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Wed 20 Dec, 2006 12:58 pm
Neo-Cons Wanted Israel to Attack Syria
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
Tuesday 19 December 2006
Washington - Neo-conservative hawks in and outside the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush had hoped that Israel would attack Syria during last summer's Lebanon war, according to a newly published interview with a prominent neo-conservative whose spouse is a top Middle East adviser in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Meyrav Wurmser, who is herself the director of the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute here, reportedly told Yitzhak Benhorin of the Ynet website that a successful attack by Israel on Damascus would have dealt a mortal blow to the insurgency in Iraq.
"If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion in Iraq would have ended," she asserted, adding that it was chiefly as a result of pressure from what she called "neocons" that the administration held off demands by U.N. Security Council members to halt Israel's attacks on Hezbollah and other targets in Lebanon during the summer war.
"The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space ... They believed that Israel should be allowed to win," she told Ynet. "A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah ... If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and (changed) the strategic map in the Middle East."
Wurmser's remarks bolster reports from Israel that hawks in the Bush administration did, in fact, encourage in the first days of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to extend its war beyond Lebanon's borders.
"In a meeting with a very senior Israeli official, [U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot] Abrams indicated that Washington would have no objection if Israel chose to extend the war beyond to its other northern neighbour, leaving the interlocutor in no doubt that the intended target was Syria," a well-informed source, who received an account of the meeting from one of its participants, told IPS shortly after the conflict ended last August. A similar account was published in the Jerusalem Post at the time.
Abrams has been known to work particularly closely with both David Wurmser, Meyrav's husband, and Cheney's national security adviser, John Hannah, who, in turn have long favoured "regime change" in Damascus.
Indeed, both Wurmsers, along with former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, worked together on a 1996 paper, entitled "A Clean Break", for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which called for overthrowing Iraq's Saddam Hussein as the first step toward destabilising Syria.
Wurmser and Hannah, according to the New York Times, argued forcefully - and successfully with Abrams' help - against efforts by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to persuade Bush to open a channel to Syria in an effort to stop the fighting in its early days.
Given her husband's work for Cheney, Wurmser's remarks, which come as the debate over policy toward Syria both here and in Israel is hotting up, offer important insights into the thinking of the dwindling number of administration hawks, particularly those around the vice president who is reportedly steadfastly opposed to any direct engagement with Damascus or Tehran.
Since last summer's conflict, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad has given a series of interviews with western media - most recently, Italy's La Repubblica - in which he has called on Israel for direct negotiations to end their state of war and fully normalise relations.
The repeated offers have split Olmert's government. Some cabinet officials, led for now by Defence Minister Amir Peretz, have called for exploring Assad's offers, if for no other reason than to determine what price, besides return of the occupied Golan Heights, Israel might be expected to pay, and what it might gain, particularly with respect to possibly weakening Syria's ties to Iran.
But Olmert has resisted this approach, insisting Sunday, for example, that he would not consider talks with Damascus until and unless it first renounced terrorism and halted its support of "extremist influences", presumably the Damascus-based wing of the Palestinian Hamas party and Hezbollah.
But many analysts believe that Olmert is being held back primarily by fear of crossing hard-liners in the Bush administration, which charges Damascus with trying to regain its influence in Lebanon by subverting the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and providing support to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
Assad himself argued as much in his Repubblica interview. "... [T]he most important thing ... is that Washington doesn't want that. This means [Olmert's] is a weak government; it allows Washington to take the decision instead of the Israeli government."
But, while hard-liners like Cheney's office and Abrams still have the upper hand on Syria policy here, the administration is also finding itself under growing pressure to re-think its strategy there, as in Iraq.
Earlier this month, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) called for Washington to directly engage Damascus and Tehran in regional negotiations designed to stabilise Iraq. Like some prominent Israelis, the ISG's co-chair, former Secretary of State James Baker, has argued that creative diplomacy could woo Damascus away from its strategic alliance with Iran.
"If you can flip the Syrians, you will cure Israel's Hezbollah problem," he said recently, adding that Syrian officials - he met with the foreign minister in September - had indicated they could persuade Hamas' militant external wing to accept Olmert's conditions for direct engagement with the Palestinians.
