Meyrav Wurmser is director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute and former executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute. She is married to David Wurmser, who is an advisor to Cheney on Middle eastern affairs. She is an Israeli and a prominent neocon.
She recently gave an interview to Ynet in which she reveals that the Bush Administration fully expected Israel to launch a war against Syria when it attacked Hezbollah last summer.
But near the end of the interview she unloads a bombshell -- that a successful attack on Syria would have achieved victory in Iraq. Yes, that's right, the thinking in the Bush Administration -- if you can call it thinking -- was that the insurgency would have collapsed if only those limp-wristed Israelis had attacked Syria like they were supposed to.
Did the administration expect Israel to attack Syria?
"They hoped Israel would do it. You cannot come to another country and order it to launch a war, but there was hope, and more than hope, that Israel would do the right thing. It would have served both the American and Israeli interests.
"The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space.... They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its strategic and important ally should be hit."
"It is difficult for Iran to export its Shiite revolution without joining Syria, which is the last nationalistic Arab country. If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran, that it would have weakened it and changes the strategic map in the Middle East.
"The final outcome is that Israel did not do it. It fought the wrong war and lost. Instead of a strategic war that would serve Israel's objectives, as well as the US objectives in Iraq. If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion in Iraq would have ended."
This is just insane. The idea that Iraq's insurgency would collapse without Syrian support is ludicrous. It supposes that the insurgency is not homegrown, but foreign-directed, contrary to all the available evidence.
This is the alternate universe that exists in the vice president's office -- the last bastion of the neocon cabal.
Abrams has been known to work particularly closely with both David Wurmser, Meyrav's husband, and Cheney's national security adviser, John Hannah, who in turn have long favored regime change in Damascus.
Indeed, both Wurmsers, along with former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, worked together on a 1996 paper, "A Clean Break", for incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which called for overthrowing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as the first step toward destabilizing Syria.
Ah, those heady days when the neocon elite were going to reshape the entire Middle east into a free-market playground.
But, of course, everyone was out to get them.
Indeed, Meyrav Wurmser, who is herself an Israeli closely identified with the Likud Party, expressed a sense of imminent defeat. Noting last week's departure of former ambassador to the UN John Bolton, a key neo-conservative ally, she said, "There are others who are about to leave.
"This administration is in its twilight days," she said. "Everyone is now looking for work, looking to make money ... We all feel beaten after the past five years ..."
While she blamed Rumsfeld, the military and the State Department for the failure to achieve neo-conservative goals in Iraq and the wider region, she also attacked Israel's conduct of the summer's war, insisting that it provoked "a lot of anger" in Washington, presumably in her husband's office, among other places.