Neocons dream of Lebanon
by Jordan Green, for ZNET
July 23, 2003


They are a prominent group of Washington conservative intellectuals who helped incubate the ideas behind the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Now, they are pressing for regime change in neighboring Syria and Iran. At the center of their passions is Lebanon, a country once riven by sectarian violence, where pro-Western, Christian, and free-market forces hope to rise again. In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared, “The gravest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.” Building to his point, he offered a grim reckoning to the people of Iraq: “Your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.”

It is no secret that many of the ideas that launched the war in Iraq – intertwining weapons of mass destruction and terrorism as evil twins, scorn for the sovereignty of disgraced governments, and belief in the transforming force of American power – have been nurtured and refined at the American Enterprise Institute, a 60-year old Washington think tank. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces, AEI Vice President Danielle Pletka gave a blunt summation of the institute’s neo-conservative philosophy: “The question of whether we have the right to go in and remove a dictator ought to be a part of our thinking.”

Now, nearly a month into the American occupation of Iraq, many neoconservatives have set their sights on Syria and Iran. The government of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, in particular, has felt the ire of the Bush administration in the wake of allegations that it provided Saddam Hussein with night-vision equipment and allowed volunteer anti-American fighters cross its border to join the war in Iraq. American officials and neoconservative intellectuals have also charged that Syria is pursuing a chemical and biological weapons program.

In recent days, the administration has tempered its hostility, allowing Secretary of State Colin Powell to pursue diplomacy in Damascus. But Syria remains noncommittal on one key U.S. demand: ending support for Hezbollah, an Islamic militia in southern Lebanon that Washington regards as a terrorist group.

One of the most enthusiastic proponents of Syrian regime change is Michael Ledeen, an AEI scholar. In 1985, as a consultant to the National Security Council, he set up meetings between Israelis and a group of international arms dealers to help broker the arms-for-hostage deal with Iran. In an article posted to AEI’s Web site on April 30, Ledeen warned that Syria and Iran will try to implement a “second Lebanon strategy” in Iraq by sponsoring thousands of suicide bombers ready to carry out attacks against U.S. and British soldiers. In an op/ed article in Canada’s National Post in early April, Ledeen wrote, “It’s time to bring down the other terror masters. Faster, please.”

“Hezbollah is the world’s leading terrorist group,” charges Ledeen. “They’re an Iranian-created group housed in Syrian-occupied Lebanon.”

Animosity towards Hezbollah – thought to be responsible for the deaths of 241 American marines killed in a 1983 suicide bombing operation – runs deep in the current administration. “They have a blood debt to us,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage is reported to have said last year. “We’re not going to forget it.”

Lebanon, it turns out, is something of a pivot point for the neoconservatives’ hopes and fears for the Middle East. Near the end of the Clinton presidency, a group of intellectuals, business people, and retired military officials who called themselved the Lebanon Study group signed their names to a 48-page document called “Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role.”

Among them were AEI Resident Fellow Richard Perle, an unpaid advisor to the Pentagon; and AEI scholar Douglas Feith and Iran-Contra figure Elliot Abrams, both of whom now hold posts in the Bush administration: Feith, as undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon, and Abrams, as the National Security Council’s point man for the Middle East. Other signers include Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel of New York, AEI Senior Fellow Jeane Kirkpatrick, and New York oil financier Philip Epstein.

“Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon” synthesizes ideas of American triumphalism, Christian exceptionalism, and fear of weapons of mass destruction. In its sequencing, it suggests the path to war with Iraq by urging sanctions against Syria, backed by military force. Beginning with the premise that “Lebanon occupies a strategically vital corner of the world,” the study goes on to warn of dangers to the Christians of the country. "Preserving Lebanon’s Christian communities," the study’s authors wrote, “becomes the cornerstone for safeguarding the country’s special freedoms that uplift all its communities.”

The tract ends with a bracing call for renewed American assertiveness: "The Vietnam legacy and the sour memories of the dead American marines in Beirut notwithstanding, the U.S. has entered a new era of undisputed military supremacy, coupled with an appreciable drop in human losses on the battlefield. But this opportunity will not wait, for as WMD capabilities spread, the risks of such action will rapidly grow. If there is to be decisive action, it will have to be sooner rather than later."

The document was co-authored by Ziad Abdelnour and Daniel Pipes. Abdelnour is a New York financier with dual Lebanese-American citizenship, and president of the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon. Pipes, as president of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, is a prolific editorialist known for his staunch support of Israel.

