The information environment has become so polluted that it’s now nearly impossible to know whom or what to believe.
Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com reported yesterday on efforts by the Cheney cabal to use the Israel-Hezbollah conflict to execute the “Clean Break” strategy. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was authored in 1996 by, among others, neoconservative luminaries Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. Written at the request of then incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “A Clean Break” proposed rejection of the Oslo agreements and “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.”
Under the fold: riddles, enigmas and lies…
The neocon “core,” eager to apply military force against Syria and Iran, has lambasted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s attempts at diplomacy in the Middle East, accusing her of being “incompetent” and of having “reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda.”
One has to wonder if this attack on Rice isn’t part of a greater neoconservative stratagem. I certainly agree that she’s hapless–at least from appearances–but she’s hapless in a way that’s channeling events in the Middle East in the direction the neocons want it to go: toward an expansion of the present hostilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon into a full blown regional conflict.
She’s made unreasonable demands of Iran, telling the country the U.S. won’t negotiate with it until it halts its energy uranium enrichment program, something it has an “inalienable right” to do under the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty. And her handling of the Israel-Hezbollah situation has been a non-stop string of stumbles and fumbles. She doesn’t want a cease-fire one minute, she does want a cease-fire the next. We want Syria to do something about Hezbollah, but we refuse to talk directly to the Syrians about what exactly we want them to do. Rice tries to present herself as an “honest broker” in the Israel-Hezbollah negotiations even though the government she represents has been backing Israel by re-supplying it with precision guided bombs and signal intelligence from the National Security Agency.
But who’s really calling the shots on the cease-fire conditions? Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he won’t consider a cease-fire until an international peacekeeping force deploys along the Israel-Lebanon and Lebanon-Syria borders. Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, France’s ambassador to the UN, has balked at that idea, as well he should have. Putting a peacekeeping force in place before all belligerents concerned have agreed to a cease-fire is textbook insanity. Despite his lack of military experience, Olmert should know that. So should Condi Rice. So should John Bolton. So should Dick Cheney and Richard Perle and Tony Blair and the rest of them.
Once again, we’re seeing peace being “negotiated” around impossible conditions.
Conclusion? The people driving the bus are unforgivably incompetent or they’re bound and determined to ensure peace doesn’t happen. And just maybe they’re using Condi Rice, along with Syria and Iran, as the fall guys and gal they can point the finger at when they say, “See? We tried diplomacy and it didn’t work.”
Lurking at the bottom of the oracle’s bowl is the story–one that apparently originated in Aljazeera–that the go ahead for the Israeli operation against Hezbollah was agreed upon by Netenyahu, Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky and Dick Cheney at an American Enterprise Institute conference held in mid-June.
Speaking of oracle’s bowls, Wayne Madsen of Global Research and other media outlets says:
Our Washington sources claim that the U.S.-supported invasions of Gaza and Lebanon and the impending attacks on Syria and Iran represent the suspected event” predicted to take place prior to the November election in the United States and is an attempt to rally the American public around the Bush-Cheney regime during a time of wider war.
I don’t know who Wayne Madsen’s “Washington sources” are, or if they’re any more credible than Sidney Blumenthal’s sources. But I do know that what they’re telling Madsen and Blumenthal fits in with the rest of the “neo-connect the dots” picture.
I just hope Madsen and Blumenthal aren’t being used as part of a broader disinformation campaign. That would fit in with the neo-connect the dots picture too.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
