From TAM (The American Muslim)

[ken hanly <northsunm@xxxxxxxxx>]

The War of the Titans: Who Will Control "Democratic
Capitalism"
Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Oct 10, 2006      ? Permalink      ?
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The War of the Titans:  Who Will Control ?Democratic
Capitalism?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

?Most of today?s conflicts in present day Asia and
Africa may be traced to imperial/colonial powers that
occupied these lands, and carved them up for the
benefit of the conquering Europeans. Carving up Iraq
will continue this policy of divide and rule.? So
writes Enver Masud, head of The Wisdom Fund, in his
article of October 10, 2006, entitled ?Iraq: Divide
and Rule, ?Ethnic Cleansing Works?.

This is one conspiracy theory.  But there are others.
Perhaps American policy toward Iraq was designed to
weaken opposition to colonial rule by forcing
independent peoples into a single centralized state,
but now internal opposition is forcing the NeoCons to
face reality.

Both of these conspiracy theories have been
refurbished by articles inspired by the deliberations
of an independent commission, the Iraq Study Group,
co-chaired by the Republican James A. Baker III and
the Democrat Lee Hamilton, two blue-blooded senior
statesmen who are called in occasionally to legitimize
possible changes in foreign policy.  Baker was
President Reagan?s first Chief of Staff and then
President Bush?s Secretary of State.  Lee Hamilton
served in the U.S. House for 34 years from 1965 to
1999, was the outstanding Chairman of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee until the Gingrich rout in
1994, and from 2002 to 2004 was Co-Chairman of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United
states (the 9/11 Panel).

Enver Masud, one of the most perspicacious pundits on
the American scene, and perhaps the most erudite
Muslim among them, concludes that the Commission?s
consideration of a strategy to divide Iraq up into
autonomous regions is an imperialist strategy to
divide and conquer in order to grab Iraq?s oil.

Sorry, Enver, but you may have it all backwards.
After all there is more than one conspiracy theory
circulating these days to explain away America?s
failures in foreign policy.  Perhaps the
Baker-Hamilton commission?s recommendation to support
autonomous regions in the Fertile Crescent is not a
strategy of divide and rule but a belated admission
that trying to impose a centralized government on
independent nations creates the chaos that blocks U.S.
control of the oil.

The answer to this question will be determined by
whether the U.S. government supports or opposes Iraqi
initiatives to privatize all the oil in the region
through individual shares of voting stock to be owned
equally by every Shi?a, Sunni, and Kurd, thereby
eliminating all government control of the oil, either
domestic or foreign.  The only other alternative is
control by a local mafia in the guise of a central
government in cooperation with multi-national oil
companies, enforced by a permanent U.S. military
occupation, which many think has been a major goal of
the NeoCons since long before the March 2003 attack on
Baghdad.

Why would anyone think that letting independent
nations rule themselves is a strategy of divide and
conquer?  The history of imperialism shows a clear
two-track strategy, which consists both of dividing
natural nations into two or more artificial states and
combining natural nations into a single artificial
state by the use of force, whichever is most likely to
destroy the identity of potential opponents.

Forcing a central government on the nations of the
Fertile Crescent could well have been a seductive
strategy to destroy the nations that have existed
there from long before the days of the Ottoman Empire.
 Unfortunately, only a home-grown dictator, like
Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Tito in Yugoslavia, and
Musharaf in Pakistan (the list is endless), could
succeed even temporarily in such a strategy.  Foreign
occupiers don?t have a chance.  Any efforts to prevent
a civil war after the American conquest culminating in
the shock and awe of March 2003 were doomed from the
start, as I have been saying since the NeoCons first
took power six years ago with an agenda to replace
Saddam Hussein with an American substitute.

The most basic fallacy of American foreign policy has
always been the dream to control the world from the
top, namely, from Washington.  The NeoCons were the
first to spell it out in a coherent ideology designed
not to empower others but to dis-empower every
possible opposition to their centralized global
control.  Don?t forget that the NeoCon stalwarts in
Washington and their mentors were liberals before they
decided to call themselves conservatives, and before
that were Trotskyite terrorists bent on world
revolution.

The most fascinating aspect of all this has been the
consistent support of the NeoCons in power by
President Bush?s confidante, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who
opposes all ideologies, even one that calls for
concentrating capital ownership within and among
nations through the euphemism of democratic
capitalism, and especially any one that clothes itself
in the trappings of morality through a call for
freedom and democracy.

Perhaps the most appropriate explanation for this
anomaly is the analogy of the Nazis and Communists in
1930, when Hitler joined forces with the Communists to
overthrow the Weimar Republic in order then to
annihilate them at the first convenient opportunity.

The moral of the story is clear.  Following Mao Tse
Dung?s famous strategy of ?Let a Hundred Flowers
Blossom,? lets preserve the free market in conspiracy
theories.  This may be the best way to pursue truth.