As it turned out, Iraq was not nearly as mired in mayhem or blundering toward the brink as Wurmser judged in 1996. At the dawn of the 21st century, Saddam was as firmly ensconced in power as ever. So much for Wurmser as a geopolitical analyst.

This posed a problem. There was no chance of “expediting” a “chaotic collapse” that wasn’t there; a process has to exist first before it can be accelerated. So Wurmser and the other neocons in the Bush administration had to cook up a collapse from scratch themselves.

And it took a full-scale invasion and occupation by a global superpower to make this particular Leninist “omelet,” at the cost of a prodigious amount of “broken eggs”: 4,425 American lives and $1.7 trillion.

But the neocons and Israel finally did get their longed for chaotic collapse in Iraq, along with the deaths of over a million Iraqis and the displacement of millions more. This blood-soaked business is what they call “statecraft.”

Yet, even then, the best laid plans of the neocons and Likudniks still completely failed to pan out.

In both of his seminal strategy documents of 1996, Wurmser imagined that if the Hashemites were installed in Iraq, they could use their influence with a certain prominent cleric there to turn the Shiites of Syria and Lebanon against Assad, Iran, and Hezbollah.

And the “Coping” report envisioned a supporting role in that project for Ahmed Chalabi, identified by Wurmser as “one of the most prominent of the Iraqi opposition figures to Saddam” and “himself a Shiite and a close, long-time Hashemite confidant.” Wurmser further anticipated that:

“…pro-Jordan Iraq Shiites as Ahmed Chalabi… would define the Iraqi Shiite community after Saddam’s removal.”

By the Iraq War, the neocons had given up on outright enthroning a Hashemite in Baghdad. It’s one thing to coordinate something like that from behind the scenes, but installing a royal despot through a high-profile American war would have made for unacceptably bad press for Washington.

So Perle and Company settled for a “democratic” “Hashemite option.” In this Plan B, “Hashemite confidant” Ahmed Chalabi graduated from a supporting to a leading role in Israel’s plan for the new Iraq.

Chalabi had long delighted the neocons by feeding Washington bogus “intelligence” on Iraqi weapons that eventually helped to justify the US invasion. On the basis of this rapport, Chalabi assured the neocons that, as a leading light in “democratic” Iraq, he would steer state policy in Israel’s favor. The neocons even swallowed his pledge to build a pipeline for them from Iraq’s oilfields to an Israeli refinery and port.

None of Chalabi’s promises ever manifested. As it turned out, Chalabi was just as much an agent of Iran (enemy to both Saddam and Israel) as he was a “Hashemite confidant.” For more details on this, see the amazing article, “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons.”

The neocons and Israel got their war and collapse in Iraq, but it blew up in their faces. The new US-armed Iraqi government, as well as the Shiite militias that do most of its fighting, became dominated, not by loyal Jordan, but by hated Iran. Oops.

And after the war, the neocons were faced, not with Wurmser’s anticipated “Jordanian-Israeli-Iraqi-Turkish bloc,” but what they perceive as an anti-Israel “Shia crescent” including Iran, Iraq, Syria, and (most importantly) Hezbollah in Lebanon. Far from being isolated, Syria seemed to have more friends than ever. Oops.

But Israel sure as hell wasn’t going to leave bad enough alone. Where the subtleties of neocon “strategists” miserably failed, Israel’s influence over the sheer wealth and brute power of the US empire (what Wurmser has called its “raw capability”) would have to make up the difference once again.

So for the sake of Israel, and since at least 2007, Washington, along with its regional allies, has been waging a broad covert proxy war to undermine the “Shia crescent.” This policy pivot, which legendary journalist Seymour Hersh dubbed “The Redirection,” has involved supporting Sunni Islamist mujahideen in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

Then, after the 2011 “Arab Spring” of popular uprisings reached Syria, “The Redirection” went into overdrive. The US-led regional coalition (Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc) has been strenuously trying to overthrow the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad since at least 2012 by heavily sponsoring an insurgency led by jihadists including Al Qaeda and ISIS .

Israel has also been contributing to the cause of chaos more directly. Like a prizefighter’s “cutman,” the Israeli military has stood in Al Qaeda’s corner, taking in its wounded terrorist “rebels,” patching them up, and then sending them back into Syria to resume fighting.

In Syria too, the neocons and Israel have finally seen their longed for chaotic collapse, to the tune of a quarter of a million Syrian deaths and millions more displaced (many fleeing to Europe or drowning en route).

As discussed above, Israel has seized on the chaos it has unleashed on its northern neighbor as an excuse for expanding settlements in the Golan Heights.

Moreover, whenever that chaos even slightly spills over into Golan, Israel has been seizing that as a pretext for still more war.

Syrian soldiers are desperately battling Al Qaeda just north of Golan. Whenever a shell strays into the Heights (almost always exploding harmlessly in some unoccupied field), Israel responds by bombing Syrian military positions, thus effectively serving as Al Qaeda’s air force as well as its combat medic.

It does this regardless of (and generally clueless as to) who actually fired the offending projectile: whether it was the Syrian army, Al Qaeda, or any other faction. As CBS News related in a report of recent such strikes:

“Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said in a statement that Israel holds the Syrian military ‘responsible and accountable for any aggression emanating from Syria.’”

Israel’s self-righteously sociopathic behavior toward Syria and the Golan Heights beggars belief. It’s like some wealthy homeowner taking over his poor neighbor’s backyard and then sending a gang of crazed ruffians to invade his home. Then in the ensuing brawl, when something crashes through the neighbor’s window onto the seized yard, the land thief yells from a balcony, “Why can’t you get your house in order!” and fires at him with a shotgun. Then the thief walks back to his room muttering to himself, “What a hopeless basket case! How I’m definitely not giving him back his yard.”