Lebanon- the new target.
The neo-conservative and the policy of creative destruction.
By Thierry Meyssan (http://www.voltairenet.org/article142364.html)
Translated by Colin Buchanan

In Washington and Tel-Aviv, they are overjoyed about the military operations being carried out in the Middle- East. As Condeleeza Rice put it, Lebanon is undergoing the "the birth pangs of a new Middle-East." For the theoreticians of "creative destruction", it is necessary to let the blood flow in order to impose a new order on a region rich in fossil fuels. Planned long since, the offensive of the Israeli Army is being supervised by the US Department of Defence.

In the course of her press conference at the State Department on 21st July 2006, Condoleeza Rice was asked about what initiatives she planned to take in order to bring peace to Lebanon. She answered : " But I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante. I think it would be a mistake. What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing — the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one ".

Viewed form Washington, what is happening today in Lebanon has nothing to do with getting back the soldiers captured by Hezbollah.What it is about is the putting into practice of the long nurtured theory of "creative destruction". According to the followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss, the media face of which are known as the "neo-conservatives", real power is not exercise in static way, but, rather, through the destruction of all resistance. It is through plunging the masses into chaos that the elites can consolidate their power.

Again, according to Strauss's followers, it is only through this violence that the imperial interests of the US and the Jewish State converge.

Israel's wish to dismantle Lebanon and to create in its place a Christian statelet and to annex part of its terrirtory isn't new.It was first enunciated, in 1957, by David Ben-Gurion in a famous letter published as an annex to his posthumous memoires.Above all, it was incorporated into a vast project for the colonization of the Middle-East drawn up in 1996 under the title : A Clean Break : A New Strategy for Securing the Realm[of Israel]. This document, written inside a neo-conservative think tank, the IASPS,was prepared by a group of experts around Richard Perle and passed to Benjamin Netanyahu[1]. It is representative of the revisionist zionist ideas of Vladimir Jabotinsky.It envisages :

- the cancellation of the Oslo accords,
- the elimination of Yasser Arafat,
- the annexation of the Palestinian territories
- the overthrowal of Saddam Hussein in Irak in order to destabilise in turn Syria and Lebanon,
- the use of Israel as a complementary base for the US star wars programme.
This document inspired the speech given by Netanyahu. soon after to the US Congress. There to be seen are all the ingredients of the present situation : threats against Iran, Syria and, most of all, the demand for the annexation of East Jerusalem.


This viewpoint coincides with that of the US administration. The control of the oil rich areas which Zbignew Brzezinski and Bernard Lewis called "the arc of crisis", that is to say, the arc connecting the Gulf of Guinea to the Caspian Sea passing through the Persian Gulf, implies a redefinition of frontiers, states and political structures : a "remodelling of the whole Middle-East", according to the expression of George W. Bush.
It is this Middle-East of which Ms Rice regards herself the midwife and to whose birth pangs she is the witness.

The idea is simple : substitute for the states inherited from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, smaller monoethnic entities which can be neutralised by playing one of against the other. In other words, it amounts to going back on the secret agreement reached in 1916, by the French and British empires, the so-called Sykes- Picot accords[2] and to ratify total Anglo-Saxon control over the region. But, in order to create new states, one must first destroy the existing ones. This is what the Bush administration and its have devoted themselves to, with the fervour of a sorcerers apprentice, for the last five years. Just judge by the results :
-7% of Palestinian territory has been eaten away ; Gaza strip and the West Bank have been physically separated by a wall ; the Palestinian Authority has been wrecked, its ministers and MPs kidnapped or illegally detained.
- the UN has enjoined Lebanon to disarm by expelling the Syrians and dissolving Hezbollah ;former prime minister Rafic Harriri has been murdered and ,with him, French influence has disappeared ;the economic infrastructure of the country has been erased ; more than half a million refugees have been created in the region.
- The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein has been replaced by an even more cruel one which kills more than 3000 people a month ; in a state of total anarchy, the country is set to be split up into three distinct entities.
- The Taliban pseudo- emirate has given way to a pseudo- democracy where the obscurantist interpretations of Sharia law still hold sway, as well as the cultivation of opium.In reality, Afghanistan is already divided up amonst the warlords and violence is rife. The central government has given up on enforcing its writ even in the capital.


In Washington, the disciples of Leo strauss, ever more impatient, dream of spreading their chaos to Sudan, Syria and Iran. In this transitional period it is no longer a question of "free market democracy" but just blood and tears.

Jacques Chirac who wished to intervene in Lebanon to defend France's remaining
interests and who had sent Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has become disenchanted : at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, George W. Bush stopped him in his tracks by telling him that it was not an Israeli operation supported by the US but a US operation carried out by Israel. Suddenly, M. de Villepin had nothing to declare but fine words and his own impotence.

