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.