borders
is to refer to a temporary condition absent the workings of nature.
Peters naturalizes the unnatural¡state of Pakistan. He sees a mixed
fate¡for the city-states of the United Arab Emirates with some being
incorporated into the puritanical cultures¡of the Arab Shia State
which he predicts to be a counterbalance to Persian Iran.
To serve the hypocritical,¡Dubai, of necessity, would be allowed to
retain its playground status for rich debauchees.¡Peters displays
his sensitivity to the needs of minorities, in this case, the rich
debauchees.¡Dubai, in the Peters scenario would play the role Nevada
plays for the°rich debauchees¡in the puritanical cultures¡of the US.
A military man-turned writer, Peters stakes claim to expertise in the
ethnic affinities and religious communalism¡of the Middle East (and
well he might have expertise, but what his qualifications are and how
he came to acquire such expertise are unstated, other than an undefined
claim to firsthand experience). Peters proffers a new map to right the
great wrongs [of] borders drawn by Frenchmen and Englishmen in the 20th
century.¡What better way for a region to emerge from humiliations and
defeats¡than to have an American militarist draw new borders for it
and then categorize the states into winners and losers? Peters even
decrees Israel to be a loser by having its ethnic cleansing project
halted at the pre-1967 borders¡(strange enough because neither Zionists
nor Palestinians wholeheartedly agree to such borders).
As an apparent justification for the redrawing of the borders,
Peters reasons that based on the cyclicality of history, new borders
are bound to happen sooner or later anyway. Despite this, Peters
admits, Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may
be impossible.¡However:
The current human divisions and forced unions between Ankara and
Karachi, taken together with the region's self-inflicted woes, form
as perfect a breeding ground for religious extremism, a culture of
blame and the recruitment of terrorists as anyone could design.
Further revealing his anti-Muslim enmity, Peters opines: In a
region where only the worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold
and where the most debased aspects of religion threaten to dominate
a disappointed faith, the U.S., its allies and, above all, our armed
forces can look for crises without end.¡±
Peters¡odious thinking is exemplified by his pointing to Iraq as a
counterexample of hope.¡This conveniently ignores the occupation-driven
genocidal blood bath there.9 What is required, says Peters, is that
we do not leave Iraq prematurely.¡Since the occupation is fueling
the resistance, and since the Iraqis don't want the American forces
to remain, the statement is pure imperialistic hubris.
Peters¡pronouncements on Iraq are a further rejection of his own
border redrawing program, which essentially is an anti-sovereignty
and anti-self-determination project. In a USA Today op-ed he railed
against Iraq's collaborationist prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's
interference with US military objectives within his country a clear
infringement of Iraqi sovereignty.10
I believed that Arabs deserved a chance to build a rule-of-law
democracy in the Middle East.¡Generous and gracious as his initial
belief was, Peters writes using the past tense, implying that he no
longer believes Arabs deserve such a chance.
He then states, Based upon firsthand experience, I was convinced
that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and
intellectually stagnant that we had to risk intervention or face
generations of terrorism and tumult.¡Peters¡racist opinionating
continues: Middle Easterners, according to him, are politically,
socially, morally, and intellectually inferior. And what was Peters¡¯
firsthand experience? Did he live or spend much time in the Middle
East? Or what ideological prism did he use to give a verdict shaped
by standard Zionist ratiocinations and manifest cultural ignorance?
That he believes Arabs are intellectually inferior is supported by
his assertion that they do not yet comprehend the dimensions¡of what
he comprehends: Iraq's impending failure¡and disaster.¡He accuses
Arabs of gleefulness at America's impending humiliation.¡But for the
uncomprehending Arabs, Peters adds it's their tragedy, not ours.¡±
Peters exculpates the invading-occupying US from any blame. Writes
Peters, It's al-Qaeda's Vietnam. They're the ones who can't leave
and who can't win.¡This is imperialist rhetoric. So the borders are
impermeable! Then, contrary to declamations from US administration
officials, there are no foreigners crossing into Iraq?
Peters follows up with a flourish of patriotic self-glorification:
Islamist terrorists have chosen Iraq as their battleground and, even
after our departure, it will continue to consume them. We'll still be
the greatest power on earth, indispensable to other regional states
such as the Persian Gulf states and Saudi Arabia that are terrified
of Iran¡¯s growing might. If the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy
of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries.2
Peters relies on ad hominem to make his case. Staying with the
definition that terrorism¡is the use of violence or threat of violence
to attain ends, it is undeniable that the US is using state terrorism
in Iraq, just as Israel is using state terrorism in Palestine. Some
so-called terrorism experts try to distinguish terrorism according
to the agent, but this is semantic subterfuge.
Nevertheless, while perchance the same in mechanism, all terrorism is
not necessarily the same. One must be careful not to fall into the
fallacy of drawing an equivalency between unprovoked or aggressive
terrorism which elicits a similar terrorism in self-defense.
Logically and morally, one cannot limit self-defense and resistance
without capitulating to the evil of the precipitating terrorism. The
US aggressed Iraq on a mendacious casus belli. It is the US which is
stoking the flames of violence with Iran. It is simply dishonest and
intellectually bankrupt argument to declare otherwise. Resistance is
a legitimate right that must not be hampered relative to the violence
of the aggressor or occupier.
