The “Seven Wars Doctrine”: Reshaping the Middle East Through Fire
Cairo: Hani Kamal El-Din
We offer readers an excerpt from a resonant interview with Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs to Tucker Carlson. Jeffrey Sachs is an American political scientist and economist who taught at Harvard University for a long time and has been working at Columbia University since 2002. The main topic of conversation with Tucker Carlson is the tragic events in Syria, a discussion of the role of Israel and the United States.
– Jeffrey, so many events have happened in Syria in recent weeks. The most dramatic and, from my point of view, unexpected is the sudden change of leadership. There was a change of regime. Who did it? Why? And what does it mean?
– This is part of a 30-year effort. This is Netanyahu’s war for the redistribution of spheres of influence in the Middle East. The war turned into a disaster. But, as Benjamin Netanyahu himself said after Bashar al-Assad left, “We have remade the Middle East.” And you have to understand that. The political catastrophe in Syria did not happen in one week. It is the result of constant war throughout the Middle East.
To better understand what happened to Syria, you need to remember a truly remarkable incident. Wesley Clark, the general who headed NATO, went to the Pentagon immediately after the events of September 11, 2001. And, as you know, they showed him a piece of paper on which it was written that in five years we will have seven wars. And he was completely dumbfounded. He said: “What does this have to do with this?”
But even then, many politicians realized that the neoconservatives and the Israelis were going to remake the Middle East. And the seven countries on Wesley Clark’s list are very indicative: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and then in Africa – Libya, Somalia and Sudan. And six of those seven countries are already at war in 2024. And I mean, we, the United States, are acting on behalf of Israel, including in Syria. And what happened in Syria a few weeks ago was the culmination of a long-term Israeli effort to remake the Middle East in its own image.
It all started in 1996 when Netanyahu and his American advisers drafted a policy document called “Clean Breakthrough,” which the Americans and Netanyahu drafted when Netanyahu became prime minister. After 9/11, everything went full steam ahead in this big project of dividing up spheres of influence in the Middle East. The first of these wars was the war in Iraq.
– “Clean Breakthrough” – what does that mean?
– “Clean Breakthrough” is how we are going to get rid of the Middle East completely. We are going to break with the past. We will not have “land for peace,” the idea that Israel should have a Palestinian state next door. No, we will have a great Israel, and we will simply smash anyone who doesn’t like it. We will do this by destroying any government that supports the Palestinians.
This is quite shocking arrogance. In my opinion, it would be a complete disaster for the United States and for the Middle East. This has been the modus operandi of the Netanyahu cabinet since 1996, and he has been prime minister for more than half of that time. The United States has systematically entered wars on his behalf. And what happened in Syria is the culmination of that effort.
So the original plan for the Middle East was seven wars in five years. Netanyahu came to the United States after 9/11 – September 20, 2001, if I remember correctly – and he gave a speech in which he said, “There is terrorism, but you don’t fight terrorists. You fight governments that support terrorists.” That’s the idea. So you go to war. You don’t just do anti-terrorism. You go to war. And the first of those wars was Iraq, and the next one was supposed to be Syria. And there was this wonderful idea on the schedule – seven wars in five years. According to all the information we now have from multiple insiders, from documents, from archives, what happened is that the United States got bogged down in Iraq. There was an insurgency there. We didn’t move on to the next war, which was supposed to be Syria, 20 years ago.
But in 2011, under Obama, what really led to the fall of Bashar al-Assad last week began. And it doesn’t really matter who the president is. This is a long-term policy of the American deep state. Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow Assad. It started in 2011.
– But why did Barack Obama need to overthrow Assad?
– Because Israel has been running American foreign policy in the Middle East for 30 years. Here’s how it works: in the US, we have the Israeli lobby, we have the “clean breakthrough” strategy, we have a plan for seven wars in five years.
And what’s interesting is that American politicians are actually carrying out this madness. They don’t explain any of this to the American people. They don’t tell anyone, but you can see this long-term strategy step by step. We’ve had six of these seven wars. The only one that hasn’t happened yet is Iran.
And if you look, every day now, the mainstream media is pushing the United States to go to war with Iran. Netanyahu is pushing for a war with Iran. They’re really trying to start it, to make it seven out of seven. But Obama, you know, for no particular reason, started two of these wars on the list of seven. He started a war to overthrow the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi in early 2011. That same year, he and Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, said Assad had to go. I remember scratching my head, saying, “Oh, that’s interesting. How are they going to do that?” At that time, Syria was a normal functioning country, no matter what you read, no matter what American propaganda says now. I recently found a 2009 International Monetary Fund report on Syria, which praised the Syrian government for reforms, rapid economic growth, and expected further stable economic development. In other words, Syria was not a wasteland or a battlefield, but a normal country.
– Was Syria a threat to the United States?
– It was not a threat to the United States. However, Netanyahu considered it a threat to Israel for the simple reason that Netanyahu wants to control all of Palestine. He wants to rule over the Palestinian people, he does not want a Palestinian state, and this led to the emergence of a militant opposition. This led to the emergence of Hamas, this led to the emergence of Hezbollah, this led to the emergence of other resistance groups. Netanyahu’s theory is this: We will never allow a Palestinian state, so we must destroy any government that supports these militant groups against us. Our primary goal is a greater Israel. That’s not a very worthy goal, by the way. Having a Palestinian state next door and peace could have saved probably a million lives over the last 30 years.
– What is a greater Israel?
– Depending on how crazy the politicians are, a greater Israel means that Israel controls not only its own geographic territory, but also the West Bank, the Golan Heights, where they just expanded their control, and the Gaza Strip.
– The Golan Heights are historically part of Syria.
– They were part of Syria. Israel claims them, and now they are expanding their territory in East Jerusalem. So everything that was captured in 1967 will belong to Israel. And Netanyahu has explicitly stated that Israel will never give up these territories. There are two reasons for this. The first is Netanyahu saying there is a security problem because he does not want to negotiate peace or create a Palestinian state. Then there are the religious fanatics. I would use even harsher characterizations for them. These fanatics use the book of Joshua, written 2,700 years ago. This book says that God gave the Jews everything from the river in Egypt, which is the Nile, to the Euphrates. And there are fanatics in Israel and in the government who think: yes, this is God’s command. We will take whatever we want.
– So what does this area “from the Nile to the Euphrates” include?
– If you look at it from a broader perspective, it includes Lebanon, Syria, part of Iraq, part of Egypt. And some of these people quote the Bible and say: “We will do this.” This is all, of course, sad and absolutely terrible. The more conservative vision of the Israelis is what they call “from the river to the sea,” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. This is the Israeli government’s literal vision of a Greater Israel. It is the idea that seven million Palestinians are no big deal to Israel. So maybe they can be ethnically cleansed, maybe they can be driven out, maybe they can just be controlled militarily.
There are probably over 100,000 people killed in Gaza alone. The official count is that 45,000 bodies have been pulled from the rubble in Gaza, but we know that many more have died since the war began. This is just one example of how the idea of a Greater Israel is incompatible with the idea of making peace with the Palestinians. So anyone who supports the Palestinians is, by definition, a mortal threat to Israel. And when you have a mortal threat, you have to eliminate it. And that is the opposite of diplomacy. As Netanyahu said last week, this is a war to re-divide the Middle East. All of this, by the way, is spelled out very clearly in Clean Break.
You have to understand that every US president has played a role in this project. If you go back to Obama, he started the war with Syria in 2011. I was on Morning Joe when it was first said, and Joe Scarborough asked me, “What do you think?” And I said, “Well, that’s pretty weird. How is Obama going to do it?” It turned out to be 13 years of massive war, 300,000 dead, and a country destroyed. That’s what it turned out to be. But Obama signed an order called Operation Sycamore. People should look it up. You can find it online. But you can’t find it in the mainstream media because it’s not discussed. But it was the so-called presidential determination that the CIA should work with Turkey, with Saudi Arabia, with other countries, to overthrow the Assad government. That was the plan, and we went to war.
– There was never any discussion of what the Americans were doing in Syria.
– Of course, it’s not a public matter. It’s a military matter, so none of it is explained. For example, The New York Times mentioned Operation Sycamore, I think, three times in the early 2010s. So a war that cost the United States billions of dollars, that killed hundreds of thousands of people, the covert actions of the CIA – it was never discussed in the media. And even when the Assad government fell last week, the public was given no background. We are supposed to have amnesia, that we are not supposed to understand that what is happening is the result of our long-term, rather catastrophic plans. And by the way, as I said, Israel has been the driving force behind many of America’s wars, and we say, “Yeah, right! It’s our greatest ally!” Israel has cost the United States an enormous amount of money, trillions of dollars. Geopolitically, we have given Israel control of our entire foreign policy. And that is absolutely devastating. It’s interesting to go back and watch Netanyahu speaking to the American people. Look at the video from 2001, 2002. In 2002, in October, he comes and testifies in the Senate. There’s a good video of him promising how great the war in Iraq is going to be. Because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and he says, “Yeah, I’m 100% sure of that!” A total lie, by the way, and the Israelis knew it was a lie at the time. And he was the one calling for Saddam Hussein to be overthrown. Said that dictators would be overthrown everywhere, that the youth of Iran would rise up. These are his ideas, developed with American political consultants, with the neoconservatives in the US government over the last 25 years. They have never apologized for dragging the United States into countless wars in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, increasing the American debt. And what are they doing? Creating chaos.
