In Bushzarro world, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was first about Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction, and then in lieu of actually finding any weapons the excuse shifted to altruism, a mawkish desire to bestow democracy on benighted Iraqis (who pretty much pioneered civilization 12,000 years ago as Mesopotamians and didn’t need any help from the neocons). In fact, the invasion had nothing to do with either of these things, as some of us said in late 2002, about the time the Straussian neocons began making serious noise about invading Iraq and killing thousands of people.

Instead, the invasion of Iraq was all about destroying Iraqi society and nationalism. It was a coup de grâce delivered after twelve years of brutal, immoral, sadistic, and medieval sanctions designed to break the Iraqis down. It has everything to do with defeating secular Arab nationalism and in this respect the occupation (and destruction) of Iraq is an Israeli project. Both Syria and Lebanon loom large on the Straussian neocon hit list precisely because they represent Arab nationalism. Syrian thinkers such as Constantin Zureiq, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel Aflaq formulated pan-Arab ideology and Aflaq and al-Arsuzi were key figures in the establishment of the Arab Ba’ath (Resurrection) Party. Since the 1980s, the Israelis and their neocon allies in the United States have work diligently to replace pan-Arab nationalism with Islamic fanaticism.

According to retired Delta Force Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney, the United States has “fomented civil war in Iraq” and has “probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis…. I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies,” Haney will tell the Los Angeles Daily News tomorrow, Raw Story reports.

Back in November, 2003, Leslie Gelb, “an influential man who, until recently, presided over the very important Council of Foreign Affairs, a think tank that brings together the CIA, the secretary of state and big shots from U.S. multinational corporations,” writes Michel Collon, proposed breaking Iraq into three ethnically distinct balkanized mini-states as an effective way to “weaken resistance,” a continuation and amplification on the old British “divide and rule” technique used to great effect in Ireland, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere (see Gelb’s The Three-State Solution, New York Times, 25 November 2003). It is an idea pushed long and hard by the Israelis, as proposed in Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon,” Yinon wrote. It is precisely “inter-Arab confrontation” initiated through false flag provocative operations occurring currently in Iraq.

Former Delta Force Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney did not say the Israelis and the Straussian neocons are behind the “civil war” in Iraq—instead he declared the “personal policies” of the Bush administration have started World War Three, a process well underway. Of course, if we read the neocon literature and take what they say at face value, the “war against terrorism,” promised to last decades if not more than a hundred years, is in fact a “clash of civilizations,” or perpetual warfare based on cultural and religious identity. “The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role,” the neocon Max Boot famously declared. Of course, the “imperial role” suggested by Boot translates into extending authority over foreign entities, especially Arab foreign entities. As Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have recently documented, foreign policy in the United States is essentially an extension of the Israeli determination to undermine and balkanize Arab neighbors at any cost, especially if that cost is borne out by benighted American tax-payers propagandized to believe they face a long-term Islamic “fascist” threat.