Peters has waffled on civil war in Iraq, first denying it and
then acquiescing to it. Now he describes Arabs as ¡°revel[ing] in
fratricidal slaughter.¡±
Inseparably entangled with the infighting is the presence of the
occupiers and the US occupiers have signaled their intention to stay.11
It is clear that Peters is laying the groundwork for a splitting of
Iraq as envisioned by arch Zionists and imperialists.
While strife was breaking out in the Balkans, the US spoke of
a preference for a coherent Yugoslavia, but neoliberal shock
therapy and capitalist inroads into Yugoslavia helped precipitate
the split up that the US finally recognized officially. In the
sanctions-ravaged and war-tattered Iraq, US imperialist agent Paul
Bremer dismantled the enviable social system and opened the country
to exploitation by US corporations. It is, therefore, unsurprising
that the splitting of Iraq despite tepid contrary pronouncements by
the Bush administration is on the US agenda. Following Peters¡logic,
it represents the inevitability of the cyclicality of history: witness
US nation-splitting in Germany, Korea, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. It
is the continuation of divide-and-conquer.
Let us dispel another myth: there is no civil war in Iraq! A
civil war¡is a war between competing factions or regions within a
country. Even if one accepts that there is inter-confessional fighting
in Iraq (and this must be regarded with utmost skepticism as there is
plenty of evidence to suggest that much of the terrorism attributed to
infighting is, in fact, the purposeful work of occupation forces to
incite such infighting12). It ignores the long history that Sunnis,
Shi¡¯a, Turkmen, Kurds, and Christians have living together and
inter-marrying.
The US and collaborating foreign forces are inciting violence by their
very presence in Iraq. Prior to the invasion there was minimal or no
internecine bloodletting in Iraq. Therefore, it is imperialist-serving
propaganda to refer to a civil war in Iraq. The term civil war¡applied
to Iraq exculpates the US and so-called coalition partners for
the invasion and occupation which have killed over 655,000 Iraqi
civilians. To be accurate and honest, it must be referred to as
occupation-incited¡infighting not civil war and not sectarianism.
Peters assumes that he has the expertise to redraw the Middle East.
He assumes that the US has a right to carry out the redrawing. No
interference will be tolerated in this US project: We must make it
clear to Iran that meddling will not be tolerated.¡13
With total disregard for the admixture of races, ethnicities, and
cultures on Turtle Island, Peters ominously warns: If the borders
of the greater Middle East cannot be amended to reflect the natural
ties of blood and faith, we may take it as an article of faith that
a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our
own. If there is an iota of truth to Peters¡warning, then Turtle
Islanders should be perennially spilling blood.
In fact, despite numerous societal inequalities and problems, Turtle
Island stands as a stark refutation to Peters¡thesis that borders
which enclose many cultures and ethnicities within a landmass lead
to continuous blood spilling.
Peters takes it as an article of faith (not fact) that the US has a
legitimate stake to involve itself in the affairs of the Middle East.
In doing so, he sings the oft-repeated mantra of the
Zionist-neoconservative cabal: Our men and women in uniform will
continue to fight for security from terrorism, for the prospect of
democracy and for access to oil supplies in a region that is destined
to fight itself.¡±
Peters¡major error is not the redrawing of borders but in the drawing
of borders. Borders separate people. They set up disparities.
Peters admits that borders are never completely just; that they
inflict a degree of injustice; that some borders provoke the deaths
of millions; that our own diplomats worship awful-but-sacrosanct
international boundaries.¡He also admits: Correcting borders to
reflect the will of the people may be impossible.¡Why then does
Peters insist that despite inevitable attendant bloodshed new and
natural borders will emerge.¡Peters is ostensibly of the impression
that border formation is inherent to the human condition. It is not.
Blood Continent: Turtle Island Peters looks overseas to draw his
new borders. Why did he not look at the blood borders on Turtle
Island? The unnatural¡states of Canada and the United States (as are
the states elsewhere in the western hemisphere) were formed by bloody
usurpation of the land of the Original Peoples. In Canada and the US,
surviving Original Peoples have been deprived of their traditional
lifestyles and culture by putting them on reserves.
Peters focused his imperialistic gaze on the oil-rich Middle East, but
he would have gained credibility if he had dealt with the iniquities
in his backyard and with other legitimate stakeholders come up with
a fair redrawing of the blood borders formed by the great holocaust
that European colonizers inflicted on the Original Peoples in the
western hemisphere.
Statehood arises from blood spillage. Empire is the predictable
direction of redrawing borders. Yet, Peters pushes a doctrine of
imperialistic benevolence conforming to Zionist objectives that is
rejected by, what he describes as, extremist elements in foreign
societies. The lie of a civil war in Iraq serves encompassing
imperialistic objectives.
Peters disclosed, in the summer of 1997, his support for a bloody
Zionist-imperialist blueprint.
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our
lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around
the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural
and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive.
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world
safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends,
we will do a fair amount of killing. 14
This violent zionist-imperialist mindset must be rejected and
defeated. The militaristic dogma promulgated by publications the AFJ
serves those dedicated to violent means to unjust ends. If borders
must exist, they must be determined by the indigenous and legitimately
established resident populations. Peters and his ilk can tend to
problems in their own backyards.
1. Quoted in the Associated Press, French report: Former U.N. envoy
Bolton says U.S. has no strategic interest¡in united Iraq,¡±
International Herald Tribune, 29 January 2007.
2. Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would
look,¡Armed Forces Journal, June 2006.
3. Ralph Peters, Wikipedia. His racist animus is revealed by comments
such as the Arab genius for screwing things up and Arab societies
can't support democracy.
4. In Jordan from 2000-2002.
5. Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter,
Ethnic cleansing¡bleaches the atrocities of genocide,¡The European
Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007.
6. Britain betrayed a promise it made to its Arab allies against the
Ottomans during World War I. Britain had pledged: to recognize and
uphold the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within
the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.¡This promise was broken
by the Sykes-Picot Agreement in May 1916, in which Britain and France
divided up the Middle East between themselves.
7. B.J. Sabri, The Zarqawi affair, part 16,¡Online Journal, 21 November
2006. It was this article that triggered the basis for the present
article. In the series, Sabri provides a compelling refutation of any
notion that there was a Sunni-Shi¡a powder keg ready to explode into
internecine fighting.
8. Franklin Lamb, Lebanon and the Planned US Airbase at Kleiaat,¡±
Counterpunch, 30 May 2007.
9. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts,
Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster
sample survey,¡Lancet, 364, October 2006: 1857-1864.
10. Last gasps in Iraq,¡USA Today, 2 November 2006. David Sanger,
With Korea as Model, Bush Team Ponders Long Support Role in Iraq,¡±
New York Times, 3 June 2007. The continual denials about an enduring
military presence in Iraq despite the permanent bases constructed
there is belied.
11. B.J. Sabri, The Zarqawi affair, part 7,¡Online Journal, 20
September 2006 and part 8, 21 September 2006.
12. Ralph Peters, Break Up Iraq Now!¡New York Post, 10 July 2003.
In this article, Peters likens the Iraqis to animals: Today, the Iraq
we're trying to herd back together consists of three distinct nations
caged under a single, bloodstained flag.¡
13. Ralph Peters, Constant Conflict,¡Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14.
14. Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. He can be reached
at: [email protected]. Read other articles by Kim.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/a-bloo dy-border-project/
--Boundary_(ID_6jRLtGtgQnwOCxs OQMpG8Q)--
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
by Kim Petersen
Dissident Voice, CA
June 5 2007
Zionist-Imperialist Dogma from the Armed Forces Journal
The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there's
one Iraq, or three Iraqs.
¨C John Bolton1
To keep them all at each other¡¯s throats is American policy.
¨C John Pilger
Assume some Arab, European, or Russian official papers or thinkers
would propose to redraw the map of Turtle Island or partition the
United States because of the danger it represents to the rest of
the world. Likeliest, such groups would be scorned as interfering
outsiders and told to tend to boundaries in their own¡backyard.
It is axiomatic that the borders of Turtle Island are artificial,¡±
and their functionality depends on who is doing the appraising. The
question is: do the borders need to be redrawn? Also, while anyone
has the right to pontificate on whatever topics swirl around in his
mind, what kind of reaction would an outsider expect for fiddling
with artificial¡lines outside his home region?
Ralph Peters is an ex-intelligence officer of the US military who
apparently possesses the ego to front for such a project. He has put
his name to a scheme for redrawing of the borders of the Middle East
and farther afield.2 It should not be assumed that Peters took the
initiative personally, as the design is consistent with the issues
of the American empire in its Zionist phase. Peters, therefore, is
but one spokesperson from among the many acolytes of hyper-imperialism.
As an agent of militarist imperialism, Peters is a pro-war agitator
who openly espouses his prejudices.3 That the platform for his racist
verbiage is the Armed Forces Journal (AFJ) serves as evidence of the
hyper-imperialist program. AFJ, a part of Gannett Company, describes
itself as the the leading joint service monthly magazine for officers
and leaders in the United States military community. Founded in 1863,
AFJ has been providing essential review and analysis on key defense
issues for over 140 years. AFJ offers in-depth feature coverage
of military technology, procurement, logistics, strategy, doctrine
and tactics.¡±
The June 2006 AFJ article by Peters provides insight into the evolving
military doctrine of US imperialism.
While Peters asserts, The most arbitrary and distorted borders
in the world are in Africa and the Middle East,¡he concedes that
these borders were drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had
sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers). Peters omits his
own backyard: Turtle Island. Even the invaders¡designation applied to
the continent¡North America smacks of a similar gross injustice than
undergirds Peters¡thought: that newcomers might ignore the Original
Peoples and name the continent after a migrating kinsman.
This is intentional because Peters has a very precise agenda and that
is the conquest of the Middle East through cumulative partitions and
drawings of maps.
It is diversionary to criticize the conditions elsewhere. On Africa¡¯s
borders, Peters states: they continue to provoke the deaths of
millions of local inhabitants.¡Borders cannot be tried in a court
of law. Therefore, those who drew up or enforce such borders bear
responsibility for those millions of deaths? Who are the people who
drew up the borders and who are the powers they represent?
Peters claims that the unjust borders in the Middle East generate more
trouble than can be consumed locally.¡This is a strange and nebulous
language. Locally? Is he writing as a Westerner concerned about
problems caused domestically by overseas borders, or is he stating that
borders drawn by western imperialists are harming Middle Easterners? If
the latter, then that would seem a matter for Middle Easterners to
decide for themselves unless they ask for outside assistance.
