03-05 - The New Yorker

Notes rapides pour un billet sur le câble de l’ambassade US en Syrie de décembre 2006, proposant des « actions possibles » pour la déstabilisation du régime de Bachar Assad :
►https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html

Au Liban, ce que dévoilent les câbles de Wikileaks
►http://blog.mondediplo.net/2013-06-24-Au-Liban-ce-que-devoilent-les-cables-de-Wikileaks

Ainsi M. Samir Geagea, dirigeant de l’extrême droite chrétienne, suggère-t-il (25 juillet 2006, 06BEIRUT2471) : « La clé pour démanteler le Hezbollah comme force militaire est d’en faire “un problème intérieur”, c’est-à-dire de faire comprendre au peuple libanais que le Hezbollah est la menace qui a causé tant de destruction au pays. La pression politique résultante, accompagnée de la dégradation continue de ses capacités infligée par l’armée israélienne, est le seul chemin vers le désarmement. » Pour M. Geir Perdersen, envoyé personnel du secrétaire général des Nations unies au Liban (5 août 2006, 06BEIRUT2539), « Israël a besoin de trouver rapidement un moyen pour permettre à des “facteurs politiques” de gérer la menace du Hezbollah (…) Un tel facteur serait l’opinion publique libanaise ».

WikiLeaks : Saad Hariri a demandé en 2006 le départ d’Al-Assad
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2011/04/15/wikileaks-saad-hariri-a-demande-en-2006-le-depart-d-al-assad_1508069_3218.ht

Selon un câble diplomatique de l’ambassade américaine au Liban daté du 24 août 2006, soit dix jours après la fin de la guerre dévastatrice entre le mouvement chiite libanais Hezbollah et Israël, M. Hariri a exhorté la communauté internationale à isoler le président Assad. M. Hariri a également mis en garde les responsables américains contre des troubles au Liban si la communauté internationale ne parvenait pas à isoler M. Assad avec des sanctions.

A la question de savoir qui pourrait combler le vide en cas de chute du régime de M. Assad, M. Hariri a proposé une alliance entre les Frères musulmans, interdits en Syrie, et d’anciens responsables syriens en exil comme l’ancien vice-président Abdel Halim Khaddam et un ex-chef d’état-major, Hikmat Chehabi, toujours selon les documents.

The Redirection (mars 2007) : rencontre de Hersh avec Nasrallah datée de décembre 2006
►http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection

Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.” “In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,” he said. “I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.” (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.)

Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was “the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war—there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.”

He went on, “I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ”

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.”

The Pentagon plan to ‘divide and rule’ the Muslim world
▻http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pentagon-plan-divide-and-rule-muslim-world-1690265165

Davidson points out that there is precedent for this: “There have been repeated references in the Reagan era to the usefulness of sectarian conflict in the region to US interests.”

One post-Reagan reiteration of this vision was published by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Strategic and Political Advanced Studies for Benjamin Netanyahu. The 1996 paper, A Clean Break, by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Richard Perle – all of whom went on to join the Bush administration – advocated regime-change in Iraq as a precursor to forging an Israel-Jordan-Turkey axis that would “roll back” Syria, Lebanon and Iran. The scenario is surprisingly similar to US policy today under Obama.

Twelve years later, the US Army commissioned a further RAND report suggesting that the US “could choose to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world… to split the jihadist movement between Shiites and Sunnis.” The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan”. Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.

Around the same time as this RAND report was released, the US was covertly coordinating Saudi-led Gulf state financing to Sunni jihadist groups, many affiliated to al-Qaeda, from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. That secret strategy accelerated under Obama in the context of the anti-Assad drive.

The widening Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict would “reduce the al-Qaeda threat to US interests in the short term,” the report concluded, by diverting Salafi-jihadist resources toward “targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East,” especially in Iraq and Lebanon, hence “cutting back… anti-Western operations”.

By backing the Iraqi Shiite regime and seeking an accommodation with Iran, while propping up al-Qaeda sponsoring Gulf states and empowering local anti-Shia Islamists across the region, this covert US strategy would calibrate levels of violence to debilitate both sides, and sustain “Western dominance”.

Le rapport de la Rand : Unfolding the Future of the Long War, 2008 :
►http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG738.pdf

Nafeez Ahmed avait déjà cité longuement ce document en août 2013 dans le Guardian (repris à l’époque sur Seenthis par Kassem) :
►http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy-pipelines

(via Angry Arab)