This article appears in the October 17, 2003 issue of
Executive Intelligence Review.
Cheney Behind
New
Mideast War Drive:
Return of
`Clean Break'by Jeffrey
Steinberg
With
very little fanfare, in September David Wurmser moved over from the State
Department office of arms control chief and leading war-party agitator
John Bolton, to the Old Executive Office Building, working directly under
Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Wurmser's move was highly significant, given that the former American
Enterprise Institute and Washington Institute for Near East Policy
neo-conservatives was one of the primary authors of the now-infamous 1996
"A Clean Break" document, which spelled out the current joint
Mideast war strategy of the Ariel Sharon government in Israel and the
Cheney cabal inside the Bush Administration in the United
States.
Just
days after Wurmser joined the Vice President's "shadow national security
council," the Bush Administration�at Cheney's urging�made an abrupt shift
in policy towards Syria, a shift that has now brought the entire Mideast
region to the brink of war and chaos�worse, even, than the fiasco of the
American occupation of Iraq, which military experts are increasingly
describing as "our new Vietnam" (see page 60).
At an
American Enterprise Institute event on Oct. 7, Leo Strauss acolyte William
Kristol, the publisher and editor of the Weekly Standard, candidly
admitted that he was miffed that the United States had not already moved
beyond the Iraq war to the "next regime change" of "the next horrible"
Middle East Arab "dictator"�Syrian President Bashar Assad.
`A Clean
Break' Revisited
Turn
the clock back seven years. On July 8, 1996, Richard Perle, currently a
member, and formerly the head of the Defense Policy Board in the Don
Rumsfeld Pentagon, delivered a document to the new Israeli Prime Minister,
Jabotinskyite Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, and a team of American neo-cons,
had been tasked by Netanyahu�through the Israeli think tank, the Institute
for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS)�to draft a strategy
for abrogating the Oslo Accords and overturning the entire concept of
"comprehensive land for peace," in favor of a jackboot policy of
U.S.-Israeli-Turkish raw military conquest and occupation.
The
short policy memo, which Netanyahu, and his successor-Likud Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, totally adopted as the core strategy of their
administrations, spelled out a four-pronged attack on the peace process
and the entire Arab world. It has become a self-evident truth that, since
the Bush "43" and Sharon governments came into power simultaneously in
early 2001, "A Clean Break" has been the guiding strategic doctrine of
both�particularly following the irregular warfare attacks on New York and
Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
The
Perle-Wurmser policy document demanded: 1) Destroy Yasser Arafat and the
Palestinian Authority, blaming them for every act of Palestinian
terrorism, including the attacks from Hamas, an organization which Sharon
had helped launch during his early 1980s tenure as Minister of Defense. 2)
Induce the United States to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
3) Launch war against Syria after Saddam's regime is disposed of,
including striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and targets in
Syria proper. 4) Parlay the overthrow of the Ba'athist regimes in Baghdad
and Damascus into the "democratization" of the entire Arab world,
including through further military actions against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and
"the ultimate prize," Egypt (see Documentation following for the
"Clean Break" report).
On Oct.
5, for the first time in 30 years, Israel launched bombing raids against
Syria, targetting a purported "Palestinian terrorist camp" inside Syrian
territory. The bombing immediately raised fears that Sharon is preparing a
nuclear strike, most likely against Iran. A senior Israeli intelligence
source told EIR that Sharon's action was clearly backed by the
"pro-Sharon" crowd in Washington, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "They continue to be committed
to their basic plan: Destroy Iran and Syria, and make Israel the dominant
power in the region, and drive the Palestinians across the Jordan River."
The source added that there "is obviously an agreement in Washington to do
nothing." In a press conference a day after the Israel attack on Syria,
President George W. Bush said Sharon had the right to "defend his own
people," and then added, "We would be doing the same thing."
'Clean Break'
Who's Who
In
addition to arch-chicken-hawk Richard Perle, the other participants in the
"Clean Break" exercise now constitute the hard core of the neo-con
apparatus poisoning the Bush Administration.
The
principal author of "Clean Break" and a series of follow-on IASPS strategy
papers elaborating the new balance of power schema for the Middle East,
was David Wurmser, now in the Office of Vice President Cheney. Wurmser's
wife, Meyrav Wurmser, another of the "Clean Break" authors, is the head of
Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, a neo-con hotbed, heavily
financed by Lord Conrad Black, owner of the Hollinger Corporation and
sugar-daddy to Richard Perle, who was installed by Black on the Hudson
Institute board as soon as the London-based publisher poured a pile of
cash into the think tank at the start of the Bush "43" Presidency. Meyrav
Wurmser received her doctorate at George Washington University, by
researching the life and works of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of
Revisionist Zionism and a self-professed fascist. Before coming to Hudson,
she headed the Washington office of the Middle East Research and
Investigation Project (MERIP), of Col. Yigal Carmon, a retired Israeli
Army Intelligence careerist, who is hard-wired into the U.S.A. neo-con
gang.
Meyrav
Wurmser has taken the point in promoting the overthrow of the House of
Saud and the American military occupation of the Saudi Arabian oil fields,
through a string of Hudson Institute policy papers, commentaries, and
seminars.
Hudson
has also played a pivotal role in the drive for war against Syria and
Lebanon, as spelled out in "Clean Break." On March 7, 2003, Hudson
sponsored a forum addressed by Gen. Michel Aoun, who was Prime Minister of
Lebanon from 1988-1990, and who is pushing a military action against
Syria, right out of the pages of "Clean Break."
Other
authors of the 1996 war scheme were: Douglas Feith, now Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the overseer of the Office of Special
Plans "information warfare" unit, which was instrumental in the black
propaganda campaign to sell President Bush and the U.S. Congress on the
Iraq war; and Charles Fairbanks, Jr., a longtime friend and disciple of
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, dating back to their graduate
studies under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. Fairbanks is now
at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International
Studies.
From Words to
Warfare
On
Sept. 16, just as David Wurmser was going to Cheney's office to replace
Eric Edelman, a longtime Wolfowitz prot�g� now tapped to be the new U.S.
Ambassador to Turkey, the Syria war drive was seriously launched. Chief
arms control provocateur John Bolton was given the green light to testify
before a House International Relations subcommittee hearing on Syria and
Lebanon. That testimony had been held up for several months, as the result
of a direct intervention by the Central Intelligence Agency, which issued
a highly unusual white paper challenging many of Bolton's planned
allegations of Syrian current involvement in terrorist operations and
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
The
fact that Bolton was given the go-ahead to Capitol Hill signalled that
Cheney had scored a tactical victory over those in the Bush Administration
who were promoting a dialogue with Damascus. In fact, Bolton's provocative
testimony undercut quiet efforts, then under way, to establish fresh
channels of cooperation between the United States and the Assad
government.
The day
after Bolton's appearance, the same House subcommittee continued the
anti-Damascus rant, by hosting General Aoun and rabid chicken-hawk Daniel
Pipes, who demanded an immediate confrontation with Syria.
This
public display of venom in Washington was all the signal that Ariel Sharon
needed. On Oct. 5, Israeli Air Force jets bombed a Palestinian camp deep
inside Syrian territory, ostensibly in retaliation for an Islamic Jihad
suicide bombing in Haifa the day before. However, the Sharon war cabinet
had approved a Syrian bombing six weeks earlier. The Bolton appearance and
the promotion of Wurmser into Cheney's inner sanctum just served as the
green light.
To make
the linkage between the Israeli actions and the Cheney-led Bush
Administration tilt even even more transparent, on Oct. 8 the White House
announced that it would no longer oppose Congressional passage of the
Syrian Accountability and Restoration of Lebanese Sovereignty Act, the
equivalent to the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act which set in motion the drive
towards war against Saddam Hussein.
This
time, Sharon and Cheney do not intend to wait five years to get their war.
Unless they are stopped, their timetable is to have Israel launch war on
Syria by November 2003. And heaven help the American GIs in Iraq if Sharon
and Cheney get their way. As Lyndon LaRouche has demanded, "Beast-man"
Cheney needs to be dumped from power within the next 30 days; and, along
with him, the entire neo-con cabal. As Bush "41" and Karl Rove must
understand by now, Cheney and his gang of "Clean Break" fanatics are the
albatross around George W. Bush's neck, and time is running out.
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