Today, Pipes deflects questions about whether he would support American ground forces marching on Damascus. “That’s a red herring,” he says. “Nobody in the administration has been talking about military action against Syria.”

Abdelnour comes from a prominent Lebanese family: his father, an industrialist, and his uncle are former members of the Lebanese parliament. Abdelnour founded the USCFL in 1997 for the purpose of “educating the public as to Lebanon’s strategic and moral significance as an ally of the United States and an outpost of Western values in the Middle East,” according to the group’s Web site. His resume cites his “extensive experience in conceptualizing and incorporating worldwide geopolitical and intelligence data into effective strategic business initiatives.”

While several members of the Lebanon Study Group have embedded themselves in the Bush administration, the latest policy developments have come from Capitol Hill. Last month, Rep. Engel, as the lone member of the legislative branch in the group, introduced the “Syria Accountability & Lebanese Sovereignty Act” in the House. In threatening Syria with sanctions unless it withdraws from Lebanon and ends its support of Hezbollah, the language of the bill bears the stamp of “Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon.” On May 2, Senators Rick Santorum and Barbara Boxer the bill in the Senate, and an earlier version has been endorsed by the Christian Coalition.

“Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is defeated, it’s time to get serious about Syria,” said Engel in a prepared statement. “The United States must not tolerate Syria’s continued support for the most deadly terrorist organizations in the world, its development of weapons of mass destruction, and its occupation of Lebanon.”

The charge of Syrian occupation of Lebanon is a fault line of historical grievance in the Middle East, just as it is in the West Bank and Gaza for Palestinians and Israelis. Syria has 20,000 troops stationed in Lebanon and is the only foreign military that remains there since the U.S. Marines and UN international peacekeepers withdrew in the 1980s, and the Israeli military was driven out by Hezbollah in May 2000. The claim by activists such as Abdelnour that Lebanon is an occupied nation undermines the legitimacy of its government, a precarious religious power-sharing arrangement headed by Christian President Emile Lahoud.

The issue of Hezbollah is also a cause of deep controversy in regional political contentions. The Islamist militia, once backed by Iran, carried out a successful war of guerilla attacks and suicide bombings against the Israeli military. Hezbollah serves as a model for Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza. Asked by Secretary Powell to crack down on Hezbollah, Lahoud recently responded, “Hezbollah is a respected and legitimate part of the Lebanese people and government, and is not a terrorist group.”

Outside the corridors of power in Washington, some geopolitical analysts echo that sentiment. “The Bush group ignores all the medical, educational and humanitarian work Hezbollah does,” wrote media activist Sam Hamod in a recent article in CounterPunch magazine, “in spite of the fact that the constitutionally elected and representative Lebanese government recognizes them as an important part of the government and recognizes them as the guardians of the south of Lebanon against Israel.”

But that view is not widely held in the United States. Admiral Stansfield Turner, who served as director of the CIA under President Carter, and is considered a foreign policy moderate, says of Hezbollah and its Palestinian counterpart Hamas: “Those groups are impediments to democracy in the sense that if they see progress made they’re going to retaliate and inflame tensions. Getting Syria to throttle down its support for these groups is important.”

Flynt Leverett, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who recently served in the National Security Council, shares the neoconservatives’ contention that Syria is a threat to U.S. interests as a supporter of terrorism that has developed weapons of mass destruction. But he cautions against their aggressive rhetoric of “regime change.” “Given Mr. Assad’s political constraints, sticks alone will not produce more than short-term tactical adjustments in Syrian behavior," he wrote recently in the New York Times op/ed pages.

While the Bush administration’s approach to Syria is being negotiated between the State Department and the Pentagon, the American Enterprise Institute is also keeping its attention on Iran. On May 6, the think tank convened a star-studded cast of neocon intellectuals and policymakers for a "black coffee briefing" entitled "The Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy and the War on Terror."

The panel included scholar Bernard Lewis, whose books on Arab and Islamic history are said to be on Vice President Dick Cheney’s reading list; Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who serves as the ranking member of the Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Subcommittee; Uri Lubrani, a senior advisor to the Israeli Defense Ministry and former Israeli government coordinator for South Lebanon; Morris Amitai of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; and the AEI’s Ledeen.

For all the risks of resentment toward American power and sectarian strife in the region, the neoconservatives maintain an idealistic faith that the attraction of the democracy will smooth over the bitter realities of war. “Arabs want the same thing as you and I,” said the AEI’s Pletka. “They want a better life for their children, and they want to be able to address their grievances without getting shot.”

