Three diaries have referenced this article. My writing is my own, and offers unique information, but I'd like to acknowledge those before me who unfortunately didn't get a lot of views: "
Another Bush August horror" by Louise, "
The neocons' next war" by minimum, and "
Peacemongers in Israel and Elsewhere" by Shergald.
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
Aug. 03, 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. ...
At Salon, subscription or ad access only, forwarded to me by Other Lisa (Paper Tiger blog).
On two NPR shows in the past two days, I've heard that Bush is urging Israel to spread the war to Syria. [UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post via One Pissed Off Liberal's diary today: "Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria." -- Thanks for the link, Agathena.]
And someone I know -- who knows things -- told me that Elliott Abrams' fingerprints have been all over the push on Israel.
You'll recall, of course, that Elliott Abrams pled guilty to charges of lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra affair; he was pardoned by Bush 41. And now Bush 43 has made him "senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council."
Here's an example of Abrams' boundless hubrus and contempuous arrogance: "Quoted in a May 30, 1994 article in Legal Times, Abrams spoke of his prosecutors as 'filthy bastards', the proceedings against him 'Kafkaesque', and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee 'pious clowns' whose raison d'etre was to ask him 'abysmally stupid' questions."
During the 1990s, Abrams worked for a number of think tanks and eventually became head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he wrote widely on foreign policy issues. He remained an integral part of the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington that revolved around one of his early mentors, Richard Perle, and former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the American Enterprise Institute. Abrams is a member of the staunchly neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was one of the signatories of the January 26, 1998, PNAC Letter sent to President Bill Clinton which called for "regime-change" in Iraq. Critics of the Bush administration see the letter as evidence that a second Gulf War was a foregone conclusion.
Like Perle, Abrams favors a Middle East strategy based on the overwhelming military power of both the United States and Israel and a military alliance between Israel and Turkey against what are considered hostile Arab states, such as Syria and Iraq, in order to create a "broader strategic context" that would ensure whatever state might emerge on Palestinian territory would be pro-American. Abrams is a staunch defender of Israel, and has publicly assailed the "land-for-peace" formula that has guided US policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 war.
James Zogby, the director of the Arab-American Institute, said Abrams' appointment sent "a very dangerous message to the Arab world" and asserts that the neocons have control of "all the major instruments of decision-making except for the State Department."
In 1997, Abrams published a book, Faith or Fear, which warned American Jews that assimilating within the secular U.S. culture posed the danger of a gradual loss of Jewish identity.
[...]
The Observer and other journals have alleged that Abrams planned the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 against Hugo Chávez. These publications claim that he and Otto Reich, interim Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere in the Bush administration, were not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it and discussed it in some detail, right down to its timing, and estimated an excellent chance of success. Guardian (Abrams bio)
By the way, Sidney Blumenthal, the author of today's Salon piece and the famously former friend of Christopher Hitchens -- whose latest piece, fittingly, is on our most critical issue, "Mel Gibson's Meltdown" and his, ahem, blood alcohol level -- is no far-out leftie or fear-mongering theorist. Blumenthal is "a widely-published journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy," an "assistant and senior adviser to Bill Clinton from August 1997 until January 2001," and "Washington bureau chief for Salon.com ... as well as being a regular columnist for the UK newspaper, The Guardian."
Blumenthal's concluding paragraph:
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.
I knew that the Neocons have been "getting it up" over this Israel/Lebanon war -- and they've been having "wet dreams" about it for a very long time.
I just dug up a July quote by Bill Kristol on FOX News (of course), and recently posted by Hunter:
KRISTOL: We have to be ready to use military force against Iran, if it comes to that. Think what this crisis would be like given what we now know about the Islamic Republic of Iran, its regime, its recklessness, its close, close ties to terrorist groups. Think what the world wore would be like with an Iran with nuclear weapons. This is a very interesting moment in that respect. You know? We are in a way lucky that Iran has revealed its aggression, its recklessness, its terror ties before they succeeded in becoming a nuclear power. We have to stop them from getting nuclear weapons. We can try diplomacy. I am not hopeful about that. We have to be ready to use force.
QUESTION: You know, the down side, though, you know very well, to all of that being that we're involved in Iraq and Afganistan. Also that Iran is much different than Iraq. It's huge and more formidable.
KRISTOL: It is, but also the Iranian people dislike their regime. I think they would be - the right use of targeted military force -- but especially if political pressure before we use military force - could cause them to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power. There are even moderates - they are not wonderful people -- but people in the government itself who are probably nervous about Ahmadinejad's recklessness.
This is why standing up to Iran right now is so important. They're overreached. They and Hezbollah have recklessly overreached. They got cocky. This is the moment to set them back. I think a setback to Hezbollah could trigger changes in Iran...
-- Bill Kristol on Fox News, via Think Progress, July 19, 2006
All I would like to say to the Israelis is this: Be careful what you wish for.
UPDATE: Steven D at BoomanTribune.com adds some important observations in his new piece also about Blumenthal's article, "The Neocons are Back in the Saddle Again":
Naturally, [Elliott Abrams] fits right in with the Bush administration, and the "Cheney Cabal" in particular. His current mission appears to be the marginalization of Condoleezza Rice (the only remaining "realist" among Bush's advisors), and the advancement of the Pentagon's war plans for Syria and/or Iran. Of course, in order to accomplish this goal, the neocons needed to deep six any hope for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Fortunately for them, Bush "bought in" to their agenda regarding the futility of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process long ago:
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."
For a time in 2004 and 2005, it appeared that the neocons had lost their position of primacy in this administration, particularly when the Plame affair threatened to engulf both Vice President Cheney and, more importantly for the President's viewpoint, Senior political advisor and Svengali, Karl Rove. Now with Rove off the hook, and the Plame scandal no longer consuming the cable news airwaves, Bush and Cheney appear to have resolved their differences, at least in part. ...
.................
A variation of this has been posted at No Quarter.