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Middle East borders will change, claims ex-CIA director

February 26, 2016 at 3:13 pm

A former director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency has said that the international agreements made after World War Two are starting to fall apart, and may change the borders of some countries in the Middle East.

“What we see here is a fundamental melting down of the international order,” Michael Hayden told CNN. “We are seeing a melting down of the post-WWII Bretton Woods American liberal order. We are certainly seeing a melting down of the borders drawn at the time of Versailles and Sykes-Picot. I am very fond of saying Iraq no longer exists, Syria no longer exists; they aren’t coming back. Lebanon is teetering and Libya is long gone.”

Hayden described the current situation as a “tectonic” moment. “Within that we then have the war against terrorism; it is an incredibly complex time.”

He explained that there are two fronts in the war. “The way I think about it, we Americans with our military backgrounds, call one element the close battle and the other the deep battle. The close battle is the one you and I are able to see everyday, that’s the heat-blasting fragmentation against those people who are already convinced they want to come kill us, and frankly, we are pretty good at that one.”

However, he said that the US is “not good” at the deep battle. “That’s the production rate of people who want to come kill us in 3, 5 or 10 years. Fundamentally the problem there is that that is not our fight.”