The idea of engaging Syria has attracted growing support not only from the U.S. foreign policy establishment and Democrats, several of whom have or are making their way to Damascus over the Christmas recess, but from some important Republican lawmakers, as well. Sen. Arlen Specter is due to travel there next week, while even Sen. Sam Brownback, the favoured 2008 presidential candidate of the Christian Right, has endorsed what he called the ISG's call for a "very aggressive, regional diplomatic effort."
The idea of engaging Syria - particularly as part of a broader "land-for-peace" deal with Israel - is anathema to the neo-conservatives whose ranks within the administration have steadily diminished over the past two years and now, in the wake of Defence Secretary Robert Gates' replacement of Donald Rumsfeld, face further losses in the Pentagon. Until his nomination, Gates served as a member of the ISG and, during his confirmation hearings, indicated sympathy for its diplomatic ideas.
Indeed, Wurmser, who is herself an Israeli closely identified with the Likud Party, expressed a sense of imminent defeat. Noting last week's departure of former UN Amb. John Bolton, a key neo-conservative ally, she said, "[T]here are others who are about to leave."
"This administration is in its twilight days," she said. "Everyone is now looking for work, looking to make money ... We all feel beaten after the past five years ..."
While she blamed Rumsfeld, the military, and the State Department for the failure to achieve neo-conservative goals in Iraq and the wider region, she also attacked Israel's conduct of last summer's war, insisting that it provoked "a lot of anger" in Washington, presumably in her husband's office, among other places.
"The final outcome is that Israel did not do it [attack Syria]. It fought the wrong war and lost ... nstead of a strategic war that would serve Israel's objectives, as well as the U.S. objectives in Iraq."
IPS sought comment from Wurmser, but its calls went unreturned.
Syria in Bush's Crosshairs
Syria in Bush's Crosshairs
By Adam Zagorin
Time
Tuesday 19 December 2006
Exclusive: A classified document suggests the Administration is considering a plan to fund political opposition to the Damascus government. Some critics say it would be an unwarranted covert action.
The Bush Administration has been quietly nurturing individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar Assad. Parts of the scheme are outlined in a classified, two-page document which says that the U.S. already is "supporting regular meetings of internal and diaspora Syrian activists" in Europe. The document bluntly expresses the hope that "these meetings will facilitate a more coherent strategy and plan of actions for all anti-Assad activists."
The document says that Syria's legislative elections, scheduled for March 2007, "provide a potentially galvanizing issue for ... critics of the Assad regime." To capitalize on that opportunity, the document proposes a secret "election monitoring" scheme, in which "internet accessible materials will be available for printing and dissemination by activists inside the country [Syria] and neighboring countries." The proposal also calls for surreptitiously giving money to at least one Syrian politician who, according to the document, intends to run in the election. The effort would also include "voter education campaigns" and public opinion polling, with the first poll "tentatively scheduled in early 2007."
American officials say the U.S. government has had extensive contacts with a range of anti-Assad groups in Washington, Europe and inside Syria. To give momemtum to that opposition, the U.S. is giving serious consideration to the election- monitoring scheme proposed in the document, according to several officials. The proposal has not yet been approved, in part because of questions over whether the Syrian elections will be delayed or even cancelled. But one U.S. official familiar with the proposal said: "You are forced to wonder whether we are now trying to destabilize the Syrian government."
Some critics in Congress and the Administration say that such a plan, meant to secretly influence a foreign government, should be legally deemed a "covert action," which by law would then require that the White House inform the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. Some in Congress would undoubtedly raise objections to this secret use of publicly appropriated funds to promote democracy.
The proposal says part of the effort would be run through a foundation operated by Amar Abdulhamid, a Washington-based member of a Syrian umbrella opposition group known as the National Salvation Front (NSF). The Front includes the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that for decades supported the violent overthrow the Syrian government, but now says it seeks peaceful, democratic reform. (In Syria, however, membership in the Brotherhood is still punishable by death.) Another member of the NSF is Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former high-ranking Syrian official and Assad family loyalist who recently went into exile after a political clash with the regime. Representatives of the National Salvation Front, including Abdulhamid, were accorded at least two meetings earlier this year at the White House, which described the sessions as exploratory. Since then, the National Salvation Front has said it intends to open an office in Washington in the near future.
