| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:10 am Post subject: Neocon Advocates Civil War in Iraq as "Strategic" |
| http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh03092006.html
March 9, 2006
Neocon Advocates Civil War in Iraq as "Strategic" Policy
Daniel Pipes Finds Comfort in Muslims Killing Muslims
By JOHN WALSH
One of the abiding myths about the War on Iraq is that the neocons were too stupid to realize that they would confront an unrelenting, indigenous resistance to their occupation of Iraq. Unwittingly, the story line goes, they led the U.S. into a conflict which has now produced a civil war. But this simply does not fit the facts. The neocons clearly anticipated such an outcome before they launched their war as Stephen Zunes documents in Antiwar.com:
"Top analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the United States to "expedite" such a collapse anyway."
Yet the line persists that the neocons had no idea what they were getting into. This cannot be correct as they think a lot about what they do and they plan carefully. Not only is that charge absurd on the face of it, but it is arrogant on the part of those who level it. And it is the worst political mistake possible underestimating your adversary.
Now the neocons are beginning to advocate for civil war in Iraq quite openly. The clearest statement of this strategy as yet comes from pre-eminent neocon and ardent Zionist Daniel Pipes. In a recent piece in the Jerusalem Post, Pipes spills the beans. He writes:
"The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. Iraq's plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi'ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one."
As ever Pipes's anti-Arab racism is simply too rabid to be hidden. If Muslims are busy killing other Muslims, then "non-Muslims" are less likely to be hurt!! What does that say about Muslim lives? And of course both Sunnis and Shia must be labeled "terrorists." Pipes is doing nothing more endorsing than the oldest of colonial strategies: Divide et impera.
Pipes envisions other "benefits" to the civil war "strategy," such as inhibiting the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Pipes again:
"Civil war will "terminate the dream of Iraq serving as a model for other Middle Eastern countries, thus delaying the push toward elections. This would have the effect of keeping Islamists from being legitimated by the popular vote, as Hamas was just a month ago."
And finally Pipes declares that a civil war "would likely invite Syrian and Iranian participation hastening the possibility of confrontation with these two states, with which tensions are already high." It is no secret that the neocons have been aching for the U.S. to strike at Iran and Syria, so here too the civil war strategy of the neocons makes good sense to them. Of course the added death and destruction is not their problem since the victims will be Muslims and some unwitting American soldiers.
There seems to be only one fly in this neocon ointment. That is, will it be possible to control the flow of oil in the midst of turmoil in Iraq. Here I suspect the neocons who put Israel first might have their differences with the oil barons, presently their allies. But the neocons have certainly given a lot of thought to that, and it probably explains why the location of the large and permanent U.S. bases in Iraq is not known. It would seem, however, that there are great uncertainties in this and it may cause some trouble among the neocons and their allies over the longer term.
The only real question is whether the civil war emerged spontaneously as Wurmser, Perle and Feith predicted or whether the Iraqis had to be goaded into it by the U.S. Given all the intrigues and mysteries in Iraq, including the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra and the shadowy death squads and torture chambers which the U.S. claims to know nothing about, the latter seems more likely as of now. It certainly fits the civil war strategy, and it is quite reminiscent of the Iran-Iraq war in which the U.S. and Israel fanned the flames that consumed over 1 million Muslim lives
The fact is that the neocons who control U.S. strategy have no interest in preventing a civil war but only in inciting one. Sectarian tensions were virtually unknown in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. And in fact the Iraqi Shia fought loyally as Iraqis against Iranian Shia in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war. So to avoid an Iraqi civil war, the most important step is to get all the U.S. troops home and thus to terminate U.S. provocations. For it is now crystal clear that the neocon strategy is one of civil war to divide and destroy Iraq; and such a strategy amounts to a crime against humanity.
John Walsh can be reached at jvwalshmd@gmail.com. | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:28 am Post subject: Bush Reaffirms Ties With Leading Neocons |
| March 15, 2006
Bush Reaffirms Ties With Leading Neocons
by Jim Lobe
If the medium is the message, then U.S. President George W. Bush's choice of forum to launch a new public campaign to defend his beleaguered Iraq policy should be troubling to those, particularly in Europe, who had hoped that his administration was moving toward a more evenhanded stance in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The staunchly neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), one of the most hawkish groups on the "war on terror" since it was created two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon, has often taken strident positions against Arab and European allies whose cooperation has been sought by the administration itself.
