http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-01/short-history-neocon-clean-break-grand-design-regime-change-disasters-it-has-fostere
Submitted by Dan Sanchez via AntiWar.com,
To understand today’s crises in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere, one must grasp their shared Lebanese connection. This assertion may seem odd. After all, what is the big deal about Lebanon? That little country hasn’t had top headlines since Israel deigned to bomb and invade it in 2006. Yet, to a large extent, the roots of the bloody tangle now enmeshing the Middle East lie in Lebanon: or to be more precise, in the Lebanon policy of Israel.
Rewind to the era before the War on Terror. In 1995,
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s “dovish” Prime Minister, was assassinated by a
right-wing zealot. This precipitated an early election in which Rabin’s
Labor Party was defeated by the ultra-hawkish Likud, lifting hardliner
Benjamin Netanyahu to his first Premiership in 1996.
That year, an elite study group produced a policy document
for the incipient administration titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm.” The membership of the Clean Break study group
is highly significant, as it included American neoconservatives who
would later hold high offices in the Bush Administration and play
driving roles in its Middle East policy.
“A Clean Break” advised that the new Likud administration
adopt a “shake it off” attitude toward the policy of the old Labor
administration which, as the authors claimed, assumed national
“exhaustion” and allowed national “retreat.” This was the “clean break”
from the past that “A Clean Break” envisioned. Regarding Israel’s
international policy, this meant:
“…a clean break from the slogan, ‘comprehensive peace’ to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.”
Pursuit of comprehensive peace with all of Israel’s neighbors was to be abandoned for selective peace with some
neighbors (namely Jordan and Turkey) and implacable antagonism toward
others (namely Iraq, Syria, and Iran). The weight of its strategic
allies would tip the balance of power in favor of Israel, which could
then use that leverage to topple the regimes of its strategic
adversaries by using covertly managed “proxy forces” and “the principle
of preemption.” Through such a “redrawing of the map of the Middle
East,” Israel will “shape the regional environment,” and thus, “Israel
will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them.”
“A Clean Break” was to Israel (and ultimately to the US)
what Otto von Bismarck’s “Blood and Iron” speech was to Germany. As he
set the German Empire on a warpath that would ultimately set Europe
ablaze, Bismarck said:
“Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided?—?that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849?—?but by iron and blood.”
Before setting Israel and the US on a warpath that would
ultimately set the Middle East ablaze, the Clean Break authors were
basically saying: Not through peace accords will the great questions of
the day be decided?—?that was the great mistake of 1978 (at Camp David)
and 1993 (at Oslo)?—?but by “divide and conquer” and regime change. By
wars both aggressive (“preemptive”) and “dirty” (covert and proxy).
“A Clean Break” slated Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as first up for regime change. This
is highly significant, especially since several members of the Clean
Break study group played decisive roles in steering and deceiving the
United States into invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam seven years
later.
The Clean Break study group’s leader, Richard Perle, led
the call for Iraqi regime change beginning in the 90s from his perch at
the Project for a New American Century and other neocon think tanks. And
while serving as chairman of a high level Pentagon advisory committee,
Perle helped coordinate the neoconservative takeover of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the final push for war in Iraq.
Another Clean Breaker, Douglas Feith, was a Perle protege
and a key player in that neocon coup. After 9/11, as Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy, Feith created two secret Pentagon offices tasked
with cherry-picking, distorting, and repackaging CIA and Pentagon
intelligence to help make the case for war.
Feith’s “Office of Special Plans” manipulated intelligence
to promote the falsehood that Saddam had a secret weapons of mass
destruction program that posed an imminent chemical, biological, and
even nuclear threat. This lie was the main justification used by the
Bush administration for the Iraq War.
Feith’s “Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group” trawled
through the CIA’s intelligence trash to stitch together far-fetched
conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with Osama bin Laden’s
Al Qaeda, among other bizarre pairings. Perle put the Group into
contact with Ahmed Chalabi, a dodgy anti-Saddam Iraqi exile who would
spin even more yarn of this sort.
Much of the Group’s grunt work was performed by David
Wurmser, another Perle protege and the primary author of “A Clean
Break.” Wurmser would go on to serve as an advisor to two key Iraq War
proponents in the Bush administration: John Bolton at the State
Department and Vice President Dick Cheney.
The foregone conclusions generated by these Clean
Breaker-led projects faced angry but ineffectual resistance from the
Intelligence Community, and are now widely considered scandalously
discredited. But they succeeded in helping, perhaps decisively, to
overcome both bureaucratic and public resistance to the march to war.
