Using ifeq and ifndef in GNU Make

I've written a fairly simple test Makefile where I define two targets, all & clean. I've got two different conditional statements. One checks for the existence of the $(MAKECMDGOALS) special variable and the other detects whether any of the command line targets matched those listed in a variable (NODEPS). The problem I'm having is that none of the branches within my conditionals get executed. Ultimately I want to use a conditional to decide whether the target I'm supplying should include some autogenerated dependency files but at the moment I'm struggling to get either expression to even evaluate. I'm running GNU make version 3.81 and I've tried it under Ubuntu and Mac OS X to no avail.

    NODEPS := clean
    INCLUDE = $(filter $(NODEPS),$(MAKECMDGOALS))

    .PHONY : all clean

    ifndef $(MAKECMDGOALS)
        @echo "$$(MAKECMDGOALS) is not defined"
    else 
        @echo "$(MAKECMDGOALS) is defined"
    endif

    ifneq (0, $(words $(INCLUDE)))
        @echo "INCLUDE = $(INCLUDE) != 0"
    else
        @echo "INCLUDE = $(INCLUDE) == 0"
    endif


    all :
        @echo "all : $(MAKECMDGOALS)"

    clean : 
        @echo "clean : $(MAKECMDGOALS)"