Intelligence is the understanding of the plans, intentions, and operational time frames of an adversary. This paper is about understanding the various Strate

Lebanon and the Destabilizing External Influences

This paper argues that there is a race between Sunni and Shia fundamentalists across the region to attack Israel and bring back Jesus Christ who will reveal the Mahdi or “Twelfth Imam.”  This is widely publicized on a plethora of videos accessible online, e.g. “The Black Flags of the Khorasan” on YouTube.

The Sunni versus Shia rivalry coincides with the Jewish Orthodox fundamentalist expectation that their long-awaited Messiah will reveal himself shortly (e.g. Chabad Lubavitch). Jewish and evangelist Christian media are reporting two significant findings: first, the Temple is not directly under the Al Aqsa Mosque and can be rebuilt without razing it, and second the births of the “unblemished red heifers” which foretell the coming of the Messiah in Jewish theology has been reported (see Erik Stakelbeck on Christian Broadcasting Network).

This is occurring as the major secular world powers are vying for the Middle East and Caspian Sea Region oil and natural gas reserves as well as each step in the overland pipeline and railway paths, and maritime port and shipping routes.

The US and UK, with immense national debts, are becoming increasingly desperate to maintain their global political center of gravity dominance in Washington and London while also keeping their fiat currencies from experiencing rampant inflation stemming from their burgeoning welfare states.

The US is nearing the $35 TRN national debt level with the higher levels of inflation that were anticipated in previous articles years ago and is hurtling towards the $40 TRN rampant inflation mark within five years at current spending levels.

This paper, along with others in the series, anticipates escalating levels of conflict in the Middle East and adjacent Central Asian regions as the US and UK are desperately attempting to access Central Asian natural gas fields and direct the product to Western Europe via pipelines.

The US and UK have already moved the EU and NATO to intercept all oil and natural gas pipelines emanating from Russia through Belarus into Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine, while NATO moved into Georgia by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to back Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia on the early 2000s. Last but not least, the reason why the US and NATO so eagerly moved into Romania and Moldova was to control the Danube River Valley to further separate Russia from its former Warsaw Pact and Slavic allies.

The US is also returning to the regime-change destabilization strategies of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stansfield Turner’s “Operation Cyclone” in an attempt to disrupt all overland “Silk Road” logistical supply routes directed toward China via overt diplomatic and covert operational methods. The hasty departure from Afghanistan was not by accident. It ultimately supported the same Sunni violent extremist organizations that the original Operation Cyclone did in the 1980s.

The bottom line in this section is that the Middle East and Central Asian region are due to be embroiled in both great power and great religious conflicts simultaneously.

Intelligence is the understanding of the plans, intentions, and operational time frames of an adversary. This paper is about understanding the various Strategic Plans (StratPlans) of the secular Western Powers in conjunction with the Theological beliefs of the Abrahamic Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists in the region.

The purpose of developing rational actor rational choice models as the basis for building StratPlans is that it illuminates the plans, intentions, and time frames of the main actors in the Middle East and the surrounding areas of North Africa and Central Asia. The secular ideological and religious beliefs of the various actors are important because they form the “motives and expectations” that give rise to the “plans and intentions” of “intelligence assessments.”

In this case, the StratPlans are explained in the Rational Choice Model/Rational Actor Belief Preference Constraint Model format discussed by Nobel Laureate John Harsanyi (1966) and the late Professor Herbert Gintis (2009). The beliefs in this case are twofold.

First, the secular “land power versus sea power” strategies of the Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman, Kagan, Kennan, Gaddis, Brezinski, and Wolfowitz thought lineage which the Great Powers foreign policy courses of action are based upon.

This thought lineage is key to the understanding of Western foreign policy, i.e. once one figures out that there is a 1:1 correlation between Russian and Chinese infrastructural projects and high levels of terrorism, sabotage, color revolutions, and low-to-high intensity conflict zones all around Europe and Asia, the more the events are no longer seen as random, but are in fact a series of encirclement, containment, and break-out strategies and counter strategies.

