By Ralph Lopez
Wikileaks has released what may be the most under-reported story of the year in a yearfull of them, Hillary Clinton’s uncanny fulfillment of Oded Yinon‘s plan for the Middle East according to Israel 30 years ago. This was summed up in Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.” Yinon, an influential right-wing Israeli strategist, envisioned a Middle East riven with conflict between Arab tribes and religious denominations, unable to oppose Israeli ambitions for regional dominance. Yinon wrote:
“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel...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.”
When former presidential candidate General Wes Clark shockingly proclaimed in 2011 that he had seen a memo emanating from the Bush defense department which revealed that the invasion of Iraq was only the beginning of a much more extensive program of “regime change” across the Middle East, one could not help but recall Yinon’s desire to provoke “inter-Arab confrontation.” Recalling a conversation with a Pentagon staffer before the invasion of Iraq, Clark told an audience:
I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
