The January/February 2007 issue of The Atlantic offers an article by Niall Fergusson titled “A War to Start All Wars” which begins:

The United States invaded Iraq in April 2003 for multiple reasons, but the most ambitious was a desire to remake a whole region. The Middle East, it was argued, was full of political and economic underachievers, driven to violence by a Muslim/Arab inferiority complex. Replacing Saddam Hussein with an exemplary democracy would begin a domino effect, spreading American values to Iraq’s most undemocratic neighbors.

In this essay, however, I propose that for the architects of the current Iraq War, establishment of “an exemplary democracy” is merely part of a cover story intended to mask the methodical pursuit of a course that might be called “Banana Republic-ization.” In other words, I offer for consideration the thought that the Neocon objective in Iraq is the fragmentation of that country into smaller ethnocentric countries, dominated and managed by Western business and military interests.

In The Atlantic article, Professor Fergusson observes:

Debate currently centers on how quickly the United States can wind down its involvement in Iraq and on whether neighboring countries can be persuaded to help stabilize it.

Indeed, Congress seems willing to be drawn into a “wind down” debate, and some will likely pay a high political price simply for talking loud and serious about the wisdom of committing another 20,000 Americans to the conflict. But others, less slavish to public approval, point out that all discussion of “wind down” may be disingenuous. For example, here is a portion of an interview with former South Dakota senator, and 1972 Democratic Party presidential candidate, George McGovern, author of “Out Of Iraq, A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now”, that aired on January 18, 2007, on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

OLBERMANN: I think most Americans assume that the goal in Iraq was go in, remove whatever threat to the U.S. existed or might have existed there, and then get out. You‘ve written about the oil deals the U.S. put in place, as well as these enduring military bases there, a dozen, 13, 14 of them. Do you think President Bush is rejecting all of these plans for withdrawal, limitation, caps, etc., because the goal has not been so much as to win, as it has been to simply stay?

MCGOVERN: It‘s interesting that even Richard Pearl, one of the neo-conservative authors of the good idea, as he put it, of invading Iraq, now says we should have left after we toppled Saddam Hussein. We didn‘t do that. We began building, more or less, permanent bases. At least 14 of them are bases almost the size of a modest sized city. And they‘re built there to last for a long, long time. It‘s the same course the British pursued after World War I that led to disaster. And finally, after many years, they withdrew.

The “course the British pursued” was a reference to the period of British control of Iraq, which began in 1918 when The League of Nations assigned pieces of the Ottoman Empire to WWI victors, putting Mesopotamia under British administration. The British mandate ended officially when Iraq achieved its independence in 1932. But British dominance continued in various forms until 1958 when Iraqi President Abdul Karim Kassim nationalized part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company – an action that was countered in 1963 by a CIA-sponsored coup that removed Kassim and set Saddam Hussein on the road to power.

How is it possible then, that with so much living history to offer cautionary guidance, and nearly half a century of US and British Intelligence Community activity in the region, an invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain should find itself in such trouble? Or are the current troubles the goal? Could a premeditated, but unacknowledged key objective of the war be to break up Iraq into smaller and more-manageable pieces? If so, such an approach to “dealing with the challenges of the Middle East” might represent a transition of deep power within the United States from Cold Warriors, such as George Bush Sr., Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, to a Neocon cadre including George Bush Jr., Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Two camps whose world views are embodied by starkly contrasting actions – the Cold Warriors left Saddam Hussein in power at the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War, leaving Iraq in a weakened but stable state, while the Neocon’s attacked Iraq and have managed its occupation in a fashion that ensures its disintegration.

What could cause so radical a shift in geopolitical tinkering, and within a period of less than fifteen years? The lesson of Yugoslavia may be a factor: Even though the West invested lots of time and money in developing economic and intelligence relationships with the countries that were created after WWI, relationships that are more-favorable to the West can be established quickly and easily if those countries are broken into smaller, economically fragile, ethnocentric units.

An opportunity to observe the distress of the Cold Warriors as they watched their network of international relations unravel – a network dependant upon post-WWI-era cartography – can be found in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article “Breaking Ranks - What turned Brent Scowcroft against the Bush Administration?” which appeared in the October 31, 2005, issue of New Yorker.

