Article at Salon.comSidney has a source on the inside talking to him.
Rice's impulse to be a deal broker for ceasefires-larger peace negotiations (aside from however ineffective she would be at brokering) is being actively thwarted from inside the administration by your old pals, the Neocons. Yes, many of them are still there. As mentioned by some folks on this site already, Bush and the Neocons see enormous value to them in tying the security crisis of Israel to their venture in Iraq, and indeed they view this as a chance to "double-down" on their lost bet in Iraq, to redeem their botched war BY SPREADING IT INTO A REGION-WIDE CONFLAGRATION.
Aug. 3, 2006 The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.
Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.
In order to try to understand the neoconservative road map, senior national security professionals have begun circulating among themselves a 1996 neocon manifesto against the Middle East peace process. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," its half-dozen authors included neoconservatives highly influential with the Bush administration -- Richard Perle, first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East aide.
By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences -- from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.---
The 4 paragraph excerpt doesn't effectively synopsize Blumenthal's article. Read it in full at Salon--it will require viewing an ad first or having a subscription.
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