The purpose of the Western strategies since the Cold War has always been to disrupt Russian and Chinese infrastructural integration. (see Alfred Thayer Mahan and Nicholas Spykman). Each new flare-up is not by accident but by external actors fanning the flames of ethnic divisions that meet some geostrategic goal.

The obvious fact is that the indigenous pawns in Brzezinski’s “Grand Chessboard” (that is the basis of US Foreign Policy over the last 5 decades) can in no way fund the $10 million a day wars that have been flaring up across the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (ME/NA/CA) during the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

Instead, the indigenous locals are proxies for the major powers and it is very easy to tell which agency is behind the conflict in any given area by knowing whose “energy pipeline” infrastructural projects are being thwarted and how it is being thwarted, e. g. by overt diplomacy or covert operations which are either political color revolutions or paramilitary “black” operations.

In other words, if you know the Grand Strategies and have a working knowledge of Western Intelligence and Federal Law Enforcement Agencies, then the dots are actually easy to connect as to who is most likely behind an operation in general terms. 

The second set of beliefs are the theological "end times" prophecies in the context of the Sunni vs Shia schism in the Islamic World, and the Orthodox Jewish rabbis. The competing Sunni and Shia Islamic groups believe that if they attack Israel successfully, they will bring back Jesus Christ who will welcome the Mahdi and the descendants of Ismail will bring peace to the world, i.e. Dar al Salem. 

Likewise, the Orthodox Jewish groups believe that the Messiah will appear shortly and bring peace to the world under Judaism, which has become newsworthy lately as rabbinical students from Chabad Lubavitch have been posting Messiah flyers of Rebbe Schneerson all over New York in the past year.

The Middle East in general, and Lebanon in particular, is in a confluence of these competing ideological and theological “end states” and is the basis of this form of strategic planning model building.

Therefore, this paper, as well as the other papers in this series, will always be discussing the collision course of the secular Grand Strategies and the Theological end times prophecies as they play out in the energy-rich ME/NA/CA.

Country assessments are done by comparing the internal dynamics that ‘pull a country together’ versus the external dynamics that ‘pull a country apart’ following the Methodology of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1923). This paper will focus on the external influences while the internal dynamics of the competing Abrahamic religions and a more granular breakdown of the competing ethnic factions will be left to a separate paper.

This micro-macro methodology is especially applicable in the region since the Sykes-Picot Treaty of Sevres in 1920 set the country boundaries and divided Bedouin ethnic and religious groups all across the region that had previously wandered back and forth across the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant unhindered for millennia. Since the Sykes-Picot agreement, the region has been under a perpetual state of low-intensity conflict that frequently escalates into kinetic conflict.

The various ethnic and religious groups have tribal and religious ties across boundaries which represent the major “forces that pull a country apart” as the various ethnic and religious groups wish to obliterate the Sykes-Picot artificial borders and form their own nation-states.

The internal dynamics of the Middle East therefore consist of a ruling class attempting to maintain order of the artificial states. Thus the internal dynamics of the Middle Eastern countries consist of governments exerting coercive control to maintain the status quo order amidst the external forces of the various ethnic groups trying to reunite in their pre-Sykes-Pico homelands. This is not only the goal of the various pan-Arabic movements of the Twentieth Century but has also been a movement among the Kurdish, Armenian, Azeri, Baluch, and Pashtun groups.

Two Major External Influences Across the ME/CA (Middle East/Central Asia)

There are two major external influences on Lebanon and the region as a whole which is a continual theme of my articles written over the last several years on LinkedIn.

The first is the secular ideological competition between the Sea Power US/UK Anglosphere versus the Land Power Russian Federation and China rivalry that is playing out across Eurasia as the US Overt Diplomacy and Covert Operations feverishly vie to maintain alliances with the Coastal Rimland countries across both Europe and Asia.

