Skip to main content

< Back to Main List

"A Clean Break" (1996) — The Memo at the Center of the Foreign-Policy-Capture Thesis

One-line summary: In 1996 a study group led by Richard Perle wrote a strategy paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging Israel to break from the Oslo peace process, adopt "the principle of preemption," and remove Saddam Hussein — and several of its authors then took senior positions in the U.S. Defense Department that produced the Iraq war, a sequence critics cite as the clearest documented case of a foreign strategy paper preceding American policy.

FieldDetails
DocumentA Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
PublishedJune 1996, by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS)
Prepared forBenjamin Netanyahu, then incoming Prime Minister of Israel
Study groupLed by Richard Perle; participants included James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser
Later U.S. rolesPerle chaired the Defense Policy Board (2001–2003); Feith served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2001–2005); David Wurmser held posts at the State Department and in the Office of the Vice President
Relevance to Deep StateCited as a documented instance in which a strategy written for a foreign government was later advanced by the same authors from inside the U.S. government — the mechanism this investigation calls foreign and ideological capture
Evidence StrengthThe document itself is DOCUMENTED — it is public, authored, dated, and its authors' subsequent U.S. appointments are a matter of record. The causal claim that it drove U.S. wars is CONTESTED / STRONG CIRCUMSTANTIAL — the sequence is verifiable; the intent behind it is disputed and denied by the authors

What the Memo Actually Says​

The paper is short and unambiguous about its purpose: it advises Netanyahu to make a "clean break" from the Oslo Accords and the land-for-peace framework his predecessors had accepted, and to replace it with a strategy of forward defense. Its stated recommendations include:

  • Abandoning "land for peace" as the organizing principle of Israeli policy and asserting the right to territory on the basis of security and law
  • Re-establishing "the principle of preemption" — acting against threats before they materialize rather than absorbing the first blow
  • "Removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq", which the paper calls "an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right"
  • Rolling back Syrian influence, including in Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, and confronting Syria's regional posture
  • Building a regional alignment with Turkey and Jordan, and pursuing the restoration of Hashemite influence in Iraq
  • Shifting the U.S.–Israel relationship away from economic aid toward strategic partnership

The full text has been public for decades and is available from one of its own authors: Clean_Break.pdf on dougfeith.com.

The Pattern Argument​

In an August 2026 clip from Theo Von's podcast This Past Weekend, geopolitics commentator Professor Xueqin Jiang — known for the YouTube channel "Predictive History" — argued that the memo is the key to reading the last thirty years of U.S. Middle East policy. His framing is explicitly one of pattern rather than proof; he says in the clip, "I'm not trying to make a judgment. All I'm trying to do is point out a pattern that's emerging."

The pattern he lays out:

  1. 1996 — the study group writes A Clean Break, urging Netanyahu toward preemption and away from Oslo.
  2. 2001–2005 — several of the same authors, Perle and Feith foremost among them, hold senior Pentagon policy positions.
  3. 2003 onward — the United States invades Iraq, and over the following two decades U.S. or U.S.-backed military action reaches Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

Jiang's question to Von is the one the post that circulated this clip used as its headline: "So, do you feel like America is working at the behest of Israel?" That is posed as a question, not a finding, and this page treats it the same way.

General Wesley Clark's "Seven Countries in Five Years"​

The clip's strongest single piece of testimony is not from Jiang but from retired General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, whose 2007 account is replayed in the video. Clark says that roughly ten days after 9/11 a general at the Pentagon told him the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made — with, in Clark's telling, no new intelligence connecting Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Returning weeks later, Clark says the same officer showed him a classified memo he described as a plan "to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran."

What is established and what is not:

  • Clark has told this story consistently and publicly since 2007, and his credentials are not in dispute.
  • The memo he describes has never been released or independently verified. No copy is public.
  • Clark himself later qualified it. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer he allowed that the document "wasn't [necessarily] a plan — maybe it was a think piece, maybe it was a sort of notional concept," but said it indicated the direction of official discussion in Washington at the time.
  • The memo Clark describes is not the Clean Break memo. In the clip Jiang links them thematically — Von asks, "So you're saying that this is part of the Clean Break memo," and Jiang answers, "That's right" — but they are two different documents, thirty years and one government apart. A Clean Break names Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran; it does not name Libya, Somalia, or Sudan. Readers should hold the two separately.

