Will British 'Great Game'
Ploy Trigger World War III?
by Jeffrey Steinberg
At no point, since the end of World War II, have so many regions of the world been swept up in chaos, asymmetric warfare, and economic disintegration, as at the present moment. Coming at a time when the global financial system has also already collapsed, this combination of seemingly isolated, "regional" conflicts and destabilizations represents nothing less than a growing threat of a global, asymmetric World War III.
The Mirror of History
Popular myth has it that World War I came about as the result of a seemingly isolated event: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. However, then as now, it was British geopolitical machinations that brought the world to the brink of general war—before the shots were fired in the Balkan capital.
It was Britain's King Edward VII, formerly the long-reigning Crown Prince Edward Albert, who was the architect of the late 19th- and early 20th-Century events that ultimately boiled over into World War I. Edward's overriding geopolitical goal was to quash the spread of the American System across Eurasia and Africa.
The post-Civil War United States had emerged as the greatest economic power in the world, and the American System of Political Economy, first codified by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and further developed by the leading 19th-Century republican economist Henry C. Carey, his German collaborator and protege Frederich List, and others, had been adopted by leading circles in Russia, Japan, Germany, China, and France—thus posing an existential threat to the then-reigning British Empire. The great American Secretary of State and President John Quincy Adams had established an American foreign policy, based on the concept of a community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation states—directly challenging European colonialism and imperialism (see The American Patriot, this issue).
To prevent the emergence of sovereign nation-states, employing the national system of political economy across Eurasia, Britain's vast "Venetian-model" military/intelligence apparatus orchestrated regional, ethnic, religious, and tribal conflicts across all of the Eurasian fault-lines, creating the conditions of global instability, such that the Sarajevo assassination became the trigger for global war. A careful review of those late 19th-Century British long-term geopolitical machinations, offers a crucial insight into many of the hot-spot eruptions today—including the Kurdish crisis, the Israel-Palestine crisis, the Pakistan-Afghanistan crisis, and the looming wars in the Horn of Africa.
The Other British Invasion of America
The crucial factor that distinguishes the present global war danger, from the events leading to World War I, is the fact that the United States has now fallen deeper into the trap of the British geopolitical gamemasters and the larger cultural disease of Anglo-Dutch Liberal thinking, than was the case at the outbreak of the First World War. This, too, is the consequence of a longstanding top British geopolitical priority, manifested in the launching of the Rhodes Trust, the Roundtable Group, and other British projects, whose openly advertised mission was to recapture the United States, and bring it back into the British imperial fold. In a famous trip to the United States in the mid-1930s, the leading British Fabian operative H.G. Wells, the author of The Open Conspiracy, had boasted that the long-term capture of America was virtually guaranteed, because the American educational system had been thoroughly overtaken by British liberal thinking.
Today, through operatives like the British Arab Bureau's Dr. Bernard Lewis, synarchist economist George Shultz, and many other British System assets—including the entire "neoconservative" apparatus—the Bush-Cheney Administration has been molded into the near-perfect instrument for the longstanding British oligarchical goal of inducing the United States to self-destruct, and bring about the end of the Westphalian System of sovereign nation-states.
As the result of the Bush-Cheney Administration's disastrous "preventive war" actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, American political capital around the world is at an all-time low—and the danger is that things could get far worse if the Vice President has his way, and the United States launches military strikes against Iran.
Well-placed U.S. intelligence community sources have described the present British strategy as "managed chaos," aimed at driving more and more nations of the developing world to "failed state" status, while carefully avoiding a full-scale outbreak of global general war. At the same time, British energy and raw materials cartels continue a global takeover spree, bolstered by the crash of the U.S. dollar and the relative strengthening of the British pound sterling. Such carefully calibrated games, however, have, in the past, led to world war.
The Great Circle of Crisis
From the Horn of Africa, to the Near East, to South and Central Asia, and the Caucasus, seemingly local crises are erupting on an unprecedented scale.
- A Turkey-Iraq border war is being fueled by a string of PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) military attacks on the Turkish Army, from bases across the border in Iraq's Kurdish region. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the terrorist PKK activation was triggered, in part, by the fact that voters in the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey had voted in record numbers for the ruling party in recent parliamentary elections. PKK incursions are aimed at provoking a Turkish military response, thus fueling Kurdish anti-Ankara sentiments.
The Turkish military and the ruling moderate Islamist party agree that the PKK operations in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, are being protected and backed by both the United States and NATO, because Kurdish insurgents are also carrying out cross-border attacks inside Iran, which is a Bush-Cheney Administration top-priority target for "regime change."
The recent visit of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Washington has done little to cool out the Turkish-Kurdish crisis. The Bush Administration promised a crackdown on the PKK inside Iraq, but the Turks remain skeptical that any serious action will be taken, and any new PKK incursion into Turkey will almost certainly trigger a Turkish cross-border invasion, thus igniting another crisis inside American-occupied Iraq.
The roots of the Kurdish crisis trace directly back to late 19th-, early 20th-Century British "Great Game" manueverings, in which the Kurds were promised a "Greater Kurdistan" nation, at the same time that the British and French, by means of the Sykes-Picot Treaty, established the modern borders of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, with Kurdish minority regions in all four nations. Today, according to U.S. intelligence sources, the British are committed to play the "Kurdish card" to maintain a permanent state of instability and chaos in all four of the vital Near East nations.
- The Pakistan-Afghanistan border area is blowing up, creating failed-state crises in both countries (see article this issue), at the same time that Afghanistan has emerged as a narco-state, with opium lords in every part of the country supplying 75-90% of the world's heroin.
- The entire Horn of Africa region is set to explode, with any instability in Sudan automatically spilling over into Egypt. On Nov. 5, the International Crisis Group issued a policy brief, warning that Ethiopia and Eritrea are on the verge of a full-scale war, worse than the conflict that engulfed the region from 1998-2000. Both countries have been engaged in a surrogate war inside Somalia, and, as of late September, Ethiopia was threatening to break the Algiers Pact, that established a border commission and ended the late 1990s war. The ICG warned that a resumption of fighting could occur before the end of November, unless there is concerted effort by the United States and the United Nations Security Council to enforce the Algiers Pact.
- In the Caucasus, Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili Nov. 7 declared a 15-day state of emergency, to crack down on demonstrators demanding his ouster, in three days of increasingly violent protests in front of the parliament. Saakashvili has accused Russia of fomenting the demonstrations, reviving tensions between Moscow and Tblisi, that could spill over into other separatist insurgencies in the region, which have long been fueled by foreign fighters, often recruited in Britain. In 1999-2000, the Russian government had filed a series of diplomatic protests to the British Foreign Office, over the fact that scores of Chechen and other separatist rebels had been recruited and financed in Britain, under London's longstanding policy of harboring international terrorists and separatists.
- The Dick Cheney-led faction inside the Bush White House continues to press for U.S. military strikes against Iran, an action which would trigger a regional explosion, likely to spread into a full-blown global religious conflict that would last for decades, like the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618-48), which finally ended with the Treaty of Westphalia.
The convergence of the global financial and monetary disintegration of the British-created post-Bretton Woods monetary system, with the eruption of regional crises all over the globe, is just the kind of conjuncture that puts the issue of a republican nation-state world, versus an oligarchical world, on the table.