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WMD Scientist's Death Rocks British Government
Fri July 18, 2003 01:52 PM ET

By Gideon Long

LONGWORTH, England (Reuters) - A mild-mannered British scientist was found dead in the woods Friday after being unwittingly dragged into a fierce political dispute about intelligence used to justify war on Iraq.

British police said they had found a body matching that of soft-spoken defense ministry biologist David Kelly, a former U.N. weapons inspector, who had been grilled in parliament over allegations the government hyped intelligence to justify war.

The political fallout was immediate. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who learned about the discovery of the body while flying from Washington to Tokyo, promised an independent judicial inquiry into the death if the body was confirmed to be Kelly's.

But opponents called for Blair to return and face a broader probe into the case he made for war. The shock even sent Britain's pound tumbling half a percent on currency markets as traders weighed the severity of the crisis for Blair.

Kelly's family reported him missing overnight after he went for a walk in the Oxfordshire countryside Thursday with no coat and stayed out despite a rainstorm.

He had denied being the source for BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who said in May a senior intelligence source had told him the government had "sexed up" intelligence on Iraq.

That report sparked parliamentary hearings into how the government made the case for war, forced Blair onto the defensive and pitted government officials against the BBC.

News of Kelly's death completely overshadowed Blair's rapturous reception by the U.S. Congress Thursday, although there was no indication the prime minister would turn back from a scheduled week-long trip to Asia.

RELUCTANT WITNESS

"The prime minister is obviously very distressed for the family of Dr. Kelly," a spokesman said aboard the flight.

Opposition Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith said Blair should return from abroad and any inquiry should cover the entire issue of intelligence used to justify the war.

"If I was the prime minister, I would cut short this visit and return home. There are very many questions that will need to be asked over the coming days," he said.

Kelly had clearly been reluctant to enter the public debate over Iraq intelligence.

Speaking so softly he could barely be heard, he admitted to parliament's foreign affairs committee he had met Gilligan, but denied telling him that Blair's communications chief Alastair Campbell had ordered intelligence to be hyped.

Kelly appeared shell-shocked when parliamentarians at the hearing described him as "chaff" and a government "fall guy" put forward to shield top officials from blame.

Kelly's wife Jane described Kelly as deeply upset, family friend Tom Mangold, a television journalist, told ITV News.

"She told me he had been under considerable stress, that he was very, very angry about what had happened at the committee, that he wasn't well," Mangold said.

The government said that if Kelly was Gilligan's source, their differing accounts proved the BBC story was wrong. Gilligan, who never named his source, was questioned at a closed-door hearing around the time Kelly vanished Thursday.

(Additional reporting by Peter Graff and Dominic Evans in London, and Katherine Baldwin in Tokyo)

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Iraq: Schemers have their way
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - With demands for a full-scale investigation of the manipulation of intelligence by the administration of President George W Bush mounting steadily, it appears increasingly clear that key officials and their allies outside the administration decided to use the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks themselves.

Within the administration, the principals appear to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney and his national-security advisor, I Lewis Libby, among others in key posts in the National Security Council and the State Department.

Outside the administration, key figures included close friends of both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey - both members of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB); Frank Gaffney, head of the arms industry-funded Center for Security Policy; and William Kristol, editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), among others.

PNAC, which is based on the fifth floor of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) building in downtown Washington, was founded in 1997 with the signing of a statement of principles calling for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity", signed by 25 prominent neo-conservatives and right-wingers, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Libby as well as several others who are now senior Bush administration officials.

A close examination of the public record indicates that all of these individuals - both in and outside the administration - were actively preparing the ground within days, even hours, after the September 11 attacks, for an eventual attack on Iraq, whether or not it had any role in the attacks or any connection to al-Qaeda.

The challenge, in their view, was to convince the public that such links either did indeed exist or were sufficiently likely to exist that a preventive strike against Iraq was warranted. Their success in that respect was stunning, although, in order to pull it off, they also had to distort and exaggerate the evidence being collected by US intelligence agencies.

A hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq with the September 11 attacks and al-Qaeda surfaced last month in a televised interview of General Wesley Clark on the popular public-affairs program Meet the Press. In answer to a question, Clark asserted, "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after September 11, to pin September 11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.

"It came from the White House, it came from other people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on September 11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"

While Clark has not yet identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney and Kristol were using the same language in their media appearances on September 11 and over the following weeks. "This could not have been done without help of one or more governments," Perle told the Washington Post on September 11. "Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments."

