Neo-Cons Wanted Israel to Attack Syria (JIM LOBE)

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Neo-Cons Wanted Israel to Attack Syria

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 18 (IPS) - Neo-conservative hawks in and outside the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush had hoped that Israel would attack Syria during last summer's Lebanon war, according to a newly published interview with a prominent neo-conservative whose spouse is a top Middle East adviser in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Meyrav Wurmser, who is herself the director of the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute here, reportedly told Yitzhak Benhorin of the Ynet website that a successful attack by Israel on Damascus would have dealt a mortal blow to the insurgency in Iraq.

"If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion in Iraq would have ended," she asserted, adding that it was chiefly as a result of pressure from what she called "neocons" that the administration held off demands by U.N. Security Council members to halt Israel's attacks on Hezbollah and other targets in Lebanon during the summer war.

"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," she told Ynet. "A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah... If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and (changed) the strategic map in the Middle East."

Wurmser's remarks bolster reports from Israel that hawks in the Bush administration did, in fact, encourage in the first days of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to extend its war beyond Lebanon's borders.

"In a meeting with a very senior Israeli official, Abrams indicated that Washington would have no objection if Israel chose to extend the war beyond to its other northern neighbour, leaving the interlocutor in no doubt that the intended target was Syria," a well-informed source, who received an account of the meeting from one of its participants, told IPS shortly after the conflict ended last August. A similar account was published in the Jerusalem Post at the time.

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