The Neocons on Syria
“Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which America can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussain from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.…

“Since Iraq’s future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting…such measures as…diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.”

—Excerpts from “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 report prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.” Study group participants were Richard Perle (study group leader and former chair and member of the Defense Advisory Board); James Colbert of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); Charles Fairbanks, Jr., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (of which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was dean at the time); Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; Robert Loewenberg, president of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies; Jonathan Torop, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; David Wurmser, Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; and Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Policy.
www.wrmea.com/archives/April_2005/0504010.html