They are vying for the coastal rimland allies in every region of Eurasia for two reasons: a) because the major industrial power centers are generally located on the coastal rimland and b) natural gas delivered via pipeline is by far the cheapest form of clean energy on the planet, leading to c) the Russian Federation, the Turkic Central Asian ‘stans and Iran have enormous reserves of both oil and natural gas in combination with the ability to feed all other Coastal Rimland countries by pipeline.

The Land Powers of Russia and China would like to control the Eurasian pipeline network and have secure overland logistical supply routes that avoid US Naval interdiction.

The sea power strategies of the US/UK/Five Eyes and NATO therefore want to disrupt any and all overland infrastructural projects that can move oil and natural gas, with the emphasis being on natural gas via pipeline.

Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) in this context is a sea power coping strategy to maintain allies until other options arise. LNG is several times more expensive than natural gas delivered by pipeline. The post-Alfred Thayer Mahan and post-Halford Mackinder “sea power versus land power” and “Russian heartland versus coastal rimland” strategic theories are now playing out across Eurasia and many fear that it could escalate into World War Three.

LNG is just not a feasible medium-term or long-term solution for replacing the cheap Russian natural gas pipelines transferred through Belarus or Nordstream. Hence the US and UK moved NATO into Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia to intercept all Russian pipelines headed West to the European pipeline network, while the collective West blocked the Black Sea Southstream project in the Black Sea by heavily influencing the elections in Bulgaria in 2011 to 2014. Nordstream, as well as many other pipelines carrying cheap Russian gas, mysteriously keep blowing up.

The idea behind pipeline political or black operations sabotage is always the same: a) prevent the cheap natural gas from being delivered to a Central European end-user or transfer hub, and b) prevent the end-user or transfer hub from eventually exiting the petrodollar trading scheme and paying in some sort of Euro-Ruble exchange. This has been the norm since the assassination of Deutsche Bank Chairman Alfred Herrhausen in 1989. 

This aspect receives attention in several other papers in the “Energy and Global Geopolitical Realignment” series, the overarching explanation of the great power politics provided so far is sufficient for this exercise.

The Urgency of a South Caspian Pipeline and Iran

What is pertinent here is the US and UK wanted to construct a pipeline from Sunni Arab-ruled Qatar to the Sunni Arab-ruled Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to Sunni Arab-ruled Jordan and onto the Sunni Türkiye but Alawite Shia Arab-ruled Syria was blocking this corridor.

Syria is backed by Shia Persian Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp assisted Shia Arab Hezbollah which occupies both southern Syria and Southern Lebanon. They have been blocking the route from the Sunni-ruled areas to Europe for decades.

They refuse to let the pipeline go through because of the US sanctions on Iran since the 1979 Shia Revolution in Iran, and Russia now increasingly allies with Iran due to the recent US sanctions on Russia. This is how non-cooperative game theory works, i.e. all zero-sum gains or negative-sum sabotage behaviors. 

Sunni versus Shia rivalry, why it matters sometimes and not other times

The second aspect answers the question of why the Sunni versus Shia rivalry matters in some instances and not others, which has to do with the competing messianic and ‘end times’ prophecies of the Abrahamic religions of the region.

The short answer is that on the one hand, the Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists in Israel are expecting the Messiah to reveal himself shortly as many fundamentalist Jewish and evangelist Christian groups have been discussing the appearance of “the red heifers” being born in Israel, as well as the discovery that The Temple of Moses is not directly under the Al Aqsa Mosque as originally thought, but only adjacent to it. The Temple can therefore be built without destroying the Al Aqsa Mosque. The fundraising effort to rebuild the Temple has been picking up steam.

The discussion of rebuilding The Temple is inflaming Islamists across the region. The reason is that the criteria to bring back Jesus Christ, who will reveal the Mahdi as prophesized in the Hadiths, has been widely discussed by several Islamic clerics in various YouTube videos over the last decade, but not widely understood in the secular West. However, the videos coming from Pakistan are available in English to those who wish to understand, while the more hardcore videos are done in Arabic and are largely produced in the Arabian Peninsula or Gulf State islands, and are geared to Arabic speakers only. 

