SALON
8/3/06
The neocons' next war

By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the
hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying
to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it.

Sidney Blumenthal

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.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick
Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the
neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National
Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence
with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply
activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both
countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says.
(Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided
to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are
described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA
intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and
Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and
to be "on board," but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert
neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an
internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has
come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support
for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of
nuclear weaponry.

Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from
initially calling on Israel for "restraint," to categorically opposing
a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to
conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy,
prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its
stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the
neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel
into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national security
official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the
entire region.

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. Instead of trading "land for peace," the
neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established
negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of
Likud's terms, "peace for peace." Rather than negotiations with Syria,
they proposed "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria."
They also advanced a wild scenario to "redefine Iraq." Then King
Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this
Sunni monarch would gain "control" of the Iraqi Shiites, and through
them "wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and
Syria."

Netanyahu, at first, attempted to follow the "clean break" strategy,
but under persistent pressure from the Clinton administration he felt
compelled to enter into U.S.-led negotiations with the Palestinians.
In the 1998 Wye River accords, concluded through the personal
involvement of President Clinton and a dying King Hussein, the
Palestinians agreed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and
Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from a portion of the occupied West Bank.
Further negotiations, conducted by his successor Ehud Barak, that
nearly settled the conflict ended in dramatic failure, but potentially
set the stage for new ones.

At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W.
Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting
any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When
Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be dire, especially
for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show for force by
one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean break" not
only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his
father.

In the current Middle East crisis, once again, the elder Bush's wise
men have stepped forward to offer unsolicited and unheeded advice. (In
private they are scathing.) Edward Djerejian, a former ambassador to
Israel and Syria and now the director of the James Baker Institute at
Rice University, urged on July 23, on CNN, negotiations with Syria and
Iran. "I come from the school of diplomacy that you negotiate conflict
resolution and peace with your enemies and adversaries, not with your
friends," he said. "We've done it in the past, we can do it again."

Charles Freeman, the elder Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
remarked, "The irony now is that the most likely candidate to back
Hezbollah in the long term is no longer Iran but the Arab Shiite
tyranny of the majority we have installed in Baghdad." Indeed, when
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington in the last
week of July he preceded his visit with harsh statements against
Israel. And in a closed meeting with U.S. senators, when asked to
offer criticism of Hezbollah, he steadfastly refused.

Richard Haass, the Middle East advisor on the elder Bush's National
Security Council and President Bush's first-term State Department
policy planning director, and now president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, openly scoffed at Bush's Middle East policy in an interview
on July 30 in the Washington Post: "The arrows are all pointing in the
wrong direction. The biggest danger in the short run is it just
increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the
Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the
world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and
this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights." When asked
about the president's optimism, he replied, "An opportunity? Lord,
spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in
a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A
once-in-a-lifetime chance?"

The same day that Haass' comments appeared Brent Scowcroft, the elder
Bush's national security advisor and still his close friend, published
an Op-Ed in the Washington Post written more or less as an open letter
to his erstwhile and errant protégé Condoleezza Rice. Undoubtedly,
Scowcroft reflects the views of the former President Bush. Adopting
the tone of an instructor to a stubborn pupil, Scowcroft detailed a
plan for an immediate end to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and for
restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "the source of the
problem." His program is a last attempt to turn the president back to
the ways of his father. If the elder Bush and his team were in power
and following the Scowcroft plan, a cease-fire would have been
declared. But Scowcroft's plan resembles that of the Europeans,
already rejected by the Bush administration, and Rice is the one
offering a counterproposal that has put diplomacy into a stall.

Despite Rice's shunning of the advice of the Bush I sages, the
neoconservatives have made her a convenient target in their effort to
undermine all diplomatic initiatives. "Dump Condi," read the headline
in the right-wing Insight Magazine on July 25. "Conservative national
security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has
reversed the administration's national security and foreign policy
agenda," the article reported. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a
member of the Defense Policy Board, was quoted: "We are sending
signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how
viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things
you're doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you'll get
out of us is talk."

A month earlier, Perle, in a June 25 Op-Ed in the Washington Post,
revived an old trope from the height of the Cold War, accusing those
who propose diplomacy of being like Neville Chamberlain, the British
prime minister who tried to appease Hitler. "Condoleezza Rice," wrote
Perle, "has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or
so away. What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval
Office; Rice's influence on the president is undiminished. It is,
rather, that she is now in the midst of and increasingly represents a
diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even
when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the
appeasement of our adversaries."

Rice, agent of the nefarious State Department, is supposedly the enemy
within. "We are in the early stages of World War III," Gingrich told
Insight. "Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't
have the right attitude."

Confused, ineffectual and incapable of filling her office with power,
Rice has become the voodoo doll that Powell was in the first term.
Even her feeble and counterproductive gestures toward diplomacy leave
her open to the harshest attacks from neoconservatives. Scowcroft and
the Bush I team are simply ignored. The sustained assault on Rice is a
means to an end -- restoring the ascendancy of neoconservatism.

Bush's rejection of and reluctance to embrace the peace process
concluded with the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. This
failure was followed by a refusal to engage Hamas, potentially
splitting its new governmental ministers from its more radical
leadership in Damascus. Predictably, the most radical elements of
Hamas found a way to lash out. And Hezbollah seized the moment by
staging its own provocation.

Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to
salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament with the U.S.
quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest
risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle U.S.
negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the
fantasies of "A Clean Break."

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.