The Iraq War that followed put the Clean Break
into action by grafting it onto America. The War accomplished the Clean
Break objective of regime change in Iraq, thus beginning the “redrawing
of the map of the Middle East.” And the attendant “Bush Doctrine” of
preemptive war accomplished the Clean Break objective of “reestablishing
the principle of preemption”
But why did the Netanyahu/Bush Clean Breakers want to
regime change Iraq in the first place? While reference is often made to
“A Clean Break” as a prologue to the Iraq War, it is often forgotten
that the document proposed regime change in Iraq primarily as a “means”
of “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” Overthrowing
Saddam in Iraq was merely a stepping stone to “foiling” and ultimately
overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria. As Pat Buchanan put
it:
“In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.”
Exactly how this was to work is baffling. As the document
admitted, although both were Baathist regimes, Assad and Saddam were far
more enemies than allies. “A Clean Break” floated a convoluted pipe
dream involving a restored Hashemite monarchy in Iraq (the same
US-backed, pro-Israel dynasty that rules Jordan) using its sway over an
Iraqi cleric to turn his co-religionists in Syria against Assad.
Instead, the neocons ended up settling for a different pipe(line) dream,
sold to them by that con-man Chalabi,
involving a pro-Israel, Chalabi-dominated Iraq building a pipeline from
Mosul to Haifa. One only wonders why he didn’t sweeten the deal by
including the Brooklyn Bridge in the sale.
As incoherent as it may have been, getting at Syria through
Iraq is what the neocons wanted. And this is also highly significant
for us today, because the US has now fully embraced the objective of
regime change in Syria, even with Barack Obama inhabiting the White
House instead of George W. Bush.
Washington is pursuing that objective by partnering with
Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf States in supporting the anti-Assad
insurgency in Syria’s bloody civil war, and thereby majorly abetting the
bin Ladenites (Syrian Al Qaeda and ISIS) leading that insurgency. Obama
has virtually become an honorary Clean Breaker by pursuing a Clean
Break objective (“rolling back Syria”) using Clean Break strategy
(“balance of power” alliances with select Muslim states) and Clean Break
tactics (a covert and proxy “dirty war”). Of course the neocons are the
loudest voices calling for the continuance and escalation of this
policy. And Israel is even directly involving itself by providing
medical assistance to Syrian insurgents, including Al Qaeda fighters.
Another target identified by “A Clean Break” was Iran.
This is highly significant, since while the neocons were still riding
high in the Bush administration’s saddle, they came within an inch of
launching a US war on Iran over yet another manufactured and phony WMD
crisis. While the Obama administration seems on the verge of finalizing a
nuclear/peace deal with the Iranian government in Tehran, the neocons
and Netanyahu himself (now Prime Minister once again) have pulled out
all the stops to scupper it and put the US and Iran back on a collision
course.
The neocons are also championing ongoing American support
for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen to restore that country’s
US-backed former dictator. Simply because the “Houthi” rebels that
overthrew him and took the capital city of Sanaa are Shiites, they are
assumed to be a proxy of the Shiite Iranians, and so this is seen by
neocons and Saudi theocons alike as a war against Iranian expansion.
Baghdad is a pit stop on the road to Damascus, and Sanaa is
a pit stop on the road to Tehran. But, according to the Clean Breakers,
Damascus and Tehran are themselves merely pit stops on the road to
Beirut.
According to “A Clean Break,” Israel’s main beef with Assad is that:
“Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil.”
And its great grief with the Ayatollah is that Iran, like Syria, is one of the:
“…principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”
All regime change roads lead to Lebanon, it would seem. So this brings us back to our original question. What is the big deal about Lebanon?
The answer to this question goes back to Israel’s very
beginnings. Its Zionist founding fathers established the bulk of
Israel’s territory by dispossessing and ethnically cleansing
three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Hundreds of
thousands of these were driven (sometimes literally in trucks, sometimes
force marched with gunshots fired over their heads) into Lebanon, where
they were gathered in miserable refugee camps.
In Lebanon the Palestinians who had fled suffered an
apartheid state almost as rigid as the one Israel imposed on those who
stayed behind, because the dominant Maronite Christians there were so
protective of their political and economic privileges in Lebanon’s confessional system.
In a 1967 war of aggression, Israel conquered the rest of
formerly-British Palestine, annexing the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and
placing the Palestinians there (many of whom fled there seeking refuge
after their homes were taken by the Israelis in 1948) under a brutal,
permanent military occupation characterized by continuing dispossession
and punctuated by paroxysms of mass murder.
