Tucker interviews Jeffrey Sachs: Israel, the Israel Lobby, and their role in removing Assad

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Jeffrey Sachs is a top-tier academic in the field of international development, but he knows a lot about international politics and, despite being Jewish, he is very blunt about the role of Israel in the Middle East going back to the 1990s and the “Clean Break” policy—a joint collaboration between Israeli foreign policy hawks and American neocons published by an Israeli thinktank. The following is from my paper (soon to be a chapter in the revised edition of The Culture of Critique) “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement.” Note the references to Syria. Israel’s desire to crush Syria has now come to fruition:

[U.S.-based neocon Richard] Perle was the “Study Group Leader” of a 1996 report titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli think tank. The membership of the study group illustrates the overlap between Israeli think tanks close to the Israeli government, American policy makers and government officials, and pro-Israel activists working in the United States. Other members of this group who accepted positions in the George W. Bush administration or in pro-Israel activist organizations in the United States include Douglas Feith (Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy), David Wurmser (member of IASPS, a protégé of Perle at AEI, and senior adviser in the State Department), Meyrav Wurmser (head of the Hudson Institute, a neocon think tank), James Colbert (JINSA), and Jonathan Torop (WINEP).

Despite Joshua Muravchik’s apologetic claims,[1] the “Clean Break” report was clearly intended as advice for another of Perle’s personal friends,[2] Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the new prime minister of Israel; there is no indication that it was an effort to further U.S. interests in the region. The purpose was to “forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.” Indeed, the report advises the United States to avoid pressure on the Israelis to give land for peace, a strategy “which required funneling American money to repressive and aggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the United States and Israel, and placed the United States in roles it should neither have nor want.” The authors of the report speak as Jews and Israelis, not as U.S. citizens: “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2,000 years—is legitimate and noble.” Much of the focus is on removing the threat of Syria, and it is in this context that the report notes, “This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”[3] The ultimate result of this has been the 2003–2011 war in Iraq and ultimately the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and is ongoing as I write, bringing devastation to the country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and over 4400 U.S. and almost 32000 wounded.[4] The Syrian civil war has become part of the ongoing conflict between Russia and its allies against the West, with Iran and Russia siding with Assad, while Israel and the United States, along with other Western countries, have supported the rebels—essentially the same forces arrayed against each other in the Ukraine war.

Sachs also brings up Timber-Sycamore, a CIA weapons project that supported rebels against the Assad regime beginning in 2012 or 2013.  In this context, Sachs emphasizes that the U.S. media, and particularly The New York Times never contextualizes their articles on the region. Although they had an article on Timber-Sycamore in 2017, the roles of the U.S. and Israel in Assad’s removal are ignored. Assad is simply a bad guy, like Saddam and Gaddafi, and he got what’s coming to him. Sachs notes that the neocon-Israeli axis wanted to destroy seven countries because they supported the Palestinians: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. So far they have gotten all except Iran, and Iran has clearly been in their plans for many years.

There will be enormous pressure on the Trump administration to go to war with Iran, presumably aided by Miriam Adelson’s $100 million campaign donation to Trump. One can only hope that clearer heads will prevail, although Trump’s rabidly pro-Israel appointments to Middle East positions are deeply concerning. Presumably Tucker has some influence on Trump given their close association during the election campaign, and he wouldn’t have done this interview if he didn’t believe that going into all these Middle East wars was a mistake and that Israel is at the root of all the wars in the region. It would be terrific if someone with this mindset had power in U.S. foreign policy in the next administration.

 A couple other things struck me: American foreign policy is run by the CIA which is unaccountable to Congress and has gotten away with numerous covert operations (e.g., Syria and Ukraine’s Maidan regime-change) without the American public having any idea of what they have done. Tucker and Sachs note that Trump’s promise to declassify documents offers some hope that what the CIA has done would become public knowledge.

Update: Netanyahu visits IDF soldiers in Syria as rebel leaders call for Israelis to exit

First Part of the Transcript:

Tucker [00:00:00] Well, first of all, thank you. So many things have happened in the last two weeks. I keep thinking, where’s Jeff Sachs? I want to go. I wonder what this means. So the most dramatic and from my perspective, unexpected thing that happened was all of a sudden the government in Syria changed. There was regime change in Syria. Who did that? Why? And what does it mean?

Jeffrey Sachs [00:00:20] Well, it’s part of a 30 year effort. This is Netanyahu’s war to remake the Middle East. It’s been a disaster. It continues to be a disaster. But as Netanyahu himself said, after Assad left, we have remade the Middle East. And so it has to be understood as something that didn’t just happen in a week, but has been an ongoing war throughout the Middle East. And maybe the right way to understand what’s happened with Syria is to think back to a really remarkable occasion when Wesley Clark, the general who headed Naito. Yes. Went to the Pentagon just after 911. And famously he was shown a piece of paper that said, we’re going to have seven wars in five years. And he was completely dumbfounded, said, What does this have to do with anything? And he was told that the neocons and the Israelis are going to remake the Middle East. And the seven countries on the list are very telling. They would Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and then in Africa, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and seven countries. We’ve been at war in six of them now. And I mean, we the United States on behalf of Israel, including in Syria. And so what happened in Syria last week was the culmination of a long term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image. That started with Netanyahu and his American advisers in 1996 in something called Clean Break, which was a political document that the Americans and Netanyahu made when Netanyahu became prime minister. After 911, it went into full gear with the Iraq war as being the first of those wars.

(0:00) The Regime Change in Syria (8:48)

What Is Greater Israel? (21:45)

Were Americans Involved in the Overthrowing of Assad? (34:26) ‘

War With China by 2027 (40:22)

Biden’s Attempt to Sabotage Trump (46:10)

The Attempted Coup of South Korea (51:20)

Jeffrey Sachs’ Warning to Trump of Potential Nuclear War (55:18)

Will We See the Declassification of the 9/11 Documents? (1:07:11)

Will Trump Pardon Snowden and Assange? (1:16:43)

The Most Important Appointment of Trump’s Cabinet (1:26:29)

Biden’s Attempt to Kill Putin (1:35:58)

Can Trump Bring Peace? (1:45:44) /

Is War With Iran Inevitable? (1:51:21)

Why Corporate Media Hates Jeffrey Sachs

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