Shimon Peres was simply using the distortions of Ahmadinejad’s comments to make excuses for the long-held Israeli and later neocon plan to not necessarily "wipe off the map" Islamic countries, but rather reduce them through "Lebanonization," or balkanization, a plan sketched out by Oded Yinon, an Israeli diplomat attached to the Foreign Ministry. Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s" document, according to historian Stephen Sniegoski, "undoubtedly reflected high-level thinking in the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The article called for Israel to bring about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings."

Of course, Israel realized it did not have the power or resources to pull off this massive undertaking. Israeli foreign policy expert Yehoshafat Harkabi reflected on Yinon’s critique "to impose a Pax Israelica on the Middle East, to dominate the Arab countries and treat them harshly" and hoped that "the failed Israeli attempt to impose a new order in the weakest Arab state—Lebanon—will disabuse people of similar ambitions in other territories." Sniegoski comments: "Left unconsidered by Harkabi was the possibility that the United States would act as Israel’s proxy to achieve this goal," a fact partially realized a decade later when Bush Senior invaded Iraq and, more than another decade removed, his son finished the job.

In the wake of Bush Senior’s invasion and merciless attack on Iraqi civilian infrastructure, octogenarian British "Orientalist" Bernard Lewis wrote for the premier globalist periodical, the CFR’s Foreign Affairs, that most "of the states of the Middle East … are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process [balkanization]. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties," a miserable and violent condition preferred by the Israelis and the Straussian neocons (see British Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations, Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg).

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s feeble and somewhat absurd letter sent to Bush through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran—an effort to stave off the impending destruction and "Lebanonization" of his country—was received in a predictable fashion. "US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed Iranian President’s surprise letter to President George W Bush, saying it did not seriously address the standoff over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program," reports NDTV. "This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort. It isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way," declared Secretary of State Condi Rice. "Rice’s comments were the most detailed response from the United States to the letter, the first from an Iranian head of state to an American president since the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran," ABC News adds. "She would not discuss the contents in detail but made clear that the United States would not change its tack on Iran."

In short, the shock and awe campaign against the people of Iran—a beginning fusillade in the process of balkanizing Iran into several more easily digestible pieces—is on. Now the question is when this will happen and what the response will be here in America and across the world. Of course, for the neocons, this response is hardly important and may be safely ignored, as opponents will once again be dismissed as a "focus group" (as Bush called those of us opposed to his invasion of Iraq) and the process of splintering the Middle East will move forward, closing in on its ultimate goal, as described by Bernard Lewis, of delivering the Muslim world "into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."