Attachment (file not included in this release)
Pre-History
- Autumn 1992: Influential Academic Advocates Breaking Up Middle Eastern Countries, Including Iraq
- Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis publishes an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs called “Rethinking the Middle East.” In it, he advocates a policy he calls “Lebanonization.” He says, “[A] possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what has late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization.’ Most of the states of the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious exception—are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity.… Then state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties.” Lewis is well known as a longtime supporter of the Israeli right wing. Since the 1950s, he has argued that the West and Islam have been engaged in a titanic “clash of civilizations” and that the US should take a hard line against all Arab countries. Lewis is considered a highly influential figure to the neoconservative movement, and some neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Harold Rhode consider him a mentor. In 1996, Perle and others influenced by Lewis will write a paper for right wing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu entitled “A Clean Break” that advocates the “Lebanonization” of countries like Iraq and Syria. Lewis will remain influential after 9/11. For instance, he will have dinner with Vice President Cheney shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some will later suspect that Cheney and others were actually implementing Lewis’s idea by invading Iraq. Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will say in May 2003, just after the invasion, “The neoconservatives’ intention in Iraq was never to truly build democracy there. Their intention was to flatten it, to remove Iraq as a regional threat to Israel.”
Info
- In 1996, Netanyahu, then Likud party leader, commissioned the policy document
- “What we see, then, is not a Jewish conspiracy, but a peculiar alliance of evangelical Christians, foreign-policy hard-liners, lobbyists for the Israeli government and Neoconservative, a number of whom happen to be Jewish. But the Jews among them—Perle, Wolfowitz, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, et al.—are more likely to speak about freedom and democracy than about Halakha (Jewish law). What unites this alliance of convenience is a shared vision of American destiny and the conviction that American force and a tough Israeli line on the Arabs are the best ways to make the United States strong, Israel safe and the world a better place.” -Ian Buruma
- “IN 1996, some of the people in Perle’s circle had begun to think about what it would mean for Saddam Hussein to be removed from the Middle East scene. They concluded that it would be very good for Israel. Perle chaired a study group of eight pro-Likud Americans, including Douglas Feith, who had worked under Perle in the Reagan administration, and David Wurmser, who was the author of the paper produced under the group’s auspices (Perle lent his own name without ever reading it). Afterward, the group was pleased enough with its work to send the paper to the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” called for Israel to free itself from both socialist economic policies and the burdens of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Instead of retreating from occupied lands in exchange for dubious promises of peace, Wurmser wrote, Israel should take the fight to the Palestinians and their Arab backers and create a realignment of forces in the Middle East that would guarantee Israel’s security. Iraq played a central, if utterly fanciful, role in this scenario”Attachment (file not included in this release)
- “Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests (as some critics of the war have charged, rather than addressing its merits head on)? Is neoconservative another word for Jewish (as some advocates of the war have complained, rather than addressing their critics head on)? For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things—an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness—and regime change there became the foreign-policy jackpot. A leading Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, answered the conspiracy theory this way: Jews are drawn to ideas. The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud. And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the uncharted era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available.” Attachment (file not included in this release)
- “Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, who had rejected “Clean Break,” was proven right. We were making Israel less secure, not more.” Attachment (file not included in this release)
- “Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser headed the task force, which submitted the report “Clean Break,” recommending that Israel make a clean break from the negotiations with Arafat and the Palestinians. Arafat couldn’t be trusted, they said; it was a waste of time. Instead, they said, the way to secure Israel was to democratize the Mideast. The Perle group recommended bombing Lebanon, “rolling back Syria … [and] drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program,” and replacing Saddam with a Hashmite ruler favorable to Israel. After Netanyahu rejected “Clean Break,” Perle, Feith, and Wurmser returned to the United States and joined the Project for the New American Century—which also included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Steve Cam- bone, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, and William Kristol.”Attachment (file not included in this release)
- “For neocons, Iraq—with its ed- ucated, urban population and its potential for an active civil society—seemed an especially good candidate for a democratic transition in the Arab world (Bamford 2.004, 261-65; Halper and Clarke 2004, 106-7, 148). Wisely, Netanyahu rejected the plan.”Attachment (file not included in this release)
Influence
- In 2005, David Martin, a CBS News National Security Correspondent, said in regards to the decision-making process that led to the war in Iraq that he “never saw any evidence that Richard Perle had any determining effect on US policy. He just wasn’t in a position to do so.”
