Doubling Down

I stated in my prior post of this morning that the neocons had no Plan "B", no fallback should the Chalabi option fail. Well, there is a Plan "B", but it has nothing to do with averting the looming catastrophe in Iraq.

Plan "B" focuses on targeting Syria. The neocons have been alleging that Syria is now the foremost sponsor of terror in the world, now that Saddam is gone. But the CIA and various Admin officials have acknowledged that Syria is hostile to AQ and was not only supplying the U.S. with AQ intelligence, but gave the U.S. permission to conduct intelligence gathering missions on AQ in Syria, near the Turkish border! Why have we rejected Syrian assistance in eliminating AQ?

The neocons tell us that although Syria is hostile to AQ, they are supporters of Hezbollah. They have incredibly suggested that Hezbollah is the "A team" of global terror, and Al Qaeda is in reality the "B team." But the only attack by Hezbollah on the U.S. was the barracks bombing in Lebanon in the early '80's. Hezbollah has not been implicated in either WTC attack. Hezbollah didn't have terror cells throughout the U.S., like Al Qaeda. Hezbollah isn't behind the efforts to foment civil war in Iraq. AQ is guilty of all of those anti-U.S. acts.

Is Syria harboring Hezbollah? Hardly. Syria maintains an uneasy truce with Hezbollah. Bashar Assad, like most mideast potentates, perceives Hezbollah and other radical islamic groups to be antagonistic and potential competitors for power. Assad would no doubt confront Hezbollah but for the fact that Hezbollah enjoys widespread popular support in Syria, as it does through much of the Islamic middle east, and Assad's control over Syria is tenuous at best. But when Syria made it plain to Hezbollah that troublemaking by Hezbollah during the Iraq war was not in Syria's interest, the U.S., far from cultivating Syria's assistance, bitch-slapped Assad. Seymour Hersh quoted a Pentagon official as stating that the Syrians were responsible for keeping Hezbollah quiet during the war in Iraq. This was, the official said, "a signal to us, and we're throwing it away. The Syrians are trying to communicate, and we're not listening."

We are not listening because our true objective is not to stop global terror, but to use it as a pretext for our designs on Syria, just as we used it as a pretext for our designs on Iraq. The neocons want us to believe that Bashar Assad is a Hezbollah buddy, but we know that not to be true. Bashar Assad, like Saddam and the Saudis, has more to fear from radical islam than to gain. Rummy and the neocons demand that Syria disarm Hezbollah, knowing full well that Syria is incapable of disarming Hezbollah, knowing full well that Bashar Assad's control of Syria is tenuous at best, knowing full well that Hezbollah's primary power base is in Lebanon, not Syria. We want Syria, not because of its sponsorship of global terror, but because Syria is the next easiest step in a plan that ultimately envisions domination of Iraq, Syria and Iran (step 3) by the U.S. and its mideast client, Israel.

And that is the neocon Plan "B". If the Chalabi option failed in Iraq, as is undeniably has, the plan was to double-down, divert the attention of the credulous from the Iraqi failure and start all over again with another bloody charade in Syria, and in the process rally the electorate around our cretinous commander-in-chief in the run-up to the presidential election.

(There was actually a brief and desperate Plan "1A", hastily and ineptly improvised by the neocons in March in the hopes that the Chalabi option could be salvaged. The key was to cleave the Shiite block headed by Sistani, who plainly held the upper hand as the insurgency grew and demonstrated the futility of the Chalabi plan. So we precipitated a crisis with Sadr by shutting down his paper. Sadr revolted, as they knew he would, and Sistani called for calm, as the neocons expected he would. The neocon expectation was that the moderate Shiites would start thinking that maybe Sistani had been co-opted by the Great Satan; that Sistani was perhaps just a stooge for the U.S. Weaken Sistani, bolster Chalabi. The consequences have been tragic and lethal. And what was this cleaving of the Shiite block intended to accomplish? Democracy in Iraq? No. The sole purpose was to plant Chalabi's his fat ass in Spiderhole Man's old palaces.)

And that is where the neocons find themselves today - a spectacularly failed policy in Iraq and no hope of stabilizing the situation in time to bolster the Deserter's election prospects. Ah, but there is always the Syria card to play.