Peters opines that the Middle East's comprehensive failure¡± includes
cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious
extremism.¡Peters makes disparaging statements about the region without
offering insight as to why such a failure came about and what keeps
it in place. Historically, the decline of the region is linked with
the beginning of western imperialist and Zionist infiltration. Being
on the losing end of conquest is not conducive to success, cultural
expansion, and moderation.
Peters¡arrogant solution is to redraw the map to redress the wrongs
suffered by the most significant cheated population groups.¡How does
he identify the most significant cheated¡ population groups? By what
authority does Peters decide on redressing wrongs? Peters¡entitlement
to redress wrongs¡and draw up his new maps derives illegitimately
from his connection to US imperialism. Would anyone in the Middle
East suggest that someone from among the people who committed the
initial wrongs¡in drawing up the awful¡and dysfunctional borders¡be
self-appointed to redraw them? Would Americans accept self-appointed
outsiders redrawing the borders of the United States? Self-interested
outsiders do not have a legitimate right to finagle the borders of
other countries. Legal convention holds that this must be determined
by the peoples of the region, in accordance with the United Nations
Charter-recognized right of self-determination.
Peters identifies many cheated¡population groups, such as the Kurds,
Baluch and Arab Shia and many other numerically lesser minorities
but he failed to mention the cheated¡majority. While living in the
Middle East, the present writer became distinctly aware of a feeling
expressed among many Arabs that they are one people.4 Imperialists and
Zionist-colonialists have killed the realization, if not the dream,
of a pan-Arabia for the time being.
Peters finds that one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a
reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by
the dying Ottoman Empire.¡Armenia has its own state. More important
is the ongoing genocide that Peters omitted: that being perpetrated
against the stateless Palestinians. The return of their territory
would go part way to redressing the haunting wrong[s]¡(in addition
to dispossession, murder, impoverishment, and humiliation) that
Zionists and their international (active or through silent complicity)
accomplices have committed against the Palestinians.
Peters proclaims the only way to a°more peaceful Middle East¡± is
through changing the geographical makeup of the area; the area
stretches beyond the Middle East to Pakistan. It is, in fact, a
redrawing of much of the Muslim World the world between Christian
Europe and Hindu India. As a purely intellectual exercise this may
be fine, but this is more than mental gymnastics for Peters. It is
a blueprint of the hyper-imperialist plan for the Muslim World.
Peters asks readers to accept that international statecraft has
never developed effective tools short of war for readjusting faulty
borders.¡This assertion is deceptive. There are dispute resolution
institutions that have been effective¡in mediating border disputes:
among them third-party diplomacy, the Law of the Sea Convention, and
the International Court. While effective¡is a subjective adjective,
one example is the 1992 settlement of the maritime boundary dispute
between Canada and France around the islands of St. Pierre and
Miquelon in the International Court of Arbitration. Peters points
to the mental effort to grasp the Middle East's organic frontiers¡±
as revealing the enormity of the task we face and will continue to
face.¡Who is this we¡that Peters is referring to? Why should anyone
be concerned about difficulties that outsiders face in their mission
to tamper with the borders of overseas states?
Peters decides to let readers in on a°dirty little secret from 5,000
years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.¡That it works is largely
irrelevant. It is a rather pathetic secret,¡but perhaps it is better
to call ethnic cleansing¡what it is: genocide.5 That genociders
achieve their insidious aims is no secret; it is just conveniently,
for some, seldom mentioned. On Turtle Island it would mean that all
non-indigenous inhabitants must confront the fact that they are living
on land that has been partially or completely wiped of its Original
Peoples and that geographical entities such as Canada and the United
States came into existence through genocide. Another little mentioned
fact: while the slain cannot be resurrected, it is possible to undo
the territorial on-the-ground facts created by genocide. The crimes
committed by ancestors and perpetuated by subsequent generations are
not forgotten facts. It just requires the obdurate will to bend with
the present population to remember and atone.
Peters steers toward the border issue most sensitive to American
readers.¡According to Peters, this is the borders of Israel. Why
is the Israeli border most sensitive¡to American readers? Are
non-readers i.e., non-military to be distinguished from AFJ readers
i.e., military? What about the US¡own borders? If Americans are
not sensitive to the US border, then why is the US building a Wall
along its Mexican flank (that will obstruct access to territory that
Mexico also a creation of European colonialists was violently forced
to cede: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah,
and Wyoming)? Also, why do border disputes exist with its friendly
white neighbor to the North; e.g., Seegaay (Dixon Entrance) and the
Northwest Passage?
Peters asserts that if Israel desires reasonable peace with its
neighbors,¡it will have to settle for its pre-1967 borders but with
essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns.¡Why does
Peters choose pre-1967? Why not choose pre-1948 or even much before
that? Why should European Zionists have any reasonable¡claim to any
land in historic Palestine? Peters does not discuss the legitimacy
of Israel's existence. Yes, he has acknowledged that ethnic cleansing
works. Unquestionably, the seizure of another people's homeland can be
achieved and enforced for a period of time. Does that make such seizure
legitimate? Does international recognition of a fact-on-the-ground
then make it legitimate? If an entity is illegitimate, can it then
have legitimate security concerns? All the states in the neighborhood
of Israel know their only legitimate neighbor is historical Palestine.
