... You'd think all of this, along with last year's exposure of the Niger uranium lie, and the vindictive response to that exposure by some very sleazy person in the administration, and the remark by Paul Wolfowitz that the WMD issue was chosen by the administration as the reason for war "for bureaucratic reasons," and the remark by Richard Perle that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone" (and so we broke it) would cause an informed public to damn the whole world-transformation project the neocons have openly outlined. You'd think their twilight might in fact be in sight.
But I am not too optimistic. If each day brings another apparent neocon setback, it brings more evidence, too, that the balls they've set rolling continue to roll. Yes, the Powell faction seems to have set back the chronology for regime change in Iran and North Korea. Yes, the media seems to get a little bit more critical. But then I switch on NPR or watch MSNBC's Chris Matthews' Hardball, and there are Richard Perle (former Defense Policy Board chief) and David Frum ("axis of evil" speechwriter), peddling their warmongering manual, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, and receiving a deferential hearing as they flout logic and urge the flouting of international law, arguing for ongoing war into what they like to call "The New American Century." The next step in their project is apparently a long-planned attack on Syria.
Last May I listed in a CounterPunch piece "the issues the neocons have and will continue to raise as they muster support for the Syria invasion:"
1. Syria's possession of chemical and biological weapons, including those represented as relocated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
2. Syria's supposed "sponsorship" of Lebanon's Hezbollah (viewed by most in Lebanon as a large, mainstream political party), and several Palestinian groups.
3. Syria's alleged involvement in the flow of personal and equipment into Iraq to fight the invaders.
4. Syria's alleged harboring of fleeing Iraqi officials.
5. Child custody disputes between Syrian fathers and their American spouses. (This added just as a means of vilifying Syrians in general.)
I felt last May that the most important of these was the first, since it was used effectively to prepare U.S. public opinion for the Iraq attack, and because if WMD weren't found in Iraq then the easiest way out of the inevitable embarrassment would be to assert that they're all over the border in Syria. (The thesis of WMD relocation was, to the best of my knowledge, first made by Ariel Sharon in December 2002, when the Israel prime minister declared, "We are certain that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria." So far U.S. officials haven't been so "certain," but they've occasionally raised the possibility.