Part of an interlocking network of neoconservative-dominated groups that include the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Committee on the Present Danger, which it founded, FDD has also tried to build support here for "regime change" in Syria and Iran.
Bush's speech, which broke little new ground, is the first of a series scheduled this week aimed at bolstering badly sagging public support for the U.S. occupation and reassuring voters that Iraq is not descending into civil war despite the widespread sectarian violence that followed the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque late last month.
"The Iraqi people made their choice," he said. "They looked into the abyss and did not like what they saw," he said. "By their response over the last two weeks, Iraqis have shown the world they want a future of freedom and peace and they will oppose a violent minority."
His speech comes amid a growing consensus among independent analysts here that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has successfully displaced Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives who clustered around him as the dominant influence on Bush's foreign policy.
Rice's rise and the eclipse of the neoconservatives, many of whom have had close ties to Israel's right-wing Likud Party, have, in this view, made Washington more modest about its ability to "transform" the Middle East by effecting "regime change" against governments that are perceived as actively hostile to the U.S. and Israel.
Similarly, Washington is now seen as far more eager to repair relations with European and Arab allies that were badly frayed during Bush's first term as a result of the unilateralist trajectory on which Cheney and the neoconservatives took U.S. policy.
In that sense, the White House's choice of the FDD as an appropriate forum would appear somewhat anomalous, given the prominence of neoconservatives in their leadership and the stridency of its views.
Among its board of advisers are Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, who has attacked Bush for supporting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan; Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; former CIA director James Woolsey, one of the most ubiquitous advocates of the notion that Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks in the run-up to the Iraq war; and the American Enterprise Institute's Richard Perle, the former ultra-hawkish chairman of the Defense Policy Board who reportedly suggested in a debate at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (that was also addressed by Cheney) that 12 B-2 bombers could solve the ongoing crisis with Iran over its nuclear program.
The group, which is headed by Clifford May, a former New York Times reporter and communications director for the Republican National Committee, originally evolved from another organization called Emet: An Educational Initiative, Inc.
It was created in early 2001 by a number of wealthy Jewish philanthropists, including Dalck Feith, the father of Bush's former undersecretary of defense for policy and Perle protégé, Douglas Feith.
Its purpose, according to a 2003 article in The American Conservative, was to bolster Israel's image among U.S. university students and faculty in the face of the Palestinian Intifada. After 9/11, Emet was transformed into FDD with May at its helm and a former Israeli embassy official, Nir Boms, as its vice president.
"Although FDD's mission statement makes no mention of Israel, FDD's public statements and operations mostly concern Israel," according to the Right Web Web site, which profiles neoconservative and other right-wing organizations.
Indeed, the group first came to public notice in the spring of 2002, when Boms produced a 30-second television spot that played repeatedly on cable news stations in Washington called "The Suicide Strategy." The spot, whose main message was that there was no difference between Palestinian suicide bombings and the Sept. 11 skyjackings, depicted successive images of Yassir Arafat, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein against scenes of violence and mayhem.
"The suicide strategy threatens all of us – all those who are hated as 'infidels,'" the voice-over intones. "If we appease terrorism, we'll get more terrorism. Our way of life is threatened."
In the run-up to the Iraq war, FDD and May, a regular guest on right-wing radio and Fox News, gave voice to many of the same arguments in favor of preventive war that were issued by the administration and its neoconservative supporters, including the assertion that Hussein and al-Qaeda had a long history of cooperation. They also assailed Western European governments and the United Nations for failing to support the U.S.
Indeed, the UN, which neoconservatives have long attacked as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, became a major target of FDD when it hired former Wall Street Journal writer Claudia Rosett to investigate the UN's "Oil-for-Food" scandal.
With the help of the Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, and other neoconservative publications, Rosett eventually published more than 50 feature articles, testified against the UN before Congress on several occasions and, in the words of FDD itself, took the "scandal from a footnote to the front page."
