

Joe Scarborough is a small-bore thinker but he worries his way through problems of perception until he approaches comprehension. His street rat instincts then lead him through a maze of double speak on the air as he seeks to force Mika's kaffeeklatch to acknowledge the obvious. Why is he so devious? Simple - he knows that "the masters" in The Borg will do him in if he is perceived to be too independent. When was the last time you saw Freeman interviewed on network TV?

This morning while the birdies were perched around the stammtisch table, Joe asked Richard Haass, president of the CFR, if it is really necessary to rid Syria of Bashar Assad. Haas blinked a few times and then said that Assad was the cause of both rebellion in general and the growth of IS and Nusra. Joe let that go of course. He will return to the subject like a dog returning to a ripe bone long buried in the back garden.

Haass has been president of CFR since 1990 -? He has long presented himself as a deep thinker and a neutral party (almost) in the great struggle of the Zionist state to realize its self perceived destiny in the ME. His predecessor at CFR, Les Gelb, was, IMO, almost comically one sided in this matter however crudely he sought to disguise the fact.

Haass has been more careful, but today the look of surprise and something like alarm that came over him was striking. What was visible in that moment was a deep need to reinforce the message, the message that people like him and Dennis Ross are, IMO, engaged in injecting into the blood stream of The Borg.

Israel is deeply in thrall to a Revisionist Zionist fantasy in which all the surrounding states must be rendered impotent and harmless. That kind of thought led AIPAC and its more covert allies to drive the US towards war and invasion in Iraq. It mattered not at all that the case to be made about WMD programs in Iraq was a total fabrication. It mattered not at all.

Now, the main visible theme in the Likudnik effort is the idea that Hizbullah, the Syrian Government and Iran are, in combination, the greatest threat to the dream yet faced. In fact, Syria has long supplied Hizbullah and has served as a port of entry for Iranian weaponry and advisers on their way to Hizbullah. The present Syrian government must therefore be destroyed.

Joe asked Haass what would replace Assad.

The answer was that a junta of Alawi generals is the mostly likely outcome when Assad is removed.

In this response can be seen the vision of a Syria that will accept a role as a Morgenthau Plan style entity that accepts its fate as a pastoral vassal of Israel.

What next, Joe? pl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_N._Haass