What about the border-defined legitimacy of Palestine's neighbors.
Since the Middle East carve up was a colonialist enterprise based
on deceit, it stands to reason that such lines drawn by outsiders
deserve and receive little respect from the local inhabitants.6
Peters writes the most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust
lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence
of an independent Kurdish state. Either Peters is using strange
artistic license for an otherwise serious topic or just what is not
clear. Land is neither just¡or unjust. The Kurds do not have their
own internationally recognized geopolitical state, but they do have
a homeland. The Kurds are not a homogeneous people, although they
share many traits. In the entire history of the Middle East (except
when Stalin carved the Kurdish state of Mahabad out of Iran, which
lasted about eight months) Kurds never formed any political state in
their existence. Then, if the Kurds never formed a state, how could it
be possible to form a state taken out of many other states without
war? Since the Kurds alone could not defeat the armies of Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Turkey, then foreign powers would be needed to do
this. But why would any power aid the Kurds without a quid pro quo? In
addition, most of the Kurds in those countries are integral parts of
their respective societies, including the state most repressive of
Kurdish rights: Turkey. How then would one define the boundaries of
scattered communities?
How to rectify this glaring injustice? Peters calls for the
partitioning of Iraq, which Peters describes as a°Frankenstein¡¯s
monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts.¡Writing
colleague B.J. Sabri utterly and compellingly refuted this ahistoric
nonsense of Peters that serves as a pretext for the US impose
a division on Iraq.7 The fueling of inter-confessional tensions
could sophistically furnish the excuse imperialists seek to slice
Iraq into more manageable minor states. It will not furnish the
Zionists-imperialists with a legitimate right to carry out such
partitioning, though.
Presumably, that is why the case of the stateless Palestinians
is not the°most glaring injustice¡for Peters. If a state and its
borders can be imposed through violent force on a region, then it
is a just land? If so, this appears to be a sure-fire recipe for a
never-ending cycle of realizing states and demarcating their borders
through violence.
Of course, to the extent that self-determination is a legitimate and
just right, then the Kurds should have this right as other peoples do.
Peters does not stop with a Free Kurdistan (in what way does he mean
free; does he also mean free from American and Zionist tampering?). He
envisions a just alignment¡where three Sunni-majority provinces in
Iraq form a truncated state. Simply writing just¡does not make it so.
Peters¡notion of a just alignment¡includes a landlocked Syria.
What is just¡about that? Lebanon would expand northward and Jordan
would expand southward into Saudi Arabia, which Peters calls an
unnatural state.¡Peters calls for Saudi Arabia to suffer¡dismantling.
Lebanon is a geographic entity that France, sympathetic to entreaties
from the Maronite community of the Ottoman sanjak of Mount Lebanon,
carved from Greater Syria. Mount Lebanon was a predominantly Christian
enclave with a substantial Druze component. The Maronites, however,
pressed for a Greater Lebanon, even though they would no longer be
a majority. The French appeased the Maronites¡demands in 1920. This
is why Syria has never acknowledged or exchanged ambassadors with
Lebanon. Today, Lebanon is predominantly Muslim and Maronites are
scrapping for waning power. Peters¡mind-boggling solution to this is to
completely deprive Syria of its coastline and expand Lebanon farther
north! The Maronite minority would be even further diluted. This
would appear to serve no one's interest in the region. So who does it
serve then? It serves western imperialist interests (and to a lesser
extent the interests of Sunni rulers). It is part of the grand scheme
risibly referred to as the War on Terrorism. A war cannot be fought
against an abstraction, but Peters¡redrawing of borders is a more
honest representation of what the War on Terrorism is really about:
divide et impera (divide-and-conquer).
Lebanon is not an easy target, though. Hizbollah has turned back
Zionist-imperialist aggressions on Lebanese soil. Imperialists,
however, seek to garner political influence with corrupt Lebanese
officials and isolate Hizbollah. Hence, the current Israeli and western
support for the weeping prime minister Fouad Siniora and machinations
to secure a military airbase in northern Lebanon8, which would serve
as a strategic springboard in redrawing the Middle Eastern map.
Like Lebanon, Jordan is a colonialist creation. The Hashemites of
Jordan, especially under the dictatorship of King Abdullah, are
downright neighborly with Zionists and firmly obedient to western
imperialists.
The Sauds pose a greater challenge to hyper-imperialists. Sitting
on top of so much oil, the Sauds have the wealth to hinder western
imperialistic ambitions. Consequently, hyper-imperialists coincide
with Zionist interests that the wealth will have to be divvied up
into smaller allotments.
Why should Saudi Arabia suffer? According to Peters: A root cause
of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal's
[sic] treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. Saudi Arabia
is a police-state¡controlled by one of the world's most bigoted
and oppressive regimes¡that exports its disciplinarian, intolerant
faith¡of Wahhabism far away. Might this, perhaps, be remedied by
exporting non-disciplinarian and tolerant US Christian fundamentalism
to the region? Peters¡worldview mirror reflects what he wants it to
reflect. Peters is adamant. He asserts, The rise of the Saudis [sic]
to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to
happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet,
and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the
Mongol) conquest.¡Is this a prejudice against Saudis or did Peters
intend to confine his remark to the Sauds? And how did the Sauds rise
to wealth and secure that wealth? To make the story very short, in
1945, following the Yalta conference, US president Franklin Roosevelt
held a secret meeting with King Ibn Saud who agreed to provide the US
access to oil in exchange for protecting the monarchy. That agreement
deepened the entrenchment of the Saud family in power.
