‘Clean Break’ Neo-Con David Wurmser May Have Been Behind ‘Targeted Strike’ on Soleimani

Jan. 21, 2020 (EIRNS)—Evidence has surfaced suggesting that David Wurmser, one of the neo-conservative co-authors of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction hoax and earlier of “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a document written for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, was the author of the policy behind the Jan. 3 U.S. assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake, in a syndicated column posted on Jan. 14, reported that Wurmser, who had been brought into the National Security Council by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton, wrote a series of memos to Bolton in May and June of 2019 arguing for what he called “regime disruption” in Iran. According to Lake, Wurmser claimed that the Iranian leadership expected the United States “to respond to its provocations in a measured and predictable fashion,” as Lake put it. Therefore, if the U.S. acts outside of this construct, the Iranian leadership gets confused or “disrupted.”

After Iran downed the U.S. reconnaissance drone in June 2019, Wurmser advised Bolton that the U.S. response should be overt and designed to send a message that the U.S. holds the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people, responsible. “This could even involve something as a targeted strike on someone like Soleimani or his top deputies,” Wurmser wrote in a June 22 memo. In these memos, Wurmser is careful to counsel against a ground invasion of Iran, says Lake. Wurmser says the U.S. response “does not need to be boots on the ground (in fact, it should not be).” Rather, he stresses that the U.S. response should be calibrated to exacerbate the regime’s domestic legitimacy crisis.

Jon Schwarz, a reporter for The Intercept, wrote two days later that Wurmser’s memos, have a twofold significance. “First, while it was already clear that the neo-conservative movement has powerfully influenced the Trump Administration,” he writes, “Wurmser’s role on Iran is further evidence of the sway that neo-conservatism still holds on the U.S. right—despite the catastrophic invasion of Iraq and Trump’s disavowal of the war. Second, it demonstrates that neo-conservatives such as Wurmser still cherish a peculiar theory about Iranian society.”

That “peculiar theory,” often espoused by Pompeo though Schwarz doesn’t mention that, is that if the U.S. disrupts the regime, the people of Iran will turn on it, overthrowing its oppression, but in fact this hardly ever happens. “We should definitely consider the possibility that the neo-cons don’t know what they’re talking about,” Schwarz writes. “And yet, here we are, with those self-same neo-cons again helping shape our foreign policy in delusional and dangerous ways.” In fact, these are the Beast-men, so identified by Lyndon LaRouche after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, because of their brutality and ignoble lies.

Robert Bridge, an American journalist living in Moscow, writes in a Jan. 20 op-ed for RT that “The revelation that Wurmser was feeding Bolton advice sheds a much-needed light—albeit an opaque one—on Trump’s inexplicable decision in early January to ‘take out’ Gen. Qasem Soleimani.” So the question now is: “What could have compelled Trump to place any trust in Wurmser, whose résumé reads like that of a bull in a china shop?” Bridge asks. “One possibility is that Trump had no idea Wurmser was feeding Bolton and other members of his administration what amounted to yet more regime change shenanigans in the Middle East.”