November 10/11/12, 2006 -- The impending partial purge of the Bush 43 neo-cons by the incoming cadre of Bush 41 officials is already having an effect on U.S.-Syrian relations. Intelligence sources report that the Bush 41 team, still grateful for Syrian President Hafez al Assad's support for Operation Desert Storm, is working to exonerate Bashar Assad, Assad's son, for his government's alleged role in the February 2005 car bomb assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. WMR has previously reported that Hariri's assassination was ordered by neo-cons in Israel and the United States who wanted to implement their "Clean Break" policy in order to drive Syrian occupation troops out of Lebanon and then engineer wars with the Lebanese Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. With the Iraq Study Group led by Bush 41 Secretary of State James Baker and including Defense Secretary-designate Robert Gates engaged in negotiations with Syria to work out an American military withdrawal from Iraq, the neo-con charges against Syria for the Hariri assassination are being cast aside, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The behind-the-scenes negotiations with Damascus reportedly will curtail moves by chief UN investigator Serge Brammertz to convene a UN "Lebanon Special Tribunal" to try members of the Lebanese and Syrian governments for the Hariri assassination. In fact, the incoming "realpolitik" advisers to the Bush administration are already taking steps to lay blame for the assassination on operatives linked to notorious Russian-Israeli Mafia weapons smuggler and Defense Department air transport contractor Viktor Bout. Such an assignment of blame is designed to send a friendly signal to Damascus while signaling to Jerusalem that the blame for the Hariri assassination is being laid very close but not actually on the doorstep of Israel's Mossad and their neo-con allies in the Bush administration. Not only has Bout enjoyed the largesse of Pentagon logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan but when she was National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice rejected a Sharjah police offer to arrest Bout at Sharjah International Airport. Rice told U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies that when it came to Bout they should "look but don't touch."
Brammertz's proposed tribunal has had the strong backing of unconfirmed, recess appointed US ambassador to the UN John Bolton and Secretary of State Rice but with the Bush 41 group taking over the reins at the Pentagon with a mandate to purge most of the neo-con elements nested there, the State Department will soon find its plans for the Lebanon tribunal spiked by Iraq Study Group members determined to patch up relations with Syria and pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud in return for their help in extricating the United States from the Iraq quagmire. Attempts by Bush to push through Bolton's permanent nomination as UN ambassador in the lame duck Senate are reportedly "dead on arrival."
The detente with Syria and its Lebanese allies is sure to irritate the neo-cons loyal to Vice President Dick Cheney but as the article below suggests, Cheney's days as well as those of his allies may be numbered. With Cheney's mentor Rumsfeld now out of the Pentagon, the Cheney wing of the administration is extremely vulnerable.