"Democracy promotion" has been a focus of both Democratic and Republican administrations, but the Bush White House has been a particular booster since 9/11. Iran contra figure Elliott Abrams was put in charge of the effort at the National Security Council. Until recently, Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the Vice President, oversaw such work at the State Department. In the past, the U.S. has used support for "democracy building" to topple unfriendly dictators, including Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Ukraine's Vladimir Kuchma.
However, in order to make the "election monitoring" plan for Syria effective, the proposal makes clear that the U.S. effort will have to be concealed: "Any information regarding funding for domestic [Syrian] politicians for elections monitoring would have to be protected from public dissemination," the document says. But American experts on "democracy promotion" consulted by TIME say it would be unwise to give financial support to a specific candidate in the election, because of the perceived conflict of interest. More ominously, an official familiar with the document explained that secrecy is necessary in part because Syria's government might retaliate against anyone inside the country who was seen as supporting the U.S.-backed election effort. The official added that because the Syrian government fields a broad network of internal spies, it would almost certainly find out about the U.S. effort, if it hasn't already. That could lead to the imprisonment of still more opposition figures.
Any American-orchestrated attempt to conduct such an election-monitoring effort could make a dialogue between Washington and Damascus - as proposed by the Iraq Study Group and several U.S. allies - difficult or impossible. The entire proposal could also be a waste of effort; Edward P. Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who worked on the Iraq Study Group report, says that Syria's opposition is so fractured and weak that there is little to be gained by such a venture. "To fund opposition parties on the margins is a distraction at best," he told TIME. "It will only impede the better option of engaging Syria on much more important, fundamental issues like Iraq, peace with Israel, and the dangerous situation in Lebanon."
Others detect another goal for the proposed policy. "Ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Syria opposed, the Bush Administration has been looking for ways to squeeze the government in Damascus," notes Joshua Landis, a Syria expert who is co-director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma. "Syria has appeared to be next on the Administration's agenda to reform the greater Middle East." Landis adds: "This is apparently an effort to gin up the Syrian opposition under the rubric of 'democracy promotion' and 'election monitoring,' but it's really just an attempt to pressure the Syrian government" into doing what the U.S. wants. That would include blocking Syria's border with Iraq so insurgents do not cross into Iraq to kill U.S. troops; ending funding of Hizballah and interference in Lebanese politics; and cooperating with the U.N. in the investigation of the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Senior Syrian government officials are considered prime suspects in Hariri case.
Money for the election-monitoring proposal would be channeled through a State Department program known as the Middle East Partnership Initiative, or MEPI. According to MEPI's website, the program passes out funds ranging between $100,000 and $1 million to promote education and women's empowerment, as well as economic and political reform, part of a total allocation of $5 million for Syria that Congress supported earlier this year.
MEPI helps funnel millions of dollars every year to groups around the Middle East intent on promoting reforms. In the vast majority of cases, beneficiaries are publicly identified, as financial support is distributed through channels including the National Democratic Institute, a non-profit affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the International Republican Institute (IRI), which is linked to the GOP. In the Syrian case, the election-monitoring proposal identifies IRI as a "partner" - although the IRI website, replete with information about its democracy promotion elsewhere in the world, does not mention Syria. A spokesperson for IRI had no comment on what the organization might have planned or underway in Syria, describing the subject as "sensitive."
U.S. foreign policy experts familiar with the proposal say it was developed by a "democracy and public diplomacy" working group that meets weekly at the State department to discuss Iran and Syria. Along with related working groups, it prepares proposals for the higher-level Iran Syria Operations Group, or ISOG, an inter-agency body that, several officials said, has had input from Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, deputy National Security Council advisor Elliott Abrams and representatives from the Pentagon, Treasury and U.S. intelligence. The State Department's deputy spokesman, Thomas Casey, said the election-monitoring proposal had already been through several classified drafts, but that "the basic concept is very much still valid."
I don't understand why you think this is news.
Set
Setanta wrote:I don't understand why you think this is news.
It wasn't news to me but many people don't know about it.
Besides, it been a long time since I bugged you and it was overdue. :wink:
BBB
WOrked out quite well when Israel attacked Iraq.
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