Qassem Soleimani and the Re-making of the middle east

by Sharif Loghdey

10 days after 911, retired US general Wesley Clark visited the Pentagon and was privy to a Memo that detailed the US’s plan to invade 7 Middle Eastern Countries in 5 years. Backtrack 5 years to 1996, a year which saw the first election of Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing extremist. It was the same year that an Israeli think-tank authored a document called “A Clean Break: A new strategy for securing the realm” which detailed a total revision of Israeli policy in the Middle East, shelving the Oslo accords and advocated for the abandonement of peace with most of Israel’s neighbours in favour of the violent toppling of unfriendly Arab regimes and replacing them with puppet regimes friendly to Israel using proxy forces and pre-emption in order to redraw the map of the Middle East – Iraq was to be the first victim. Fast forward a few months later, when the identical foreign policy revamp was sold to the Bush administration as an American imperative to secure its own Global hegemony through unilateral military action by a newly formed US based thinktank called PNAC, founded in 1997 in Washington. Significantly, both Israeli and US think-tanks contained members who would go on to serve in the Bush Administration in some form or another , amongst them, Afghan born current US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department, Zalmay Khalilzad. It even alluded to the necessity for a “catalysing event”, a “new Pearl Harbour”, to launch America’s new drive to invigorated total dominance, free and unfettered of the moral, ethical and political constraints international law dictated, absent which, seem to have been created anyway, not by a Pearl Harbour type event, but a Gulf of Tonkin type (false flag) event. The PNAC-Clean Break policy recommendations were not unique to Israeli foreign policy thinking. There were others dating back to the 1950’s. A more recent precedent was the 1980’s Oded Yinon plan (named after Israeli Diplomat and journalist) which articulated very much the same ideal - that Israel should become the regional hegemon through the violent dissolution of the larger, surrounding Arab states and that beginning with Iraq, promoted its division into 3 ethnically distinct regions (Sunni-Shia-Kurdish) via Balkanisation, a feat that was to be attempted through the employment of the CIA created ISIS terror outfit. Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Egypt and Sudan were to be replaced by several ethnic, weaker states, all beholden to Israeli military and economic dominance. Yinon suggested that this Balkanization should be realized by fomenting discord and war among the Arabs:

“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.”

Israel was able to trial run this policy itself on the weakest of its neighbours and according to author Dan Sanchez, in 1976, Israel militarily supported Maronite Christian Arabs, aggravating the Lebanese Civil War that had recently begun. In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon, and recruited locals to create a proxy force called the “South Lebanon Army.”

Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982, and tried to install a Christian Fascist organization called the Phalange in power. This was foiled when the new Phalangist ruler was assassinated. In reprisal, the Phalange perpetrated, with Israeli connivance, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, butchering hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shiites.

The civil war that Israel helped foster, fractured Lebanon for a decade and a half. It was Lebanon’s chaotic fragmentation that Yinon cited as the precedent and model for the rest of the Arab world, but of course, Israel needed help with the rest, hence, enter the US prompted by PNAC.

By adopting PNAC, the Bush administration subordinated US foreign policy to Israeli long term hegemonic aspirations for the Middle East. Either, amazingly, the Neocons fortuitously received their wish of a “catalysing event” on que by divine intervention, or manufactured one themselves, for this event was none other than the events on 911 and hence set in motion, a 20 year long and counting, orgy of genocidal warfare and mayhem in the Middle East, and so the bogus “war on terror began” with a ferocious attack on Afghanistan in September 2001 and two years later, Iraq was targeted after the Neocons falsified a Cassus Belli, consuming Saddam’s Iraq in an inferno of mayhem and killing which lasts to this day.

Somalia was destabilised by US intervention and Sudan was balkanised into an oil rich South and North Sudan. Libya followed suit with destruction and next it was Syria’s turn. In fact, a plan existed for the Balkanisation of Saudi Arabia as presented to NATO by Condeleeza Rice.

However successful the neocon plan for the periphery of the Middle East was, the heartland and that which affected Israel most, was far from being finalised.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Iran, rightfully fearing it would be next on the neocon regime change list, embarked on a course of action that would eventually stop the Neocon advance dead in its tracks.