In August of 1991, when the Baltic states were about to break free from Moscow’s control and the Soviet Union itself seemed close to dissolution, Bush [Senior] visited Ukraine. He used the occasion, however, to warn his Kiev audience about the dangers of “suicidal nationalism.” He was ridiculed for this speech – it was labeled the “Chicken Kiev” speech [so dubbed by Neocon spokesperson William Safire] – and it did nothing to slow the Soviet republics’ momentum toward independence.

[Author] Natan Sharansky is now allied with the neoconservative camp, and he cites the Chicken Kiev speech as a typical instance of realist policymaking. A book that he wrote last year, “The Case for Democracy,” came to national attention when George W. Bush told the Washington Times, “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book ‘The Case for Democracy.’ ... It’s a great book.”

Sharansky argues that the United States would best serve its own interests by choosing as allies only countries that grant their citizens broad freedoms, because only democracies are capable of living peacefully in the world. In Kiev, “America had missed a golden opportunity,” Sharansky wrote in a chapter criticizing the President’s father. George H. W. Bush’s Administration, he said, “was not the first nor will it be the last to try to stifle democracy for the sake of ‘stability.’ Stability is perhaps the most important word in the diplomat’s dictionary. In its name, autocrats are embraced, dictators are coddled and tyrants are courted.”

And…

One day, I asked Scowcroft if he placed too much value on inaction. I had in mind the first Bush Administration’s record on Bosnia. Toward the end of Bush’s term, Yugoslavia was beginning to disintegrate. The Bush team was hesitant to intervene, or even to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims, who were being murdered by Serbs. Lawrence Eagleburger, the acting Secretary of State, said at the time, “This tragedy is not something that can be settled from the outside, and it’s about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.”

Scowcroft addressed the question with more delicacy than Eagleburger, but he didn’t disagree: there was only so much that the United States could do, he said. “I didn’t think it would break up,” he went on. “I didn’t think the hatred was so deep; I didn’t want to stir it up. I would have proposed that we go to the Yugoslavs and say, ‘It makes no sense for you to break up. Economically, you’re small as it is, but, if you’re going to break up, here are the rules. Here are the rules, and we’re going to insist on those rules.” The Bush Administration, in an echo of Chicken Kiev, was hoping, Scowcroft said, for Yugoslavia to stay together.

Stability and “break up rules” – what disparity of meaning such concepts seem to have for the Cold Warriors and the Neocons. Where the break up of Iraq is concerned, it appears that the Neocons are determined “to stir it up.” To risk a period of bloody instability, and wait out the emergence of small ethnocentric entities that cannot stand on their own economically…or militarily. And the infrastructure to accommodate the latter contingency is already in place in the form of the massive, enduring military bases that so vex Olbermann and McGovern.

Robert Baer offers insights into key steps the Neocons have taken to ensure Iraq gets broken up. He was an operative in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, and served as leader of a CIA team in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq in 1995 following the first Gulf War. In his book “Sleeping With The Devil – How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude” Baer describes his experience of entering Baghdad as an ABC Correspondent on April 11, 2003, two days after the fall of the city to US forces:

The first thing I noticed driving along the Amman-Baghdad road was the burned out Iraqi armor, mostly T-72 main battle tanks with big black holes caused by American rockets. Some had their turrets blown off. By the time we got to Baghdad’s outskirts, the ruins of what was once the world’s fourth largest army were everywhere – whole fields of burned-out armor and artillery. The accuracy of the American anti-armor assault was devastating. Some of the tanks were destroyed in narrow alleys, others under bridges, the surrounding structures untouched.

Looking at the destruction, I couldn’t help but remember how Arabs, especially the Saudis, described the Iraqi army as “the shield of the Arabs.” These same destroyed T-72 tanks I was seeing had stopped waves of Iranians at Faw during the Iran-Iraq war. Now the shield was gone. What was going to stop the next Iranian attack? Without the American military to stop them, the Iranian army could be across Faw and into Saudi Arabia’s oil field literally in hours.

