Neocon Plan: Smashing up the Middle East was and is the whole Point

I hardly count myself a fan of Justin Raimondo or his Paleoconservative/libertarian website antiwar.com, but post, which I happened across at Dissident News, is too good to ignore. The title of the original piece, “Nihilism and Neoconservatism: Brothers under the skin” offers up only the vaguest idea what is being argued here . . . fortunately, Dissident News goes with the longer, more descriptive title of “Neocon Plan: Smashing up the Middle East was and is the whole Point”.

I’ve been going on and on like a broken record for the past four years in arguing that what we are seeing unfold in Iraq is not the result of Bush Administration incompetence, much less evidence of the incompetence of the Neoconservative war architects. No, what is going on is not incompetence but rather the fruition of a sinister, very well-planned and executed plot to sow enough chaos in the Middle East to ensure US hegemony in the region cannot be challenged in a meaningful way. It’s Geopolitics 101. (for a good illustration of this theory, frequently termed the “incompetence dodge” by progressives, see this short piece by Norman Solomon)

To quote from Raimondo:

Where will it all end? The goal of the neocons is a U.S.-Israeli-dominated region, patrolled by U.S. troops and divided into a large number of much smaller statelets. With both Iraq and Iran broken down into their constituent ethno-religious parts, the Middle East becomes Lebanon writ large: weak, vulnerable to attack, and easy to control.

A central premise of the “realist” critique of the neoconservative agenda is that it promotes a dangerous instability, which shows that the realists just don’t get what neoconservatism in the foreign policy realm – and particularly when it comes to the Middle East – is all about. The idea is to create – and preside over – a condition of permanent instability. There is no better way to justify the permanent presence of U.S. troops and plenty of aid to U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes.

Nihilism and neoconservatism are brothers under the skin, and nothing illustrates this more starkly than the horror unfolding presently in Iraq. It is a war we were lured into by means of a massive and quite artful deception, and its true purpose remains hidden beneath layers of presidential rhetoric and “patriotic” posturing. Yet a big problem for the neocons is that the closer they get to achieving their objective, the more their real agenda is exposed to the light of day – and they run the risk of a major backlash, one that could take an unexpected – and quite ugly – turn. Quite ugly for them, that is, and quite a relief to the rest of us.

Raimondo is slippery here in describing the Neocons’ agenda vis-a-vis Israeli domination of the region. It would seem to me that a much stronger argument could be constructed around Israel being a client state of the US in the region that is financed and armed to advance the Hyperpowers’ geopolitical interests in the Middle East, especially in ensuring strategic control of energy resources. Frankly, I haven’t seen any persuasive evidence that notwithstanding the fact that most of the Neocons happen to be Jewish, that US foreign policy goals in the region currently revolve around furthering Israel’s interests as opposed to advancing the US’s.