Ammon News - by Patrick J. Buchanan


Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. …One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.” So wrote H.G. Wells in “What Is Coming:

A Forecast of Things After the Warin the year of Verdun and the Somme Offensive. In redrawing the map of Europe, however, the statesmen of Versailles ignored Wells and parceled out Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, and othernationalities to alien lands to divide, punish, and weaken the defeated peoples.
So doing, they set the table for a second world war.The Middle East was sliced up along lines set down in the secretSykes-Picot agreement. But with the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to beasserting itself. Sunni and Shia align with Sunni and Shia, as Protestants and Catholics didin 17th-century Europe.

Ethiopia and Sudan split. Mali and Nigeria may benext. While world attention is focused on Aleppo and when Bashar Assadmight fall, Syria itself may be about to disintegrate. In Syria’s northeast, a Kurdish minority of 2 to 3 million with ethnic tiesto Iraqi Kurdistan and 15 million Kurds in Turkey seems to be dissolvingits ties to Damascus. A Kurdish nation carved out of Syria, Iraq, Turkey,and Iran would appear to be a casus belli for all four nations. Yet in anynatural map of the world, there would be a Kurdistan.

The Sunni four-fifths of the Syrian population seems fated to rise and theMuslim Brotherhood to rule, as happened in Egypt. The fall of Assad and hisShia Alawite minority would be celebrated by the Sunni across the border inIraq’s Anbar province, who would then have a powerful new ally in any campaign to recapture Sunni lands lost to Iraqi Shia. With its recent murderous attacks inside Iraq, al-Qaeda seems to beinstigating a new Sunni-Shia war to tear Iraq apart. The fall of the Alawites in Damascus would end the dream of a Shia crescent— Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Hezbollah — leave Hezbollah isolated, and conceivably lead to a renewal of Lebanon’s sectarian and civil war. The losers in all this? Certainly Iran, which seems fated to lose its onlyArab ally, Syria, and its land link to Hezbollah.

That would make Israel a winner. But Israel’s situation appears moreperilous than it was a decade ago. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has replaced Hosni Mubarak, who kept thepeace in Sinai and the lid on Hamas. Recently, new Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi met with Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal at the presidential palace inCairo. The Sinai is becoming a no-man’s land where terrorists plot andAfricans cross to Israel. To Israel’s east, there is no true peace with the Palestinians, and theJordanian throne has rarely been shakier. On the Golan Heights, quiet fordecades, the future may see Syrian troops loyal to a militant Sunni regimein Damascus. Hezbollah sits on Israel’s northern border.

Beyond is a Turkeyno longer friendly. Israel is blaming the atrocity in Bulgaria, in which Israeli tourists were massacred, on Iran. But neither the Bulgarians nor the Americans appear toknow who did it. And why would the Iranians, who, following the slaughter,publicly denounced such atrocities against civilians, do it? Were an Iranian hand to be found in this act of barbarism, it would giveIsrael justification for an attack, igniting a war in which America couldbe dragged in. Why would Iran want a war with the United States when that would meandestruction of its air force, navy, missile force, and nuclear program, acrippling blockade, and perhaps destruction of its vital oil facilities onKharg Island? Whoever was behind the attack on the Israeli tourists seems to want a warbetween the Jewish state of Israel and the Shia state of Iran.

Who would benefit from such a war? Answer: Al-Qaeda, which, during the Iraq War, urged the United States tobomb Iran back to the Stone Age. An al-Qaeda affiliate has also attackedIsraeli vacationers before, at Egyptian resorts on the Gulf of Aqaba. “There is an international plot against Gulf states in particular and Arabcountries in general … to take over our fortunes,” says Dubai’s chief ofpolice. “I had no idea that there is this large number of Muslim Brotherhood in the Gulf states.” What is al-Qaeda’s goal? Ignite Sunni-Shia wars and Muslim-Christian clashes in Arab states. Draw in the Americans to smash Iran. And when theSunni are ascendant, expel the Americans and Christians, isolate Israel,and set about creating the caliphate of Osama bin Laden’s dream. If a U.S. war on Iran is good for al-Qaeda, how can it be good for us?




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