Going for the Soft Underbelly

Cor blimey, if this Mordechai Kedar chap isn't the love-child of Oded Yinon, then my name isn't Sir Mark Sykes:

"We may see reports of the frictions only occasionally, but Iran is always a nation on the verge of fragmenting - and right now things are particularly fragile. The social makeup of Iran's population is complex because there is no such thing as an Iranian people or Iranian nation. There are, instead, Iranian citizens divided into many ethnic groups [...] There is a deep hatred of the ayatollahs simmering inside large sectors of Iranian society, a hatred that burst into the streets in a series of large demonstrations last November... The cry 'death to the dictator' was shouted by many, including many women who stood on podiums in front of the public, removed their head coverings and hung them on sticks to show their mockery for the Islamic law they are forced to observe... This is the soft underbelly to which anyone concerned about Iran must pay heed. It is the target at which arrows must be aimed, straight at those ethnic groups fighting for independence and the restless youngsters fighting for liberty. The civilised world can and should find those anti-ayatollah forces, support them and empower them to bring Iran to the same end that met the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by creating homogenous ethnic states on the ruins of the artificial state of Iran." (Iran is hardly a nation and will likely fall apart, Mordechai Kedar, The Australian, 17/7/18)

And note how Trump, in his own deranged way, seems to be reading from the same script:

"Later, Mr Trump said Russia's position on Iran was because of trading benefits between Moscow and Tehran. 'It is not good for us or for the world, but they have riots in all their cities,' Mr Trump told Fox News of Iran's situation. 'The inflation is rampant, going through the roof. And not that you want to hurt anybody, but that regime wouldn't let the people know that we are behind them 100 per cent'." (Backing for Bibi unlikely unifier, Jacquelin Magnay, The Australian, 18/7/18)

Zionist Dreaming

The 1982 Yinon Plan (A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties):

"Lebanon's total dissolution into 5 provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula, and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes, who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today."

The Yinon Plan in action today:

"If Assad wins,' one IDF official in the Golan Heights told me, 'we will have Hezbollah not on two borders but one.'

"Yavne, the brigadier general, similarly described the Iranian influence as significantly more worrisome than ISIS or other Sunni Muslim terror groups: 'If I can be frank, the radical axis headed by Iran is more risky than the global jihad one,' said Yavne. 'It is much more knowledgeable, stronger, with a bigger arsenal.'

"As far as these Israeli officers are concerned, the ideal strategy is to sit back and let both typres of groups duke it out - and work to contain the conflict rather than trying to end it with military forces. As the IDF intelligence officer put it, 'the battle for deterrence is easier than the battle for influence.'

"But does that mean that the United States and its allies should simply allow ISIS to retain its so-called caliphate in parts of eastern Syria and eastern Iraq? 'Why not?' the officer shot back. 'When they asked the late [Israeli] Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the Iran-Iraq War in the 8os, who does Israel stand for, Iraq or Iran, he said, 'I wish luck to both parties. They can go at it, killing each other.' The same thing is here. You have ISIS killing Al Qaeda by the thousands, Al Qaeda killing ISIS by the thousands. And they are both killing Hezbollah and Assad." (Israeli officers: You're doing ISIS wrong, Bryan Bender, politico.com, 22/5/17)

Tom Switzer Channels Oded Yinon in the Herald

Whatever happened to progress? One hundred years ago we had Britain Sir Mark Sykes and France's Georges Picot, smack bang in the middle of World War I, drawing lines on a map of the Middle East and coming up with the Sykes-Picot Agreement: You take those bits and we'll have these, old chap.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.

