Strategies of Domination between Bernard Lewis and Ayatollah Khomeini

The principle of weakening the Middle East region by dividing it into its ethnic, religious and political components, and pitting those components against each other, was - in the past and still is - the means by which invaders from the East and the West control the region, which still suffers from international policies aimed at controlling it.

In 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed between Britain and France, and in agreement with Tsarist Russia, to divide the legacy of the Ottoman Empire or “the sick man.” In the same year, the British-American Jewish thinker Bernard Lewis was born, who died in 2018. He studied the history of Islam at the doctoral level, and wrote many books about Islam, the Arabs, and Turkey. He crystallized the features of his integrated project to control the Middle East and the Arab and Islamic worlds, politically, financially, militarily, and even culturally, through “the fragmentation of the East into its religious, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal components.” This project was adopted by the US Congress in 1983, and was viewed as the second version of the “Sykes-Picot” agreement, which was “a wrong Western measure, and is no longer valid today,” according to Lewis’s assessment.

Lewis became one of the leading theorists of the “philosophy of using force” and “hitting the Arabs between the eyes with a big stick” because they are “corrupt and chaotic” and cannot be civilized or established as modern states, and that “if left to themselves they will form waves of terrorism that will surprise the world” and that they are not fit for civilization, and therefore it is necessary to “export Western civilization” to them by “reoccupying them and destroying their religious culture” based on tribal foundations, a vision that can be measured – with a difference – by the vision of Ayatollah Khomeini based on “exporting the Islamic revolution” based on the universality of Islam, which necessitates exporting that revolution to the regional neighborhood, then the world, as we will see later.

Returning to the thinker Bernard Lewis, his star shone after his migration from Britain to the United States, where he built a wide network of relationships with the movement whose most prominent founder was Henry Jackson, which later became known as the “neo-conservatives,” who played a hugely destructive role in the Middle East, driven by Lewis’ ideas about the necessity of “hitting the Arabs,” especially after the events of September 2001 in the United States.

Lewis's project was based on preparing for a series of sectarian and ethnic wars in Yemen, the Levant, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and dividing the region into small, conflicting states according to their religious, ethnic and tribal components, for the sake of a major goal, which is to enable Israel to lead the new Middle East, as the vanguard of Western civilization in the region.
Echoes of Lewis’s philosophy have been found in a number of theoretical works in the United States and Israel, such as the book “The New Middle East” by former Israeli President Shimon Peres, published in 1992, and the book “A Place in the Sun” by current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, published in 1993. This philosophy also motivated US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who adopted Bernard Lewis’s idea of “creative chaos” in 2005, and her assertions that this chaos had become a priority for US foreign policy under George W. Bush. The effects of Lewis’ philosophy also appeared in the ideas put forward by retired US Colonel Rolf Peters in the “Blood Borders” plan in 2006, which is a partition plan that includes a number of Arab and Islamic countries, in order to formulate a “New Middle East” under Israeli leadership.

After the plans and ideas emanating from Bernard Lewis’ philosophy bore fruit with this bitter harvest in the region, it was the turn of the theorists of the “Abraham Accords” to say that the Arab-Israeli conflict – and not the inter-Arab conflicts – must end in order to establish the new Middle East that was planned to be led by Israel, after the capabilities of the Arab peoples were or are being destroyed, and their fragmentation into what we see today of sectarian and ethnic components that weakened their institutional structures.

In contrast to Bernard Lewis’ philosophy, here comes another philosophy, but in an Islamic guise, that aims to expand Iranian influence and compete with Israel over areas of dominance in the new Middle East.

Ayatollah Khomeini, in his book on “Islamic Government,” argues that this Islamic government is not specific to Iran alone, because it is a government that reflects the universality of Islam, and therefore it must work to “expand the influence of Islam in the world beyond national borders” through what he called “exporting the Islamic Revolution,” a principle included in Article 154 of the Constitution, which stipulates “supporting the oppressed against the arrogant powers in the world.” This is the clause on which Iran built all its destructive interventions, sectarian, military, political, and economic, and based on it, it established its various militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, with desperate attempts to intervene in the Gulf States, and repeated attempts to penetrate Egypt, Jordan, and the countries of the Maghreb, not to mention Iranian intervention in Africa, in line with Khomeini’s statement: “We will work to export our experiences to every place in the world.” These are the experiences that the Iranians are trying to export, by fueling sectarian conflicts, and dividing the Arabs into their sectarian components that are in conflict today.

If the Zionist project chose Palestine for its religious and global symbolism, and planted Israel in it, with the aim of domination, then the Iranian project realized this symbolism, and made Palestine a political and ideological cover for its goals of domination through its sectarian militias, and before that, attempts to control Iraq in the eighties of the last century, where this policy paved the way for implementing Bernard Lewis’ plan, by fragmenting the Arab countries into their sectarian components, and igniting sectarian wars that led to a situation that Israel could not have dreamed of anything better than.

Today, after Iran’s interventionist policies have exhausted the countries of the region, through its militia arms, and under the philosophy of “exporting the revolution” and “resisting the forces of global arrogance,” and after those forces have given Tehran the opportunity to control a number of Arab countries, through Tehran’s regional agents, it seems that Israel and the West behind it have begun sending clear messages to Iran, stating that the fruits of its interventions during the last decade will not go to its pocket alone, and that these interventions were acceptable to a certain extent, and that Israel must reap the fruits, which Tehran sees as impossible after the disregard for its intervention made it believe that it could swallow the morsel alone. This is the main reason for the current tense situation, which is poised for further escalation, in the Middle East, after the goals of the fighters who fought under American air cover in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, and under the attractive title: “the war on terrorism,” have differed.

Israel, then, seeks to dominate the region with a project it calls the “New Middle East” through normalization and peace that bypasses the rights of the Palestinians, while Iran seeks to dominate with a project it calls the “Islamic Middle East” through “exporting the revolution” with its militias that bypass Arab borders, while “Iranian Islam” and “Israeli modernity” are merely deceptive slogans for two states that act as “agents” for international powers: Eastern and Western, managing their conflicts through regional agents, on Arab land, with the absence of any features of an Arab project that could fill this horrific void.

Here we can say that Iran and Israel, and behind them the international powers - East and West - view the Arab region today as the Western powers view the legacy of the "sick man" at the beginning of the twentieth century. These powers believe that it is time to put in place a revised version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which redrawn the Arab map in the first half of the twentieth century, through plans developed and considered by the American Jewish thinker Bernard Lewis, the theorist of "exporting Western civilization" to the Middle East, who sought the same goals sought by the Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the theorist of "exporting the Islamic revolution" to the region.

*Quoted from Al-Quds Al-Arabi