By Jamal Kanj

In 1992 British born American Zionist Bernard Lewis wrote in the Foreign Affairs journal “Rethinking the Middle East” calling for the “Lebanonisation” of the Arab world for it was “vulnerable to such a process.” Lewis suggested the weakening of central power in countries to the point where “there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity.”

The current Iraqi mini dictator Nuri Al Maliki and the burgeoning Islamists are direct by-product of the 2003 US invasion. Under the pretense of “war on terror” the Zion-Cons exploited America’s might to break up Iraq and the Middle East – as Lewis predicted – into “squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties,” led by leaders like Maliki with parochial sectarian interest lacking national “common identity.”

This blueprint for the New Middle East was envisioned by Lewis more than 10 years before Israeli firsters succeeded in steering the gullible George W Bush to fight Israel’s wars in the Middle East.

Instead of Condoleezza Rice’s – US secretary of state – promise of democracy, the rise of the Al Qaeda-inspired “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” along with other affiliated groups, extending from the sub-Saharan Africa to the sub-continent is today’s rendition of Rice’s growing “‘birth pangs” of the New Middle East.

Fearing such an outcome, veteran foreign affairs adviser Brent Scowcroft – former Air Force Lieutenant General and national security adviser in the first Bush administration – warned the Bush administration in 2002 against getting entangled in another costly foreign adventure for it “could turn the whole region into a cauldron and destroy the War on Terror.”

Michael Ledeen, a leading Zion-Con from the Bush team dismissed Scowcroft’s warning arguing that it was the US “mission in the war” to cauldronise the region, “If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronised, it is the Middle East today.” Adding that if the US waged the war effectively, it “will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.”

Unlike Scowcroft who served faithfully in the US army and as a high-level national security official in several US administrations, Ledeen was an indoctrinated Zionists known for his role in getting the US embroiled in embarrassing scandals.

In the mid-1980s Ledeen was the key mediator between then Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres and Iranian intermediary Manucher Ghorbanifar to supply Iran with American weapons in what became infamously recognized as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Ledeen was also behind the fake documents of supposed Iraqi purchase of yellowcake uranium powder from Niger. His lie was crucial in Tony Blair and Bush’s decision to invade Iraq resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of human life.

In addition, he was one of several Zionist neoconservatives – suspected of spying for Israel and had long been association with Israeli think tanks – who infiltrated the dens of the Pentagon advocating the “creative destruction” theorem to remake the “New Middle East.”

Ironically Lewis, Scowcroft and Ledeen were right in their predictions or objectives. For Scowcroft, the Middle East has turned into a cauldron of conflict costing the US trillions of tax payers’ money.

For Lewis and Ledeen, a US mission to “cauldronise” Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Libya has made Israel safer. An enterprise paid for by American money and cemented by hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Zion-Con cauldronisation is not over yet.

– Jamal Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) writes weekly newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab world issues. He is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. (A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper.)