Well, they haven't, because now we've got Australia's Tom Switzer and America's John Bolton having another go at drawing lines on a map of the Middle East. Here's Switzer (research associate at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre and host of Radio National's Between the Lines):

"The problem boils down to this: Iraq and Syria as we know them are gone. Iraq is not one people, but rather three peoples: Kurds, (minority) Sunnis, and (majority) Shiites. Syria is also three peoples: Kurds, (majority) Sunnis, and (minority) Alawites/Shiites, who protect the Christians and other religious minorities. None of this should surprise a student of modern history. Both Iraq and Syria are artificial states and ethnically divided societies created out of the ruins of the the Ottoman Empire a century ago. What the US-led invasion in 2003 and the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 did was unleash age-old sectarian animosities that are eroding political structures and borders that have more or less prevailed since the end of World War I. What to do? John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN and senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, has a good idea: create independent states for the Kurds and Sunnis after the defeat of IS. A 'Sunni-stan', he argues, could be a bulwark against the Iran-backed regimes in Damascus and Baghdad." (Redrawing the map is the best solution, Sydney Morning Herald, 5/1/16)

No, the problem really boils down to this - the Switzers and Boltons of this world.

Just a reminder: John Bolton is an American neoconservative, one of the rum crew, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith & Abrams, that formed PNAC (Project for a New American Century) back in the 1990s. At the time the PNAC neocons/Ziocons urged Clinton to blitz Iraq - to no avail. Unfortunately for them, they had to wait for Bush Jr, 9/11 and a few plum posts in the Bush administration before they could realise their dream - today's Iraq (and Libya and Syria).

Bolton became US Undersecretary of State and duly went off to confer with USraeli leader Ariel Sharon in February 2003. Needless to say, there was - LOL - a meeting of minds:

Sharon said "that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq. 'These are irresponsible states which must be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve'."

And Bolton replied "that he had no doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea."*

Good old John. As the late Republican Senator (and friend of Jesus) Jesse Helms said in endorsement: "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armaggedon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."

Actually, it's not Sir Mark Sykes that Tom Switzer and John Bolton are channeling here. It's Israel's Oded Yinon and his 1982 Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties:

"Iraq... 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... Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us... 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... 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."

But hang on, wasn't Oded Switzer telling us only a matter of weeks ago that "The smartest strategy is for the West to slowly but steadily disengage militarily from the Middle East and allow the people in that region to settle their own differences"?**

Now here he is, hanging with John (Regime Change) Bolton, who wants to create Kurdistan, Sunnistan, Shiastan (and, for all we know, Yazidistan as well). (Hey, maybe they could be called Cheneystan, Rumsfeldistan, Perlestan and so on.)

What ever happened to consistency? Oh, wait, I can guarantee that Oded Switzer will never, ever, want to play around with Israel's borders - wherever they happen to be.

And just remember: Oded Switzer doesn't peddle his dubious wares in the Murdoch press, but in Fairfax and on ABC radio.

Have a nice day!

[*Sharon says US should also disarm Iran, Libya & Syria, Aluf Benn, Haaretz, 18/2/03; **The West should let the Middle East settle its own differences, Sydney Morning Herald, 16/11/15]

Remember Iraq, March 20, 2003

Hands up all those who still think Iraq was mugged for its oil rather than to satisfy an Israeli wet-dream:

"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." (From A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon, Kivunim, February, 1982)

The Refugee Factory

"A few weeks ago I was in Amman, the capital of Transjordan, and spent an evening driving round the town with an official of the Ministry of the Interior. The town was packed with these refugee Arabs [from Palestine], crouching in doorways, lying in the gutters, sleeping in the provincial buses, in schools, in hospitals, in the fields - even in the graveyards. Many of their faces were already gaunt with hunger. For years there has been no begging in this town, but at this time one could not walk ten yards down the street without being acosted for alms." (Letter from 'Middle East Observer' in The Spectator, August 6, 1948)

To revisit the bleeding obvious, Israel is a state built squarely on the foundation and maintenance of a massive 6-decades old Palestinian Arab refugee problem. After first driving out the mass of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland in 1948, Israel proceeded to write them off as 'absentees', settle Jewish immigrants in their homes and on their lands, and, in one of history's most breathtaking displays of historical chutzpah and revisionism, has played the sweet innocent ever since.

