Analysis: Attack will open way for remaking of Mideast

If you want to know what the administration has in mind for Iraq, here's a hint: It has less to do with weapons of mass destruction than with implementing an ambitious U.S. vision to redraw the map of the Middle East.

The new map would be drawn with an eye to two main objectives: controlling the flow of oil and ensuring Israel's continued regional military superiority. The plan is, in its way, as ambitious as the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between the empires of Britain and France, which carved up the region at the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The neo-imperial vision, which can be ascertained from the writings of key administration figures and their co-visionaries in influential conservative think tanks, includes not only regime change in Iraq but control of Iraqi oil, a possible end to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and newly compliant governments in Syria and Iran - either by force or internal rebellion.

For the first step - the end of Saddam Hussain - September 11 provided the rationale. But the seeds of regime change came far earlier. "Removing Saddam from power," according to a 1996 report from an Israeli think tank to then-incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was "an important Israeli strategic objective".

Now this has become official U.S. policy, after several of the report's authors took up key strategic and advisory roles within the Bush administration.

They include Richard Perle, now chair of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board; Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defence; and David Wurmser, special assistant in the State Department.

In 1998, these men, joined by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz (now the top two officials in the Pentagon), Elliott Abrams (a senior National Security Council director), John Bolton (undersecretary of State) and 21 others called for "a determined programme to change the regime in Baghdad."

After removing Saddam, U.S. forces are planning for an open-ended occupation of Iraq, according to senior administration officials who spoke to the New York Times.

The invasion, said Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, would be "a historic opportunity that is as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire." Makiya spoke at an October "Post-Saddam Iraq" conference attended by Perle and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute.

Any occupation would certainly include protecting petroleum installations. Control of the country's vast oil reserves, the second largest in the world and worth nearly $3 trillion at current prices, would be a huge strategic prize.

Some analysts believe that additional production in Iraq could drive world prices down to as low as $10 a barrel and precipitate Iraq's departure from Opec, possibly undermining the organisation.

This, together with Russia's new willingness to become a major U.S. oil supplier, could establish a long-sought counterweight to Saudi Arabia, still the biggest influence by far on global oil prices. It would be consistent with the plan released by Vice President Dick Cheney's team in June, which underscored "energy security" as central to U.S. foreign policy.

"The gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy," the report states.

Some analysts prefer to downplay the drive to control Iraqi oil. "It is fashionable among anti-American circles to assume that U.S. foreign policy is driven by commercial considerations," said Patrick Clawson, an oil and policy analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an October talk.

Rather, Clawson said, oil "has barely been on the administration's horizon in considering Iraq policy. U.S. foreign policy is not driven by concern for promoting the interests of specific U.S. firms."

Indeed, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, whose close ties with Perle, Wurmser, Rumsfeld and Cheney predate the current Bush administration, met recently with U.S. oil executives.

Afterward, Chalabi, the would-be "Iraqi Karzai" and the hawks' long-standing choice to lead a post-Saddam Iraq, made it clear he would give preference to an American-led oil consortium. He also suggested that previous deals - totaling tens of billions of dollars for Russia's Lukoil and France's TotalFinaElf - could be voided.

But taking over Iraq and remaking the global oil market is not necessarily the endgame. The next steps, favoured by hardliners determined to elevate Israeli security above all other U.S. foreign policy goals, would be to destroy any remaining perceived threat to the Jewish state: namely, the regimes in Syria and Iran.

"The war won't end in Baghdad," wrote the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen in the Wall Street Journal. In 1985, as a consultant to the National Security Council and Oliver North, Ledeen helped broker the illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran by setting up meetings between weapons dealers and Israel. In the current war, he argues, "we must also topple terror states in Tehran and Damascus."

In urging the expansion of the war on terror to Syria and Iran, Ledeen does not mention Israel. Yet Israel is a crucial strategic reason for the hardline vision to "roll back" Syria and Iran - and another reason why control of Iraq is seen as crucial.

In 1998, Wurmser, now in the State Department, told the Jewish newspaper Forward that if Ahmad Chalabi were in power and extended a no-fly, no-drive zone in northern Iraq, it would provide the crucial piece for an anti-Syria, anti-Iran bloc.

"It puts Scuds out of the range of Israel and provides the geographic beachhead between Turkey, Jordan and Israel," he said. "This should anchor the Middle East pro-Western coalition."

Now, however, Israel is given a lower profile by those who would argue for rollback. Rather, writes Ledeen, U.S. troops would be put at risk in order to "liberate all the peoples of the Middle East." And this, he argues, would be virtually pain-free: "If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support."

Perle concurs on Iraq - "The Arab World will consider honour and dignity has been restored" - as well as Iran: "It is the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime."

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has joined the call against Tehran, arguing in a November interview with The Times of London that the United States should shift its focus to Iran the day after the Iraq war ends.

The vast ambition of such changes to the Middle Eastern map would seem an inherent deterrent.

The writer, an I.F. Stone Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, reports frequently on the Middle East