Yemen: Running Updates Thread: Houthi fighters backed by tanks reach central Aden--

[KoKo]

34. The Pentagon Plan to ‘Divide and Rule’ the Muslim World--(history sourcing, overview)

(A long read with some history of Rand Corporation, NeoCon's, etc. prescription for the Middle East)


The Pentagon Plan to ‘Divide and Rule’ the Muslim World

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Yemen is the latest casualty of a neoconservative strategy commissioned by the US Army to ‘capitalise on Sunni-Shia conflict’ in the Middle East - the goal is nothing short of ‘Western dominance’

By Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez Ahmed, PhD, is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and best-selling author who tracks what he calls the 'crisis of civilization'. He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.


Divide and rule

The escalation of the crisis in Yemen threatens to spiral into a full-scale Sunni-Shia regional war-by-proxy.

Since 9/11, every country in the region touched by major US interference has collapsed into civil war as their social fabric has been irreversibly shattered: Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya.

The ensuing arc of sectarian warfare bears uncanny resemblance to scenarios explored in a little-known study by an influential Washington DC defence contractor.

The 2008 RAND Corporation report was sponsored by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Army Capability Integration Centre. It set out US government policy options for prosecuting what it described as “the long war” against “adversaries” in “the Muslim world,” who are “bent on forming a unified Islamic world to supplant Western dominance”.

Muslim world adversaries include “doctrinaire” Salafi-jihadists; “religious nationalist organisations” like “Hezbollah and Hamas that participate in the political process” but are also “willing to use violence”; secular groups “such as communists, Arab nationalists, or Baathists”; and “nonviolent organisations” because their members might later join “more radical organisations”.

The report suggests that the US Army sees all Muslim political groups in the region that challenge the prevailing geopolitical order as “adversaries” to be countered and weakened.

Among the strategies explored by the US Army-sponsored report is “Divide and Rule,” which calls for “exploiting fault lines between the various SJ [Salafi-jihadist] groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts,” for instance between “local SJ groups” focused on “overthrowing their national government” and transnational jihadists like al-Qaeda.

This appears to be the strategy in Libya and Syria, where local insurgents, despite affiliations with al-Qaeda, received covert US aid to overthrow Gaddafi and Assad.

The RAND report recommendeds that the US and its local allies “could use the nationalist jihadists to launch proxy IO [information operation] campaigns to discredit the transnational jihadists… the United States and the host nation could even help the nationalist jihadists execute a military campaign to stamp out al-Qaeda elements that are present locally.”


Continued:

Source: I find ICH easier on the eye without distractions, but here's both links for the article:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41438.htm

and

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pentagon-plan-divide-and-rule-muslim-world-1690265165