3 Weeks After 9/11 Rumsfeld's military objective to remake the Middle East by force...

[cynatnite]

WASHINGTON - Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism".

In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states" in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and Saddam regimes are listed as "state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons".

General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE07Ak01.html

[acmavm]

1. The only conclusion that anyone could ever reach when it comes

to ALL of those schmucks is that they were and ARE batshit crazy with a very big dose of EVIL thrown in for good measure.

[Submariner]

2. Rummy was such a professional diplomatic representative of the U.S.

and well liked too.

[cynatnite]

4. I have never seen that pic before n/t

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. This information was freely available on the PNAC website

for years...why is it news now? I read it in ...gee, 2003, I think.

thought to myself at the time, why the hell would anyone post this heads up information, but damn if it wasn't there in plain sight.