This compounding of their tragedy drove the Palestinians to
despair and radicalization, and they subsequently lifted Yasser Arafat
and his fedayeen (guerrilla) movement to the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then headquartered in Jordan.
When the king of Jordan massacred and drove out the PLO,
Arafat and the remaining members relocated to Lebanon. There they
waged cross-border guerrilla warfare to try to drive Israel out of the
occupied territories. The PLO drew heavily from the refugee camps in
Lebanon for recruits.
This drew Israel deeply into Lebanese affairs. In 1976,
Israel started militarily supporting the Maronite Christians, helping to
fuel a sectarian civil war that had recently begun and would rage until
1990. That same year, Syrian forces entered Lebanon, partook in the
war, and began a military occupation of the country.
In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO back and to recruit a proxy army called the “South Lebanon Army” (SLA).
In this war, Israel tried to install a group of Christian Fascists called the Phalange in power over Lebanon. This failed when the new Phalangist ruler was assassinated. As a reprisal, the Phalange perpetrated, with Israeli connivance, the massacre of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shiites. (See Murray Rothbard’s moving contemporary coverage of the atrocity.)
The Lebanese Shiites were either ambivalent or welcoming toward being rid of the PLO. But Israel rapidly squandered whatever patience the Shiites had for it by brutally occupying southern Lebanon for years. This led to the creation of Hezbollah, a Shiite militia not particularly concerned with the plight of the Sunni Palestinian refugees, but staunchly dedicated to driving Israel and its proxies (the SLA) completely out of Lebanon.
Aided by Syria and Iran, though not nearly to the extent
Israel would have us believe, Hezbollah became the chief defensive force
directly frustrating Israel’s efforts to dominate and exploit its
northern neighbor. In 1993 and again in 1996 (the year of “A Clean
Break”), Israel launched still more major military operations in
Lebanon, chiefly against Hezbollah, but also bombing Lebanon’s general
population and infrastructure, trying to use terrorism to motivate the
people and the central government to crack down on Hezbollah.
This is the context of “A Clean Break”: Israel’s obsession
with crushing Hezbollah and dominating Lebanon, even if it means turning
most of the Middle East upside down (regime changing Syria, Iran, and
Iraq) to do it.
9/11 paved the way for realizing the Clean
Break, using the United States as a gigantic proxy, thanks to the Israel
Lobby’s massive influence in Congress and the neocons’ newly won
dominance in the Bush Administration.
Much to their chagrin, however, its first phase (the Iraq
War) did not turn out so well for the Clean Breakers. The blundering
American grunts ended up installing the most vehemently pro-Iran Shiite
faction in power in Baghdad, and now Iranian troops are even stationed
and fighting inside Iraq. Oops. And as it turns out, Chalabi may have
been an Iranian agent all along. (But don’t worry, Mr. Perle, I’m sure
he’ll eventually come through with that pipeline.)
This disastrous outcome has given both Israel and Saudi
Arabia nightmares about an emerging “Shia Crescent” arcing from Iran
through Iraq into Syria. And now the new Shiite “star” in Yemen
completes this menacing “Star and Crescent” picture. The fears of the
Sunni Saudis are partially based on sectarianism. But what Israel sees
in this picture is a huge potential regional support network for its
nemesis Hezbollah.
Israel would have none of it. In 2006, it launched its
second full scale war in Lebanon, only to be driven back once again by
that damned Hezbollah. It was time to start thinking big and regional
again. As mentioned above, the Bush war on Iran didn’t pan out. (This
was largely because the CIA got its revenge on the neocons by releasing a
report stating plainly that Iran was not anything close to a nuclear
threat.) So instead the neocons and the Saudis drew the US into what
Seymour Hersh called “the Redirection” in 2007, which involved
clandestine “dirty war” support for Sunni jihadists to counter Iran,
Syria, and Hezbollah.
When the 2011 Arab Spring wave of popular uprisings spread
to Syria, the Redirection was put into overdrive. The subsequent US-led
dirty war discussed above had the added bonus of drawing Hezbollah into
the bloody quagmire to try to save Assad, whose regime now finally seems
on the verge of collapse.
The Clean Break is back, baby! Assad is
going, Saddam is gone, and who knows: the Ayatollah may never get his
nuclear deal anyway. But most importantly for “securing the realm,”
Hezbollah is on the ropes.
Well, dear reader, you and I are the eggs. And
if we don’t want to see our world broken any further by the imperial
clique of murderers in Washington for the sake of the petty regional
ambitions of a tiny clique of murderers in Tel Aviv, we must insist on
American politics making a clean break from the neocons, and US foreign
policy making a clean break from Israel.
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