De Bush Bende 30

De pro-Israel lobby en de huidige collega's van Hirsi Magan/Ali van the American Enterprise Institute, de extremistische denktank die de uitzichtloze politieke doctrine van president de Bush bedacht, zijn in grote moeilijkheden gekomen.

Common Dreams bericht: 'Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report.

WASHINGTON - To have read the neo-conservative press here over the past month, one would think that former Secretary of State James Baker poses the biggest threat to the United States and Israel since Saddam Hussein. As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991 Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as close to the devil himself. But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday, has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious" French. The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard and The National Review -- has been to discredit the ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are published. Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of a much bigger effort at training and strengthening Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008. On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen. John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region, leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as part of its diplomatic strategy. Baker himself telegraphed this aspect of his approach after meeting with Damascus's foreign minister and Tehran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Javad Zarif, who reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "(I)n my view, it's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," he said. Those remarks set off a tidal wave of protest and criticism beginning with the published announcement in the Weekly Standard by Michael Rubin, a fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), that he had resigned from an "expert working group" advising the ISG. Rubin accused Baker and his Democratic co-chair, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, of having "gerrymandered (the) advisory panels to ratify predetermined recommendations" -- panels, he noted, which included Middle East experts who had actually opposed the Iraq war. In a preview of attacks that appeared with increasing frequency over the following month, Rubin also assailed Baker for what he called the former secretary of state's "legacy" in the Middle East -- namely, his approval of the 1989 Taif Accords which "sacrificed Lebanese independence" to Syria and his "betrayal" of Kurdish and Shiite rebels after the first Gulf War. Rubin was quickly followed by Eliot Cohen, a member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, who, writing in the Wall Street Journal, mocked the ISG as a "collection of worthies commissioned by Congress that has spent several days in Iraq, chiefly in the Green Zone." "To think that either (Syria or Iran), with remarkable records of violence, duplicity and hostility to the U.S., will rescue us bespeaks a certain willful blindness," Cohen wrote.'

Lees verder: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1206-06.htm