syria preplanned

New Cheney Adviser Sets Syria In His Sights

by Jim Lobe

October 21, 2003: (Inter Press Service) 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.

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.

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.

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.

The move also follows House of Representatives' approval of a bill that
would impose new economic and diplomatic sanctions against Syria.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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."

Copyright: Inter Press Service
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5031.htm

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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