posted December 20, 2006 01:04 AM              

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 18 (IPS) - 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... [i]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. (END/2006)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35888

posted December 21, 2006 05:58 PM            

Now that neocons are being slow-roasted in effigy all over the world, this may be the right time to ask the question: Why isn't the whole Left neoconservative? Remember that neocons like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel P. Moynihan were former left-wingers who saw the light --- which only seems like common sense, after witnessing Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims (Dad and Junior), and the whole mass-murdering gang of cutthroats.

After the Soviet Union crashed and no one could possibly ignore the bloody mess the Left kept making over seventy long years. So why didn't all the decent Leftists just read their Milton Friedman and grow up?

That's what the so-called neocons did, and more power to them. I take it as obvious that they were correct and morally decent, in learning to see how wrong they had been. They grew up. My question is: What happened to all the others?

Or to ask it a different way: Why is it that in Britain, of all countries, a BBC4 survey showed that the greatest philosopher of all time is considered to be ... Karl Marx? A hate-filled parasitical scribbler who spent his life in the British Museum, stoking the fires that killed 100 million people in the 20th century? What is wrong with British education that the plain facts do not shout out for themselves?

The fact that the Left never, ever learns gives the lie to all its high-falutin' claims of "idealism," "progressivism," and superior morality. There is one and only one reason the Left isn't blamed for its misdeeds: It still controls the organs of propaganda, following der Übermenschlicher Karl. Thus some 90 percent of our media functionairies are left wingers. A predominant percentage of professors and teachers are, too.

To hold on to their beliefs leftists must shut down any competing ideas, which is precisely what they do. Just take your favorite leftist friends, and tell them some obvious fact they don't want to hear. You can see it working right in front of your eyes: They just won't hear it. Like the stone idols of the Bible, they have eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear. (Ps. 115) As long as they control the dominant media, our society will keep teetering at the brink of destruction.

All this is relevant today, because the Western world has just realized (again!) that multiculturalism, the latest mass delusion from the elites, comes down to societal suicide. Ooops! In exchange for the Multiculti Cult we get the Twin Towers on 9/11, carnage in London, Madrid, Mumbai, Bali and Baghdad, nightly riots in the banlieus of France, hateful anti-Americanism throughout Europe and America, and yes, the rise of yet another version of Left Fascism, this time marked by loudly voiced race hatred and anti-Semitism. Who could be surprised? Yet nobody blames the snake-oil peddlers for those deadly toxins.

Europe is still suffering from the intellectual monopoly of socialism. "Sophisticated" Europe doesn't see any respectable alternative to the Left, since conservatism is constantly and deliberately confounded with fascism. The American Left tries to ape the Euromyth that any decent and moral person must be a Leftist --- but so far only American professors believe it. Since in the tunnel-vision of the anointed there is no alternative to themselves, if one fairy-tale of Earthly Paradise is seen to crash, another one must instantly take its place. That is why the commissars of Post-Modernism and Multiculturalism suddenly rose to power all over the West in the 1970s and 80s. The faithful had to find a new way to justify their idee fixe.

Such mental fixedness is utterly irrational. A psychiatrist would have to ask whether the people who keep peddling the same toxins over and over again are themselves deeply malevolent and destructive: Whether unconsciously they really want to murder their societies. Why else would they keep pushing toward chaos?

So I ask again: Why isn't everybody on the Left a neocon? Why isn't Hillary? Chomsky? John Kerry? All those Sixties leftovers who never learned --- why are they so intellectually stuck? Have they no decency?