I was prompted to reflect thus on Israel's historical role as a refugee-producing nation when I read the following sentence: "Iraq will set up camps at two of its three border crossings with Syria to provide support for Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict in their homeland, a government spokesman said on Tuesday." (Iraq to set up camps for Syrian refugees, AFP, 24/7/12)

Who could've imagined, prior to the glory days of GW Bush and his Ziocon urgers, that within the space of a decade Iraqi refugees would be flooding into Syria and Syrian refugees into Iraq? The question then arises: if the war on Iraq (which resulted in a huge refugee exodus, now largely abandoned and barely remembered) was primarily about rearranging the Middle East to suit Israel, then what about the war in Syria? Is Israel, a nation which may well have produced, directly or indirectly, more refugees than any other on the planet, really just the innocent, even fearful, bystander its propagandists make it out to be?

The evidence, I'm afraid, suggests otherwise.

There's the documentary evidence:

In a recent post (22/7/12), Syria's 'Alawis: A Corrective, I quoted the words of Israeli analyst Oded Yinon to the effect that Israel's "targets" in Syria should be a) "the dissolution of [its] military power," and b) "its dissolution into ethnically and religiously unique areas." That was written in 1982 as Israel was cutting a swathe through Lebanon.

In 1996, US Ziocon strategists advising Netanyahu asserted in their infamous document, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm' that "Israel can shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria," a strategy closely tied to the idea of regime change in Iraq: "This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions." Following the fall of Baghdad in April, 2003, the same crowd, from their redoubts in the Bush administration, turned their sights on Syria, with Paul Wolfowitz declaring that there has "got to be regime change in Syria," and Richard Perle telling the Syrians: "You're next." (See The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007, p 274.)

And in 2012 we've got the US State Department-funded US Institute of Peace (USIP) and its blueprint for regime change in Syria, The Day After: Supporting a democratic transition in Syria. (So you know where USIP's coming from, its president, US congressman Jim Marshall, voted to restrict UN funding in 2005, co-sponsored the Syria Accountability & Liberation Act in 2007, and signed a 2010 letter to Secretary of State Clinton, along with 326 other congressmen, affirming the US's "unbreakable bond" with Israel. Its leading light on the Syrian front is academic and Syria 'expert' Steven Heydemann, who had this to say of his pet 'project': "We have very purposely stayed away from contributing to the direct overthrow of the Assad regime... Our project is called 'the day after'. There are other groups working on the day before."* Oh, and cui bono? "We should hope for the best, Steven Heydemann says - democracy, secularism, maybe even peace with Israel - but not rule out the worst."**)

There are the links between the key personnel of the two external Syrian opposition groups, the Syrian National Council and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, on the one hand, and assorted Ziocon groups and individuals on the other.(See The Syrian opposition: who's doing the talking?, Charlie Skelton, The Guardian, 12/7/12)

Finally, there are those devastating explosions targeting the key structures and personnel of the Asad regime. Sure, they could have been the handiwork of the Free Syrian Army - anything's possible. But frankly, if educated guesses are more to your liking, you'd probably be on safer ground fingering the folk who brought down Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946 and enriched our store of euphemisms with the term 'targeted killings'.

So the question arises: are we today seeing Yinon's wet-dream unfolding?

The scenario sketched by political scientist Virginia Tilley sounds as plausible as any: "[The Syrian] opposition is a mixed bag, with sharp disagreements, particularly about external intervention, as well as whether, when and how to negotiate with the government. These disagreements are certainly sincere and most are principled. Left alone, consensus could gel. But Israel's interests, which weave through them like a fog, run in a different direction: to steer Syrian events away from any process that will generate a representative, stable and strong country in the long run. Far preferable for Israel is to keep things polarised to ensure a catastrophic internal crisis that will dismantle Syria's security forces, permanently fragment its political elite and paralyse domestic politics in bitter internecine squabbles (with rival foreign supporters), which as a package will ensure that a strong state can't be rebuilt. Thus Syria's independent role in the region would evaporate and Israel's foreign policy prerogatives will be secured. Even more perfect would be a Syrian collapse defined by sectarian bigotry, a game at which Israel enjoys grand mastery. Of course, Israel bases its whole existence ideologically on the premise that the Middle East and the world at large are entirely steered by bigotry, but this worldview has also proved useful as realist foreign policy. It's always easy to turn idle biases into rabid racism. The Mossad is also brilliant at infiltrating Arab movements, as Palestinians will bitterly attest, and has been sending agents across the Syrian border to gather intelligence and stoke 'tribal' divisions for decades. It can certainly do this with much greater facility now that the country is in such upheaval. Hence it's only sensible to assume that Israeli plants are all over the Syrian movement, among and within factions, playing off arguments about best ways forward. And as Israel's best outcome is crisis, polarisation and violence that will generate a weak Syria in the end, those arguing about negotiating with the regime must consider which of the voices rejecting negotiations are sincere and which are Israeli hand-puppets." (Crying wolf, foreign agendas & Israel's role in destabilising Syria, Al-Jazeera, 1/2/12)

