A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.....
The following excerpts come from pages 261-269 of Bamford's 'A Pretext
for War' book*:
"Then Bush addressed the sole items on the agenda for his first high
level national security meeting. The topics were not terrorism--a
subject he barely mentioned during the campaign --or nervousness over
China or Russia, but Israel and Iraq. From the very first moment, the
Bush foreign policy would focus on three key objectives: get rid of
Saddam, end American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process, and rearrange the dominoes in the Middle East. A key to the
policy shift would be the concept of pre-emption.
The blueprint for the new Bush policy had actually been drawn up five
years earlier by three of his top national security advisors. Soon to
be appointed to senior administration positions, they were Richard
Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser. Ironically the plan was
orginally intended not for Bush but for another world leader, Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At the time, the three officials were out of government and working
for conservative pro-Israel think tanks. Perle and Feith had
previously served in high level Pentagon positions during the
presidency of Ronald Reagan. In a very unusual move, the former--and
future--senior American officials were acting as a sort of American
privy council to the new Israeli Prime Minister. The Perle task force
to advise Netanyahu was set up by the Jerusalem based Institute for
Advanced Stategic and Political Studies, where Wurmser was working. A
key part of the plan was to get the United States to pull out of peace
negotiations and simply let Israel take care of the Palestinians as it
saw fit. "Israel," said the report, "can manage it's own affairs. Such
self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a
significant lever of pressure used against it in the past."
But the centerpiece of the recommendations was the removal of Saddam
Hussein as the first step in remaking the Middle East into a region
friendly, instead of hostile, to Israel. Their plan "A Clean Break: A
New Strategy for Securing the Realm," also signaled a radical
departure from the peace-oriented policies of former Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a member of an extreme right-
wing Israeli group.
As part of their "grand strategy" they recommended that once Iraq was
conquered and Saddam Hussein overthrown, he should be replaced by a
puppet leader friendly to Israel. Whoever inherits Iraq, they wrote,
dominates the entire Levant strategically. Then they suggested that
Syria would be the next country to be invaded. Israel can shape it's
strategic environment, they said.
This would be done, they recommended to Netanyahu, by re-establishing
the principle of pre-emption and by rolling back it's Arab neighbors.
From then on, the principle would be to strike first and expand, a
dangerous and provocative change in philosophy. They recommended
launching a major unprovoked regional war in the Middle East,
attacking Lebanon and Syria and ousting Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Then,
to gain the support of the American government and public, a phony
pretext would be used as the reason for the original invasion.
The recommendation of Feith, Perle and Wurmser was for Israel to once
again invade Lebanon with air strikes. But this time to counter
potentially hostile reactions from the American government and public,
they suggested using a pretext. They would claim that the purpose of
the invasion was to halt Syria's drug-money and counterfeiting
infrastructure located there. They were subjects in which Israel had
virtually no interest, but they were ones, they said, with which
America can sympathize.
Another way to win American support for a pre-emptive war against
Syria, they suggested, was by drawing attention to its weapons of mass
destruction program. This claim would be that Israel's war was really
all about protecting Americans from drugs, counterfeit bills, and WMD--
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
It was rather extraordinary for a trio of former, and potentially
future, high-ranking American government officials to become advisors
to a foreign government. More unsettling still was a fact that they
were recommending acts of war in which Americans could be killed, and
also ways to masquerade the true purpose of the attacks from the
American public.
Once inside Lebanon, Israel could let loose--to begin engaging
Hizballah, Syria and Iran, as the principle agents of aggression in
Lebanon. Then they would widen the war even further by using proxy
forces--Lebanese militia fighters acting on Israel's behalf (as Ariel
Sharon had done in the 80's)--to invade Syria from Lebanon. Thus, they
noted, they could invade Syria by establishing the precedent that
Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by
Israeli proxy forces.
As soon as that fighting started, they advised, Israel could begin
"striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove
insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper [emphasis in
original]."
The Perle task force even supplied Nentanyahu with some text for a
television address, using the suggested pretext to justify the war.
Years later, it would closely resemble speeches to justify their own
Middle East wars; Iraq would simply replace Syria and the United
States would replace Israel:
Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syria's require cautious
realism. One cannot sensibly assume the other side's good faith. It is
dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its
own people, openly aggressive towards its neighbors, criminally
involved with international drug traffickers and counterfeiters, and
supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations.
The task force then suggested that Israel open a second front in its
expanding war, with a focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in
Iraq--an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right--as a
means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions.