Peters asks readers to°imagine how much healthier the Muslim world
might become were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council
representative of the world's major Muslim schools and movements in an
Islamic Sacred State a sort of Muslim super-Vatican where the future
of a great faith might be debated rather than merely decreed.¡An
astoundingly radical suggestion: catholicizing Islam.
But even the Vatican represents only the Roman Catholics of
Christianity not all Christians nor all Catholics. Besides, given
that Peters maintains that Sunnis and Shia are involved in internecine
bloodletting, how does he propose to carry out this merger of Muslim
schools and movements? After all the dividing of Muslim lands,
the illusion of solidarity is to be provided by°a sort of Muslim
super-Vatican.¡But why must a sovereign Muslim state cede control of
its territory to other Muslims?
Peters calls for true justice¡which he does not define other than
to suggest that we might not like it. It is an astounding admission
that Westerners are antagonistic to°true justice.¡The implication
is that Westerners pursue a justice that is not true and hence not
justice. But, for Peters, true justice¡involves giving away what is
not his to give. Peters would like to gift Saudi Arabia's coastal oil
fields to the Shia Arabs.¡His intention is to confine the House of
Saud to a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh¡to
deter the Sauds from mischief toward Islam and the world.¡Peters,
as is the case throughout his article, does not give any examples of
this mischief.¡The ultimate goal of Israel via the US is to create a
Shia imperialist dependency and push for war between the two branches
of Islam.
While not absolving the Sauds from any mischief¡they may perpetrate,
there is a generally acknowledged rule of discourse that is
colloquially stated as people who live in glass houses shouldn't
throw rocks.¡That Peters could accuse the Sauds of mischief¡in the
Islamic world and elsewhere while never mentioning the ¡°mischief¡±
that US, western, and zionist imperialists wreak around the world
speaks pointedly to a bias in Peters¡¯ thesis. It is an unmitigated
contradiction that undermines the entire basis of Peters¡thesis. Peters
is proposing US mischief¡guised as true justice¡in lands far afield
from US shores.
Peters¡true justice¡conveniently carves up all the lands that would
make it easier for US imperialists to increase their influence and
control over the Middle East to Pakistan. It is mischief¡that
is belligerent divide-and-conquer. Peters avers otherwise,
asserting that the maps are drawn according to the desires of local
populations and not as we would like them.¡There are many problems
with his assertion. First, maps have been drawn according to the
interests of great powers. Second, local populations did not draw the
Peters¡map. Third, Peters does not reveal how he knows the preferences
of local populations. Fourth, he does not define the parameters of
a local population.
He refers to artificial¡and natural¡states and borders without defining
them. Does a natural¡state exist? Arguably, yes.
But do natural borders exist in perpetuity? Some states are bounded
by rivers, which change course over time. Even island states
(as Atlanteans found out) are prone to the whims of tectonic,
meteorological, oceanic, or, for those so inclined, divine or
extraterrestrial forces. Consequently, to refer to natural¡borders
is to refer to a temporary condition absent the workings of nature.
Peters naturalizes the unnatural¡state of Pakistan. He sees a mixed
fate¡for the city-states of the United Arab Emirates with some being
incorporated into the puritanical cultures¡of the Arab Shia State
which he predicts to be a counterbalance to Persian Iran.
To serve the hypocritical,¡Dubai, of necessity, would be allowed to
retain its playground status for rich debauchees.¡Peters displays
his sensitivity to the needs of minorities, in this case, the rich
debauchees.¡Dubai, in the Peters scenario would play the role Nevada
plays for the°rich debauchees¡in the puritanical cultures¡of the US.
A military man-turned writer, Peters stakes claim to expertise in the
ethnic affinities and religious communalism¡of the Middle East (and
well he might have expertise, but what his qualifications are and how
he came to acquire such expertise are unstated, other than an undefined
claim to firsthand experience). Peters proffers a new map to right the
great wrongs [of] borders drawn by Frenchmen and Englishmen in the 20th
century.¡What better way for a region to emerge from humiliations and
defeats¡than to have an American militarist draw new borders for it
and then categorize the states into winners and losers? Peters even
decrees Israel to be a loser by having its ethnic cleansing project
halted at the pre-1967 borders¡(strange enough because neither Zionists
nor Palestinians wholeheartedly agree to such borders).
As an apparent justification for the redrawing of the borders,
Peters reasons that based on the cyclicality of history, new borders
are bound to happen sooner or later anyway. Despite this, Peters
admits, Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may
be impossible.¡However:
The current human divisions and forced unions between Ankara and
Karachi, taken together with the region's self-inflicted woes, form
as perfect a breeding ground for religious extremism, a culture of
blame and the recruitment of terrorists as anyone could design.
Further revealing his anti-Muslim enmity, Peters opines: In a
region where only the worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold
and where the most debased aspects of religion threaten to dominate
a disappointed faith, the U.S., its allies and, above all, our armed
forces can look for crises without end.¡±
Peters¡odious thinking is exemplified by his pointing to Iraq as a
counterexample of hope.¡This conveniently ignores the occupation-driven
genocidal blood bath there.9 What is required, says Peters, is that
we do not leave Iraq prematurely.¡Since the occupation is fueling
the resistance, and since the Iraqis don't want the American forces
to remain, the statement is pure imperialistic hubris.