Woolsey was more direct. "It's not impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the government ... the Iraqi government has been quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and - on some matters - has had direct contact with [Osama] bin Laden," he told one news anchor in a series of at least half a dozen national television appearances on September 11 and 12, 2001.

That same evening, Kristol echoed Woolsey on National Public Radio. "I think Iraq is, actually, the big, unspoken sort of elephant in the room today. There's a fair amount of evidence that Iraq has had very close associations with Osama bin Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it had associations with the previous effort to destroy the World Trade Center [in 1993]."

While Kristol and company were trying to implicate Saddam Hussein in the public debate, their friends in the administration were pushing hard in the same direction. Cheney, according to published accounts, had already confided to friends even before September 11 that he hoped the Bush administration would remove Saddam from power.

But the evidence about Rumsfeld is even more dramatic. According to an account by veteran CBS newsman David Martin last September, Rumsfeld was "telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks" five hours after an American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon.

Martin attributed his account in part to notes that had been taken at the time by a Rumsfeld aide. They quote the defense chief asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether [it was ] good enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time, not only UBL" (Osama bin Laden). The administration should "go massive ... sweep it all up, things related and not", the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying.

Wolfowitz shared those views, according to an account of the meeting of September 15-16, 2001, of the administration's war council at Camp David provided by the Washington Post's Bill Woodward and Dan Balz. In the "I was there" style for which Woodward, whose access to powerful officials since his investigative role in the Watergate scandal almost 30 years ago is unmatched, is famous, he reported: "Wolfowitz argued [at the meeting] that the real source of all the trouble and terrorism was probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of September 11 created an opportunity to strike. Now, Rumsfeld asked again: 'Is this the time to attack Iraq?'

"Powell objected," the Woodward and Balz account continued, citing Secretary of State Colin Powell's argument that US allies would not support a strike on Iraq. "If you get something pinning September 11 on Iraq, great," Powell is quoted as saying. "But let's get Afghanistan now. If we do that, we will have increased our ability to go after Iraq - if we can prove Iraq had a role."

On their return to Washington, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz convened a secret, two-day meeting of the DPB chaired by Perle. Instead of focusing on the first steps in carrying out a "war on terrorism", however, the discussions centered on how Washington could use September 11 to strike at Iraq, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC), neither the State Department nor the CIA was invited to participate in the meeting.

After those deliberations concluded, however, Woolsey was sent - it remains unclear under whose authority - to London to collect evidence of any possible ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. Although he returned empty-handed, that did not prevent him and his close associates on the DPB from writing and speaking out in the press about Saddam's alleged - and completely unconfirmed - role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and any other rumor, dubiously sourced story, or allegations by INC-supplied defectors that appeared to implicate Saddam in terrorist activities in general and with al-Qaeda in particular.

But even as the DPB was locked in the Pentagon, Kristol was gathering signatures on a letter to Bush, eventually published in the PNAC's name in the Washington Times on September 20, 2001, advising him on targets in his war on terrorism, an agenda that so far has anticipated to a remarkable degree the evolution of Bush's actual policy. In addition to calling for the ouster of the Taliban and war on al-Qaeda - as well as cutting off the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and other moves - the letter stated explicitly that Saddam Hussein must go regardless of his relationship to the attacks or al-Qaeda.

"It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States," it said. "But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

The letter was signed by 38 prominent neo-conservatives, many of whom - especially Perle, Kristol, Gaffney, William Bennett, DPB member Eliot Cohen, AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht and Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, Clifford May and Randy Scheunemann (who would go on to head the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq) - would emerge, along with Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous champions of war with Iraq outside the administration.

It was the same people who, on behalf of their friends in the Pentagon, also mounted an almost constant campaign against the CIA, the State Department and anyone else who tried to slow the drive to war or question the administration's assertions about Saddam's links with al-Qaeda or the threat he posed to US security.

Their success is beyond question. By last October, just before the House of Representatives was to vote on giving Bush authority to go to war, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of adult respondents believed that "Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11 attacks".

While that percentage has declined over time, a strong majority was found late last month to believe that Saddam supported al-Qaeda, and a remarkable 52 percent believe that the US has actually found "clear evidence in Iraq" of close ties between the two. A mere 7 percent in the latter poll said they believed "there was no connection at all", the finding that most accurately reflects the views of the US intelligence community.

(Inter Press Service)

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الجنود الدنماركيون في العراق
تلقوا كاسحة ثلوج !

