 The Bush administration wants to bring about a regime change in seven Middle Eastern countries, according to General Weasley Wesley Clark’s new book. According to Clark, this is part of a Defence Department strategy. He recalls that on his first visit to the Pentagon, less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, a “senior general” told him, that the US was “going to attack Iraq”. “The decision has basically been made,” Clark quoted him as saying.
Six weeks later, when Clark returned to Washington and asked the same general if the invasion of Iraq was still on, the officer said, “‘Oh, it’s worse than that!”
| Excellent! I can think of several regimes that should go down ... |
Clark said the general then showed him a memo, apparently a “paper from the office of the Secretary of Defence 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.
| "We're making a list .. checking it twice .. ..." |
Targetted nations: Later, Clark said in a TV interview that the hit-list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan as well as Iraq, Iran and Syria. During a CNN interview, Clark shifted ground slightly by saying that the memo “wasn’t 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.”
| "Coulda been anything, maybe something I doodled around with myself after a drinking binge ..." |
Clark also remembers a May 1991 conversation with Paul Wolfowitz, the erstwhile third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon, to congratulate him on the success of the first Gulf War.
“We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president believes he’ll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it. 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,” he said.
| Wolfowitz, what a smart guy, no longer the progressives did everything they could to dig him out of the World Bank. |
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