Peters¡pronouncements on Iraq are a further rejection of his own
border redrawing program, which essentially is an anti-sovereignty
and anti-self-determination project. In a USA Today op-ed he railed
against Iraq's collaborationist prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's
interference with US military objectives within his country a clear
infringement of Iraqi sovereignty.10
I believed that Arabs deserved a chance to build a rule-of-law
democracy in the Middle East.¡Generous and gracious as his initial
belief was, Peters writes using the past tense, implying that he no
longer believes Arabs deserve such a chance.
He then states, Based upon firsthand experience, I was convinced
that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and
intellectually stagnant that we had to risk intervention or face
generations of terrorism and tumult.¡Peters¡racist opinionating
continues: Middle Easterners, according to him, are politically,
socially, morally, and intellectually inferior. And what was Peters¡¯
firsthand experience? Did he live or spend much time in the Middle
East? Or what ideological prism did he use to give a verdict shaped
by standard Zionist ratiocinations and manifest cultural ignorance?
That he believes Arabs are intellectually inferior is supported by
his assertion that they do not yet comprehend the dimensions¡of what
he comprehends: Iraq's impending failure¡and disaster.¡He accuses
Arabs of gleefulness at America's impending humiliation.¡But for the
uncomprehending Arabs, Peters adds it's their tragedy, not ours.¡±
Peters exculpates the invading-occupying US from any blame. Writes
Peters, It's al-Qaeda's Vietnam. They're the ones who can't leave
and who can't win.¡This is imperialist rhetoric. So the borders are
impermeable! Then, contrary to declamations from US administration
officials, there are no foreigners crossing into Iraq?
Peters follows up with a flourish of patriotic self-glorification:
Islamist terrorists have chosen Iraq as their battleground and, even
after our departure, it will continue to consume them. We'll still be
the greatest power on earth, indispensable to other regional states
such as the Persian Gulf states and Saudi Arabia that are terrified
of Iran¡¯s growing might. If the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy
of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries.2
Peters relies on ad hominem to make his case. Staying with the
definition that terrorism¡is the use of violence or threat of violence
to attain ends, it is undeniable that the US is using state terrorism
in Iraq, just as Israel is using state terrorism in Palestine. Some
so-called terrorism experts try to distinguish terrorism according
to the agent, but this is semantic subterfuge.
Nevertheless, while perchance the same in mechanism, all terrorism is
not necessarily the same. One must be careful not to fall into the
fallacy of drawing an equivalency between unprovoked or aggressive
terrorism which elicits a similar terrorism in self-defense.
Logically and morally, one cannot limit self-defense and resistance
without capitulating to the evil of the precipitating terrorism. The
US aggressed Iraq on a mendacious casus belli. It is the US which is
stoking the flames of violence with Iran. It is simply dishonest and
intellectually bankrupt argument to declare otherwise. Resistance is
a legitimate right that must not be hampered relative to the violence
of the aggressor or occupier.
Peters has waffled on civil war in Iraq, first denying it and
then acquiescing to it. Now he describes Arabs as ¡°revel[ing] in
fratricidal slaughter.¡±
Inseparably entangled with the infighting is the presence of the
occupiers and the US occupiers have signaled their intention to stay.11
It is clear that Peters is laying the groundwork for a splitting of
Iraq as envisioned by arch Zionists and imperialists.
While strife was breaking out in the Balkans, the US spoke of
a preference for a coherent Yugoslavia, but neoliberal shock
therapy and capitalist inroads into Yugoslavia helped precipitate
the split up that the US finally recognized officially. In the
sanctions-ravaged and war-tattered Iraq, US imperialist agent Paul
Bremer dismantled the enviable social system and opened the country
to exploitation by US corporations. It is, therefore, unsurprising
that the splitting of Iraq despite tepid contrary pronouncements by
the Bush administration is on the US agenda. Following Peters¡logic,
it represents the inevitability of the cyclicality of history: witness
US nation-splitting in Germany, Korea, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. It
is the continuation of divide-and-conquer.
Let us dispel another myth: there is no civil war in Iraq! A
civil war¡is a war between competing factions or regions within a
country. Even if one accepts that there is inter-confessional fighting
in Iraq (and this must be regarded with utmost skepticism as there is
plenty of evidence to suggest that much of the terrorism attributed to
infighting is, in fact, the purposeful work of occupation forces to
incite such infighting12). It ignores the long history that Sunnis,
Shi¡¯a, Turkmen, Kurds, and Christians have living together and
inter-marrying.
The US and collaborating foreign forces are inciting violence by their
very presence in Iraq. Prior to the invasion there was minimal or no
internecine bloodletting in Iraq. Therefore, it is imperialist-serving
propaganda to refer to a civil war in Iraq. The term civil war¡applied
to Iraq exculpates the US and so-called coalition partners for
the invasion and occupation which have killed over 655,000 Iraqi
civilians. To be accurate and honest, it must be referred to as
occupation-incited¡infighting not civil war and not sectarianism.
Peters assumes that he has the expertise to redraw the Middle East.