For years the killing of Saddam Hussein had been among the highest,
and most secret, priorities of the Israeli government. In one stroke
it would pay Saddam Hussein back for launching Scud missiles against
Israel, killing several people, during the Gulf War. Redrawing the map
of the Middle East would also help isolate Syria, Iraq's ally and
Israel's archenemy along its northern border. Thus, in the early
1990's, after the US-led war in the Gulf, a small elite team of
Israeli commandos was given the order to train in absolute secrecy for
an assassination mission to bring down the Baghdad ruler.
The plan, code-named Bramble Bush, was to first kill a close friend of
the Iraqi leader outside the country, someone from Hussein's hometown
of Tikrit. Then, after learning the date and time of the funeral to be
held in the town, a funeral Hussein was certain to attend, they would
have time to covertly infiltrate a team of commandos into the country
to carry out the assassination. The murder weapons were to be
specially modified "smart" missiles that would be fired at Hussein as
he stood in a crowd at the funeral.
But, the plan was finally abandoned after five members of the team
were accidently killed during a dry run of the operation.
Nevertheless, removing Saddam and converting Iraq from threat to ally
had long been at the top of Israel's wish list.
Now Perle, Feith, and Wurmser were suggesting something far more
daring--not just an assassination but a bloody war that would get rid
of Saddam Hussein and also change the face of Syria and Lebanon. Perle
felt their "Clean Break" recommendations were so important that he
personally hand-carried the report to Netanyahu.
Wisely, Netanyahu rejected the task force' plan. But now, with the
election of a receptive George W. Bush, they dusted off their pre-
emptive war strategy and began getting ready to put it to use.
The new Bush policy was an aggressive agenda for any president, but
especially for someone who had previously shown little interest in
international affairs. We're going to correct the imbalances of the
previous administration on the Mideast conflict, Bush told his freshly
assembled senior national security team in the Situation Room on
January 30, 2001. We're going to tilt it back toward
Israel. . . .Anybody here ever met Ariel Sharon? Only Colin Powell
raised his hand.
Bush was going to reverse the Clinton policy, which was heavily
weighted toward bringing the bloody conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians to a peaceful conclusion. There would be no more US
interference; he would let Sharon resolve the dispute however he saw
fit, with little or no regard for the situation of the Palestinians.
The policy change was exactly as recommended by the Perle task force's
"Clean Break" report.
I'm not going to go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon, Bush
told his newly gathered national security team. I'm going to take him
at face value. We'll work on a relationship based on how things go.
Then he mentioned a trip he had taken with the Republican Jewish
Coalition to Israel. We flew over the Palestinian camps. Looked real
bad down there, he said with a frown. Then he said it was time to end
America's efforts in the region. I don't see much we can do over there
at this point, he said.
Colin Powell, Secretary of State for only a few days, was taken by
surprise. The idea that such a complex problem, in which America had
long been heavily involved, could be simply brushed away with the
sweep of a hand made little sense. Fearing Israeli-led aggression, he
quickly objected.
He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon
and the Israeli army, recalled Paul O'Neill, who had be sworn in as
Secretary of the Treasury by Bush only hours before and seated at the
table. Powell told Bush, the consequences of that could be be dire,
especially for the Palestinians. But Bush just shrugged. Sometimes a
show of strength by one side can really clarify things, he said.
Powell seemed startled, said O'Neill.
Over the following months, to the concern of Powell, the Bush-Sharon
relationship became extremely tight. This is the best administration
for Israel since Harry Truman, said Thomas Neuman, executive director
of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs "JINSA" a pro-
Israel advocacy group. In an article in the Washington Post titled
"Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Middle East Policy," Robert G.
Kaiser noted the dramatic shift in policy.
For the First time, wrote Kaiser, a US administration and a Likud
government in Israel are pursuing nearly identical policies. Earlier
US administrations, from Jimmy Carter through Bill Clinton's, held
Likud and Sharon at arm's length, distancing the United States from
Likud's traditionally tough approach to the Palestinians. Using the
Yiddish term for supporters of Sharon's political party to the new
relationship between Bush and Sharon, a senior US government official
told Kaiser, "The Likudniks are really in charge now."
With America's long struggle to bring peace to the region quickly
terminated, George W. Bush could turn his attention to the prime focus
of his first National Security Council meeting; ridding Iraq of Saddam
Hussein. Condoleezza Rice led off the discussion. But rather than
mention anything about threats to the United States or weapons of mass
destruction, she noted only that Iraq might be the key to reshaping
the entire region. The words were practically lifted from the "Clean
Break" report, which had the rather imperial-sounding subtitles: "A
New Strategy for Securing the Realm."