اصيب الجنود الدنماركيون المنتشرون في جنوبي العراق بالذهول عندما ارسلت لهم كاسحة ثلوج ومعدات لإزالة الثلج تحت شمس العراق الحارقة، وهم يشكون بصورة عامة من معدات رديئة ومن عدد غير كاف من المدرعات، وذلك وفقا ما اوردت صحيفة <<اكسترا بلاديت>>.
وأكد الناطق باسم هيئة اركان الجيوش الدنماركية الميجور يان برينك لوكالة <<فرانس برس>> <<نقر بحصول اخطاء في ارسال المعدات، كإرسال كاسحة ثلوج الى العراق، وهو امر يبدو مضحكا. لكننا نحاول معالجة النواقص ونعمل بكد لإرسال المعدات الضرورية لرجالنا>>.
وقالت الصحيفة مستندة الى شهادة عسكريين في الوحدة الدنماركية المؤلفة من 380 عنصرا والمتمركزة منذ حزيران في القرنة على مسافة 75 كيلومترا شمالي البصرة، ان بعض المدرعات غير مجهز بنظام تبريد، في حين ترتفع الحرارة في العراق الى اكثر من خمسين درجة.
ويذكر الجنود من النواقص في معداتهم عدم توافر سترات واقية من الرصاص تناسب قياسهم، وأوتاد لنصب الخيم ومادة المورفين للفرق الطبية. كذلك انتقدوا عدم تعديل اجهزة التبريد بحيث تقاوم درجات الحرارة المرتفعة، ما ادى الى اصابتها بأعطال.
وكانت دهشة الجنود كبيرة حين تلقوا آلات لجز العشب وكاسحة ثلوج ومعدات لإزالة الثلج وأملاح لإذابة الجليد. ولم يخف وزير الدفاع الدنماركي سفيند اغي ينسبي استياءه أمس، منتقدا عدم الإعداد بشكل جيد لمهمة الجيش الدنماركي في العراق. (ا ف ب)

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On Goree Island, Bush Visit Sparks Anger
Tue Jul 8,12:00 PM ET

By Clar Ni Chonghaile

GOREE ISLAND, Senegal (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) made an eloquent speech but did not win many friends during his brief visit to Goree Island off Senegal on Tuesday.

"We are very angry. We didn't even see him," said Fatou N'diaye, a necklace seller watching dignitaries file past to return to the mainland at the end of Bush's tour.

N'diaye and other residents of Goree, site of a famous slave trading station, said they had been taken to a football ground on the other side of the quaint island at 6 a.m. and told to wait there until Bush had departed, around midday.


Bush came to Goree to tour the red-brick Slave House, where Africans were kept in shackles before being shipped across a perilous sea to a lifetime of servitude.


He then gave an eloquent speech about the horrors of slavery, standing at a podium under a sizzling sun near a red-stone museum, topped by cannon pointing out to the sea.


The cooped-up residents were not impressed.


"It's slavery all over again," fumed one father-of-four, who did not want to give his name. "It's humiliating. The island was deserted."


White House officials said the decision to remove the locals was taken by Senegalese authorities. But there was no doubt who the residents blamed.


"We never want to see him come here again," said N'diaye, hiking her loose gown onto her shoulders with a frown.


As the sun rose over Goree before Bush's arrival, the only people to be seen on the main beach were U.S. officials and secret service agents. Frogmen swam through the shallows and hoisted themselves up to peer into brightly painted pirogues.


Normally, the island teems with tourists, Senegal's ubiquitous traders, hawkers of cheap African art, photographers offering to take pictures and all the expected trappings of a tourist hot-spot in one of the world's poorest countries.


On Tuesday, shutters on the yellow and red colonial-style houses remained shut. The cafes were closed and the narrow pier deserted, apart from security agents manning a metal detector, near the sandy beach. A gunship patrolled offshore.


"We understand that you have to have security measures, since September 11, but to dump us in another place...? We had to leave at 6 a.m. I didn't have time to bathe, and the bread did not arrive," the father-of-four said.


"We were shut up like sheep," said 15-year-old Mamadou.


Many residents compared Bush's hour-long visit unfavorably to the island tour by former President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) in 1998.


"When Clinton came, he shook hands, people danced," said former Mayor Urbain Alexandre Diagne.


As the Bush roadtrip moved on, Goree was returning to normal with children once again diving into the shallows and clambering over the now inoffensive pirogues.

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