IASPS-Neocon Wurmser new Adviser of Cheney

New Cheney Adviser Sets Syria In His Sights

IPSNews AsiaTimes -October 21, 2003

By Jim Lobe

A neo-conservative strategist who has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to "roll back" the Ba'ath-led government in Syria has been quietly appointed as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

David Wurmser, who had been working for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, joined Cheney's staff under its powerful national security director, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in mid-September, according to Cheney's office.

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The move is significant, not only because Cheney is seen increasingly as the dominant foreign-policy influence on President George W. Bush, but also because it adds to the notion that neo-conservatives remain a formidable force under Bush despite the sharp plunge in public confidence in Bush's handling of post-war Iraq resulting from the faulty assumptions propagated by the "neo-cons" before the war.

Given the recent intensification of tensions between Washington and Damascus touched off by this month's U.S. veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution deploring an Israeli air attack on an alleged Palestinian camp outside Damascus Wurmser's rise takes on added significance.

The move also follows House of Representatives' approval of a bill that would impose new economic and diplomatic sanctions against Syria.

Wurmser's status as a favoured protege of arch-hawk and former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) also speaks loudly to Middle East specialists, who note Perle's long-time close association with Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's chief deputy Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz was the first senior administration official to suggest that Washington might take action against Syria amid reports last April that Damascus was sheltering senior Iraqi leaders and weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the U.S. invasion. "There's got to be a change in Syria," Wolfowitz said, accusing the government of President Bashar Assad of "extreme ruthlessness." Rumsfeld subsequently accused Syria of permitting Islamic "jihadis" to infiltrate Iraq to fight U.S. troops.

Perle, who last week was in Israel to receive a special award from the "Jerusalem Summit," an international group of right wing Jews and Christian Zionists who describe themselves as defenders of "civilisation" against "Islamic fundamentalism," has made no secret of his own desire to confront Damascus.

...Damascus has been in Wurmser's sights at least since he began working with Perle at AEI in the mid-1990s.

For the latter part of the decade, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez Assad in hopes of destroying Baathist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by "tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments."

Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in favour of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. "Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).

Wurmser, whose Israeli-born spouse Meyrav Wurmser heads Middle East studies at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, was the main author of a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the 'Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000'.

The paper, called 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm', was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading "land for peace" by transforming the "balance of power" in the Middle East in favour of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

To do so, it called for ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.

...perhaps we should rethink our entire Middle East policy to focus more on nations that do seem to have greater respect for human rights, like Turkey, Israel, and moderate Arab monarchies such as Kuwait and Jordan. This would involve a retooling of our entire Middle East strategy in the last 75 years, but then again, that may be just what is needed.

Orchards and American Integrity

Khilafah.com - 21 Oct 2003

By Karen Kwiatkowski

"...Americans may now take for granted the past year of propaganda by Bush and Cheney. They may have accepted those "few points… repeat[ed] over and over" Goebbels-like by the "crazies," as illustrated in John Pilger’s new documentary "Breaking the Silence." But the idea that America’s interests are identical to those of the tightly knit group of neoconservatives, who advocate a U.S. led-and-funded assault and forcible transformation of the entire Middle East, is – so far – not taken as an American truth.

Observers of the evolution of American foreign policy see an interesting conundrum. As neoconservatives clamor and push for holding misbegotten ground and continued forced transformations of sovereign states, the White House’s proud unilateral and independent foreign policy appears, more and more, to be bilateral and co-dependent.

We do share some interests, Israel and America. Apparently, we are adding to the list the objective of turning American soldiers into thugs and toughs who will administer our own version of the West Bank and Gaza for the "hajjis" in Iraq and parts of Afghanistan. Crushing vehicles with tanks, humiliating Islamic men, women and children, destroying homes and razing70 -year old orchards is certainly not something we currently train our sons and daughters to do in American boot camps.

And if that doesn’t work, we can always bring in the Turks.

Karen Kwiatkowski is a recently retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She now lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley.

Source: Lewrockwell

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