HoustonChronicle.com - 'A Pretext For War' by James Bamford: "the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration.
Described as a kind of 'American privy council' to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a 'Clean Break' plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let 'Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit.' Under the 'Clean Break' plan, Israel would launch pre-emptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel.
Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises 'the most troubling conflict of interest questions,' he writes."