In this issue:

Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan, Says Guardian

Brit Empire Propagandist: America Recalls British Heyday

In War's Aftermath, Rummy Wants More Power

Bush Scales Back Tax Cut to $550 Billion

DLC Chair Evan Bayh: Dems Should Stop Anti-War Discussions

Fight Shaping Up Over Extension of Patriot Act

From Volume 2, Issue Number 16 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Apr. 21, 2003

United States News Digest

Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan, Says Guardian

"Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan" was the front-page headline of the London Guardian April 15, which reported the following: "The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the U.S. should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday." It goes on to say that Donald Rumsfeld "ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad," and that the DOD's "Doug Feith, and William Luti, ... were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups, and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr. Feith and Mr. Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq."

The paper added: "Mr. Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush Administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could 'shape its strategic environment ... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria'"—in a reference to the Clean Break document.

The paper continued: "However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the 'war on terror' to Syria."

The paper quoted a Washington intelligence source who says, "The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion."

Tony Blair was cited, as also being opposed to any move against Syria. "I have the advantage of talking to the American President on a regular basis and I can assure you there are no plans to invade Syria," he said. "Neither has anyone on the other side of the water, as far as I am aware, said there are plans."

The conclusion of the article is that the U.S. will "use its military ascendancy in the region to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Damascus and resolve what Washington sees as longstanding problems, including the threat to Israel posed by Damascus-backed Islamic extremists, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and Syria's chemical weapons."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said April 15 that U.S. forces had shut down a pipeline used for allegedly illegal oil shipments from Iraq to Syria. In a question-and-answer session with reporters, Rumsfeld denied coalition forces had destroyed any pipelines. "We have preserved infrastructure in that country," he said.

Brit Empire Propagandist: America Recalls British Heyday

Writing in the Times of London April 12, a leading British Empire propagandist chortled that American leaders today are like the leaders of the British Empire at its mid-Victorian heyday. Andrew Roberts, a biographer of Churchill, wrote: "The sense of vigour and confidence that the American political leadership has shown since last November is reminiscent of nothing so much as those mid-Victorians who convinced themselves that the British Empire was the foremost force for good in an otherwise debased world." He went on: "If you need a 19th-century counterpart for the neo-conservative movement led by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Condoleezza Rice, look at the idealistic imperialists produced by Balliol and other Oxford colleges from the 1850s." According to Roberts, "The victory [sic] in Iraq is a major step forward."

The empire is on the way up, and the U.S. "will not—it almost cannot—stop at Baghdad. An internal dynamic begins to take over...." Roberts cautioned that "of course, that is precisely the moment when hubris and nemesis have struck earlier empires," referring to reversals of Rome's Augustus Caesar, Spain's Philip II, France's Napoleon, and Britain itself, in the Boer War. And so, the American imperial expansion might end up crashing.

In War's Aftermath, Rummy Wants More Power

According to the New York Times of April 14, in the aftermath of the Iraq war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has sent to Capitol Hill proposed legislation that would give him greater authority over personnel policy at the Pentagon, from senior generals and admirals down to the lowest enlisted ranks. At the top levels, Rumsfeld wants to be able to lengthen tenures of four-star officers, and allow one- and two-star officers, whose path to promotion would be affected by the longer tenures of four-stars, to retire early. Already Rumsfeld personally interviews every candidate for positions of one-star and above, leading some in the officer corps to charge that Rumsfeld is weeding out the high command to preserve only like-minded officers.

At the lower ranks, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David Chu says that there are 300,000 support jobs currently held by military people that could be done by civilians. While the Times article doesn't say so, it's likely that the such an initiative would be folded into ongoing efforts to privatize hundreds of thousands of government jobs.

Missing from the proposed legislation, however, is an earlier rumored proposal to consolidate staff positions on the Joint Staff under the Secretary of Defense. Under current law, the Joint Staff serves the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and some officers viewed the proposal as an attempt by Rumsfeld to rein in the independent analysis of the Joint Staff.

Bush Scales Back Tax Cut to $550 Billion

As part of a move to focus on his domestic agenda, now that "we've won" in Iraq, said the White House, President Bush is demanding $550 billion in tax cuts over 10 years—the amount approved by the House—down from his original proposal of $726 billion. The Senate has approved just $350 billion, insisting like the House that the full tax cut would cause rising deficits. In an example of Greenspan-like lunacy, Bush said the money from the tax cuts would "be in circulation, which will be good for our economy."

Over the next two weeks, 25 Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials will speak at 57 events in more than 40 cities to push the Administration's tax-cut package.

Under the headline, "It's the economy, stupid," the London Guardian's Mark Tran warns that if Bush does not attend to the faltering economy in the U.S., he could lose the next election, repeating the fate of Bush, Sr. The tax-cut plan would not be much stimulus, writes Tran, yet would cause bigger deficits.

DLC Chair Evan Bayh: Dems Should Stop Anti-War Discussions

Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), chairman of the organized-crime-linked Democratic Leadership Council, has said that opponents of the Iraq war and the Bush policy should cut it out, because "equivocating about whether Saddam Hussein's departure is a good thing ... doesn't help the Democratic Party." Bayh—poster boy for the "second Republican Party"—insists that Bush has been so strengthened by the insane war that the Democratic Party can only nominate a Presidential candidate that can rival Bush's image as "a commander-in-chief in dangerous times." Bayh is portrayed by the New York Times as leading the pack of consultants and campaign managers who are running scared about the "victory" of the Iraq war, and telling their candidates to back off. Even Sen. John Kerry's campaign manager, Jim Jordan, is quoted as saying that unless Kerry can "make a compelling and convincing case ... that he can keep Americans safe ... we're looking at McGovern-like results," referring to Nixon's landslide defeat of anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern in 1972.

One "prominent Democratic senator" who did not want to be named, warned that the big difference between 1992, when Bush 41 could be defeated on the economic issues after the first Gulf war, and now, is that "this Administration will never end the war...." This Administration will constantly play the "war on terrorism," and might expand the "never-ending military commitment to Iraq" to other countries. According to a well-informed Washington political source, this DLC/Lieberman-led argument is rampant, pushed by the professional consultants and "image makers" taking over the party. This is one of the reasons, said this source, that former President Clinton went public at the Conference Board, with criticisms that he has only expressed privately before—no one else (other than LaRouche) is about to take on Bush and his war party (for Clinton's remarks, see USA DIGEST SUPPLEMENT).

Fight Shaping Up Over Extension of Patriot Act

"Over my dead body," says the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, when talking about efforts by the Justice Department to make permanent many of the powers in the 2001 U.S.A./Patriot Act. Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) also says that it is "way premature" for Congress to consider the Justice Department's new package of anti-terrorism measures—known as Patriot II—until the Department of Justice has proven the merits of the first Patriot Act. Last week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) circulated an amendment to remove the "sunset" provision from the first Patriot Act, under which it expires in 2005 unless renewed; but Hatch later withdrew his amendment.

The major newspaper in Hatch's home state, the Salt Lake City Tribune, ran an article highly critical of Hatch last Sunday, quoting both conservative and civil-liberties groups as charging Hatch with leading the charge to strip away civil liberties from Americans. Right-wing groups criticizing Hatch include the American Conservative Union, the Eagle Forum, and Americans for Tax Reform.

Another Senator carrying water for Ashcroft's Justice Department is Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is spearheading a bill to water down the "agent of a foreign power" provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, so that a lone individual without foreign connections could be targetted for secret wiretaps and break-ins.

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