- On March 11, 2003, as final preparations were under way
for the neo-cons' greatest triumph--the invasion of Iraq--New Yorker magazine
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh exposed an extortion scheme by neo-con
Richard Perle, to extract tens of millions of dollars out of the Saudi
royal family, in league with the infamous Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan
Khashoggi. The scheme involved a Perle company, Trireme Partners LP, which
wanted a piece of the billions of dollars in homeland security contracts
soon to be issued by the Kingdom. The proposal, according to Prince Bandar
bin Sultan, then the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, smacked of a quid
pro quo: Perle, a leading critic of the Saudi regime, would drop the propaganda
barrage and the calls for regime change, coming out of his Defense Policy
Board, and the Saudis would cough up.
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- Several senior U.S. intelligence officials recently
told EIR that some higher-ups in the Saudi royal family, perhaps including
Prince Bandar, who is now the national security advisor to King Abdullah,
regret that they didn't take the bait and pay off Perle and his partners
back in January 2003. A few million dollars might have saved them several
years of headaches, as the neo-con propaganda Wurlitzer waged a non-stop
regime-change campaign against them. But even more to the point, suddenly,
the Saudis, along with several other Sunni Arab regimes, find themselves
as strange bedfellows with Washington's neo-cons and with the Ehud Olmert
government in Israel--in common cause against Iran.
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- A Nov. 3, 2006 teaser from Vanity Fair magazine revealed
that the neo-cons are going through a major retooling--wiping their hands
of the entire Iraq fiasco, and placing the blame for the failure squarely
on the shoulders of President George W. Bush and his team of national security
incompetents and nincompoops. In a preview of a story to appear in the
January 2007 Vanity Fair, author David Rose delivered excerpts from interviews
he conducted in October 2006 with some of the cream of the neo-con crap--starting
with the ``Prince of Darkness,'' Perle himself, and also including Kenneth
Adelman, who gained infamy by proposing that the U.S. Lovers of Iraqi faker
Ahmed Chalabi, and Iraq warhawks to a man, these neo-cons are now saying
that if they had it to do over again, knowing that the Bush-Cheney-Rice
team was the most incompetent national security management group in the
post-World War II history of America, they would have opted for an alternative
to war.
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- In a scene worthy of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, these
modern-day Brutuses have stabbed President Bush and Condi Rice in the back.
As far as the neo-cons are concerned, according to a number of informed
Washington sources, both Iraq and George W. Bush are yesterday's news.
They are now preparing to survive the fall of the House of Bush, and are
already making plans for the next confrontations: against Iran and Russia,
to name the top two targets du jour.
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- While the Bush Presidency is flaming out in the aftermath
of what has been dubbed the ``Nov. 7th Massacre,'' the neo-cons are still
a formidable force inside the Republican Party, with some leading neo-con
superstars, like John Podhoretz, already touting Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
as the elephant they intend to ride back into the Oval Office. Across the
aisle, another crew of hardcore neo-cons is preparing to surface within
the Democratic Party, should a donkey take the Presidency in 2008. It is
reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter era, when scores of life-long ``Scoop Jackson
Democrats,'' led by Perle, Stephen Bryen, Ledeen, Gaffney, and Elliott
Abrams, slithered over to the GOP as ``Reagan Democrats,'' and, after Ronald
Reagan's landslide victory in 1980 over Jimmy Carter, occupied top civilian
posts at the Pentagon, and cushy consulting jobs with the Reagan National
Security Council.
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- Whichever party lands in the White House come January
2009, the neo-cons hope to be there to share in the spoils. Either way,
they are busily organizing a ``Get Iran'' war alliance with frightened
Sunni regimes in the Persian Gulf and Arab world and Israel--to make sure
that the Bush-Cheney regime commits one more fatal atrocity--a military
strike on Iran's purported secret nuclear weapons sites--before leaving
office (see preceding article).
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- To make sure that this Iran war happens before Team
Bush leaves office, the neo-cons are working through their one reliable
partner remaining inside the regime--Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney's
office remains Neo-con Central, with David Wurmser and John Hannah still
on staff. Elliott Abrams remains the Cheney ``mole'' at the National Security
Council.
