First Draft: Was This Iran War Planned 30 Years Ago?
Mehdi on the neoconservative memo on Israel and Iran from 1996 (!) that you really need to read. Plus, the horrifying attack yesterday on a synagogue in Michigan, and the FBI teams up with... UFC?
🚨 Breaking: At least four of the six crew members on board a US KC-135 refueling aircraft supporting operations against Iran were killed yesterday when the plane crashed over Iraq, US Central Command confirmed today. The US military insisted the crash was “not due to hostile or friendly fire.”
Good morning! Mehdi here, sending solidarity in this month of Ramadan to my Jewish cousins in Michigan, where a Muslim man from Lebanon, a naturalized US citizen, attacked a synagogue in the city of West Bloomfield, near Detroit, and was killed in the process. Thankfully, there were no casualties inside the synagogue, and, of course, it goes without saying that there is never, ever, any justification for attacking a synagogue or any house of worship. More details on this disturbing story below.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ I lead with the story of the ‘Clean Break’ memo that explains so much of what is going on in the Middle East today, especially Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran. Plus, Kash Patel’s FBI is getting new training from the strangest, the weirdest, of places, and two new European countries sign onto South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.
From ‘Clean Break’ to ‘Epic Fury’
If you want to understand the origins of the devastating and very illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran, you don’t have to start with Donald Trump. You don’t have to go back a year to the 12 Day War, or 11 years to the Iran nuclear deal, or even 25 years to 9/11. You have to go back to a little-known policy paper written almost exactly 30 years ago.
It was 1996. The Cold War was over. The United States was the world’s lone superpower. And a group of American neoconservatives drafted a strategy memo for Israel’s newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The document was called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” Its authors included a who’s who of right-wing, hawkish, pro-Israel figures who would later dominate US foreign policy during the war-obsessed presidency of George W. Bush: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, among others. And their proposal was a radical one: Israel, they insisted, should abandon the old “land for peace” formula in the Middle East and instead reorder the region through military confrontations and even regime change operations.
They were explicit about their targets. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and, yes, Iran. The report talked about “removing Saddam Hussein from power,” “striking” targets in Syria, and pulling Lebanon away from Iran.
At the time, this seemed like the pipe dream of a handful of fringe ideologues. Today, however, it reads like a blueprint. Just look at what happened next.