More precisely, the project for the destruction of Lebanon had been pesented to the Bush administration by the Israeli army just over a year ago as revealed by the San Frncisco Chronicle[3]. It was up for discussion at the annual world forum, the 17th and 18th of June 2006 at Beaver Creek organised by the American Enterprise Institute. Benjamin Netanyahu and Dick Cheney spoke at length in the company of Richard Perle and Nathan Sharansky. The green light was given in the course of the following days by the White House.

The military operations of Tsahal are supervised by the US Defnce Department. They decide the basic strategy and choose the targets. The main role has been given to Bantz Craddock in his capacity as head of Southern Command. Craddock is a specialist in the deployment of armoured vehicles as he showed when he commanded NATO's ground forces in Kosovo. He is the right -hand man of Donald Rumsfeld whose personal staff office he runs and on whose behalf he set up Guantanamo. Next November he can be expected to be namd head of European Command and of NATO.In this capacity, he could lead the NATO force to be deployed in South Lebanon as well as those already on the ground in Afghanistan and Sudan.
The generals of Israel and the US have already had the opportunity to get to know each other over the last thirty years, thanks to the exchanges organised by The Jewish Institute for Natinal Security Affairs (JINSA), a grouping which obliges its cadres to follow courses of study of the thought of Leo Strauss.

Thierry Meyssan is a journalist and writer and president of the Voltaire Network

Onto Iran?

By vetoing a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire Blair has given his full support to the Israeli blitzkrieg in Lebanon. This wanton act of terrorism threatens everyone in Lebanon including , incidently, several thousand British citizens whose possible deaths would have thereby been sanctioned by British prime minister.Apparently, all is fair in the “war on terrorism”.These attacks have been justified by feigned outrage at Hezbollah's actions which have gone as far as kidnapping i.e. capturing two Israeli soldiers – yes, soldiers!- engaged in nothing more than an illegal infiltration of a neighbouring country. And so it's only reasonable that the neighbouring country had to be destroyed.

But this is not enough for the warlord Blair. Blair, remember, has vision. And what does he see? A chance to provoke the wider war which is his heart's desire.If the armed forces are, as they have shown themselves to be, reluctant to engage in a nuclear attack on Iran perhaps there is a chance to bounce them into it.Surely, after all, they will rally to the defence of democracy. Specifically, Israeli democracy,- not, perhaps, the best that money can buy ( isn't there something of a racial element in it?) but, anyway, a democracy. Remember, Blair will tell them, we are fighting for a state built on the same foundations as our own, expropriation, genocide and terror.

Definately Maybe

A consensus seems to have emerged that Hezbollah “started it”by infiltrating into Israel to abduct the two soldiers. According to Voltaire Network it was the other way round but anyway it has become a “virtual” fact of the type that monopoly control of the media makes possible.More importantly, a consensus has emerged that Iran( and Syria) are somehow behind it.A recent meeting in the House of Commons organised by the Campaign against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran(http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/) condemned Blair's attempts to implicate Iran.As Professor Abbas Edalat put it

"Until the new war waged by Israel against Lebanon, the main focus of the US/Israeli hysteric campaign against Iran was centred around the unfounded allegation of a covert nuclear arms program in Iran. We now have a new orchestrated campaign of threats. Today Iran and Syria are being blamed falsely by the US and the UK for being at the root of the present conflict in Lebanon. This double accusation and threat will multiply many fold the danger of a military attack against Iran as well as Syria by Israel and the US. "


But to no avail- Blair's view has already achieved alarmingly wide-ranging resonance.It is also being echoed on the left. Thus Alex Callincos in the latest Socialist Worker writes:

“My guess is that the Hizbollah offensive - for that is what the raid that captured two Israeli soldiers amounted to - was coordinated with the Iranian regime”

Joining in the guessing game was the Great Sage of Massachusetts. In a dithering response to Amy Goodman, Chomsky opined that

“ I don't think we have the slightest idea. You can guess anything you’d like. It's a possibility. In fact, even a probability”

Is this “It's probably Iran” meant to be a rebuttal of the War Party's vehement chorus of denunciation of Iran?

My guess is with this kind of opposition Blair fancies his chances of steamrollering us into the global war, the World War III that Gingrich says has already started. The crisis which started with the Israelis “taking out” a seaside picnic is taking on proportions which are truly terrifying.

Incidently, if anyone thinks that the Brits are laggards when it comes to this escalation read the Times 21st July.It talks of Britains plans for “containment” of Iran and

“ British frustration with the US’s failure to devise a plan for dealing with Tehran, once the Iraqi conflict stripped it of the appetite for military action.”

A bang or a whimper?

There is an air of finality about the situation as if our fate is at last to be decided either way. Will it be with an apocalyptic war against Iran soon to be transformed into a generalized East- West conflict which engulfs us all or is it just the last gasp of the Anglo-American-Israeli ascendancy who with their anti-humanist ideology, their ever more terrible techniques of death, their mercenaries, their death squads, their media whores and their sanctimonious, smirking, lying toadies in the political parties, think-tanks and academia have lorded it over the world for too long?