Neocons Again Lusting for Middle Eastern War

Boxed in by Neocons and the Media, Will Trump Launch Iran War?

President Trump did the smart thing last week by calling off a US airstrike on Iran over the downing of an American spy drone near or within Iranian territorial waters. According to press reports, the president over-ruled virtually all his top advisors – Bolton, Pompeo, and Haspel – who all wanted another undeclared and unauthorized US war in the Middle East.

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Iran: To Neocon or Not to Neocon, Is That the Question?

Neoconservatism has had a bad reputation since the Iraq War, a conflagration that was supposed to turn that Middle Eastern country into Denmark.

We all know how that went. Those of us who were neocons in those days (I was, more or less, as well as tons of people who now pretend otherwise) didn't bank on the tribalism of the region as well as the fundamentalist nature of Islam that resists, to put it mildly, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

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Trump's Neocons See Erdogan as Their Ticket to a Region-Wide M.E. War

Turkish troops and armored units are massed along Turkey’s southern border awaiting orders to invade northern Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to clear a ten mile-deep swath of land east of the Euphrates River in order to remove terrorist-linked militants (YPG) currently occupying the territory. The proposed offensive would put US Special Forces in the line of fire which significantly increases the likelihood of US casualties. If American troops are killed or wounded by the Turkish operation, Washington will respond in force leading to a potentially catastrophic face-off between the two NATO allies. The possibility of a violent clash between Turkey and the United States has never been greater than it is today.

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Who’s After Golan Heights Riches?

A planned push by U.S. senators to recognize Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights hides an effort by rich, powerful neocons and their Israeli backers to seize energy riches from what international law declares is part of Syria.

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How Neocons Turned American Jews Against Russia

Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour declaration of 1917. This long term plan of the British Empire continues today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan.

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The Neocon Zionist Plan for an Apocalyptic War in the Mideast

“This year’s extraordinary March Madness was engineered by NATO’s Operation Gladio to trigger yet another unprovoked war of aggression in the Middle East.  2018 has already seen a cascade of fabricated and provocative events that point to the New World Order globalists.  The same perps are planning more false flag terrorist attacks for this April and beyond.  These strategic acts of state-sponsored terrorism are being carried out by the leadership of the Zio-Anglo-American Axis in order to initiate the hot phase of World War 3.  There is both a script and a schedule being strictly followed by this criminal cabal of Neocon Zionists.  Each terror operation is always followed by a highly organized cover-up coordinated by the US, UK and Israeli intelligence communities, participating NATO militaries, Western mainstream media, major social network utilities, federal and local law enforcement agencies, as well as transnational corporate entities such as SERCO.  These same co-conspirators also conduct stunningly sophisticated psyops before, during and after these black ops known variously as Operations Gladio A, B and C depending on their purpose and location.

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US Destabilization Plan for Iran and the Middle East, and the Need to Strengthen the Resistance

In the previous section (1), I examined the US agenda of global domination (2) under the direct influence of the Neo-Conservative “Project for the New American Century” (3).  In this section, the question will be further investigated in the framework of another Neocon project, the “Greater Middle East Initiative” (4). The initiative which is claimed to promote ‘democracy and human rights’(5) in the region, was part of President Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom,” by which the US-led expansion of political rights and political participation in the Muslim world is imputed to combat the appeal of Islamist extremism.

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Arab Neoconservatives And Peace In The Persian Gulf

Recent years have seen a rise of what could be described as Arab neoconservatives: ambitious leaders such as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed. Their distinctive feature is a heavy reliance on military power to re-shape the political map of the Middle East in their favor, with the overarching aim of pushing back against Iran, a policy they share with the original, American neoconservatives.

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I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again.

Fifteen years ago this week, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, spoke at the United Nations to sell pre-emptive war with Iraq. As his chief of staff, I helped Secretary Powell paint a clear picture that war was the only choice, that when “we confront a regime that harbors ambitions for regional domination, hides weapons of mass destruction and provides haven and active support for terrorists, we are not confronting the past, we are confronting the present. And unless we act, we are confronting an even more frightening future.”

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Iraq, Syria, Iran…Are We To Destroy Iran Next?

