[NYTr] 7 Countries in 5 Years: Bush Reich's Secret Warplans

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Salon via Info Clearing House - Oct 12, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18544.htm

"Seven countries in five years"

Wesley Clark's new memoir casts more light on the Bush administration's
secret strategies for regime change in Iran and elsewhere.

By Joe Conason

While the Bush White House promotes the possibility of armed conflict
with Iran, a tantalizing passage in Wesley Clark's new memoir suggests
that another war is part of a long-planned Department of Defense
strategy that anticipated "regime change" by force in no fewer than
seven Mideast states. Critics of the war have often voiced suspicions
of such imperial schemes, but this is the first time that a
high-ranking former military officer has claimed to know that such
plans existed.

The existence of that classified memo would certainly cast more dubious
light not only on the original decision to invade Iraq because of
Saddam Hussein's weapons and ambitions but on the current efforts to
justify and even instigate military action against Iran.

In "A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country," published by Palgrave
Macmillan last month, the former four-star general recalls two visits
to the Pentagon following the terrorist attacks of September 2001. On
the first visit, less than two weeks after Sept. 11, he writes, a
"senior general" told him, "We're going to attack Iraq. The decision
has basically been made."

Six weeks later, Clark returned to Washington to see the same general
and inquired whether the plan to strike Iraq was still under
consideration. The general's response was stunning:

"'Oh, it's worse than that,' he said, holding up a memo on his desk.

'Here's the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then
Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We're going to take out seven
countries in five years.' And he named them, starting with Iraq and
Syria and ending with Iran."

While Clark doesn't name the other four countries, he has mentioned in
televised interviews that the hit list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia
and Sudan. Indeed, he has described this same conversation on a few
occasions over the past year, including in a speech at the University
of Alabama in October 2006, in an appearance on Amy Goodman's
"Democracy Now" broadcast last March, and most recently in an interview
with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." On "Democracy
Now" he spoke about the meetings and the memo in slightly greater
detail, saying that he had made the first Pentagon visit "on or about
Sept. 20."

Clark says he didn't read the memo from Rumsfeld's office. When the
general first held it up, he remembers asking, "Is it classified?"
Receiving an affirmative answer, he said, "Well, don't show it to me."
He also says that when he saw the same general last year and reminded
him of their conversation, the officer said, "Sir, I didn't show you
that memo! I didn't show it to you!"

During the Blitzer interview, Clark backed off slightly, conceding that
the memo "wasn't [necessarily] a plan. Maybe it was a think piece.
Maybe it was a sort of notional concept, but what it was, was the kind
of indication of dialogue around this town in official circles ... that
has poisoned the atmosphere and made it very difficult for this
administration to achieve any success in the region."

Clark's book also describes a telling encounter nearly a decade earlier
with neoconservative eminence Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy
secretary of defense under Rumsfeld who resigned under a cloud of
scandal from the World Bank last spring. In May 1991, according to
Clark, he dropped in for a conversation with Wolfowitz, then the
third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon, to congratulate him on the
success of the Gulf War.

"We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president [then
George H.W. Bush] believes he'll be overthrown by his own people, but I
rather doubt it," he quotes Wolfowitz lamenting. "But we did learn one
thing that's very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now
use our military with impunity. The Soviets won't come in to block us.
And we've got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet
surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower
emerges to challenge us ...

We could have a little more time, but no one really knows."

More than a decade and a half later, the neoconservative obsession with
regime change persists and flourishes in the upper reaches of the Bush
administration, where Vice President Dick Cheney is reportedly pressing
for action against Iran. (Of course, by overthrowing Saddam and putting
the Shiites in control of Iraq, Cheney and President Bush have already
done more to empower Tehran than the ruling mullahs could ever have
imagined in their fondest fantasies.) The stated reasons range from
Iran's suspected sponsorship of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq to its
worrisome pursuit of nuclear power, but Clark's allegations strongly
suggest American policymakers chose war years ago, no matter what
Tehran ended up doing.

Perhaps it is time for the appropriate Senate and House committees to
start asking harder questions about this administration's secret
strategies for the Mideast. They might begin by interviewing Clark
behind closed doors about that classified memo -- and to what extent
such extreme ideas have promoted the "permanent war" policy that is
fundamental to neoconservative ideology.

[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York
Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in
the Age of Bush."]

Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group