But it wasn’t just the ruined armored divisions that alarmed me. The Iraqi army was what had held Iraq together for centuries; it was the glue that stopped the country from spinning apart into its three main ethnic divisions – the Shi’a Arabs, the Sunni Arabs, and the Sunni Kurds. In the CIA, we had always assumed the Iraqi army would always be there to hold the country together. No one thought a representative democracy or a loose federalism would ever substitute it. Who or what was going to replace the glue now?

If the word “lies” characterizes the Neocon’s public posture in the lead up to the current Iraq war, the word “Oops!” seems to summarize its posture in relation to the occupation of Iraq.

• Oops! Disbanded the army. (Which not only destroyed “the shield of the Arabs” and dissolved the glue that held an ethnically-diverse nation together, but also rendered unemployed and on the streets half a million angry men…a host of experienced fighters more than twice the size of the US-lead occupation force.)

• Oops! After the fall of Baghdad instructed the occupying force to defend only the oil infrastructure from looting.

• Oops! Organized troop levels and rotations so that towns are systematically occupied long enough to embolden some local Iraqis to participate in US-sponsored “reconstruction efforts,” then US troops abandon those towns, leaving “US collaborators” to be murdered by anti-US forces. (This has contributed to the mass exodus of Iraq’s professionals and middle class in general, effectively eliminating the country’s professional and intellectual infrastructure.)

• Oops! Exercised leadership in a callous and bellicose fashion that encouraged abuse of Iraqi civilians and prisoners.

• Oops! Orchestrated the drafting of a constitution utterly unacceptable to one of the three primary ethnic groups, then staged a ratification referendum which intensify awareness of the width and depth of the distance between the aspirations of those three groups.

In accordance with the new constitution, an Iraqi Council of Representatives election was held on December 15, 2005. The outcome, as illustrated here (courtesy of Wikipedia, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Iraq_Dec05_Elect.png"), was that Iraq’s political boundaries became officially synchronized with its ethnic boundaries.

The light green area pictured above corresponds alarmingly with the region that rejected the constitution – a statement of principles that has formalized and antagonized ethnic rivalries into a wedge that splits Iraq apart.

Is this an illustration of the future the Neocons envision for what is now called Iraq – three small countries, each with no resources of consequence except oil, and incapable of sustaining an economy independent of American and British petroleum interests? If so, from the Neocon perspective, this may be a vision cheaply realized. Only a few thousand American lives lost. A very small number compared to the 40,000+ that die in automobile accidents in the United States each year. And, all in all, is a hundred billion dollars a year in war expenses for five or six years all that much when compared to the vast profits that will likely fall to American and British oil companies in the future. After all, Exxon Mobil announced on April 9, 2003, that its revenue for the previous year was $89 billion.

If the Neocon strategy includes a willingness to be perceived as right minded, God-serving American bunglers in the short run, in exchange for a shattered, dependant Middle East in the next ten to fifteen years, what is the likely impact upon America near-term? Additional infringements of Constitutional Rights seem likely since the greatest obstacle to a strategy of nation destruction, and the attendant suffering and loss of life, is the humanitarian instincts of the American people. More Neocon sponsored terrorism at home, and appropriate stern legislation “to prevent further attacks” also seem inevitable. And the Democratic Party may be destined to play the fall guy when Iraq disintegrates into the chaos that must precede the emergence of small, ethnocentric countries, since that party will likely be remembered by a frightened and inattentive American public as having prevented the Bush Administration from doing what needed to be done to keep Iraq whole.

Returning to the lesson of Yugoslavia, when the oppression of the Soviet Union was gone, there was an ugly period of adjustment during which a county the size of Wyoming fragmented into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia. All fragile entities, willing to make concessions to Western interests in exchange for loans from the IMF and the World Bank, now headed by George W. Bush appointee Paul Wolfowitz. Conditions grow ever more favorable for banana republics to blossom blood red along the Euphrates. If this is, indeed, the Neocon objective, how has the project come to such an advanced state of completion almost entirely unobserved?

In the preface to the paperback edition of his book “Colossus – The Rise and Fall of the American Empire” Naill Ferguson cites a passage from Ron Suskind’s New York Times Magazine article of October 17, 2004, which quotes a “senior advisor” to George W. Bush.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”