Maybe NeoCons Didn't Care About What Followed Saddam

Interesting discussion of David Wurmser in Dick Cheney's Office:

Like Hannah, who came to the OVP from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Wurmser traipsed a roundabout path to Cheney’s staff: He worked with Hannah at WINEP in the 1990s, and then went to AEI, where he directed Middle East affairs, to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department, and then to the OVP.

Even among ardent supporters of Israel, Wurmser -- and his wife, Meyrav, who runs the Hudson Institute’s Middle East program -- is considered an extremist. In 1996, the Wurmsers, Perle, and Feith co-authored the famous “Clean Break” paper for then–Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, which called for radical measures to redraw the map of the entire Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine) to benefit Israel.

Later, in a series of papers and a book, Wurmser argued that toppling Saddam was likely to lead directly to civil war and the breakup of Iraq, but he supported the policy anyway:

The residual unity of [Iraq] is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.

After Saddam, Iraq will

be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families. Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.

Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse.

The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.

Robert Dreyfuss, Vice Squad