Wurmser Interview “Bears” Reading

For those who haven’t seen them, the Friday Daily Telegraph’s interview with David Wurmser, “U.S. ‘Must Break Iran and Syria Regimes’,” and the author’s blog post on the interview make for important reading, as they clearly reflect the reigning views in Vice President Cheney’s office and its neo-con advisers at the American Enterprise Institute, particularly with respect to Syria, Iran, and Cheney’s commitment to “democracy,” as opposed to “freedom.” His comment, “Don’t shoot a bear if you’re not going to kill it,” sounds more like something Cheney would say, as I suspect Wurmser himself is not a hunter. He also suggests that the main opposition to an attack on Iran is centered in the Pentagon. I hope the Telegraph might consider posting a transcript of the entire interview.

Jim Lobe

Jim Lobe served for some 30 years as the Washington DC bureau chief for Inter Press Service and is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy and the influence of the neoconservative movement.

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  1. could you link me or direct me to your excellent article on the incestuous neo-con cabal. I am trying to suggest that MEMRI is perhaps not entirely objective. Meyrav Wurmser’s founding position seems problematic. Of course this makes me anti-semitic. Keep charging me as such and I may be persuaded. gallows humor

  2. Scott — You mean this?

    http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/3713

    A Right Web Special Report:

    THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES
    Jim Lobe & Michael Flynn | November 17, 2006

    (excerpt)
    “…The ostensible “success” of the PNAC agenda through mid-2003 represented a union of two distinct, though mutually reinforcing, agendas that had been laid out by the neoconservatives and their various supporters during the decade before the first presidency of George W. Bush. Shortly after the end of the Cold War, neoconservatives began developing a number of ideas aimed at keeping the United States militarily engaged and dominant in the world. The emerging ideas supported a hegemonic global strategy that had at its core two main elements: ensuring global U.S. preeminence, and radically altering the Middle East to ensure a particular vision of Israel security.

    These ideas were initially spelled out in two documents, one drafted by senior Pentagon officials in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the other by a small group of hard-line neoconservatives with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party. The first, a draft of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), which was leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post in the spring of 1992, offered a blueprint for maintaining U.S. solo-superpower status, prompting one Democratic critic, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE), to criticize it as “literally a Pax Americana.” The second, a 1996 report entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was a short memorandum prepared for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It laid out an Israeli strategy toward the Middle East that could dramatically shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor, allowing it to “break away” from the Oslo peace process and effectively impose whatever terms it wished for a final settlement with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors. While much of the paper focused on the destabilization of Syria, the first step in the proposed strategy called for the ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his replacement by a pro-Western government.

    These two strategies were ultimately embraced by the same coalition of hawks (neoconservatives, aggressive nationalists, and the Christian Right) that later coalesced around PNAC in the late-1990s. In turn, the strategies helped to set the course of U.S. foreign policy immediately after 9/11, when a U.S. president with virtually no international experience or curiosity was grasping for an appropriately dramatic—perhaps even messianic—response to the trauma that had just befallen the nation…..”

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