A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm - Criticism

Criticism

Journalist Jason Vest wrote that the report was "a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto." In Vest's analysis, it proposed "a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes, destabilization and containment. Indeed, it even goes so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with missile-defense advocacy." He wrote that because of the shared organizational membership of the paper's authors the report provides "perhaps the most insightful window" into the "policy worldview" of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and Center for Security Policy, two United States-based thinktanks.

An October 2003 editorial in The Nation criticized the Syria Accountability Act and connected it to the Clean Break report and authors:

"To properly understand the Syria Accountability Act, one has to go back to a 1996 document, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,' drafted by a team of advisers to Benjamin Netanyahu in his run for prime minister of Israel. The authors included current Bush advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. 'Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil,' they wrote, calling for 'striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.' No wonder Perle was delighted by the Israeli strike. 'It will help the peace process,' he told the Washington Post, adding later that the United States itself might have to attack Syria. But what Perle means by 'helping the peace process' is not resolving the conflict by bringing about a viable, sovereign Palestinian state but rather - as underscored in 'A Clean Break' - 'transcending the Arab-Israeli conflict' altogether by forcing the Arabs to accept most, if not all, of Israel's territorial conquests and its nuclear hegemony in the region."

John Dizard claimed there is evidence in the Clean Break document of Ahmed Chalabi's involvement. (Chalabi, an Iraqi politician, was an ardent opponent of Saddam Hussein.):

"In the section on Iraq, and the necessity of removing Saddam Hussein, there was telltale 'intelligence' from Chalabi and his old Jordanian Hashemite patron, Prince Hassan: 'The predominantly Shi'a population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shi'a leadership in Najaf, Iraq, rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shi'a away from Hizbollah, Iran, and Syria. Shi'a retain strong ties to the Hashemites.' Of course the Shia with 'strong ties to the Hashemites' was the family of Ahmed Chalabi. Perle, Feith and other contributors to the 'Clean Break' seemed not to recall the 15-year fatwa the clerics of Najaf proclaimed against the Iraqi Hashemites. Or the still more glaring fact, pointed out by Rashid Khalidi in his new book Resurrecting Empire, that Shiites are loyal only to descendants of the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, and reject all other lineages, including the Hashemites. As Khalidi caustically notes, 'Perle and his colleagues were here proposing the complete restructuring of a region whose history and religion their suggestions reveal they know hardly anything about.' In short, the Iraqi component of the neocons 'new strategy' was based on an ignorant fantasy of prospective Shia support for ties with Israel."

Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in their controversial and critical "The Israel Lobby" article of March 2006, published in the London Review of Books that the Clean Break paper

"called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle 'are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments ... and Israeli interests'."

Sidney Blumenthal criticized the report, writing:

"Instead of trading land for peace, the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of Likud's terms, peace for peace. Rather than negotiations with Syria, they proposed weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. They also advanced a wild scenario to redefine Iraq. Then King Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni monarch would gain control of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria."