General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: So sad. The Arab Spring has withered on the vine. [View all]leveymg
(36,418 posts)As for Israel's support for that, one needs to go back to the beginning, the seminal 1996 regime change document prepared for then and now PM Netanyahu, "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" (a Greater Israel) by a group of American neocons that went on to positions of great influence in the Bush Administration and whose thinking still pervades some corridors in Washington. See, http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm, (excerpted version). A Clean Break, authored by Richard Perle and fellow Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP) policy planners, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser (the guys who carried out the intelligence deceptions that led to the Iraq War), is a remarkably prescient and accurate plan for the string of of regime change operations, and the campaign to derail Iran's leadership of Shi'ia Islam, that were actually implemented during the next 15 years.
Wiki: Journalist Jason Vest wrote that the report was "a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto." In Vest's analysis, it proposed "a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes, destabilization and containment. Indeed, it even goes so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with missile-defense advocacy." He wrote that because of the shared organizational membership of the paper's authors the report provides "perhaps the most insightful window" into the "policy worldview" of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and Center for Security Policy, two United States-based thinktanks.[11]
An October 2003 editorial in The Nation criticized the Syria Accountability Act and connected it to the Clean Break report and authors:
"To properly understand the Syria Accountability Act, one has to go back to a 1996 document, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,' drafted by a team of advisers to Benjamin Netanyahu in his run for prime minister of Israel. The authors included current Bush advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. 'Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil,' they wrote, calling for 'striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.' No wonder Perle was delighted by the Israeli strike. 'It will help the peace process,' he told the Washington Post, adding later that the United States itself might have to attack Syria. But what Perle means by 'helping the peace process' is not resolving the conflict by bringing about a viable, sovereign Palestinian state but rather - as underscored in 'A Clean Break' - 'transcending the Arab-Israeli conflict' altogether by forcing the Arabs to accept most, if not all, of Israel's territorial conquests and its nuclear hegemony in the region."[12]
John Dizard claimed there is evidence in the Clean Break document of Ahmed Chalabi's involvement. (Chalabi, an Iraqi politician, was an ardent opponent of Saddam Hussein.):
"In the section on Iraq, and the necessity of removing Saddam Hussein, there was telltale 'intelligence' from Chalabi and his old Jordanian Hashemite patron, Prince Hassan: 'The predominantly Shi'a population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shi'a leadership in Najaf, Iraq, rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shi'a away from Hizbollah, Iran, and Syria.