General Reveals Residual Neocon-Likudnik Haunting at Pentagon

By Kurt Nimmo
Dec. 19, 2006

For the neocons, it was not enough last month when Bush compared Iran to al-Qaeda. Forget the rhetoric, say the neocons. Bomb Iran, now. Of course, this is nothing new, as the Israel First neocons, at the behest of Likud-Kadima, the nationalist-religious parties, and the fanatical settler wing of the Israeli government, have called for mass murdering untold numbers in Iran for some time now.

However, with each passing day, the calls get more strident, more shrill, more desperate, especially with Israel’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Hezbollah last summer. Hezbollah over the border in Lebanon and a tarnished invincibility image, however, take a backseat to the cardinal fear of the Israelis—international pressure may force them to seriously negotiate with the Palestinians and, dread to imagine, work toward creating a Palestinian state.

“Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom the Israelis believed had been firmly co-opted into the U.S.-Israeli camp, has recently called for the economic boycott of the Palestinians to be lifted once the unity government is in place,” writes Patrick Seale for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. “This is all very bad news for right-wingers in Israel and their American supporters. They had hoped that the ‘land-for-peace’ formula of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 had been finally buried. They want to break the Palestinian national movement—hence Olmertā€™s unremitting assault on Gaza and the West Bank—rather than negotiate a political compromise with it. They want to seize more Palestinian land, not to withdraw to anything like the 1967 borders.”

In Israel, all political thought and activity orbits around preventing this shuddersome inevitability, and this is why the Iran-with-nukes fairy tale—or rather the Iran suicide story, i.e., a supposedly antisemitic and holocaust-denying Iran nuking Israel, inviting an armageddon-like response, at its base an absurdity—is at the very forefront of the “debate” over the “threat” of Islam to America, or rather America as viewed through the Israeli lens, as held up by Israel First neocons.

It is common knowledge, or should be, that the neocons long ago took over the Pentagon, an effort epitomized by former undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, a rabid Zionist. “Feithā€™s right-wing Zionism typifies neoconservatism. The Pentagonā€™s advocacy of an invasion of Iraq and, more recently, its hard-line postures with respect to Iran and Syria, must be considered in light of the Zionist convictions and Likud Party connections of those shaping the administrationā€™s Middle East policy,” notes Tom Barry, director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center.

In order to “understand why Israeli leaders would want a Middle East war,” writes Steve Sniegoski, it is “necessary to take a brief look at the history of the Zionist movement and its goals.” Although we never hear such things in the corporate media here, “the indigenous Palestinian population was an integral part of the Zionist effort to found a Jewish national state in Palestine” and the continued existence of the Palestinians remains an integral part of Israel’s “security,” including recent efforts to demonize Iran and initiate hostilities against the Islamic state. As an example of Iranian support of the Palestinian struggle, consider that Palestinian prime minister Ismael Haniyeh met with Iran’s Chairman of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani earlier this month. Iran’s vice president Parviz Davoudi “announced Iran’s readiness to put its valuable achievements and experiences in the political and urban development sectors at the disposal of Palestinians,” reported Arabic News at the time. Of course, the Israelis have spent a lot of time and effort making sure Palestine’s “urban development sectors” are reduced to rubble.

Israel may be able to bomb the densely populated Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza, flattening homes with American-made armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, but the task of expelling the Palestinians en masse, as they did in 1948, is a task beyond their means and currently outside the scope of political reality. Israeli foreign policy expert Yehoshafat Harkabi, writing “from a realist perspective,” explains Sniegoski, “concluded that Israel did not have the power to achieve that goal, given the strength of the Arab states, the large Palestinian population involved, and the vehement opposition of world opinion.” Harkabi, however, wrote his critique well before the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “war against terror,” the beginning of the “clash of civilizations,” promised to last a century or more. “Left unconsidered by Harkabi was the possibility that the United States would act as Israel’s proxy to achieve the overall goal,” concludes Sniegoski.

As we know, after Bush was “elected” (appointed) in 2000, “neoconservative ideologues” grabbed U.S. Middle East policy by the horns and aligned it with “Israeli hardliners,” that is to say ethnic cleansing settlers, determined if not to expel the Palestinians, at least make their collective lives a living hell on earth. “I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq,” writes retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. “This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.” Kwiatkowski writes elsewhere that “Israelā€™s hawks have long recognized that the co-optation, or barring that, the destruction of Iraq was necessary for a more permanent approach, the clean break, the assertion of Israelā€™s monopoly of force in the Middle East. Our country, for only two trillion dollars and a few hundred thousand dead and maimed on all sides, has facilitated the destruction of Iraq,” and, if the Pentagon neocons have their way, the destruction of Iran will follow in order, according to plan, as the United States is now Israel’s proxy, as Sniegoski reminds us.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler is not retired, so he has yet to experience one of JINSA’s (the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) infamous and stepfordizing Israel walking tours, but he is completely onboard with the now patented “clash of civilizations” palaver, an ideological stance well-ensconced in the Pentagon.

“The American people need to prepare for a long-duration war against radical Muslims who are set to fight for 50 to 100 years to create an Islamist state in the region,” writes Bill Gertz, seasoned Iraq invasion propaganda disseminator, for the Moonie Times, otherwise known as the Washington Times. Schissler is deputy director for the “war on terrorism” within the strategic plans office of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. “I don’t care about the politics. I care about people understanding the facts of what’s our enemy is thinking about, what’s our strategy to defeat them, and for [Americans] to understand that it will take a long fight, mostly because our enemy is committed to the long fight…. One of my concerns is how to maintain the American will, the public will over that duration,” that is to say 50, 100, 200 years, however long it takes to reduce the Middle East to a smoldering backwater.

“Our enemy,” naturally, just so happens to be Israel’s, as well. And although the frontline neocons—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle—are no longer at the Pentagon, their “Grand Strategy for the Middle East” (called the “Bush-Sharon Grand Strategy” in 2003 by Patrick Buchanan) lives on at the highest reaches of the Pentagon, as the remarks of Schissler reveal.