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- According to Middle East and Washington sources, this
crew was responsible, earlier this year, for trashing all efforts by the
Syrian regime of Bashar Assad to reopen direct peace talks with Israel,
talks that no Israeli regime prior to that of Ariel Sharon, would have
flat-out rejected, no matter how much pressure came down from Washington.
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- More recently, they are reportedly pushing a covert
weapons-smuggling operation into the West Bank, arming Fatah factions to
launch what would rapidly become a full-scale civil war against Hamas.
The noted retired Israeli general, Shlomo Brom, in a recent paper for the
Jaffe Center at Tel Aviv University, warned that such an outbreak of communal
violence among the Palestinians would be bad for Israel, provoking a likely
split between a Fatah-controlled West Bank and a Hamas-run Gaza Strip.
Both sides would be vying to prove that they are more effective in terrorizing
Israel, through suicide bombings and rocket attacks, the general warned,
and this would make life unbearable in the Jewish state.
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- Arab sources have added that in his recent trip to Washington,
Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was given a similar offer of ``covert
military aid'' to take on Hezbollah inside that war-ruined nation, which
still hasn't recovered from its 15-year civil war (1975-90). Such covert
operations, aimed at provoking the neo-cons' beloved perpetual warfare
throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region, do not depend on Pentagon
muscle, so the departure of Donald Rumsfeld from the scene, and his replacement
by former CIA Director Robert Gates, a Brent Scowcroft and James Baker
III ally (and presumable a Dick Cheney enemy), does not necessarily interfere
with the game.
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- In fact, as the Democrats prepare to take back control
of the U.S. House and Senate in January 2007, they face a world map of
hot-spots, all set to blow, with the slightest provocation (see accompanying
map).
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- Several senior Washington intelligence veterans, and
one regional vice president of a major U.S. defense firm, say that their
greatest fear--between now and the New Year when the Democrats take the
keys to Capitol Hill back--is a ``Gulf of Tonkin'' incident, a provocation
covertly arranged originating from Washington, that would provide the pretext
for war. The most likely target of such a scheme: Iran. The most likely
architect of such an operation: Dick Cheney and his remaining coterie of
neo-con troublemakers and whatever assets they have recruited from within
the Special Forces community and the ``black operations'' side of the intelligence
community. One burning question is whether President Bush has already signed
a Presidential Intelligence Finding, authorizing these covert tricks.
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- On Oct. 10, 2006, the web-based magazine World Politics
Watch ran a provocative story, echoing the new neo-con scheme, under the
headline ``Mideast Realignment: Could Iran Unite Arabs and Israelis?''
Noting the rumors, officially denied by both sides, that Prince Bandar
had secretly met in Jordan with a top Israeli government official, Frida
Ghitis wrote that ``a handful of Middle East observers were not surprised
to hear of possible talks between Israel and the kingdom. That's because
they political transformation is fear of Shi'ite Iran by Sunni Arabs. As
a result, the traditional enemy of Arabs, Israel, could gradually begin
developing a subtle but powerful alliance with Sunni Muslim regimes in
the Arab world.... It is this natural convergence of interests that has
the potential to recast the political landscape from the traditional one
of Arabs versus Israelis, which has dominated the Middle East since the
late 1940s, into a Sunni vs. Shi'a alignment, with Israel and Sunni governments
on the same side.''
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- This, Washington sources emphasize, is the latest neo-con
wet dream. For years the neo-cons have been preaching their own brand of
Leon Trotsky's ``Permanent Revolution,'' masked in the cry for ``democracy.''
From the start of the Bush-Cheney regime up to recent months, the number
one target of these latter-day Jacobins had been what Middle Eastern historians
referred to as the ``Sunni Stability Belt,'' the ruling combination of
hardline monarchies and dictatorships that kept the oil patch safe and
stable from the time of Sykes-Picot (1916) on. Now that the neo-con ``Shi'ite
Card'' has turned Iraq into Hell-on-Earth, the flexible neo-con fantasists
have modified their rhetoric, to suddenly find common cause with the very
Sunni Arab monarchs and dictators whom they targetted only months ago,
with such schemes as their 1996 ``A Clean Break.''
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- The neo-cons are shameless sophists, who have no problem
distorting the truth beyond recognition--if it suits their goal of perpetual
power. Will the Sunni Arab lions and the Israelis be so stupid as to walk
into this trap?
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- Stay tuned.
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