He assumes that the US has a right to carry out the redrawing. No
interference will be tolerated in this US project: We must make it
clear to Iran that meddling will not be tolerated.¡13
With total disregard for the admixture of races, ethnicities, and
cultures on Turtle Island, Peters ominously warns: If the borders
of the greater Middle East cannot be amended to reflect the natural
ties of blood and faith, we may take it as an article of faith that
a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our
own. If there is an iota of truth to Peters¡warning, then Turtle
Islanders should be perennially spilling blood.
In fact, despite numerous societal inequalities and problems, Turtle
Island stands as a stark refutation to Peters¡thesis that borders
which enclose many cultures and ethnicities within a landmass lead
to continuous blood spilling.
Peters takes it as an article of faith (not fact) that the US has a
legitimate stake to involve itself in the affairs of the Middle East.
In doing so, he sings the oft-repeated mantra of the
Zionist-neoconservative cabal: Our men and women in uniform will
continue to fight for security from terrorism, for the prospect of
democracy and for access to oil supplies in a region that is destined
to fight itself.¡±
Peters¡major error is not the redrawing of borders but in the drawing
of borders. Borders separate people. They set up disparities.
Peters admits that borders are never completely just; that they
inflict a degree of injustice; that some borders provoke the deaths
of millions; that our own diplomats worship awful-but-sacrosanct
international boundaries.¡He also admits: Correcting borders to
reflect the will of the people may be impossible.¡Why then does
Peters insist that despite inevitable attendant bloodshed new and
natural borders will emerge.¡Peters is ostensibly of the impression
that border formation is inherent to the human condition. It is not.
Blood Continent: Turtle Island Peters looks overseas to draw his
new borders. Why did he not look at the blood borders on Turtle
Island? The unnatural¡states of Canada and the United States (as are
the states elsewhere in the western hemisphere) were formed by bloody
usurpation of the land of the Original Peoples. In Canada and the US,
surviving Original Peoples have been deprived of their traditional
lifestyles and culture by putting them on reserves.
Peters focused his imperialistic gaze on the oil-rich Middle East, but
he would have gained credibility if he had dealt with the iniquities
in his backyard and with other legitimate stakeholders come up with
a fair redrawing of the blood borders formed by the great holocaust
that European colonizers inflicted on the Original Peoples in the
western hemisphere.
Statehood arises from blood spillage. Empire is the predictable
direction of redrawing borders. Yet, Peters pushes a doctrine of
imperialistic benevolence conforming to Zionist objectives that is
rejected by, what he describes as, extremist elements in foreign
societies. The lie of a civil war in Iraq serves encompassing
imperialistic objectives.
Peters disclosed, in the summer of 1997, his support for a bloody
Zionist-imperialist blueprint.
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our
lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around
the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural
and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive.
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world
safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends,
we will do a fair amount of killing. 14
This violent zionist-imperialist mindset must be rejected and
defeated. The militaristic dogma promulgated by publications the AFJ
serves those dedicated to violent means to unjust ends. If borders
must exist, they must be determined by the indigenous and legitimately
established resident populations. Peters and his ilk can tend to
problems in their own backyards.
1. Quoted in the Associated Press, French report: Former U.N. envoy
Bolton says U.S. has no strategic interest¡in united Iraq,¡±
International Herald Tribune, 29 January 2007.
2. Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would
look,¡Armed Forces Journal, June 2006.
3. Ralph Peters, Wikipedia. His racist animus is revealed by comments
such as the Arab genius for screwing things up and Arab societies
can't support democracy.
4. In Jordan from 2000-2002.
5. Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter,
Ethnic cleansing¡bleaches the atrocities of genocide,¡The European
Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007.
6. Britain betrayed a promise it made to its Arab allies against the
Ottomans during World War I. Britain had pledged: to recognize and
uphold the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within
the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.¡This promise was broken
by the Sykes-Picot Agreement in May 1916, in which Britain and France
divided up the Middle East between themselves.
7. B.J. Sabri, The Zarqawi affair, part 16,¡Online Journal, 21 November
2006. It was this article that triggered the basis for the present
article. In the series, Sabri provides a compelling refutation of any
notion that there was a Sunni-Shi¡a powder keg ready to explode into
internecine fighting.
8. Franklin Lamb, Lebanon and the Planned US Airbase at Kleiaat,¡±
Counterpunch, 30 May 2007.
9. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts,
Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster
sample survey,¡Lancet, 364, October 2006: 1857-1864.
10. Last gasps in Iraq,¡USA Today, 2 November 2006. David Sanger,
With Korea as Model, Bush Team Ponders Long Support Role in Iraq,¡±
New York Times, 3 June 2007. The continual denials about an enduring
military presence in Iraq despite the permanent bases constructed
there is belied.
11. B.J. Sabri, The Zarqawi affair, part 7,¡Online Journal, 20
September 2006 and part 8, 21 September 2006.
12. Ralph Peters, Break Up Iraq Now!¡New York Post, 10 July 2003.
In this article, Peters likens the Iraqis to animals: Today, the Iraq
we're trying to herd back together consists of three distinct nations
caged under a single, bloodstained flag.¡
13. Ralph Peters, Constant Conflict,¡Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14.
14. Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. He can be reached
at: [email protected]. Read other articles by Kim.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/a-bloo dy-border-project/
--Boundary_(ID_6jRLtGtgQnwOCxs OQMpG8Q)--
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress