Thursday 21 November 2024

From the archive of Abdelrahim Ali

Trojan Horse

Published
Abdelrehim Aly

The Trojan Horse in Greek mythology was a trick used by the Greeks to storm the city of Troy during the war that took place between them and the Trojans. The Greeks besieged the city with fortified castles and walls for ten whole years, which prompted them to invent a trick through which they deceived the Trojans to withdraw and break the siege, leaving behind a giant wooden horse, the Trojan Horse, as a kind of gift to the victors.

When the Trojans found the horse, they rejoiced in their victory over the Greeks and entered it into the city, while the Greeks hid a number of their fiercest and most talented fighters inside it. When darkness fell, the Greek fighters came out of the belly of the wooden horse and infiltrated the city gates and opened them, which made it easier for the Greek army, which was hiding with its ships behind the mountains, to advance and enter the city.

The trick of the Greeks succeeded and they took over the town that had been impenetrable for a decade, a century by the standards of our time. Since that day, the term has been used to express the deception of the enemy from within by recruiting elements of its followers and bringing them into his camp.

In fact, this is exactly what happened with us in the so-called Arab Spring. With the beginning of the 1990s, the new unipolar world order emerged, led by the United States, based on the disintegration of the other power, the Soviet Union. The second Gulf War was the first announcement of this system’s thought of dealing with international crises through an international coalition led by the United States in the face of what it called the “rogue” state in order to force it to go along with this system.

Then this system developed so that the United States, with its own capabilities and with the limited participation of its allies, assumed the implementation of its strategic goals, especially in the field of the war against terrorism that erupted at the beginning of the third millennium and targeted many regions of the Middle East as direct targets to which America applied its new strategy in preemptive strikes and using unprecedented armament, command and control systems.

This hegemony was not a coincidence. Since the Second World War, America has planned to jump to the top of the world without any competition. The new world order targeted the Middle East region in particular, and many wars, crises and attempts at polarization took place on its land and around it, which were not managed by America alone, but with the full or limited participation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is the longitudinal arm of the new world order and which Washington was keen to maintain, despite the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Things did not stop at that, but the alliance evolved from a mere military mechanism to defend Europe in the face of the old Soviet Union to become a political-military administration to confront crises in the world in favor of the West. The United States was keen on its survival until the European intentions of forming an independent European military force that might become hostile at some point in the face of the United States were thwarted and forced European countries to accept the idea that the continuation of the alliance and its support is the only option. Through this support, Washington was able to achieve its goals, with European countries bearing the costs those goals on its behalf.

 

Sykes-Picot

During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, then-US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that the dilemma that the United States would suffer from, from then on, is how to activate a second Gulf war based on the sidelines of the first Gulf war that occurred between Iraq and Iran through which America could correct the Sykes-Picot borders.

Following the release of this statement, and commissioned by the Pentagon, the British Jewish orientalist Bernard Lewis began in 1981 to develop his famous project of dismantling the organic unity of the group of Arab and Islamic countries all separately, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the North African countries and others, to turn them into a group of ethnic, religious and sectarian cantons and states. He attached to his detailed project a set of maps drawn under his supervision that included all the Arab and Islamic countries that were candidates for fragmentation, inspired by the content of the Brzezinski’s statement.

In 1983, the US Congress unanimously approved the project in a secret session and it was codified, approved, and included in the files of American strategic policy in the following years. Its mechanisms and plans for its implementation were developed, and these moves were completed following the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s.

 

Greater Middle East

The beginning of the implementation of the idea on the ground was with the US National Security Commission, a federal advisory committee known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, drafting a large report in February 2001 entitled “The New Global Security Environment in the First Quarter of the 21st Century”. The report included a number of studies and researches on different regions of the world, including what the report calls the “Greater Middle East”.

The report defined the Greater Middle East region as “that region that includes the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent.” This region, as stated in the report, represents “the largest deposit of energy in the world”. The Washington Post was the first to disclose this new American initiative when it reported on February 9, 2004 that the administration of President George W. Bush was working to formulate an ambitious initiative to promote and spread democracy in the Greater Middle East by re-adapting and modifying a model that was used before to push for freedoms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Already, senior White House and State Department officials began talks with key European allies about drawing up a comprehensive blueprint for the 2004 summits of the Group of Eight, NATO, and the European Union in Istanbul, Turkey.

The alliance worked to promote the project by putting forward attractive ideas such as comprehensive development and economic welfare, providing job opportunities for the unemployed, applying democracy and liberation from situations of oppression and political oppression, and encouraging civil society non-governmental organizations to rebel in one way or another against the existing political systems under the pretext of freedom according to the American perspective, and by allocating huge financial allocations from the White House budget to support the activities of these organizations, which in this case, it is assumed that they would not oppose any American orientations. The Brotherhood, and organizations such as April 6, the National Association for Change, and people like Mohamed ElBaradei, Mostafa Higazy, Wael Ghonim, Amr Hamzawy, Mostafa El-Naggar and Ahmed Maher, were the Trojan Horse that the United States and NATO needed to enter the Arab region, with Egypt at the heart of it, and its fragmentation from within, which began in January 2011, taking advantage of popular anger due to distorted policies that led the country to the preludes of a revolution that lacked the subjective circumstance par excellence. In fact, the attempts of those forces have not stopped yet, especially after the great Egyptian people, backed by their armed forces, broke that plan on June 30, 2013, which makes us open our eyes well to what is to come in January 2015 and beyond to prevent the entry of a new Trojan Horse into our country.