Years ago there was a plan, A Clean Break: Project for the New American Century(PNAC), to wreck the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians and to re-mold the Middle East. It first involved destroying Iraq or in the discredited words of Paul Wolfowitz, “The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.”

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Giving Peace Very Little Chance

After nearly 15 years of Mideast war – with those conflicts growing ever grimmer – you might expect that peace would be a major topic of the 2016 presidential race. Instead, there has been a mix of warmongering bluster from most candidates and some confused mutterings against endless war from a few.

No one, it seems, wants to risk offending Official Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment that is ready to castigate any candidate who suggests that there are other strategies – besides more and more “regime changes” – that might extricate the United States from the Middle East quicksand.

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More Neocon Hypocrisy in the Mideast

Shortly afterward Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy presented a piece titled “Islamists Are Not Our Friends,” which illustrates almost in caricatured form some of the misleading attributes of the single-bucket attitude that I was discussing.

Ross’s article probably is not grounded in Islamophobia, although it partly appeals to such sentiment. The piece ostensibly is about how “a fundamental division between Islamists and non-Islamists” is a “new fault line in the Middle East” that provides “a real opportunity for America” and ought to guide U.S. policy toward the region.

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The Human Price of Neocon Havoc

Whether the tragedy is four boys getting blown apart while playing on a beach in Gaza or nearly 300 killed from a suspected missile strike on a Malaysian Airliner over Ukraine or the thousands upon thousands of other innocent victims slaughtered in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other recent war zones, the underlying lesson is that the havoc encouraged by America’s neocons results in horrendous loss of human life.

While clearly other players share in this blame, including the soldiers on the ground and the politicians lacking the courage to compromise, the principal culprits in the bloodshed of the past dozen years have been the neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies who can’t seem to stop stirring up trouble in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”

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The bloody shirt

"Neocon war hawks" upset at the resurgence of Sunni and al Quaeda in Anbar in Iraq are waving the "bloody shirt" to invoke the memory of Fallujah, urging U.S. intervention. To understand the Middle East it is necessary to have a map of the area, be aware of who borders who and who are Sunni and who are Shia.

Iraq, was a Sunni dominated state with a large Shia minority until the US invasion in 2003. Iraq had fought an inconclusive war against Shia dominated Iran, from 1980 to 1988, ending in a stalemate. Iraq remained a counter balance to Iran.

Iran's long-term rival, Saudi Arabia, is Sunni dominated, and with its powerful economic position has rivaled Iran for control of the Persian Gulf promoting jihadists, like al Quaeda, and spreading its hard line wahhabi brand of Islam. 

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The ‘Surge’ Myth’s Deadly Result

Central to the neocons’ narrative on the current Mideast crisis – as Islamic terrorists seize territory in Iraq and Syria – is that George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq in 2007 had achieved “victory at last,” but was squandered by President Obama. But that’s a self-serving myth, as Robert Parry wrote in 2012.

To the degree that neocons do recognize the outcome of the two wars as mostly disasters, the blame will be placed on Obama, who will be said to have not only betrayed Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq but failed to pull off his own in Afghanistan.

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Neocons and Democracy: Egypt as a Case Study

If one thing has become clear in the wake of last week’s military coup d’etat against Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, it’s that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. Unlike protecting Israeli security and preserving its military superiority over any and all possible regional challenges (which is a core neoconservative tenet), democracy promotion is something that neoconservatives disagree among themselves about — a conclusion that is quite inescapable after reviewing the reactions of prominent neoconservatives to last week’s coup in Cairo. Some, most notably Robert Kagan, are clearly committed to democratic governance and see it pretty much as a universal aspiration, just as many liberal internationalists do. An apparent preponderance of neocons, such as Daniel Pipes, the contributors to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and Commentary’s ’Contentions’ blog, on the other hand, are much clearer in their view that democracy may be a universal aspiration, but it can be a disaster in practice, especially when the wrong people get elected, in which case authoritarian rulers and military coups are much to be preferred.

The latter group harkens back to the tradition established by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams, among others, in the late 1970’s when anti-communist “friendly authoritarians” — no matter their human rights records — were much preferred to left-wingers who claimed to be democrats but whose anti-imperialist, anti-American or pro-Palestinian sympathies were deemed too risky to indulge. These leftists have now been replaced by Islamists as the group we need “friendly authoritarians” (or “friendly militaries”) to keep under control, if not crush altogether.

