Perle & Feith: "clean break"

* atrios has a piece in the LAT about joe-nertia. he manages to use hacktastic in a sentence, and also uses italics to emphasize a word.

* Joseph Cirincione:

In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser (all later senior officials in the Bush administration) had a plan for how to destroy Hezbollah: Invade Iraq. They wrote a report to the newly elected Likud government in Israel calling for “a clean break” with the policies of negotiating with the Palestinians and trading land for peace.

The problem could be solved “if Israel seized the strategic initiative along it northern borders by engaging Hizballah (sic), Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon.” The key, they said, was to “focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” They called for “reestablishing the principle of preemption.” They promised that the successes of these wars could be used to launch campaigns against Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, reshaping “the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly.”

Now, with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, with Bush losing control of world events, and with the threats to national security growing worse, no one could possibly still believe this plan, could they? Think again.
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The neoconservatives are now hoping to use the Israeli-Lebanon conflict as the trigger to launch a U.S. war against Syria, Iran or both. These profoundly dangerous policies have to be exposed and stopped before they do even more harm to U.S. national security then they already have."

* flashback to Cirincione last month:

"The Senate report and the 9/11 Commission report, as good as they are, as information-rich as they are, as well-written as they are, tell only half the story. Until the full details of the roles played by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice-President Cheney and his Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby are revealed, policy-makers will not understand how the system became so corrupted."

(read his bio here - he knows where the bodies are buried: "Mr. Cirincione worked for nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives on the professional staff of the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Government Operations")