When Bush goes on vacation, the world quakes in fear. This time, the fear is of what would truly be another World War. Sidney Blumenthal reports in today's
Salon:
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.
(You'll have to watch a brief commercial to read the whole piece.)
Someone presently inside the Bush White House is convinced that the NeoCons are determined to attack Syria and Iran. Whoever this person is, he or she is extremely worried. And Blumenthal is not the first journalist they approached.- just the first person in the MSM with the guts to take the story public.
More after the jump -
Wayne Madsen, who is often discounted and ignored here, reported the same information last week:
July 26, 2006 -- Our intelligence sources report that the Israeli Defense Force attack on Lebanon is being carried out as a joint Israeli-U.S. military operation. Moreover, there are joint Israeli and U.S. war rooms coordinating the U.S.-supported Israeli attacks on Lebanon. The ultimate aim of Washington and Jerusalem is not only to eliminate Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon but also to remake Lebanon as an American and Israeli client state. Israeli forces are pounding parts of Lebanon, especially in the north, where there are no Hezbollah units and primarily Christian populations. In addition, Israeli forces are being aided by the Bush administration with high-resolution overhead imagery from U.S. spy satellites and signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts from National Security Agency assets, including SIGINT satellites.
Why do I argue that the same person is talking to both Blumenthal and Madsen? Because both journalists use the same piece of proof. They directly tie the intended four-front war to a document called "A Clean Break".
Blumenthal today:
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.
This reiterates what Madsen had reported on July 27:
July 27, 2006 -- A little known goal of "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser in 1996 and being pushed by Binyamin Netanyahu, was the dismemberment of Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Already, Kurdistan is functioning as a quasi-independent state. With Shi'as and Sunnis now evacuating mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, the ground is being set, with White House encouragement, for the establishment of a Sunni state in central Iraq, west of the Tigris (including western Baghdad), and a pro-Iran Shia state in the east (including East Baghdad, east of the Tigris, running alongside the Iranian border to Basra in the south. An independent Kurdistan will invite a military attack by Turkey, while the Sunni state will be a U.S. puppet beholden to financial aid from Wahhabi-led Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu at this very moment is travelling in Britain, trying to gin up support for the Israeli "incursion" by talking about "insane Muslims terrorists who want to destroy the West. Take a listen to his interview on the BBC Newshour today. He's been sent out as the point man on this marketing campaign.
Yesterday, the York Times reported that the Bush I camp is extremely disturbed by Bush II's Mid-East policy. One can see why - the current Bush administration is working as hard as it can to start a war that will stretch from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. Oil prices will destroy the economy and the possibility of "assymetric attacks" on Americans here at home becomes greater by a magnitude of 10.
But that is the path that the NeoCons are determined to pursue:
Blumenthal:
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.
Of course, both Iran and Syria may say, "You and what army?" We have absolutely no combat-ready troops available that aren't already in the field. And those in the field are 130,000 sitting ducks if the Iranian and Iraqi Shi'a decide that this is a full-scale war against the US. Is it supposed to be a US air war fought with Israeli proxy troops or mercenaries? A war like that won't just be fought for oil - it will be run on oil. Without the petroleum, it can't continue. What will be "our" alternative then? Nuclear bombs on Damascus and Tehran, and the unending enmity of the entire world?
What do Perle and Wolfowitz want? A world war that justifies the Congressionally-sanctioned end of American democracy? They, of course, are playing a game of strategy on the Grand Chess Board, and thinking that they can win. Will the rest of the world - Russia, China, the EU - let this play out?
It's not only Liberals and Democrats that are scared of the potential scenarios. It's apparent that there are Republicans and members of the Bush White House that are petrified as well. The fact that a national security advisor has been trying to get this information out there shows that we are in an extremely parlous national position. The fact that only Sidney Blumenthal and Wayne Madsen have the guts to actually report this information shows that our press corps are truly traitors to our Constitution, though not for the reasons Rush Limbaugh may cite.
Where is Seymour Hersh when we need him? Can nothing stop these insane men in the White House? Tony Blair seems to be trying to do something - a speech calling for a "new approach", a promise of imminent ceasefire in Lebanon - without making a blatant break with Dubya. Perhaps he believes that he has more influence with Shrub if he publically remains a friend. Blair is deluding himself.
Whose denunciation of present administration direction would actually seize the attention of Americans? It would be ironic indeed if George Herbert Walker Bush has to step up and denounce the actions of his son in order to save the nation, even if it means that the son ends up being tried for war crimes.
