Seize the Chaos: Israel, The Neocons And Their Bloody, Blundering ‘Art’ of War

• Seize the Chaos: Israel, The Neocons And Their Bloody, Blundering ‘Art’ of War 
  by Dan Sanchez, http://antiwar.com/  
  Israel lacks a national motto. If its leaders are looking for a Latin one, “carpe chaos” would be an apt and honest choice. “Seize the chaos” is half of Israeli foreign policy in a nutshell (the other half being the instigation of that chaos in the first place). Indeed, even its friends in the media cannot help but put it in such terms. For example, The New York Times recently reported about the:
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  “…many Israeli leaders and thinkers seizing on the chaos in Syria to solidify Israel’s hold on Golan.”
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  This refers to the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and has occupied ever since. Even the Israel-enabling United Nations considers that occupation and subsequent annexation to be unjust and illegal. Returning Golan to Syria has long been advanced as part of a potential peace deal.
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  But now, Israel is using the civil war in Syria as an excuse to expand settlements in the Golan Heights; a senior minister wants 100,000 new residents in the next five years. Its potential uses are manifold:
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  “The 400-plus square miles of the Israeli-controlled Golan on the northeast border with Syria is both strategic plateau and lush agricultural terrain yielding prize apples, cherries and beef. It is also a vast playground that drew 3 million tourist visits last year.”
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  This is Israel’s usual M.O. in the Palestinian West Bank as well: forging ahead with illicit settlements to establish “realities on the ground” that will be too intractable to reverse, thereby fixing the occupation permanently in place.
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  Advocates of the new Golan settlements defend them by citing the chaos in Syria:
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  “With Syria ‘disintegrating’ after years of civil war, they argue, it is hard to imagine a stable state to which the territory could be returned.”
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  The Times quotes Israeli MP Michael Oren who adds a blatant lebensraum argument to the case for good measure:
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  “We need places to build, and the world doesn’t want us to build in the West Bank. I don’t think anyone in the world can come at us and say we’re building on land that’s going to be part of a peace deal if we build on the Golan Heights.”
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  “Seize the chaos” is not a new doctrine: neither is it limited to Israeli halls of power. A veritable “carpe chaos” manifesto was written in 1996 for a Washington think tank by David Wurmser, an Israel-first neocon (but I repeat myself) who would later play a key role in the Bush administration’s drive to the Iraq War: advising Dick Cheney in the Vice President’s Office, assisting John Bolton at the State Department, and fabricating fanciful “connections” between Iraq and Al Qaeda at the Department of Defense.
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  Indeed, it is Washington’s Israeli-occupied foreign policy that has enabled Israel’s “seize the chaos” doctrine by using America’s vast imperial might to create so much seizable chaos in the first place.
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  the neocons and Israel finally did get their longed for chaotic collapse in Iraq, along with the deaths of over a million Iraqis and the displacement of millions more. This blood-soaked business is what they call “statecraft.”
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  So for the sake of Israel, and since at least 2007, Washington, along with its regional allies, has been waging a broad covert proxy war to undermine the “Shia crescent.” This policy pivot, which legendary journalist Seymour Hersh dubbed “The Redirection,” has involved supporting Sunni Islamist mujahideen in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
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  Israel has also been contributing to the cause of chaos more directly. Like a prizefighter’s “cutman,” the Israeli military has stood in Al Qaeda’s corner, taking in its wounded terrorist “rebels,” patching them up, and then sending them back into Syria to resume fighting.
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  Syrian soldiers are desperately battling Al Qaeda just north of Golan. Whenever a shell strays into the Heights (almost always exploding harmlessly in some unoccupied field), Israel responds by bombing Syrian military positions, thus effectively serving as Al Qaeda’s air force as well as its combat medic.
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  And now that Russia has been drawn into the Syrian war, where its bombers and troops operate at cross purposes with American bombers and proxy fighters, the chaotic sea threatens to become a thermonuclear lake of fire engulfing the whole world.
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  read more.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4oj7fjODQQ]

• Published on Jan 21, 2014
  On Morning Joe, Carl Bernstein says that because he’s Jewish, he could be permitted to reveal on national television that “Jewish” neo-cons were responsible for persuading President George W. Bush into starting an “insane” war against Iraq.
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• “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservatives, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history.”
  – Ari Shavit Ha’aretz News Service (Israel) April 5, 2003
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  “A new generation has its hands on the tiller of power…Jewish neocons have emerged as the Pentagon’s Paladins…Most striking is how unmentionable this is in the liberal press…These well-placed hawks are Jewish-Americans and it is their hardcore Zionism that is shaping American foreign policy. Zionism is fast becoming a poisoned chalice…There is real madness here, but who will stop it?”
  – Ann Pettifer Common Sense December 18, 2002 

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