Three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.
Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.
Feith’s book, ‘War and Decision’, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W. Bush on Sep. 30, 2001 calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing ‘new regimes’ in a series of states by ‘aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism.’
In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase ’some other states’ in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon ‘campaign plan’ document, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes are listed as ’state regimes’ against which ‘plans and operations’ might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out ‘for security reasons’.
Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO bombing campaign in the Kosovo War, recalls in his 2003 book ‘Winning Modern Wars’ being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.
Clark writes that the list also included Lebanon. Feith reveals that Rumsfeld’s paper called for getting ‘Syria out of Lebanon’ as a major goal of U.S. policy.
When this writer asked Feith after a recent public appearance which countries’ names were deleted from the documents, he cited security reasons for the deletion. But when he was asked which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, ‘All of them.’… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <IPS>
This is confirmation of a story I posted here in March, 2007. That story was the video of a statement by Gen. Clark, which I am reposting here:
Now we have confirmation from within the inner circle of the GOP Reich that Iraq was only part of a plan for world domination through military force. They made the US a rogue state, and all involved in their attempt to implement this plan should be tried as war criminals.
On the campaign trail, McBoomBoom has promised more wars. I submit to you that these are the wars.
All articles cross-posted from Politics Plus
On Friday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), referring to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), told conservative bloggers that “it’s very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States.” Now one of McCain’s top surrogates, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has picked up on the line of attack, telling the Reno Gazette-Journal that “the recent endorsement by Hamas” was “revealing”:
ROMNEY: I think Barack Obama was more of a blank sheet. I think the primary revealed more about him than perhaps he would’ve liked. The recent endorsement by Hamas of his candidacy is I think the kind of development which people find revealing.
QUESTION: What do you take that to mean?
ROMNEY: Well, I think he’s said in his first year he would be inclined to visit with [Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, [North Korean President] Kim Jong Il, [former Cuban President] Fidel Castro. I think they find that appealing.
McCain and Romney’s scurrilous attacks are reminiscent of the over-the-top rhetoric of hardline right wingers like Rush Limbaugh and John Bolton. Earlier this month, Limbaugh claimed that “Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats” while Bolton contended in January that “the Mullahs in Tehran” want the Democrats to win. [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Think Progress>
Although this was intended as a attack, in a funny way, Romney may have a point. Hamas probably would prefer Obama to McBoomBoom. As the democratically elected government of Palestine, Hamas naturally wants to be a party in negotiations, so it would be natural for them to prefer an leader that negotiates with enemies over one that makes up songs about bomb, bomb bombing them. What’s best for Hamas is a fair peace in the middle east. That will not happen under McBoomBoom. On the other hand, Osama bin Laden would prefer McConJob, because he would continue the same high-handed Bush policies that have brought Al Qaeda so many new recruits.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog pledged Friday to investigate whether Syria had secretly built an atomic reactor with North Korean help, but the agency also criticized the United States for delaying the release of intelligence.
The United States disclosed its intelligence material on Thursday, saying the Syrian reactor was “nearing operational capability” a month before Israeli warplanes bombed it on Sept. 6.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, criticized Israel on Friday for the airstrike, saying his inspectors should have been able to inspect the site before the bombing.
Dr. ElBaradei said “the unilateral use of force by Israel” undermined “the due process of verification that is at the heart of the nonproliferation regime.” He also said the American allegations against Syria would be investigated with due vigor.
Syria denied the charges and accused Washington of involvement in the Israeli attack.
Dr. ElBaradei, alluding to the United States, denounced a failure to share intelligence information “in a timely manner” about the project, which Washington said was initiated in 2001. He confirmed that Washington disclosed information this week and said that a Syrian facility destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in September was an unfinished reactor.
Analysts said the American disclosure did not amount to proof of an illicit nuclear arms program, because there was no sign of a reprocessing plant needed to convert spent fuel from the plant into bomb-grade plutonium.
“The absence of such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor was part of an active nuclear weapons program,” David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security said in an e-mail commentary.
“The United States does not have any indication of how Syria would fuel this reactor,” they said. “This type of reactor requires a large supply of uranium fuel,” they added, saying that it “raises questions about when this reactor could have operated.”
Analysts said the Bush administration had delayed releasing the intelligence because of the risk that it might prompt Syria to retaliate against Israel.
Syria pledged to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency investigation. “Syria has nothing to hide,” its United Nations envoy, Bashar Jaafari, told reporters on Friday in New York… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <NY Times>
I’ve held off writing about this situation until now, because of the lack of credible information about really happened and why. That lack persists, but I’m suspicious now based on two reasons. The first is the lack of support facilities, as stated above. The other is that the reason the Reich has given for the delay is clearly a lie. Lets get real here. Syrian retaliation against Israel is not a credible threat. Israel has nuclear weapons. Syria does not. Even if Israel had no nukes, the overwhelming superiority of Israel’s armed forces over Syria’s is sufficient to co make the threat of retaliation mute. Clearly, Bush and the GOP are hiding something here. the questions are what and why.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Friday that he failed to achieve any progress in Middle East peace talks with President Bush and was returning home with little to show for his visit.