But back to those Arab refugees - whether they've fled from Palestine to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan; from Iraq to Syria and Jordan; or from Syria to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey - one thing's certain, they are all products of the refugee factory that is Israel.

[*Steven Heydemann on the 'Family Business' in Syria, Christopher Lydon, radioopensource.com, 12/5/11;**Inside the quiet effort to plan for a post-Assad Syria, Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy, 20/7/12]

Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze

Chaos, panic & disorder - our work is done.

"With George W Bush's presidency about to end, what will happen to the neoconservatives? Rarely in the history of US politics has a small number of bookish intellectuals had so much influence on foreign policy as the neo-cons had under Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, neither of whom is noted for his deep intellectual interests... Writing for journals such as The Weekly Standard and using the pulpits of think tanks... neocons offered an intellectual boost to the invasion of Iraq. The logic of the US mission to spread freedom across the globe - grounded, it was argued, in American history since the founding fathers - demanded nothing less." (As wrong as neo-cons were, Obama may have to preserve their ideals, Ian Buruma*, The Australian, 13/12/08)

[* "[P]rofessor of human rights at Bard College, New York state."]

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton, Libby & Co, all American boys, albeit bookish to a fault, committed to the (exclusively) American ideals of promoting freedom here, there, & everywhere, beginning with Iraq's transformation into a Jeffersonian democracy, just happened to be sauntering by, heads in the clouds as usual, minding their own business, when they were accosted by two "powerful leaders with an authoritarian bent" - the suave and charismatic Dubya and his Svengali Dick Cheney - whose pheromones fairly turned the neocon's cloud-wreathed heads and sucked them into slavish, but "misguided", service of these two ambitious autocrats.

Yeah, right. This is what passes for 'quality journalism' in Murdoch fishwrapper.

Enough already! We are lucky indeed to have an antidote to such rubbish - Stephen J Sniegoski's The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008).

As its title suggests, Sniegoski's book "examines a controversial and in some respects taboo subject: the close relationship of the American neoconservatives with the Israeli Likudnik right, and their role as the fundamental drivers of the Bush administration's militant American policy in the Middle East - a policy which inspired both the 2003 war in Iraq and the equally militant solutions contemplated since for other Middle East policy problems. It marshals evidence to illustrate that the war in Iraq... and the policy that inspired it and continues to inspire our approach to other actors and issues in the Middle East, have their common origin in the orientation of the neoconservative policy towards the service of the interests of Israel... The overarching goal of both the neocons and the Likudniks was to create an improved strategic environment for Israel... [T]his does not necessarily mean that the neocons were deliberately promoting the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States. Instead, they maintained that an identity of interests existed between the two countries - Israel's enemies being ipso facto America's enemies. However, it is apparent that the neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest, as Israeli interest was perceived by the Likudniks." (p 4-5)

Some extracts:-

"With the Likud's assumption of power, the most far-reaching militant proposals entered mainstream Zionist thinking, involving militant destabilization of Israel's neighbors and Palestinian expulsion. An important article in this genre was by Oded Yinon, entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s'... Yinon called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. Yinon believed that this would not be a difficult undertaking because nearly all the Arab states were afflicted with internal ethnic and religious divisions. In essence, the end result would be a Middle East of powerless mini-states that could in no way confront Israeli power. Lebanon, then facing divisive chaos, was Yinon's model for the entire Middle East... Yinon looked upon Iraq as a major target for dissolution, and he believed that the then on-going Iran-Iraq war would promote its break-up... 'In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, 3 (or more) states will exist around the 3 major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north'." (p 50-51)