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How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast

Newly available documents reveal how Ronald Reagan's neocon aides cleared the way for Israeli arm sales to Iran in 1981, shortly after Iran freed 52 U.S. hostages whose captivity doomed Jimmy Carter's reelection. The move also planted the seeds of the Iran-Contra scandal, reports Robert Parry.

Just six months after Iran freed 52 Americans hostages in 1981, senior Reagan administration officials secretly endorsed third-party weapons sales to Iran, a move to align U.S. policy with Israeli desires to sell arms to the Islamic republic then at war with Iraq, according to documents recently released by the National Archives.

This Israeli arms pipeline to Iran already was functioning at the time of the policy shift on July 21, 1981. Three days earlier, on July 18, an Argentine plane strayed off course and crashed (or was shot down) inside the Soviet Union exposing Israel's secret arms shipments to Iran, which apparently had been going on for months.

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How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast

Just six months after Iran freed 52 Americans hostages in 1981, senior Reagan administration officials secretly endorsed third-party weapons sales to Iran, a move to align U.S. policy with Israeli desires to sell arms to the Islamic republic then at war with Iraq, according to documents recently released by the National Archives.

This Israeli arms pipeline to Iran already was functioning at the time of the policy shift on July 21, 1981. Three days earlier, on July 18, an Argentine plane strayed off course and crashed (or was shot down) inside the Soviet Union exposing Israel’s secret arms shipments to Iran, which apparently had been going on for months.

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More Evidence Neocon Network Behind “Innocence of Muslims” Video

In an article breaking down the linkages behind the “Innocence of Muslims” video, Justin Raimondo points to a chart on The Flower Throwers website:

Drilling down the chart, we see the same old cast of neocon characters who have worked tirelessly to keep the anti-Muslim agenda front and center and thus feed the war on terror against Israel’s enemies. Principle among these are David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and Aubrey Chernick.

Chernick is the lesser known of the three. He runs a Los Angeles-area software company named the National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination and is a former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank for Democrat neocons (disgraced sexting Democrat Anthony Weiner once described this faction as “the ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] wing of the Democratic Party”). WINEP is a project of AIPAC, the Israeli pressure group. Chernick’s fortune is dedicated to funding the Anti-Defamation League and CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), a group that counters negative reporting on Israel.

Daniel Pipes is the well-known Islamophobe who founded the Middle East Forum (MEF), an organization that attacks academics for criticizing Israel. MEF specializes in drawing attention to the so-called “Islamic network” in the United States. “Quietly, lawfully, peacefully, Islamists do their work throughout the West to impose aspects of Islamic law, win special privileges for themselves, shut down criticism of Islam, create Muslim-only zones, and deprive women and non-Muslims of their full civil rights,” Pipes wrote in 2008. He has supported many Likudnik and neocon initiatives and organizations, including the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Israel-based advocacy outfit Jerusalem Summit, and the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon. Pipes was also a scholar at WINEP.

David Horowitz, a former radical Marxist, is a key member of the neocon intelligentsia. As Infowars.com has noted, Horowitz has taken money from CIA operative Richard Mellon Scaife. The David Horowitz Freedom Center is affiliated with Jihad Watch, the virulent anti-Muslim website run by anti-Islam blogger and author Robert Spencer, who along with Islamophobe Pam Geller (who founded Stop Islamization of America) plays an instrumental role in the “Innocence of Muslims” operation. Horowitz has described Islam as a religion of “hate, violence and racism.” Both Horowitz and Pipes have donated money to Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim politician.
The more we learn about the “Innocence of Muslims” video, the more obvious it becomes that it was devised by a group of Islamophobes and hardcore radical Israel supporters to further enflame tensions in the Middle East.

The neocon Clash of Civilizations narrative requires an ultimate conflict between the West and Islam. We are now witnessing neocons in both establishment parties and Likudnik fanatics pushing religious and ethnic hatred and conflict to its zenith as the United States and Israel prepare a coordinated attack on Iran that will undoubtedly result in a world war with cataclysmic proportion.