In an interview, the Palestinian leader sounded pessimistic about the prospects of achieving a deal with Israel this year, despite a U.S. push that began five months ago at a summit in Annapolis, Md.
“Frankly, so far nothing has been achieved. But we are still conducting direct work to have a solution,” Abbas said.
He said the biggest obstacle is Israel’s continued expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian-occupied territories.
“We demanded the Americans implement the first phase of the road map that talks about the cessation of settlement expansion,” Abbas said, expressing disappointment that the United States has not put more pressure on Israel to stop. “This is the biggest blight that stands as a big rock in the path of negotiations.”
Asked for comment, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said: “President Bush is helping to push the process forward. This wasn’t a meeting in which major breakthroughs were expected.
“Ultimately, this is for the Israelis and the Palestinians to come to an agreement. Each party has more to do – and given the serious commitment of the leaders, the president remains confident that defining a state by the end of the year is still possible.”
Israel is pushing forward with building projects on disputed land in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and is refusing to take down illegal settlement outposts, release Palestinian prisoners, halt military incursions, and dismantle roadblocks that disrupt daily life… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <San Francisco Chronicle>
What the Chronicle reported about this is accurate, as far as they went, but they failed to tie in how Bush and the GOP have worked behind the scenes to prevent peace by signing off on Israel’s illegal settlements in a secret deal, which I reported HERE.
A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president’s efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.
Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush’s letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush’s peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.
U.S. officials say no such agreement exists, and in recent months Rice has publicly criticized even settlement expansion on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which Israel does not officially count as settlements. But as peace negotiations have stepped up in recent months, so has the pace of settlement construction, infuriating Palestinian officials, and Washington has taken no punitive action against Israel for its settlement efforts.
Israeli officials say they have clear guidance from Bush administration officials to continue building settlements, as long as it meets carefully negotiated criteria, even though those understandings appear to contradict U.S. policy.
Many experts say new settlement construction undermines the political standing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — who is to meet with Bush today at the White House — and adds to Palestinian cynicism about the peace process. Palestinians view the settlements as an Israeli effort to claim Palestinian lands, and in a meeting yesterday with Rice, Abbas said settlement construction was “one of the greatest obstacles” to a peace deal… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Washington Post>
Bush and the GOP have been caught dead to rights on this one. I cannot imagine Olmert making such an obscene claim were this not the truth. Olmert actually thinks this justifies new settlements on Palestinian land. It does not. Bush and the GOP do not represent the view of the people. They presented their peace plan to the world, while secretly undermining that plan behind the scenes. This exposes Bush and the GOP for exactly what they are, liars who speak of peace while they scheme for more war. They lied to the American people! They lied to the whole world!! Bush and every Repuglican in office must be replaced by people of good will who will support peace in the middle-east.
Some of the country’s most prominent Jewish liberals are forming a political action committee and lobbying group aimed at dislodging what they consider the excessive hold of neoconservatives and evangelical Christians on U.S. policy toward Israel.
The group is planning to channel political contributions to favored candidates in perhaps a half-dozen campaigns this fall, the first time an organization focused on Israel has tried to play such a direct role in the political process, according to its organizers.
Organizers said they hope those efforts, coupled with a separate lobbying group that will focus on promoting an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, will fill a void left by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other Jewish groups that they contend have tilted to the right in recent years.
The lobbying group will be known as J Street and the political action group as JStreetPAC. The executive director for both will be Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House.
“The definition of what it means to be pro-Israel has come to diverge from pursuing a peace settlement,” said Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser involved in the initiative. In recent years, he said, “We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard.”… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Washington Post>
What a magnificent idea! While I am not altogether comfortable with ANY foreign nation lobbying our representatives, it has been going on for some time, so the issue is who will do the lobbying.
Were I an Israeli, I would feel most uncomfortable to have the primary group fostering my interests to be one focused on the notion that my nation exists to bring about Armageddon, and that, when it happened, I would have to convert or be judged for my faith. That is the AIPAC agenda.
AIPAC, now a neocon theocon tool, is destructive to Israel, because it predicates US support upon having an extreme right government with policies that foster war rather than peace. A lasting peace is in the best interests of both Israel and the Palestinians, but against the interests of the neocons and theocons that control AIPAC.
McBoomBoom is a big AIPAC supporter, and his spiritual mentor, John Hagee, is one of AIPAC’s most prominent leaders.
Cross-posted from Politics Plus
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
…According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Vanity Fair>
To put this in a nutshell the present crisis in Gaza came to pass as a direct result of the Machiavellian maladroitness of the Moronic Monkey and his GOP minions. At the time, Hamas was holding out an Olive branch to Israel, one that could have brought peace to the region, had the Bush/GOP Reich not intervened. I’ve provided you just a tiny snippet of an eight page article, spelling out the debacle in devastating detail. I urge you to click through and read it.
Cross-posted from Politics Plus