"[T]he vision of 'regime change' in the Middle East through external, militant action originated in Israel, and its sole purpose was to advance the security interests of Israel. It had nothing to do with bringing 'democracy' to Muslims. It had nothing to do with any terrorist threat to the United States. These latter arguments accreted to the idea of regime change as the primary military actor changed from Israel to the United States. But the Israeli government would continue to be a fundamental supporter of the regional military action, even as the ostensible justifications for the action changed. Israel advocated the American attack on Iraq and preached the necessity of strong action against Iran. It would appear that for Ariel Sharon during the Bush II administration, the strategic benefits that would accrue to Israel from such a militant restructuring of the Middle East were the same as those that Likudniks sought in the 1980s. But unlike Begin's failed incursion into Lebanon in 1982, the Bush II effort not only relied upon the much greater power of the United States but was also wrapped in a cover of 'democracy' and American national interest, effectively masking the objective of Israeli hegemony. This helps to explain the much greater success of this intervention, which has come at no cost to Israel - but at a heavy cost to the United States." (pp 56-57)

"During the 1990s, the neoconservatives were quite open about their goal of War in the Middle East to destabilize Iraq and other enemies of Israel. A clear indication of the neoconservative thinking on this subject - and the intimate connection with Israeli security - was a 1996 paper entitled 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm', published by an Israeli think tank... Included in the study group that produced the report were figures who would loom large in the Bush II administration's war policy in the Middle East - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser... The 'realm'... was that of Israel. The purpose of the policy paper was to provide a political blueprint for the incoming Israeli Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper stated that Netanyahu should 'make a clean break' with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's claim to the West Bank and Gaza. It presented a plan by which Israel would 'shape its strategic environment', beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. Significantly, the report did not present Saddam's Iraq as the major threat to Israel. Rather, Iraq was more like the weak link among Israel's enemies. By removing Saddam, the study held that Israel would be in a strategic position to get at its more dangerous foes. In short, elimination of Saddam was a first step toward reconfiguring the entire Middle East for the benefit of Israel." (pp 89-90)

"It was apparent that during the Clinton years the neocons had formulated the entire plan for a Middle East war and had established the mechanisms, with their think tanks and media outlets, to disseminate this view to politicians and the public at large. They had become wedded to the idea, developed earlier by Likudnik thinkers, that it was necessary to bring about a reconfiguration of the Middle East, not only by removing those regimes that opposed Israel but also by fragmenting some of those countries. And they perceived Iraq as the initial target for the overall Middle East effort. Significantly, they saw the need for American involvement - quickly moving from the idea that the United States would be supportive of Israeli military action to the point where the United States would initiate military action itself. To achieve such American involvement it would be necessary to show how the United States itself was directly threatened; thus, by the end of the 1990s the neocons were portraying Saddam as an especially lethal threat to the American homeland. In actuality, however, the removal of Saddam was simply intended to be the beginning phase in the overall restructuring of the Middle East. The neocons were quite unified in presenting the danger Saddam allegedly posed to the United States, and their think tanks and media outlets could effectively disseminate this view. However, they could not achieve their goal by simply being a 'shadow defense department'; what was needed was to gain a prominent role in the foreign-policy and national-security apparatus of the next administration, and then perhaps await a 'catastrophic and catalyzing event' (as the PNAC report deemed necessary) to fully implement their program. All of this would soon come to pass." (pp 102-103)

"Whereas George W Bush had not expressed any interest in eliminating Saddam, Cheney, at a celebration dinner after the 2000 presidential campaign, reportedly told a group of friends that the new administration might have an opportunity to correct the mistake of the previous Bush administration of having left Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq. Cheney would be in a position to facilitate this development. Cheney was in charge of the new administration's transition team between the election in November 2000 and Bush's inauguration in January 2001, and used that position to staff national security positions with his neoconservative associates, who would promote the Middle East war agenda." (p 114)

