{"id":21513,"date":"2012-08-09T17:18:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T13:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=21513"},"modified":"2012-08-09T17:19:32","modified_gmt":"2012-08-09T13:19:32","slug":"american-neocons-eye-arab-spring-spoils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/showcase\/american-neocons-eye-arab-spring-spoils\/","title":{"rendered":"American ‘NeoCons’ Eye Arab Spring Spoils"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The neoconservatives are back with a vengeance. While popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other Arab countries had briefly rendered them irrelevant in the region, Western intervention in Libya signaled a new opportunity. Now Syria promises to usher a full return of neoconservatives into the Middle East fray.<\/p>\n

\u201cWashington must stop subcontracting Syria policy to the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. They are clearly part of the anti-Assad effort, but the United States cannot tolerate Syria becoming a proxy state for yet another regional power,\u201d wrote Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (Washington Post, July 20).<\/p>\n

Pletka, like many of her peers from neoconservative, pro-Israeli \u2018think tanks\u2019, should be a familiar name among Arab reporters, who are also well aware of the level of destruction brought to the Middle East as a result of neoconservative wisdom and policies. Rarely though are such infamous names evoked when the ongoing conflict in Syria is reported – as if the main powers responsible for redrawing the geopolitical maps of the region are suddenly insignificant.<\/p>\n

Pletka was the biggest supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, the once exiled Iraqi, who she once described as \u201ca trusted associate of the Central Intelligence Agency (and) the key player in a unsuccessful coup to overthrow Saddam Hussein\u201d in the 1990s (LA Times<\/em>, June 4, 2004). Chalabi led the Iraqi National Congress, which was falsely slated as an authentic Iraqi national initiative. Eventually, members of the council, composed mostly of Iraqi exiles with links to the CIA and other Western intelligences, managed to sway the pendulum their way, and Iraq was destroyed.<\/p>\n

Although the destruction of an Arab country is not a moral issue as far as the neocons are concerned, the chaos and subsequent violence that followed the US war in 2003 made it impossible for warring \u2018intellectuals\u2019 to promote their ideas with the same language of old. Some reinvention was now necessary. Discredited organizations were shut down and new ones were hastily founded.<\/p>\n

One such platform was the Foreign Policy Initiative, which was founded by neoconservatives who cleverly reworded old slogans. Matt Duss, wrote in ThinkProgress.org<\/em> about the Foreign Policy Initiative inaugural conference on Afghanistan in March 2009: \u201cI was struck by how very little that was said was controversial,\u201d he wrote. \u201cAnd that\u2019s really the point \u2014 in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons are widely and rightly held responsible, it simply won\u2019t do to bang the drum for American military maximalism. One has to be a bit slicker than that. And these guys are nothing if not slick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slick, indeed, as neoconservatives are now trying to weasel in their version of an endgame in Syria. Their efforts are extremely focused and well-coordinated, making impressive use of their direct ties with the Israeli lobby, major US media and Syrian leaders in exile. They are being referred to as \u2018foreign policy experts\u2019, although their \u2018expertise\u2019 is merely confined to their ability to destroy and remake countries to their own liking \u2013 and even these are unmitigated failures.<\/p>\n

Writing on CNN<\/em> online, Elise Labott reported on a recent neoconservative push to upgrade American involvement in Syria:<\/p>\n

\u201cForeign policy experts on Wednesday (August 1) urged the Obama administration to increase its support of the armed opposition.\u201d The \u2018experts\u2019 included Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), another pro-Israel conduit in Washington. It was established in 1985 as a research department for the influential Israeli lobby group, AIPAC, yet since then it managed to rebrand itself as an American organization concerned with advancing \u201ca balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obama, of course, obliged under pressure from the \u2018experts\u2019. According to CNN<\/em>, he signed a secret order \u201creferred to as an intelligence \u2018finding,\u2019 allow[ing] for clandestine support by the CIA and other agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the neocons want much more. The bloodbath in Syria has devastated not only Syrian society, it also brought to a halt the collective campaigns in Arab societies which called for democracy on their own terms. The protracted conflict in Syria, and the involvement of various regional players made it unbearable for the neoconservatives to hide behind their new brand and slowly plot a comeback. For them, it was now or never.<\/p>\n

On July 31, AIPAC wrote all members of Congress urging them to sign on a bill introduced by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman. Entitled \u2018The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (H.R.1905)\u2019, the bill, if passed, \u201cwill establish virtual state of war with Iran,\u201d according to the Council for the National Interest.\u00a0 The old neoconservative wisdom arguing for an unavoidable link between Syria, Iran and their allies in the region is now being exploited to the maximum.<\/p>\n

A few days earlier, on July 27, fifty-six leading ‘conservative foreign-policy experts’ had urged Obama to intervene directly in Syria. \u201cUnless the United States takes the lead and acts, either individually or in concert with like-minded nations, thousands of additional Syrian civilians will likely die, and the emerging civil war in Syria will likely ignite wider instability in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing of the letter, partly organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative, was hardly random. It was published one day before the first \u2018Friends of Syria\u2019 contact-group meeting in Tunisia, which suggests that it was aimed to help define the American agenda regarding Syria. Signatories included familiar names associated with the Iraq war narrative – Paul Bremer, Elizabeth Cheney, Eric Edelman, William Kristol, and, of course, Danielle Pletka.<\/p>\n

With the absence of a clear US strategy regarding Syria, the ever-organized neoconservatives seem to be the only ones with a clear plan, however damaging. In her Washington Post<\/em> piece, Pletka\u2019s argument for intervention, bridging countries, peoples, sects and groups of all kinds – as if the Middle East is but a chess game governed by delusional but persistent ambitions. In one single paragraph, she made mention of Iran, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, terrorists aimed at destabilizing Iraq, \u201cpuppet governments in Beirut\u201d and \u201cPalestinian terror groups dedicated to Israel\u2019s destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, it is this sort of \u2018political expertise\u2019 that governed US foreign policy in the Middle East for nearly two decades. Now that the short respite is over, the neoconservatives are back with their bizarre maps, bleak visions, and a fail-proof recipe for perpetual conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAMZY BAROUD: After a short respite, neoconservatives are back with their bizarre maps, bleak visions, and a fail-proof recipe for perpetual conflict. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":21514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,83,82,317,135],"tags":[24,6554,114,3182,322,2453,1563,18300,13446,2734,8654,18306,5126,18321,2825,18311,5921,18332,6949,191,2317,3008,18330,8458,18322,18302,2020,5213,5205,2624,18313],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}