Soon after his rise as head of Iran’s extra territorial paramiltary arm of the IRGC, the Quds force, in 1997, a division of Iran’s powerful IRGC, Major General Qassem Soleimani stepped into the Iraqi quagmire and within a few short years ended up wielding such influence in Iraq, that at one stage, he was thought to run the country. Entire ministries came under the sway of Iran right upto successive prime minister’s offices, where he personally brokered the selection of the new Iraqi government[1]. In 2007, General Petraeus, the notorious “surge” General and number one US commander in Iraq at the time, seconded by Obama to crush the Sunni uprising against the US occupation, relates an incident in which he was handed a phone with a text message from Soleimani which read “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran when it comes to Iraq and also Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.“

And so the war for Israeli regional hegemony, decades in the making, which resulted in the fall of Saddam Hussein, implacable enemy of Iran, was replaced not by a pro-US, Pro – Israeli government as planned, but by a pro-Iran government, beholden to General Soleimani, who was second only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the Neocons had shot themselves squarely in the foot. Perhaps it was for this reason that Ayatollah Khamenei proclaimed “Praise be to God who made our enemies fools”

Soleimani had facilitated it. Lauded by friends and foes alike, Soleimani aka “The Shadow Commander”, has been described as “a strategic genius”, “brilliant tactician” frighteningly intelligent[2], the most powerful operative in the Middle East[3] and the 2^nd most powerful man in Iran, became the defacto controller of Iranian policy in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

Soleimani accomplished much of the Iraqi successes by the active courting of Iraqi politicians and 2ndly, via the neutralisation of the Sunni advance via the cultivation of proxy Iraqi Shiite militia whose leaderships were beholden to him and initially received military and ideological training in Iran by the IRGC.

When the last US troops left Iraq at the end of 2011, Iraq was a Shia dominated state, almost entirely under the sway of Iran, with a paramilitary militia force amongst them Kataib Hizbollah and others, more powerful than the Iraqi army, and loyal to Soleimani.

In the interim, Soleimani had assisted in the streamlining and strengthening of Iran’s other extra-territorial assets, Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance groups, most notably, HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and finally the Houthis of Yemen. Soleimani even narrowly escaped with his life while being present with Nasrallah for the duration of Israel’s 2006 33 day war against Hezbollah in which it is widely accepted that Hezbollah gained the upper hand over Israel. Through Soleimani’s nurturing of the Gaza resistance groups, there seemed to be an amazing transformation in fighting doctrine as witnessed in their fighting successes in the 2014 Operation Protective Edge compared to previous encounters with the IDF. Since the 2006 Lebanon war, for the past 16 years, Israel has not once attempted similar military adventures as it was wont to do in the previous decades prior to 2006. Lebanon had been secured, at least militarily, if not politically.

After the NATO overthrow of Gadaffi in 2011[4], it was the turn of Syria. In the early years of the Syrian, US-Saudi-Gulf fomented insurgency, Iran remained uninvolved. Soleimani, in 2014, was pre-occupied in Iraq with the emergence of a new threat – ISIS – which amounted to part 2 of the US-Israeli Balkanisation plan. The US had created ISIS, according to Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Seymour Hersch[5], with the declared goal of creating a Sunni Islamic State or Caliphate in Iraq and Syria (hence accomplishing the break-up of Iraq and Syria). With slick media access and brand new Toyota pickup trucks, ISIS marched on Mosul and captured one of Iraq’s most populous cities in June 2014. The US then used this as a pretext to re-enter Iraq after its 2011 withdrawal to begin the Balkanisation. Soon ISIS was knocking on the doors of the capital Baghdad, whilst Iraqi army regulars deserted, melting away before an advancing ISIS.

Soleimani, using his Iraqi Shiite Popular Mobilisatation Forces saved the day and soundly defeated ISIS, once more foiling the major Israeli foreign policy goal of Iraqi balkanisation through destabilisation, for ISIS has become the Imperial West’s favourite tool of Intervention and the US’s go to pretext for it’s replacement of International law with the doctrine of Responsibilty To Protect, a special vehicle giving an exceptional hegemon a quick circumvention of the Security Council.