Then Rice turned the meeting over to CIA Director George Tenet, who
offered a grainy overhead picture of a factory that he said "might" be
a plant "that produced either chemical or biological materials for
weapons manufacture." There were no missiles or weapons of any kind,
just some railroad tracks going to a building; truck activity; and a
water tower--things that can be found in virtually any city in the US.
Nor were there any human intelligence or signals intelligence reports.
There was no confirming intelligence, Tenet said.
It was little more than a shell game. Other photo and charts showed US
air activity over the "no fly-zone," but Tenet offered no more
intelligence. Nevertheless, in a matter of minutes the talk switched
from a discussion about very speculative intelligence to which targets
to begin bombing in Iraq.
By the time the meeting was over, Treasury Secretary O'Neill was
convinced that "getting Hussein was now the administration's focus,
that much was already clear," But, O'Neill believed, the real
destabilizing factor in the Middle East was not Saddam Hussein but the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict--the issue Bush had just turned his back
on. Ten years after the Gulf War, said O'Neill, "Hussein seemed caged
and defanged. Clearly, there were many forces destabilizing the
region, which we were now abandoning."
The war summit must also have seemed surreal to Colin Powell, who said
little during the meeting and had long believed that Iraq had not
posed a threat to the United States. As he would tell German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer just a few weeks later, "What we and other
allies have been doing in the region, have succeeded in containing
Saddam Hussein and his ambitions. . . .Containment has been a
successful policy."
In addition to the "Clean Break" recommendations, David Wurmser only
weeks before the NSC meeting had further elaborated on the way the
United States might go about launching a pre-emptive war throughout
the Middle East. America's and Israel's responses must be regional not
local, he said. Israel and the United Staes should adopt a coordinated
strategy, to regain the initiative and reverse their region-wide
strategic retreat. They should broaden the conflict to strike fatally,
not merely disarm, the center of radicalism in the region--the regimes
of Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, Tripoli, and Gaza. That would re-
establish the recognition that fighting with either the US or Israel
is suicidal. Many in the Middle East will then understand the merits
of being an American ally and of making peace with Israel.
In the weeks and months following the NSC meeting, Perle, Feith and
Wurmser began taking their places in the Bush administration. Perle
became chairman of the reinvigorated and powerful Defence Policy
Board, packing it with like-minded neoconservative super-hawks anxious
for battle. Feith was appointed to the highest policy position in the
Pentagon, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. And Wurmser moved into
a top policy position in the State Department before later becoming
Cheney's top Middle East expert.
With the Pentagon now under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz--both of whom had also long believed that
Saddam Hussein should have been toppled during the first Gulf War--the
war planners were given free reign. What was needed, however, was a
pretext--perhaps a major crisis. Crisis can be opportunities, wrote
Wurmser im his paper calling for an American-Israeli pre-emptive war
throughout the Middle East.
Seeing little reason, or intelligence justification, for war at the
close of the inaugural National Security Council meeting, Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill was perplexed. Who, exactly, was pushing this
foreign policy? He wondered to himself. And "why Saddam, why now, and
why [was] this central to US interests?"
The following excerpts come from pages 318-322 of Bamford's 'A Pretext
for War' book*:
"Hadley and Libby were part of another secret office that had been set
up within the White House. Known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG),
it was established in August 2002 by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card,
Jr., at the same time the OSP (Office of Special Plans) was
established in Feith's office. Made up of high-level administration
officials, its job was to sell the war to the general public, largely
through televised addresses and by selectively leaking the
intelligence to the media.
In June 2002, a leaked computer disk containing a presentation by
chief Bush strategist Karl Rove revealed a White House political plan
to use the war as a way to "maintain a positive issue environment."
But the real pro-war media blitz was scheduled for the fall and the
start of the election season "because from a marketing point of view,
you don't introduce new products in August," said Card.
At least once a week they would gather around the blonde conference
table downstairs in the Situation Room, the same place the war was
born on January 30, 2001, ten days into the Bush presidency. Although
real intelligence had improved very little in the intervening nineteen
months, the manufacturing of it had increased tremendously. In
addition to Hadley and Libby, those frequently attending the WHIG
meetings included Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, communications gurus
Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; and legislative
liaison Nicholas E. Calio.
In addition to ties between Hussein and 9/11, among the most important
products the group was looking to sell as Labor Day 2002 approached
were frightening images of mushroom clouds, mobile biological weapons
labs, and A-bomb plants, all in the hands of a certified "madman." A
key piece of evidence that Hussein was building a nuclear weapon
turned out to be the discredited Italian documents purchased on a
street corner from a con man.
