News, Views, &
Analysis Governments,
Lobbies, & the
Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know
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Exclusive
Information, Commentation and Analysis from MiddleEast.Org
TARGET
IRAN!
NEOCONS
and ISRAEL have IRAN in the Gunsights
MER -
MiddleEast.Org -
Washington - 5 August 2006:
From
the brutal relentless devastation of Palestine to Lebanon of late, to
the targeting of Syria and Iran now underway, the Neocon/Evangelicals
in the U.S. in
historical alliance with the Zionist Israelis are on the march.
They
also think they are on a roll.
It is this
Neocon/Evangelical alliance in the U.S. in tandem with the Zionist Israelis that
also brought our world the miserably bloody invasion,
occupation, and now civil war in Iraq.
This is not the first time MER has focused on
TARGET IRAN. We have in fact repeatedly and for some time pointed
out that what the Neocon/Evangelical Americans and the hardline Zionist
Israelis are up to is far bigger than vanquishing the Palestinians and
destroying the Lebanese.
It is about an unprecedented crusading zealotry
to enforce a dangerously unstable 'New World Order' in which the U.S.
and Israel will continue to control the affairs of the critical Middle
East region for years to come. IF...and it is now a big and growing
IF...they can somehow crush all opposition through brute military force
in combination with the covert capabilities of both the CIA and the
Mossad.
With Iraq exploding out of control,
Afghanistan still rebelling, and much of the world filled with more
hatred and loathing for the U.S. and Israel than ever, these 'New World
Order' crusaders may think they have little more to lose.
This is especially the case as the American mid-term election
approaches; possibly leading to a Democratic House of Representatives
which itself could then lead to major Congressonal investigations, new
supoenas against the sitting Administration and the Neocons themselves, and quite possibly an
unprecedented impeach Bush-Cheney attempt.
And so the largely Jewish cabal of Neocons who so
dominate Washington affairs in coordination with the Jewish/Israel
Lobby -- and the new Evangelical/Israel Lobby which the Jewish one has
greatly encouraged and helped -- now have the big target in
sight: IRAN!
Just think back to a few months ago last March when some 5000
strong Jewish/Israeli Lobby AIPACers descended on Washington's
Convention Center for their national convention. It was a major
political gathering that clearly and quite vociferously had as its main
target GET IRAN!
In this insightful article published by Salone.com, Sid Blumenthal
plays
down the fact that most of the leading neocons are hardline Zionist
Jews long connected with the Israelis and 'The Lobby'. Blumenthal
clearly downplays the overwhelming power of the Jewish/Israeli Lobby,
and of Israel itself, on the ways of Washington. He spins things with
such ommissions largely because of his own good standing in the
Democratic party -- after all he was a
major official in the Clinton White House -- as well as his own liberal
Jewish credentials. Consequently, as one reads this nevertheless
revealing article, make sure to also take these social and political
realities into
account.
The
neocons' next war
By
secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining
the
hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are
trying to
widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it.
By
Sidney Blumenthal*
Richard Perle (Zuma Press photo)
and Elliott Abrams (Reuters photo)
Aug.
3, 2006 | 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.
* Sidney
Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton
and the author of "The
Clinton Wars,"
writes a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
BUSH = CRAP - So Says Tony Blair's Deputy Prime Minister! (August 17, 2006)
BUSH = CRAP Did You Say? OK, apparently the "Crap" reference had specifically to do with the so-called U.S. "Roadmap" and promises to the Brits and others regarding the disastrous Iraqi War. But you'll pardon us for expanding the context and suggesting it applies quite generally across the board. We think the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, would agree, if he could.
Pakistan's Musharaf Blackmailed by US? (August 16, 2006)
Target Musharraf after years of blackmail? None of us can know for sure -- such things are closely held national secrets that few even in the intelligence services have access to. But there is a great deal of circumstantial 'evidence' that lends considerable possible veracity to what is discussed in this article which is written by an enterprising Pakistani journalist now exiled in Canada. And some years ago there was the demise of another strong-man Pakistani General, Zia al-Haq.
The Rise of Hezbollah in 'The New Middle East' (August 13, 2006)
Just look at opinion polls around the world where even ordinary people are asked about the policies of the U.S. and Israel -- never ever so dangerously off the charts. Here is the origin of the disgust, the hatred, and the desire for revenge that is propelling so many to decide that they must themselves find ways to fight, to defend, to revenge. This substantial cover story comes from India, from the well-known magazine Frontline published by The Hindu.
SHAMEFUL, SCANDALOUS, PREPOSTEROUS - The Arab 'Leaders' (August 9, 2006)
So much for the far-too-late far-too-little Arab Foreign Ministers Summit a few days ago. Even as they pontificated in a 'safe' part of Beirut not far away the Israelis bombed away reducing the Arab States to a rag-tag collection of pathetically weak pseudo- governments and American-sponsored 'client regimes' going through the rituals and crying crocodile tears.
Hezbollah's al-Manar (August 6, 2006)
Meanwhile the battle for Iran is still in the early phases, the war in Iraq is going very badly for the Americans, Lebanon has been destroyed again, the Palestinians are suffering far worse than apartheid, the credibility and resources of the American Empire are draining away at an accelerating pace, and the hatred for Israel is bubbling over.
Target IRAN! (August 5, 2006)
And so the largely Jewish cabal of Neocons who so dominate Washington affairs in coordination with the Jewish/Israel Lobby -- and the new Evangelical/Israel Lobby which the Jewish one has greatly encouraged and helped -- now have the big target in sight: IRAN!
UN To Fight For Israel and US Against Arabs and Muslims! (August 3, 2006)
Now the Christian Evangelical President, in tandem with the Zionist Neocon 'cabal' and the Israel Lobby in Washington, is actually attempting to manipulate the U.N. to send an armed 'multinational' force -- NOT a blue-helmet 'peace keeper' force mind you --' to take over the area of southern Lebanon nearest to Israel's northern border!
ON THE BRINK... At The Root... (August 1, 2006)
The Neocons and the Israeli Lobby have been working for years now in crusading fashion to bring the world to the verge of what is now a potential slow-burn world war. That is what they have been planning for some time largely because it fits the Israeli geopolitical design for the Middle East region.