Neocons vs. the 'Arab Spring': Back on
the Warpath
10 August 2012By Ramzy Baroud
Neocons are back with their bleak recipes for
perpetual conflict.
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.
"Washington 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," wrote Danielle Pletka, vice president
of foreign and defense policy studies at the American
Enterprise Institute (Washington Post, July 20).
Pletka, like many of her peers from neoconservative,
pro-Israeli ‘think tanks', 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.
Pletka was the biggest supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, the
once exiled Iraqi, who she once described as "a
trusted associate of the Central Intelligence Agency
(and) the key player in a unsuccessful coup to
overthrow Saddam Hussein" in the 1990s (LA Times, 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.
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 ‘intellectuals'
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. One such platform was the Foreign Policy
Initiative, which was founded by neoconservatives who
cleverly reworded old slogans. Matt Duss, wrote in
ThinkProgress.org about the Foreign Policy Initiative
inaugural conference on Afghanistan in March 2009: "I
was struck by how very little that was said was
controversial," he wrote. "And that's really the point
— in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons
are widely and rightly held responsible, it simply
won't 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."
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 ‘foreign policy
experts', although their ‘expertise' is merely
confined to their ability to destroy and remake
countries to their own liking – and even these are
unmitigated failures.
Writing in CNN online, Elise Labott reported on a
recent neoconservative push to upgrade American
involvement in Syria: "Foreign policy experts on
Wednesday (August 1) urged the Obama administration to
increase its support of the armed opposition." The
‘experts' 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 "a balanced and realistic
understanding of American interests in the Middle
East."
Obama, of course, obliged under pressure from the
‘experts'. According to CNN, he signed a secret order
"referred to as an intelligence ‘finding,' allow[ing]
for clandestine support by the CIA and other
agencies."
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.
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 ‘The Iran
Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act
(H.R.1905)', the bill, if passed, "will establish
virtual state of war with Iran," according to the
Council for the National Interest. 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.
A few days earlier, on July 27, fifty-six leading
'conservative foreign-policy experts' had urged Obama
to intervene directly in Syria. "Unless 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."
The timing of the letter, partly organized by the
Foreign Policy Initiative, was hardly random. It was
published one day before the first ‘Friends of Syria'
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.
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 piece, Pletka's 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, "puppet
governments in Beirut" and "Palestinian terror groups
dedicated to Israel's destruction."
Yet, it is this sort of ‘political expertise' 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.
- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net)
is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the
editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is
My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold
Story (Pluto Press, London.)
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