- (Inter Press Service) -- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The move also follows House of Representatives' approval
of a bill that would impose new economic and diplomatic sanctions against
Syria.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- In a series of interviews, Perle applauded Israel's attack
on Syrian territory - the first since the 1967 war - in alleged retaliation
for a Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel. "I am happy to see the
message was delivered to Syria by the Israeli Air Force, and I hope it
is the first of many such messages," he said.
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- Perle said he "hope(d)" the United States would
itself take action against Damascus, particularly if it turned out that
Syria was acting as a financial or recruiting base for the insurgency in
Iraq.
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- "Syria is itself a terrorist organisation,"
he asserted, insisting that Washington would not find it difficult to send
troops to Damascus despite its commitment in Iraq. "Syria is militarily
very weak," added Perle.
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- Damascus has been in Wurmser's sights at least since
he began working with Perle at AEI in the mid-1990s.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "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).
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- 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'.
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- The paper, called 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm', was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- "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."
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- "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.
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- A follow-up report by Wurmser titled 'Coping with Crumbling
States', also favoured a substantial redrawing of the Middle East along
tribal and familial lines in light of what he called an "emerging
phenomenon - the crumbling of Arab secular-nationalist nations."
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- The penchant of Washington and the West in general for
backing secular-nationalist states against the threat of militant Islamic
fundamentalism was a strategic error, warned Wurmser in the second study,
a conclusion he repeated in a 1999 book, Tyranny's Ally, which included
a laudatory foreword by Perle and was published by AEI.
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- While the book focused on Iraq not Syria, it elaborated
on Wurmser's previous arguments by attacking regional specialists in U.S.
universities, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) who, according to him, were too wedded to strong secular states in
the Arab world as the preferred guarantors of regional stability.
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- "Our Middle East scholarly and policy elite are
informed by bad ideas about the region that lead them to bad policies,"
he charged, echoing a position often taken by Perle.
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- In the book's acknowledgments, Wurmser praised those
who most influenced his work, a veritable "who's who" of those
neo-cons most closely tied to Israel's far right, including Perle himself,
another AEI scholar, Michael Ledeen and Undersecretary of Defence for Policy
and the man in charge of post-Iraq war planning, Douglas Feith.
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- He listed former CIA director James Woolsey, who has
called the conflict in Syria the early stages of "World War IV,"
Harold Rhode, a Feith aide who has also called himself Wolfowitz's "Islamic
Affairs adviser" and INC leader Ahmed Chalabi.
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- Wurmser also gave thanks to Irving Moskowitz, a major
casino operator and long-time funder of Israel's settlement movement, whom
he described as a "gentle man whose generous support of AEI allows
me to be here." 1996 Report, "A Clean Break" and "Coping
With Crumbling States."
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- Copyright Inter Press Service
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- http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=9953
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