There is nothing ‘clean’ about this, the blueprint for the American-Israeli Neo-Con Axis for warmongering militarism in order to ‘remake the mideast’ in some new Strangelovian vision.

William Rivers Pitt does a good job here in detailing the history behind this and reveals the depth of the roots which underly the recent fighting in Lebanon.

Over the last several weeks, an old White Paper found new life in the shattered ruins of Lebanon’s infrastructure. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the paper was masterminded by three neo-con hawks who, in the fullness of time, became powerful members of the Bush administration: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. The three were working for a pro-Israel think tank called the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies when the paper was first drafted.

“A Clean Break” was originally written for the benefit of Benjamin Netanyahu after he rose to the position of Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. This, in and of itself, was unique; it is rare indeed to have a trio of American foreign policy specialists crafting national security policy for a foreign power. Those who have seen the hand of the Israeli Likud Party guiding American foreign policy over the last several years base their premise, to no small degree, upon the involvement of these three men in Israeli affairs before their ascendancy in American government. The arguments contained in this document eventually became the basis for the now-infamous White Paper by the Project for the New American Century titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which was authored in 2000.

Perle, Feith and Wurmser’s vision for a new Israel centered around the re-invigoration of the discredited policy of pre-emption, i.e., attacking a perceived foe based on whatever premise can be found in order to show strength in the region and intimidate local governments into compliance. “Israel’s new agenda,” read the paper, “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.”

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