Thursday, July 27, 2006

Why The Usual Suspects are lashing out at Rice

The Usual Suspects have published a story in the latest issue of Insight in which they rip into Condi Rice as being incompetent and having reversed the administrations national security and foreign policy agenda. This coming from her handling of the Israeli/Lebanon crisis.

Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle were the most vocal of The Usual Suspects. Newt taking the opportunity to beat his World War III drum , even though it's technically World War IV now.

"North Korea firing missiles," Mr. Gingrich said. "You say there will be consequences. There are none. We are in the early stages of World War III. Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."


What was Condi's major faux pas?

"Rice attempted to increase pressure on Israel to stand down and to demonstrate restraint," said Stephen Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "The rumor is that she was told flatly by the prime minister's office to back off."


And as I've already pointed out in It's World War IV Stupid! How the Usual Suspects planned this all along. , attempting to reign in Israel's attack on Lebanon is definately the exact opposite of the neocons foreign policy agenda.

Is it any wonder, then, that people like Perle, Gingrich, Hannah, Bolton and Abrams are united in castigating Miss Rice? Afterall, Israels attempts to destroy Hezbollah are but the opening phases of the reimaging of the Middle East as laid out a decade ago by David Wurmser. This is called the Clean Break policy and the first step it called for has already been accomplished:

1: replace Saddam with an Iraqi National Congress. (check)

The next step is just getting underway:

2: Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syria by "Israeli proxy forces" in Lebanon and/or striking Syria proper.

Knocking out Hezbollah is merely the prelude to Israel positioning itself so that it can carry out the second phase of the plan detailed by Wurmser nearly a decade ago. It's spelled out plainly in Clean Break:

An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah,


That is why Israel planned the invasion over a year ago.
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.

In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.


It's all been planned out and now, suddenly Condi Rice is talking about "restraint" and "diplomacy". But as the neocons know, diplomacy and restraint aren't a part of the agenda. Or as their article pointed out:

They said by that time even Mr. Bush will recognize the failure of relying solely on diplomacy in the face of Iran's nuclear weapons program.


And there you have it: Diplomacy and Iran don't mix. World War IV is getting underway. How dare Condi Rice try to slow things down!


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Friday, July 21, 2006

It's World War IV Stupid! Or How the Usual Suspects planned global war all along.

So Newt Gingrich thinks we are seeing the beginning of World War III. Looks like he's been out of touch with his neocon buddies for quite some time then, because, as anybody who's followed the megalomaniacal ramblings of the Usual Suspects knows, this is actually World War IV.


The Usual Suspects have been planning this big brouhaha for some time and if you'd like, I'll take you down their little rabbit hole and show you the roadmap they've made.  So whip out your Blue Pills and let's go...

Cross Posted at Conceptual Guerilla's.



The History of World War IV.


First off, a little history before we come to The Plan.  As ex-CIA director James Woolsey told us several years ago (didn't Newt get the memo?), The Cold War was World War III.  We are on the brink of World War IV, he told us back in 2003, and furthermore:


This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War


One can only hope can't they?  The Military Industrial Complex must have been orgasming in ecstasy when they heard that.  But that's not all Woolsey tells us of the neocons plans for our future and our childrens future:


He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.


Woolsey told the audience of about 300, most of whom are students at the University of California at Los Angeles, that all three enemies have waged war against the United States for several years but the United States has just "finally noticed."


So we've actually been fighting World War IV for several years now, but the United States has just "finally noticed".  Sort of a delayed reaction, I guess, kinda like right after Katrina hit.  


You might want to know a few details about the milieu in which Woolsey made this sweeping Declaration of War.  He was at a "teachin" at UCLA.  There were a series of "teachins" across the nations universities at the time.


A group calling itself "Americans for Victory Over Terrorism" sponsors the teach-ins, and the Bruin Republicans, UCLA's campus Republicans organization, co-sponsored Wednesday night's event.


The group was founded by former Education Secretary William Bennett, who took part in Wednesday's event along with Paul Bremer, a U.S. ambassador during the Reagan administration and the former chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism.


Newt really should be more in the loop.  In fact, you can go back to the weeks after 9-11 to find that the World War IV meme was already in use by the neocons when Eliot Cohen wrote "World War IV: Let's call this conflict what it is."  in which he also asserts, as Admiral Woolsey did, that the war

"began well before Sept. 11, and its casualties include, at the very least, the dead and wounded in our embassies in Africa, on the USS Cole and, possibly, in Somalia and the Khobar Towers."


And Cohen reiterates that "The Cold War was World War III." So obviously, Newt was completely out of the loop to have missed the entirety of World War III.  But does Cohen name the same enemies as Woolsey?


The enemy in this war is

not "terrorism"...but militant Islam....Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles

there just one campaign....The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran....The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary

Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden...Second, the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism.  Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction...Third, the U.S. must mobilize in earnest...the beginning of a desperately needed "transformation" of the American military...


One can almost hear the Military Industrial Complex crying out at the end, "Oh God!  Oh God!  I'M CUMMING!"  One can almost see the dollar signs in the corporatists eyes and hear the cash register going "Ka-Ching!".


But did Cohen, professor of strategic studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, come up with this meme or did he simply get the memo that Newt missed?


Actually, Woolsey gave a speech entitled "World War IV" just 4 days before Cohens article, so the memo had already been out there.  Gee Newt, considering you shared a spot on the same defense policy board as Woolsey, you really should read your memo's more often!


Oh wait!  I think I found the memo!  Yep, it's right here called the Project For the New American Century (PNAC), established in 1997 and Woolsey, Bennett, Bremer and Cohen are all members of it.  


Take a close look at the PNAC and you'll find many of the Usual Suspects are charter members.  Billy Kristol is the chairman, Wolfowitz, John Bolton the man I tagged as being the Usual Suspect that outed Valerie Plame is a member:


Let's take a moment to consider something: Where did The Usual Suspects get their information about Valerie Plame?  Who in the administration would have had access to Top Secret information pertaining to Valerie Wilson/Plame's role in nuclear proliferation?  The only logical person to turn to for such information would have been John Bolton, State Dept. deputy secretary in charge of WMD's.  Bolton played a central role in the Niger Yellowcake story.


And who was Bolton's assistant?  David Wurmser, also a member of PNAC.  And at last, we come to


The Plan


As detailed in The Wurmser Turns, David Wurmser gave us a very detailed look at exactly what World War IV is going to look like.


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 Ba'athist 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.


Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by "Israeli proxy forces" based in Lebanon and "striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper."


"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria," the report argued, to create a "natural axis" between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq and Turkey that "would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula."


"For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria's territorial integrity," it suggested.


There's the groundwork being laid for World War IV, way back in 1996.  Israel must move into Lebanon and from there the attack on Syria begins.  So how influential is David Wurmser?  Read what I've uncovered about The Usual Suspects here, here and ashulmans diary here. Take special note of the list of "authors" at the bottom of ashulmans diary.  Then take another look at the flowchart that shows Wurmser's place in the grand scheme of things.  Wurmser's job at one time was to prove there existed a link between Al Queda and Iraq.  Do any of the other names on that flowchart look familiar?


Woolsey, Gingrich, Perle, Cheney, Libby, Michael Ledeen (Keyser Soze himself!), Harold Rhode, Bolton, Shulsky, Rubin, Wolfowitz, etc.


These are The Usual Suspects, people, and this plan for starting World War IV has been long in the making.


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