So, back to the seven countries: what has happened to them since 2001? Lebanon barely exists as a country now. Syria – it will be torn to pieces. Don’t believe what they say about territorial integrity. Israel just invaded from the southwest deep into Syria. Turkey – from the north. Russia has its military bases. The United States and the Kurds have theirs. This place will be a battlefield for many years. Iraq – we all know what a tragedy happened to Iraq. Trillions of dollars spent on war, total destabilization of the country. Look at the other three wars. The United States tore apart Sudan. Why? Sudan was an enemy of Israel, so we had to tear apart Sudan. So we supported the South Sudanese. Now we have a real trifecta: a massive civil war in Sudan and a massive civil war in South Sudan. In other words, we tore apart the country, and now both halves are in civil war. Somalia basically doesn’t exist as a country. Libya – it doesn’t exist, it’s a battlefield, a war zone. So six out of six. And Netanyahu is happy that now we’ll move on to Iran.
– Who paid for all these wars?
– You. Me. American taxpayers. Where did the $28 trillion in debt come from? We paid probably $7 trillion if you add it up, for example, according to research from Brown University. Something like $7 trillion has been spent on military spending. Israel alone could not last a day. Netanyahu says, “We are lions!” No, you are liars. It is we, the United States, who are funding you, arming you, paying for all this. And this is strange to me, because we say “yes” to protect our ally. We, the United States, have a pro-Israel foreign policy that makes no sense, does not lead to any peace. It essentially leads to escalation of hostilities throughout the Middle East. And we say, “This is good for us.” Why is this good for us? What does the United States get out of all this? We have gotten nothing out of this except massive geopolitical isolation.
The latest UN votes, for example, left the United States alone, along with Israel. We have countries like Micronesia on our side. We have Nauru with 12,000 people on our side, maybe a couple more. The rest of the world says, “What’s going on?” And there’s this endless war going on in the Middle East. And all because we’re defending somebody with 7th century BC ideas about what their geographic territory should be.
By the way, let me tell you an interesting story. The war in Syria started in 2011. As always, the CIA portrayed it as a local uprising of freedom fighters. They said it was the Syrians protesting the government and the regime in Syria. There may be a local opposition, but the CIA is providing the weapons, the heavy weapons, the funding, the training, the camps, the political organization of the whole protest process. It all started in 2011. In 2012, it was already a bloodbath, a lot of people died, civilians, in a lot of ancient historical places, because Syria is the birthplace of humanity and civilization. And so a very senior diplomat, whom I knew well, was tasked with trying to find a peaceful solution. Peace is a good idea. Maybe we don’t need a bloodbath. I met him in the spring of 2012, and he said the attempt had failed. I asked him why it had failed. He said we had a full peace agreement, but it was blocked by only one side. We had different forces in Syria, regional ones, but it was blocked by one side. Who blocked it? It was blocked by the United States government. Why? Well, because their condition was that Assad had to go on the first day of the agreement, they didn’t want a political process. Everyone else agreed to a political process, but the United States said: no, we need regime change. Assad has to go on the first day. And that was impossible. That’s how the attempt at peace ended. So we have to understand that this was an American operation.
– I never understood and still don’t understand why we should all hate Assad. Speaking for myself, I don’t have strong feelings for Assad one way or another. Obviously, he protects Christians, and I’m grateful for that as a Christian. But… Why should I hate Assad? Tulsi Gabbard went and met with Assad. Since then, she’s been under all kinds of attacks. Has anyone ever explained why Americans should hate Assad?
– Because in every regime change operation that we do, we have to make sure that the enemy is the worst villain since Hitler or is just Hitler reincarnated.
– What’s next in Syria?
– The war will continue. Now we’re facing a war with Iran. Anything is possible. Netanyahu really wants the US to go into Iran and bomb it. Probably some of President Donald Trump’s advisers feel the same way. The new administration is a mix of old school hardliners and people with completely different views. So there will be an internal struggle for the heart and soul of the new administration. But there will also be those who will say, yes, now is the time to continue the war. The objective conditions have been created: Hezbollah and Hamas are weakened, Syria has fallen, the air defenses have been destroyed. So now we can fly and strike Iran. Of course, all this is deeply mistaken, and I think it is very important to understand this. So far, none of the six wars we have unleashed have led to stability, to peace, much less to the resolution of geopolitical problems.
