Politics: The Usual Suspects, Bound for Damascus

Tompaine.com rounds up how the regular cast of neo-cons -- along with the addition of noted racist Bush nominee to the board of the U.S. Institute for Peace Daniel Pipes -- has had Damascus in the U.S. sites for a while, just waiting for an opportunity to knock on Assad's door.

It turns out that before the Bush family restored the monarchy in 2000, Pipes' organization, the Middle East Forum, issued a paper entitled "Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role." Pipes co-chaired the body producing the report, and the final document was signed by "Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle East policy-maker under Bush; Douglas Feith, currently the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Paula Dobriansky, the current Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs; and Michael Rubin and David Wurmser, who during the past year have worked at the Pentagon and State Department, respectively, on Iraq policy and previously worked on Middle East issues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Also signing the 22-page report were Richard Perle, the powerful former chairman [and still member] of the Defense Policy Board; former U.N. Ambassador (and currently U.S. Representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission) Jeane Kirkpatrick; and Frank Gaffney, director of the right-wing Center for Security Policy (CSP)."

Now, does anybody have any doubt that a powerful cabal of right-wing nutjobs who all share a dangerously antagonistic antipathy toward the Arab world and Islam enjoy an enormous amount of power in our current government? I didn't think so.