In a recent interview by Amy Goodman with Andrew Cockburn, the author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, there was this interesting exchange regarding George W. Bush asking his father the definition of a neocon:
AMY GOODMAN: In 2006, you write that George W. Bush said to his father, "What's a neocon?"
ANDREW COCKBURN: That's right. One of the rare moments of sort of communication between the two. Bush said to -- they were out at Kennebunkport, and Bush Jr. says, "Can I ask you a question? What's a neocon?" And the father says, "Do you want names or a description?" The President says, "I’ll take a description." He says, "I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel," which is interesting on all sorts of levels, including the confirmation that our president doesn't really read the newspapers.
The above quotation neatly summarizes what many observers have known for a long time - namely, the strong ties of neoconservative political operatives in the United States with the Israeli right-wing party's interests in the Middle East. (It also illustrates the inadequately equipped and woefully ignorant mind of George W. Bush.)
This was confirmed most recently in an article written by Jonathan Cook that examined the events that led to the Lebanon war last year. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media to date, the then newly elected Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, had planned an attack on Lebanon months in advance of its start in July 2006. And this was done in behind-the-scene collusion with the United States government, which gave it advanced encouragement and helped ship weapons during the air and ground hostilities in Lebanon.
Israel's supposedly "defensive" assault on Hizbullah last summer, in which more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed in a massive aerial bombardment that ended with Israel littering the country's south with cluster bombs, was cast in a definitively different light last week by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.
His leaked testimony to the Winograd Committee -- investigating the government's failures during the month-long attack -- suggests that he had been preparing for such a war at least four months before the official casus belli: the capture by Hizbullah of two Israeli soldiers from a border post on 12 July 2006. Lebanon's devastation was apparently designed to teach both Hizbullah and the country's wider public a lesson.
[snip]
Olmert told Winograd that, far from making war on the hoof in response to the capture of the two soldiers (the main mitigating factor for Israel's show of aggression), he had been planning the attack on Lebanon since at least March 2006.
His testimony is more than plausible. Allusions to pre-existing plans for a ground invasion of Lebanon can be found in Israeli reporting from the time. On the first day of the war, for example, the Jersualem Post reported: "Only weeks ago, an entire reserve division was drafted in order to train for an operation such as the one the IDF is planning in response to Wednesday morning's Hizbullah attacks on IDF forces along the northern border."
In Cook's article, we have reference to an interview in Israel's leading newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, with Meyrav Wurmser, the spouse of David Wurmer, Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser, in which she states:
"The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians. The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space. They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its [Iran's] strategic and important ally [Syria] should be hit."
In other words, the picture that emerges is of a long-standing plan by the Israeli army, approved by senior US officials, for a rapid war against Lebanon -- followed by possible intimidatory strikes against Syria -- using the pretext of a cross-border incident involving Hizbullah. The real purpose, we can surmise, was to weaken what are seen by Israel and the US to be Tehran's allies before an attack on Iran itself.
Given how much of this information is now being written about openly in Israel's major newspapers, the US's mainstream media should find a little journalistic courage and intestinal fortitude to cover these breaking stories in a timely fashion, regardless of alienating a number of neocons and other right-wing Israeli interests in this country.