On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Colin Brace wrote:
>> A broad ME war would threaten oil supplies - not even ExxonMobil would
>> like it if oil were at $200 a barrel because no one could get any.
>
> It appears not to be unthinkable, not least by the oracles at the NYT. The
> WSWS today:
<snip>
> An off-shoot of the plan, which the Times cynically describes as
> something "some hawks have tossed out in meetings," is a suggestion
> that the US could reap the benefits of a region-wide sectarian
> conflagration. "America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq's
> Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead
> to a regional Shiite-Sunni war," the Times writes. "And in that, the
> Shiitesand Iranlose because, while there are more Shiites than
> Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost
> everywhere else."
>
> [...]
>
> full: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/iraq-d18.shtml
>
> More of Condi's "birth pangs"?...
An even fuller version of this idea was first put forth AFAIK in this TAP article by Robert Dreyfus on the eve of the war:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=6746
He maintains there were actually several prominent neocons with the ear of power who seriously suggested that what they desired as an ultimate goal was a mass regional middle-eastern war that eventually broke the entire Arab middle east Iran into a Yugoslavian mish-mash of mini states. He quotes several authorities both for them and against them saying that chaos and the break up of Saudi Arabia is not only something they're not scared of, it's their most cherished goal. And ditto for Iraq and Iran.
Of course it's as unbelievably stupid as it is crazy as it is evil. But of course that was true of the Iraq invasion too. So that too doesn't mean they don't think it.
The only real problem with accepting that anyone in power actually thinks this is that I've never seen a text where a neocon actually puts it forth, not even in the kind of obscure AEI books where they put forth such winners as reinstalling the Hashemites in Iraq. So I'm not positive this isn't an extrapolated figment. That doesn't mean they don't actually say it. I just haven't seen proof yet.
If there's one thing the neocons have really proved, it's that intelligence, in the conventional way we use the term, really only has the haziest relation to being right. Sometimes it just helps you to be more preposterously wrong than someone with half your brains would have dared to venture.
Michael