Wurmser gone - 18 months to go for Bush

Cheney losing David Wurmser

Vice President Cheney is losing a trusted aide: David Wurmser, Cheney's
chief adviser on Middle East affairs and perhaps the Bush administration's
most radical hawk. According to multiple sources, Wurmser will leave the
office of the vice president (OVP) in August for the private sector, where
he will start a risk-consulting business.

Wurmser's departure is just the latest in a long series of
neoconservatives who've bailed out of the Bush administration since 2005,
including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John
Bolton, Robert Joseph, and J.D. Crouch, along with Richard Perle, who
earlier resigned under pressure from the Defense Policy Board, and
Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president's daughter, who left the State
Department's Near East affairs bureau last summer to have her second child.

Wurmser's departure is not totally a surprise. "He's been looking for a
way out for a year," said a conservative friend of Wurmser's, who added
that former vice presidential staffers don't necessarily command a premium
in the job market. In addition, said this source: "He thinks there's a
purge going on, and that people are out to get him."

In June, Wurmser's name appeared in a front-page New York Times story. In
that account, based in part on reporting that first surfaced in Steve
Clemons' blog, The Washington Note, Wurmser was alleged to have told
thinktanks and conservative policy analysts that Vice President Cheney
disagreed with President Bush's decision to use diplomacy to dissuade Iran
from pursuing nuclear weapons. According to the Times, Wurmser said "that
Mr. Cheney believed that [Condi] Rice's diplomatic strategy was failing,
and that by next spring Mr. Bush might have to decide whether to take
military action."

Reflecting Wurmser's close ties to the Israeli military establishment and
Israel's right-wing Likud bloc led by Bibi Netanyahu, Clemons reported
that Wurmser was colluding with Israel to force a showdown: "Cheney is
planning to deploy an 'end run strategy' around the President if he and
his team lose the policy argument," wrote Clemons. "The thinking on
Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment
in the ongoing standoff … to mount a small-scale conventional strike" on
Iran's nuclear facilities, thus forcing a U.S.-Iran confrontation in its
wake.

Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the
Hudson Institute and David's wife, ridiculed the stories from Clemons and
the Times. "They are all categorically wrong, and there not one thing in
those articles that is correct." But Meyrav Wurmser herself is a strong
advocate for confronting Iran, including support for Iranian opposition
groups and military action. "You don't need to attack the nukes," she
says. You can do something against the oil facilities. You can do
something against the parliament building. You can give them an ultimatum:
stop building nukes or every week we will take another building down."

In the 1990s, David and Meyrav Wurmser joined Richard Perle and Douglas
Feith to author the famous "Clean Break" paper that they presented to
Netanyahu, in which they called for strong Israeli action to force regime
change in Iraq and Syria and to redraw the map of the Middle East. Before
joining the Bush administration in 2001, David Wurmser worked at the
American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy.

In the Bush administration, David Wurmser and a colleague, Michael Maloof,
founded the predecessor organization to the Pentagon's Office of Special
Plans, where they sought to develop intelligence linking Saddam Hussein's
Iraq to Al Qaeda. That work, carried out under Feith's supervision, has
been widely discredited, and a recent report from the Pentagon's own
inspector general declared that their conclusions were not supported by
the underlying intelligence. Wurmser also spent time as an aide to John
Bolton at the State Department before joining Cheney's OVP as his chief
Middle East specialist.

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The ...summary of Wurmser and Feith's duplicity and its ideological
foundation, "A Clean Break," appears to be the answer to why the U.S.
invaded and occupied Iraq, yet for some reason seems to be a prohibited
narrative in American mass-media. (Why is that?) I rarely see it explained
so succinctly. A citizen applauds your courageous journalism.

Furthermore, for balance I presume, you included Mrs. Wurmser's
wonderfully cinematic statement, "They are all categorically wrong, and
there not one thing in those articles that is correct." Adjusted to the
past tense, Mrs. Wurmser might consider it a bold and appropriate choice
for her epitaph.

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Bush has but 18 months to go, as good a time as any to make some
predictions about what will happen, and not happen, before he is replaced
by President Giuliani (and the current times subsequently become known as
the 'Golden Age of American Politics'). What gives for the last 18
months?:

1. The United States won't attack Iran (or any other place of
significance).

2. Bush and Cheney will keep up their weekly assault on the American
Constitution, but, despite much bloviating from the Democrats and their
blogging fellow travellers, neither will come even close to impeachment.
It is not impossible that Cheney resigns for 'health reasons'.

3. There won't be any domestic terrorist attack on the United States.
The idea that one would be necessary gives the American political system
way too much credit, as it will go along with what Bush wants with or
without another attack.

4. The Democrats will continue to wiggle around to try to fool
Americans into believing that they want American troops out of Iraq.
Americans won't be fooled.

5. On the day Bush leaves office, there will still be more than 100,000
American troops in Iraq.

6. The next American elections will be rife with vote fraud, both the
old kinds (which won't have been stopped), and whatever new kinds Rove
cooks up.