The chief criteria of the videos are that Israel will be defeated by the armies of the “Khorasan” who attack Israel from the North. This is vital as Shia Persian Iran is in West Khorasan and has been building its armies in Southern Syria and Lebanon for decades. It has been stockpiling large quantities of rockets, missiles, and drones within the last decade and a half. They obviously plan to overwhelm Israel’s “Iron Dome” integrated air defense system (IADS).

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force's special operations indigenous training wing is Al Quds Force, which means “the Jerusalem Force,” as its’ sole reason for being is to prepare the Mahdi Army to invade Israel.

Al Quds Force exists for no other reason than to take control of the logistical supply routes of the Shia Crescent from Iran to Iraq into Syria and Lebanon. The US is staying in Iraq as long as it can to block these supply routes in both Arabian Southern Iraq as well as the Kurdish areas of Northern Iraq. 

Iran has all the major criteria met to attack Israel now and bring back Jesus Christ and the Mahdi but lacks adequate control of the logistical supply corridors to actually win such an engagement in an extended all-out war.

Since the Shia Arabs have met the major criteria of the Hadith prophecies, the Sunnis are racing to catch up. Since the 1979 Shia revolution in Iran, the Sunni Arabs had their own revolution in the Grand Mosque Seizure of 1979, the upshot of which was that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would contribute to the massive construction of Sunni Salafi Wahhabi madrassas and mosques across the region and the world.

In this sense, they have been popping up in Europe and North America near inner cities and the more “tolerant” University neighborhoods, but since this is a paper pertaining to the ME/NA/CA the focus will be limited to this region.

In particular, a key place that Sunni Salafi Wahhabism was exported to was the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan from the 1970s forward. General Zia ul Haq of Pakistan was an Islamist who welcomed the fundamentalist madrassas and mosques in the region since he took power in 1977 as he detested the atheistic Marxism of the Soviet Union during that era. 

This building of the radical madrassas and mosques in the region coincided with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s and Stansfield Turner’s Operation Cyclone to use US Special Forces to train and equip the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to repulse the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980.

The part to keep in mind is that the Anglosphere is playing the Great Game of blockading all Russian seaports and preventing them from gaining a warm water port in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean directly via Iranian and Pakistani Baluchistan. 

In brief, Operation Cyclone was a regime-change destabilization operation meant to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining a warm water port while also trying to destabilize the Southern Republics of the Soviet Union by encouraging the spread of Sunni Salafi Wahhabism in the Central Asian region. Zbigniew Brzezinski gave many interviews regarding Operation Cyclone in the context of the rise of the Taliban since the 9/11/2001 Global War on Terror before his death in 2017 in Northern Virginia.

The upshot of the Global War on Terror is that the regime-change nation-building of Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Donald Rumsfeld failed and the US has returned to the regime-change destabilization strategies of Brzezinski-Turner of intentionally arming the Sunni violent extremist organizations (Sunni VEOs) in Central Asia and across the region. Hence the various names of the various Sunni “terror organizations” such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State are misleading.

When the various Sunni Group factions act against the US interests, they simply give them a name and make a reason to attack them. However, when the Sunni VEOs operate in US interests to disrupt Russian, Iranian, or Chinese infrastructural projects, then the US gives them a new name, refers to them as “freedom fighters”, and funds them.

The videos of General Austin explaining to the US House of Representatives how he spent $500 million in training and equipping the “Free Syrian Army” during the Obama administration and was unable to account for either the fighters he trained or the equipment that they were issued are still available on YouTube. He has been promoted to Secretary of Defense for his efforts during GWOT.

Hence the author uses the term "Sunni VEOs" to avoid such subterfuge of US operations and the supporting political rhetoric so people will not be confused when groups are given a name associated with terrorism and when a group is given a name and deemed “freedom fighters.”

The Significance of the Pashtun “lost tribes of Israel” to the Arabs

And now to the point explaining regional trends in this report about Lebanon. The significance of people from the Arabian Peninsula avidly funding, educating, training, and equipping the Pashtun tribes in Pakistan and Afghanistan is that the Pashtun tribes are believed to be six of the ten lost tribes of Israel by a few Israeli and Arabic Scholars.

The intent of the Arab oil Sheikhs who funded the Mujahideen of the 1980s and the Taliban of today is that the Pashtun represent the descendants of Abraham who followed the correct prophet path of Mohammad and are to be united with their Arabic cousins for the all-out war with the Jewish state.

To the Salafi Wahhabi sects that take a strict adherence to the Sunna and Hadiths as the controlling writings of Islam, those people who remained “Jews” and did not follow the correct prophet path according to their interpretation of Islamic writings about the life of Mohammad are to be driven from the promised land. 

The second significant aspect of the Pashtun is that they are in East Khorasan. According to the Black Flags of the Khorasan videos, if they can march Westward from the “snowcapped mountains of the Khorasan” and attack Israel, then they would also meet the criteria of the Hadith prophecies. Hence the religious Sunni and Shia adherents are essentially in a race to see who can meet the major criteria and attack Israel first.

But an interesting fact here is that the videos coming from the Imams in Pakistan discuss how the West will eventually attack, or somehow destabilize, Iran making the trek Westward possible. These videos have been posted for over a decade or more. And here we are today with much discussion from Western politicians who argue for a preemptive strike on Iran as soon as possible. The videos are either prophetic, or they can read pipeline and petroleum field maps, or they have been watching videos of Lindsay Graham.

In conclusion, this article that is supposed to be on “Lebanon” is actually about what is going to be “descending on Lebanon” in the near future.

What is occurring is that Western leaders are increasingly desperate to have access to Iranian oil and gas fields to save the West from financial collapse in one sense, while keeping the global political center of gravity from shifting from Washington and London to Berlin and Moscow in another sense. 

Had the Nordstream and South Stream pipelines been allowed to operate then power would be shared between the US and UK sea powers and the Berlin and Moscow-based land powers, which could then isolate China and North Korea while maintaining its Pacific Rim alliances.

However, the West has pursued a path (the Wolfowitz doctrine of 1992) whereby they retain sole superpower status for the US and UK alliance, but this gamble now jeopardizes the solvency of the empire and the Sykes-Picot boundaries in the Middle East.

In an effort to “have it all,” the collective West blocked Russian oil and gas pipelines through the steady expansion of NATO, predicting a collapse of the Russian economy, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, in each and every quarter, this collapse has simply never happened. 

The reason that this collapse has never happened is because Russia and China have been deliberately integrating their overland infrastructural supply routes to be self-sufficient and mitigate the effects of the foreseeable sanctions.

The US and UK are now desperate to construct alternative pipelines South of the Caspian Sea to: a) bypass Russia, b) get this accomplished prior to more countries exiting the petrodollar trading scheme, and c) prior to the US nearing $40 TRN in debt where interest payments on the debt will eclipse both the Department of Defense expenditures and preclude welfare state expenditures.

The final conclusion of this paper is that if one looks at a religious demographic map of Lebanon one will see that the Sunni and Shia VEOs are active in different parts of Lebanon with the Christian groups somewhat surrounded.

In the event of an escalation of the Israeli and Sunni Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas and Shia Iranian-backed Hezbollah conflict that is currently going on, Lebanon will be a focal point in the end times prophecies of the various “Mahdi militias” in the region that wish to retake “al Quds.” Lebanon and Syria are therefore important for geopolitical and logistical reasons, as well as theologically.

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As the Founder of the G3Strat Group, he combines business acumen with military precision to guide companies in risk resilience. With over a decade of experience, he has held multiple roles in security, intelligence, and training. His expertise includes risk assessment, national security, operational planning, and intelligence analysis.

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George McMillan

Founder and Head of Research

<h2>Executive Summary</h2><p>This paper argues that there is a race between Sunni and Shia fundamentalists across the region to attack Israel and bring back Jesus Christ who will reveal the Mahdi or “Twelfth Imam.”  This is widely publicized on a plethora of videos accessible online, e.g. “The Black Flags of the Khorasan” on YouTube.

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