- Certain aspects of the policies set forth in the “Clean Break” report were rejected by Netanyahu.
Misc
The “Clean Break” memo, drafted in 1996 by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others for then–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been repeatedly misrepresented as a blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. In reality, it was a policy recommendation for Israel—not the United States—emphasizing Israeli unilateralism and regional assertiveness. That its authors later served in the Bush administration is a matter of public record, but to conflate advisory roles in Israeli policy with direct causation of U.S. military action is to engage in guilt by association rather than reasoned analysis. The memo itself does not call for U.S.-led regime change campaigns across the Middle East, and citing it as proof that Israel “controls” U.S. foreign policy is intellectually lazy and factually baseless.
Moreover, the claim that the U.S. invaded six out of “seven countries” allegedly targeted in the memo (usually referring to the often misquoted “seven countries in five years” line attributed to Gen. Wesley Clark) is a post hoc rationalization built on coincidence and ideological fervor. The countries Clark referenced—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran—were mentioned in a separate context, not the “Clean Break” memo, and U.S. interventions in those nations had widely varying motives, coalitions, and contexts. For example, the intervention in Somalia predates the Bush administration entirely, and Libya was bombed under Obama in a NATO-led campaign. To lump these disparate actions together under the banner of a supposed Israeli plot is conspiratorial thinking masquerading as geopolitical insight. It ignores the complexity of U.S. strategic interests and the diverse, often conflicting, drivers of its foreign interventions. The world is not a chessboard controlled by Tel Aviv, and those who insist otherwise reveal more about their ideological fixations than they do about the actual structure of American power.
The “Clean Break” memo, often touted by conspiracy theorists as smoking-gun evidence of Israeli control over U.S. foreign policy, was in fact a set of unsolicited policy suggestions submitted to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 by a group of American neoconservatives. Far from being a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy document, it was an independent briefing paper written by private individuals who had no authority over U.S. or Israeli government decisions at the time. And crucially, Netanyahu did not adopt its recommendations. He disagreed with the memo’s core strategy advocating for Israeli unilateralism and the abandonment of the Oslo Peace Process. Instead, upon taking office, he pursued negotiations with Yasser Arafat and continued engagement with the United States along the lines of the peace track—contrary to what the “Clean Break” authors had advised.
The memo’s relevance to later U.S. foreign policy is vastly overstated by those determined to see Israel’s hand behind every American intervention. The claim that the U.S. subsequently attacked six of seven countries allegedly mentioned in or linked to the memo—a trope often derived from a separate anecdote by Gen. Wesley Clark—relies on a crude exercise in retroactive pattern-matching. The U.S. invasions and military actions in places like Iraq, Libya, and Somalia were driven by a variety of factors: counterterrorism, humanitarian intervention, oil politics, and domestic political pressures, not Israeli demands. For instance, Libya was targeted under Obama in a NATO-led mission justified by R2P doctrine, while operations in Somalia stretch back to the early 1990s. Reducing these complex and often contradictory actions to a single foreign influence is not only wrong—it’s reductive to the point of delusion.
To argue that Israel “controls” U.S. foreign policy based on a rejected Israeli policy memo written by Americans is to abandon rigorous analysis in favor of ideological storytelling. It is a narrative built not on documentation or diplomacy, but on the suspicion that policy alignment must imply puppet strings. That kind of thinking is not foreign policy critique—it’s a fever dream fueled by confirmation bias and political resentment.
References
[1]: Reddit - Dive into anything
[2]: If Israel wants peace, it must break away from Netanyahu’s ‘Clean Break’ doctrine
[3]: How to Talk About Israel - The New York Times
[4]: Feet to the fire : the media after 9/11 : top journalists speak out : Börjesson, Kristina : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
[5] Attachment (file not included in this release)
[6] Attachment (file not included in this release)
[7] Attachment (file not included in this release)