Video​

Professor Xueqin Jiang and Theo Von discuss the Clean Break memo and General Wesley Clark's "seven countries in five years" account. Source: @RedPillSayian on X, August 14, 2026, clipped from This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von*.*

Key Statements​

From the video (machine transcription, lightly cleaned for readability):

General Wesley Clark, on the days after 9/11:

"One of the generals called me in... he said, 'We've made the decision. We're going to war with Iraq.' This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, 'We're going to war with Iraq — why?' He said, 'I don't know. I guess they don't know what else to do.' I said, 'Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?' He said, 'No, no. There's nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.'"

"He reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, 'I just got this down from upstairs — from the Secretary of Defense's office today.' And he said, 'This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.' I said, 'Is it classified?' He said, 'Yes, sir.' I said, 'Well, don't show it to me.'"

Professor Jiang, on the pattern:

"In '96 they write the Clean Break memo, encouraging Netanyahu to choose a path of war and dominance in the Middle East, and to clean break away from the Oslo peace process. And that's exactly what he's been doing for the past 20 years... Then these people — specifically Richard Perle — they go work for the Pentagon, and they help implement a lot of the Clean Break memo policies by starting a war against Iraq."

"So again, there's a pattern here, right? So I'm not trying to make a judgment. All I'm trying to do is point out a pattern that's emerging."

Theo Von, putting the question directly:

"So you feel like America's working at the behest of the Israeli government, of Netanyahu's choices? What do you think that relationship is there?"

Jiang's answer is conditional, and the conditional matters: "Well, it seems — yeah, because if this is true, then it would say that America's working at the behest of Netanyahu and some of these other people."

Why This Belongs in the Deep State Investigation​

This investigation's Tier 1 question is whether entities above the elected government set the direction of American foreign policy. A Clean Break is unusual as evidence because the ordinary difficulty — that influence is invisible and deniable — largely does not apply. The document is public, signed, dated, and addressed to a foreign head of government; the authors' subsequent U.S. appointments are in the Congressional Record; and the policies later adopted rhyme closely with what the paper recommended. What remains contested is causation, not chronology. That makes it a useful test case for the whole investigation: it is the strongest available example of the mechanism, and it still falls short of proof — which is itself worth stating plainly. It connects directly to the Neoconservative / PNAC network, whose 1997 founding and September 2000 "new Pearl Harbor" report follow the same authors, and to Lawrence Wilkerson's account of the same Pentagon offices in 2002.

Counterpoint​

The authors and their defenders reject the reading above, and their objections are substantive:

  • It was advice to a foreign government, not U.S. policy. Perle and others have maintained that the paper was written as counsel to an incoming Israeli prime minister about Israeli strategy, and that recommending something to Israel in 1996 is not the same as directing American policy in 2003.
  • Netanyahu did not adopt it. The report was published by a think tank, not a government. It was never Israeli policy, and Netanyahu's first government did not implement it as written.
  • Regime change in Iraq was already U.S. law. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, under the Clinton administration, making the removal of Saddam Hussein declared American policy through a route that had nothing to do with this memo.
  • The 9/11 explanation is sufficient for many analysts. A large body of mainstream historiography attributes the Iraq war to post-9/11 threat perception, WMD intelligence failures, and long-standing containment fatigue, rather than to a 1996 paper.
  • The seven-country list does not match. As noted above, the countries in Clark's account are not the countries in A Clean Break, which weakens the claim that one document produced the other.
  • Feith has publicly contested characterizations of his role. He has defended his Pentagon work against allegations of intelligence manipulation, and has kept the memo's text posted on his own website — not the behavior of someone treating it as concealed.

Every individual named on this page is living. Nothing here should be read as an assertion that any of them committed a crime or acted unlawfully. Writing a strategy paper and later serving in government are both lawful acts; what is at issue is interpretation of a documented sequence, and the interpretation is disputed.

Sources​

X.com posts:​

Last updated on