In 2004, FDD, which had by then begun receiving government funds for training students and activists in the Middle East in addition to private contributions, submitted a brief to the International Court of Justice in support of Israel's construction on Palestinian land of the wall sealing off Israel and major Israeli settlement from the rest of the West Bank on the grounds that "it can benefit the Palestinians."
In the same year, it also helped found Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) and recruited former Secretary of State George Shultz and Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to its board. FDD and CPD have run a number of joint conferences "targeted at the Washington policy community," particularly regarding Syria and Iran, and espousing the view that Washington faces "World War IV" in its battle with "Islamofascism."
That Iran poses a major threat to the U.S. is perhaps the most prominent current theme of the groups' work. After the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections in January, May wrote that its "leaders have long taken direction from the Militant Islamists of Tehran and will continue to do so no matter how much money we throw at them."
In his most recent Web posting just last week, May quoted another Perle protégé, the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen, as identifying Iran as the terrorist puppet master that "now exercises effective control over groups ranging from Hezbollah, Ansar al-Islam, al-Qaeda, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Jaish-e-Mahdi, and Jaish-e-Huti (Yemen) to the Joint Shi'ite Army of Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and part of Saudi Arabia, as well as Islamic movements in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia."
At another FDD/CPD forum in the Capitol building last month, Center for Security Policy's Gaffney warned that Iran's missile program was designed to detonate a nuclear weapon "in space high above the United States, unleashing an immensely powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) [that] could reduce the United States to a pre-industrial society in the blink of an eye."
"The Foundation is making a difference across the world," Bush said Monday, "and I appreciate the difference you're making."
(Inter Press Service)
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8703
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 10:00 am Post subject: Jewish Neocons Want Civil War in Iraq |
| Jewish Neocons Want Civil War in Iraq:
http://www.davidduke.com/?p=499 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:33 pm Post subject: |
| Israel wants to dominate the Middle East....Israel is interested in cutting Syria into small states, which will then be the puppets of Israel. All these things have been published and discussed inside Israel in many ways.
http://mepc.org/journal_shahak/shahak29.asp | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 2:29 am Post subject: |
| Israel connects Iraq to 9/11 before 9/11
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_members&Number=293695536&part=1
"The Zionist Plan for the Middle East (Translated and edited by Israel Shahak)" Israel Shahak June 13, 1982
http://www.theunjustmedia.com/the%20zionist_plan_for_the_middle_east.htm
Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.15<<< source: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East (Translated and edited by Israel Shahak )
Compare to recent news:
Pentagon: Iraq to be split into 3 sectors
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
From the International Desk
Published 3/7/2003 6:11 PM
View printer-friendly version
WASHINGTON, March 7 (UPI) -- U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks will be in total charge of Iraq immediately after the war, but will be supported shortly thereafter by three civilian administrators, each in charge of a different geographic sector of the country, Pentagon officials said Friday.
Iraq would be divided into thirds for administrative purposes -- northern, southern and central sectors. The borders of those areas have not been established, according to the Pentagon officials, but the southern sector is expected to be demographically dominated by Shiites and the northern sector by Kurds. Boundary lines would be determined by existing major roads, terrain features and population centers.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030307
-043844-5481r
Israeli Paper/Think Tank Call for Civil War in Iraq
By Marc Parent | bio
A crippled and partitioned Iraq has been part of the plan from day one. The author is a well known Neocon.
24/05/2006
Let them fight it out, by Edward N. Luttwak
http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/30145
Behind the Scenes of the Iraq War
The plan for the Iraq war, which has erupted in the face of opposition from the entire world, was drawn up at least decades ago, by Israeli strategists
In its attempt to realize its strategy of destabilizing or dividing the Middle Eastern Arab states, Israel has Egypt, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia on its list of subsequent targets.
As these lines are being written, the United States of America has begun striking at Iraq. Despite the fact that most countries of the world, and even the majority of the USA's allies, opposed it, the US administration was determined for the strike to go ahead. When we look behind the scenes of this insistence, it seems that Israel and its powerful lobby in the US, have the greatest share in the make-up.
In fact, Israel's policy aimed at the fragmentation of Iraq has lengthy historical roots…
The Age-Old Israeli Plan to Divide Iraq
17.04.2003 Source: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/2587-moslem-0 | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
