Bush's axis of failure - Sidney Blumenthal

[DoYouEverWonder]

9 - 8 - 2006

The United States’s National Security Agency (NSA) is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hizbollah 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 programme. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.)

Inside the administration, neo-conservatives on vice-president Dick Cheney's national-security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neo-conservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council (NSC), 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 programme says. The neo-conservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board", but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neo-conservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalise her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neo-conservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.

Rice's diplomacy in the middle east has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint", to categorically opposing a ceasefire, to proposing terms for a ceasefire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hizbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national-security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the entire region.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy/axis_faliure_3806.jsp

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. Kick - This is a great article

Ties in the PNAC and the Clean Break document.

[lutefisk]

2. Shows why Bush was put in the Presidency. Excellent article!

Any of the neocons would have been far too repugnant to ever become President- by any means. George Walker Bush was the only person they could find who could be fashioned into something the corporate media could work with and help put in office, while still being stupid enough to manipulate into doing the criminally insane work of the neocons from the oval office.

Junior has been manipulated, through his arrogance and stupidity, since well before he came into office. He quite possibly thinks he really is the "decider." Powell and Rice are not stupid, but they are Republicans with a sense of duty- kind of like the "good" Nazis, I guess. I hope they never get a night's sleep for what they've taken part in...

[enough]

3. k&r

[jpkenny]

4. This is why Americans of good conscience for peace and humanity

must work to together to "clense" our government of the neocons and their supporters. It won't happen in just one election but it can happen in two or three OR we will see our nation drug deeper and deeper into the abyss of state sponsored terrorism and WE WIL BE the evil we say we abhor.