"The neoconservatives made Iraq a key issue in the bush administration from the very beginning. According to Richard Clarke, who was a counter-terrorism advisor early in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives in the administration were fixated on Iraq as the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. When, in April 2001, the White House convened a top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, Wolfowitz expressed the view that Saddam Hussein was a far more important subject than Al Qaeda, which had been Clarke's focus. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said he could not 'understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden'. The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam. To bolster his contention, Wolfowitz cited the eccentric views of neocon favorite Laurie Mylroie, who saw the hand of Saddam behind much of the terrorism of the 1990s, including the World Trade Towers attack of 1993. For Wolfowitz to express Mylroie's unproven Saddam Hussein conspiracy theory was incomprehensible to Clarke, who opined: 'Here was the number 2 person in the Pentagon saying that he agreed with her and disagreed with CIA, with FBI, disagreed with all the massive evidence that Al Qaeda had attacked the World Trade Center in '93, not Iraq. Why anybody as sophisticated as a Wolfowitz or the others would attach themselves to that sort of stuff, I didn't know'. Of course, if Wolfowitz and other neocons wanted propaganda for a war on Iraq, they would promote such unlikely stories, just as they would later focus on the WMD falsehoods." (p 124)

"In the eyes of Israel's leaders, the September 11 attack had joined the United States and Israel together against a common enemy. And that enemy was not in far off Afghanistan, but was geographically close to Israel. Israel's traditional enemies would now become America's as well. Israel now would have a free hand to deal harshly with the Palestinians under the cover of a 'war on terrorism'. Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation would simply be portrayed as 'terrorism'. Conversely, America would make itself the enemy of those who previously had focused on Israel." (p 139)

"For the neocons, the terrible tragedy of 9/11 offered the extremely convenient pretext to implement their war agenda for the United States. 'Before 9/11', war critic Joseph Wilson writes, 'regime change by invasion was still just a fringe part of the debate about how to handle Saddam Hussein'. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the neoconservatives found the perfect climate to publicly push for a wider war on terrorism that would immediately deal with Israel's enemies, starting with Iraq. 'At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn't doable. There was no heft', observed neocon Kenneth Adelman. 'That changed with September 11 because then people were willing to confront the reality of an international terrorist network, and terrorist states such as Iraq'. Perle concurred that 'Nine-eleven was the turning point with respect to leaving Saddam unmolested'... According to Bob Woodward in Bush at War, as early as the day after the terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 'raised the question of attacking Iraq Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda? he asked." (pp 140-141)

"As a result of 9/11, the neocons became the guiding force in American foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger in 2004 explained the neocon's success: 'The neocons were organized. They had intellectual content. Bush was not totally captured by it but tends in that direction'. As time progressed, Bush would follow more and more of their agenda... [T]he events of 9/11... had a profound impact on Bush's psyche, causing him to embrace the neocon's pre-packaged simple solution of a war of good vs evil [which] was undoubtedly in line with Bush's purported Christian evangelical beliefs. Furthermore, Bush's adoption of the neocon war agenda provided him with his purpose in life, which he identified as the will of God." (p 147)

"The adoption of the neocon agenda with its focus on Iraq and the Middle East would distract the United States from consolidating its control of Afghanistan, which could have been used for the American domination of the Eurasian landmass along the lines of the thinking of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Control of Central Asia had been abandoned, or, at least, put on the back burner, in the move to invade Iraq and thence achieve regime change elsewhere in the Middle East. None of these goals had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. The morass that the United States would find in Iraq, a quagmire that was easy to predict, would not enhance American global domination. It would, however, bring about the destabilization of the Middle East sought by the neocons and the Israeli Likudniks. In a fundamental sense, American hegemonic interests had been trumped by Zionist ones." (p 150)

The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel - the perfect companion treatise to Mearsheimer & Walt's The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy.