Dang Me If Its Not From Richard Perle!

Values Australia provides the following information to help Australians understand some of their Australian values, especially to understand where our values come from in relation to Middle East policy (yes, we know they come from America, but where did they get them from?)

In 1996 a group calling themselves the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, and led by Richard Perle (well known for his work for the Likud at the Project for the New American Century), produced a paper for Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-Prime Minister of Israel.

Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and known as “The Prince of Darkness” was also at the time an advisor to the Administration on Defense matters and remains a director of the Jerusalem Post. Amongst many other things.

David Wurmser is the Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Douglas Feith was George W Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He was one of the signatories of the 1998 letter to President Clinton advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein. Feith led the controversial Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon which was set up to second-guess the CIA and other intelligence agencies and, some say, preemptively conclude that Iraq had WMD and “stove-pipe” this conclusion to the White House..

Other contributors were James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Loewenberg and Meyrav Wurmser.

The paper was called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm“.

Amongst its conclusions:

“Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism

[…]

“Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon”

[…]

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can 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.”

[…]

“Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.”

[All emphasis added]

Anything ring a bell?