In 2015, with Assad now in serious trouble with an insurgency that had spiralled out of control, Soleimani flew to Moscow to outline Iran’s plan for assisting Syria, marking the entry of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah’s into the Syrian debacle on the side of Assad. Within just 3 months of this intervention, positive results were seen in the Assad camp with Moscow conducting the air war and Iran directing ground forces alongside Hezbollah and the PMF’s who were recruited from Shiite communities afar afield as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. As of now, the Assad position has seen a complete turnaround with very little territory not under the control of Damascus – not only a huge setback for the Israeli-US regional plan, but also a complete reversal of fortune for Israel strategically. The fall of Iraq into Iranian hands, alongwith Iran’s entry into the Syrian war, has brought a hitherto previously impossible status quo into existence – that of Iranian forces on Israel’s very doorstep, threatening its very existence.

Soleimani had accomplished in a decade and a half a strategic masterpiece – that of creating an Iranian super state spanning the contiguous land mass or bridge to the Mediterranean.

It is hence no surprise, that the Neocon US-Israeli partnership now views Iran with exceptional disdain for what amounted to a Neocon humiliation.

In December 2019, Russia, China and Iran conducted naval drills in the Arabian sea – previously uncontested US territory. Soleimani’s reign as the prince of the new Persian empire has overseen the tangible demise of US regional hegemony, in fact, the US has never before witnessed such a rapid erosion of its status as sole hegemon as it did under the watch of Donald Trump, so much so, that few nations that were not directly pressured, would agree to go along with US demands that the Iranian Arms Embargo not be lifted when it expired recently, including the US’s traditional European allies.

A weakened US means a weakened Israel, who relies on US firepower and whitewashing of Israeli atrocities and daily breaches of International law, to implement its more serious destructive regional aspirations in its bid to create Eretz Yisrael.

Although, on the face of it, Iran and Palestine may have suffered a political setback with Trump’s forced Arab-Israeli normalistation plot, however, it is quite clear that the solution to Palestinian and regional instability looks more like a military one, rather than a political settlement – and for that, Iran seems supremely ready.

All of the preceding advantageous strategic developments having been distilled from the considered Iranian cultivation of the axis of resistance so masterfully crafted by Soleimani that it propelled Iran to become the pre-eminent power in the Middle East where his axis of resistance extends from Yemen through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon right to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. If he has accomplished anything at all, at the very least, it was to establish a balance of deterrence for unbridled Saudi attacks on Yemen, Israeli routine levelling of Lebanon and the routine indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and according to Ali Soufan[6] at Westpoint’s CTC, accomplished this employing a unique style of fusing insurgent with State power, co-opting governments from within.

After his demise, Iran’s symbolic revenge attack on the US’s ‘ain al Assad base in Iraq was a reminder to Israel of Soleimani’s legacy of deterrence, that the Islamic Republic has the ability to target its ballistic missiles with pinpoint accuracy, anywhere it is threatened understanding full well, the inability of US and Israeli inability to cope with the masses of casualties any war with Iran will generate. That display was preceded months earlier with a massive, co-ordinated attack on a Saudi Oilfield which virtually shutdown Saudi oil production.

By sheer force of personality, diplomacy, and strategy, Soleimani had outmanoeuvred the US in Iraq and the entire regional balance of power was unmistakeably altered at very little cost to Iran, comparatively speaking – The US through its Israel-First Neocons had done all the heavy lifting, just to see Iraq slip firmly into the grip of Iran. Once again, as in the nascent days of the new Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, the US goaded a Sunni Arab regime to engage Iran in a (proxy) war on Yemeni soil, which amounts to about the only vestige of the Yinon plan that always seems to work, that is, causing as much intra-regional strife as possible. The Saudis obliged, yet, all that has transpired, points once again to an enhanced Iranian arc of influence, and by extension, Iranian strategic power. Iran today, is the Middle East’s pre-eminent power, not Israel, and Soleimani, possibly, this century’s greatest anti-imperialist warrior, statesman and Iranian patriot.

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