The WHIG began priming its audience in August when Vice President
Cheney, on three occasions, sounded a shrill alarm over Saddam
Hussein's nuclear threat. There "is no doubt," he declared, that
Saddam Hussein "has weapons of mass destruction." Again and again, he
hit the same chord. "What we know now, from various sources, is that
he . . . continues to pursue a nuclear weapon." And again: "We do
know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system
to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build
a nuclear weapon."
Facing network television cameras, Cheney warned, "We now know that
Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. . . . Among
other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from
defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law." The relative was
Hussein Kamel, who defected to Jordan in 1995 with a great deal of
inside information on Iraq's special weapons programs, which he
managed. He was later convinced by Saddam to return to Iraq, but
executed by the ruler soon after his arrival.
But what Kamel told his interrogators was the exact opposite of what
Cheney was claiming he said. After numerous debriefings by officials
from the United States, the UN, and Jordan, he said on August 22,
1995, that Saddam had ended all uranium-enrichment programs at the
beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 and never restarted them. He also
made clear that "all weapons --biological, chemical, missile, nuclear--
were destroyed." Investigators were convinced that Kamel was telling
the truth, since he supplied them with a great deal of stolen raw data
and was later murdered by his father-in-law as a result. But that was
not the story Feith's OSP, Bush's WHIG, or Cheney wanted the American
public to hear.
At the same time that Cheney began his media blitz, Ariel Sharon's
office in Israel, as if perfectly coordinated, began issuing similar
dire warnings concerning Hussein and pressing the Bush administration
to go to war with Iraq. Like those from Cheney, pronouncements from
Sharon's top aide, Ranaan Gissin, included frightening "evidence" ---
equally phony --- of nuclear, as well as biological and chemical,
threats.
"As evidence of Iraq's weapons building activities, " said an
Associated Press report on the briefing, "Israel points to an order
Saddam gave to Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission last week to speed up
its work, said Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin. 'Saddam's going to be able
to reach a point where these weapons will be operational,' he
said. . . . Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that
Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical
weapons, Gissin said."
It was clear, based on the postwar reviews done in Israel, that
Israeli intelligence had no such evidence. Instead, the "evidence" was
likely cooked up in Sharon's own Office of Special Plans unit, which
was coordinating its activities with the Feith/Wurmser/Shulsky Office
of Special Plans. The joint get-Saddam media blitz would also explain
the many highly secret visits by the Israeli generals to Feith's
office during the summer..
"Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike
against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel
Minister said Friday," the AP report continued. " "Any postponement of
an attack on Iraq at this stage with serve no purpose,' Gissin told
the Associated Press. 'It will only give him [Saddam] more of an
opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass
destruction.'"
As expected. Sharon's callw as widely publicized and increased
pressure on Congress, which often bows to Israel's wishes, to vote in
favor of the Bush war resolution. "Israel To U.S.: Don't Delay Iraq
Attack," said a CBS News headline. "Israel is urging U.S. officials
not to delay a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, an aide
to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday," said the report.
The story also made the news in London, where the Guardian newspaper
ran the headline: "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq." It went
on, "With foreign policy experts in Washington becoming increasingly
critical of the wisdom of a military strike, and European governments
showing no willingness to support an attack, the Israeli prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, wants to make it clear that he is the US
president's most reliable ally."
It was as if the Feith-Wurmser-Perle "Clean Break" plan come full
circle. Their plan for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein and put a
pro-Israel regime in his place had been rejected by former Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Now Bush, with Sharon's support,
was about to put it into effect.
Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Tony Blair also
contributed to the war fever by releasing a much-hyped report that
reinforced the White House theme that Iraq was an imminent threat not
only to the United States but also to Britain. In addition to
including a reference to the bogus Iraq-Niger uranium deal, the report
-- later dubbed the "doggie dossier"--made another frightening claim.
It warned that Iraq could launch a deadly biological or chemical
attack with long-range ballistic missiles on British tourists and
servicemen in Cyprus with just forty-five minute's notice.
Only after the war would it be publicly revealed that the reference
was not to a strategic weapon that could reach Cyprus, but simply to a
short-range battlefield weapon that could not come anywhere close to
Cyprus. And because all the missiles were disassembled, even to fire
on them on the battlefield would take not forty-five minutes but days
of assembly and preparation. At least three times prior to the war,
Blair was warned by intelligence officials that the report was
inaccurate, but he made no public mention of it.. "
* The paperback edition of A Pretext for War includes new Afterword
