The Neocons' Next War
BY SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL
Salon.com
Posted by Bulatlat
The National Security Agency is
providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran
are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles
into northern Israel, according to a national security official with
direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret
program.
Inside the administration,
neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff
and
Elliott Abrams, the
neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security
Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and
they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential
pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to
conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that
gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various
purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the
possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict
between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is
said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board," but she is not a central
actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing"
appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and
marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent
neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with
Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.
Rice's
diplomacy in the Middle East
has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint,"
to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a
cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to
thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli
offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern
Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to
pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the
national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered
policy in the entire region.
In order to try to understand the
neoconservative road map, senior national security professionals have
begun circulating among themselves a 1996
neocon manifesto against
the Middle East peace process. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm," its half-dozen authors included neoconservatives
highly influential with the Bush administration -- Richard Perle,
first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, former
undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East
aide.
"A Clean Break" was written at the
request of incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
intended to provide "a new set of ideas" for jettisoning the policies of
assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Instead of trading
"land for peace," the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements
that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian
acceptance of Likud's terms, "peace for peace." Rather than negotiations
with Syria, they proposed "weakening, containing, and even rolling back
Syria." They also advanced a wild scenario to "redefine Iraq." Then King
Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni
monarch would gain "control" of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them "wean
the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria."
Netanyahu, at first, attempted to
follow the "clean break" strategy, but under persistent pressure from the
Clinton administration he felt compelled to enter into U.S.-led
negotiations with the Palestinians. In the 1998 Wye River accords,
concluded through the personal involvement of President Clinton and a
dying King Hussein, the Palestinians agreed to acknowledge the legitimacy
of Israel and Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from a portion of the occupied
West Bank. Further negotiations, conducted by his successor Ehud Barak,
that nearly settled the conflict ended in dramatic failure, but
potentially set the stage for new ones.
At his first National Security Council
meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state,
Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process. When Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be
dire, especially for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show
for force by one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean
break" not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies
of his father.
In the current Middle East crisis, once
again, the elder Bush's wise men have stepped forward to offer unsolicited
and unheeded advice. (In private they are scathing.) Edward Djerejian, a
former ambassador to Israel and Syria and now the director of the James
Baker Institute at Rice University, urged on July 23, on CNN, negotiations
with Syria and Iran. "I come from the school of diplomacy that you
negotiate conflict resolution and peace with your enemies and adversaries,
not with your friends," he said. "We've done it in the past, we can do it
again."
Charles Freeman, the elder Bush's
ambassador to Saudi Arabia, remarked, "The irony now is that the most
likely candidate to back Hezbollah in the long term is no longer Iran but
the Arab Shiite tyranny of the majority we have installed in Baghdad."
Indeed, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington in
the last week of July he preceded his visit with harsh statements against
Israel. And in a closed meeting with U.S. senators, when asked to offer
criticism of Hezbollah, he steadfastly refused.
Richard Haass, the Middle East advisor
on the elder Bush's National Security Council and President Bush's
first-term State Department policy planning director, and now president of
the Council on Foreign Relations, openly scoffed at Bush's Middle East
policy in an interview on July 30 in the Washington Post: "The arrows are
all pointing in the wrong direction. The biggest danger in the short run
is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in
the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the
world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this
will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights." When asked about the
president's optimism, he replied, "An opportunity? Lord, spare me. I don't
laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this
is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
The same day that Haass' comments
appeared Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor and
still his close friend, published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post written
more or less as an open letter to his erstwhile and errant protégé
Condoleezza Rice. Undoubtedly, Scowcroft reflects the views of the former
President Bush. Adopting the tone of an instructor to a stubborn pupil,
Scowcroft detailed a plan for an immediate end to the Israel-Hezbollah
conflict and for restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "the
source of the problem." His program is a last attempt to turn the
president back to the ways of his father. If the elder Bush and his team
were in power and following the Scowcroft plan, a cease-fire would have
been declared. But Scowcroft's plan resembles that of the Europeans,
already rejected by the Bush administration, and Rice is the one offering
a counterproposal that has put diplomacy into a stall.
Despite Rice's shunning of the advice
of the Bush I sages, the neoconservatives have made her a convenient
target in their effort to undermine all diplomatic initiatives. "Dump
Condi," read the headline in the right-wing Insight Magazine on July 25.
"Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt
against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is
incompetent and has reversed the administration's national security and
foreign policy agenda," the article reported. Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, was quoted: "We are
sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter
how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things
you're doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you'll get out of
us is talk."
A month earlier, Perle, in a June 25
Op-Ed in the Washington Post, revived an old trope from the height of the
Cold War, accusing those who propose diplomacy of being like Neville
Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appease Hitler.
"Condoleezza Rice," wrote Perle, "has moved from the White House to Foggy
Bottom, a mere mile or so away. What matters is not that she is further
removed from the Oval Office; Rice's influence on the president is
undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of and
increasingly represents a diplomatic establishment that is driven to
accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such
allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries."
Rice, agent of the nefarious State
Department, is supposedly the enemy within. "We are in the early stages of
World War III," Gingrich told Insight. "Our bureaucracies are not
responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."
Confused, ineffectual and incapable of
filling her office with power, Rice has become the voodoo doll that Powell
was in the first term. Even her feeble and counterproductive gestures
toward diplomacy leave her open to the harshest attacks from
neoconservatives. Scowcroft and the Bush I team are simply ignored. The
sustained assault on Rice is a means to an end -- restoring the ascendancy
of neoconservatism.
Bush's rejection of and reluctance to
embrace the peace process concluded with the victory of Hamas in the
Palestinian elections. This failure was followed by a refusal to engage
Hamas, potentially splitting its new governmental ministers from its more
radical leadership in Damascus. Predictably, the most radical elements of
Hamas found a way to lash out. And Hezbollah seized the moment by staging
its own provocation.
Having failed in the Middle East, the
administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating
Israel's predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for
their part, see the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance
to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to
realize the fantasies of "A Clean Break."
By using NSA intelligence to set an
invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for
regional conflagration with untold consequences -- from Pakistan to
Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might
thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is
a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.
Posted by
Bulatlat
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