Attack Iran? Cheney's Already Tried

[babylonsister]

Attack Iran? Cheney's Already Tried

By Gareth Porter, IPS News. Posted June 10, 2008.

How Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.


WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official.

J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposal several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran", citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think-tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation for such an attack. Carpenter said the DoD officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go - what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks".

The question of escalation posed by DoD officials involved not only the potential of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but possible responses by Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/audits/87488/?page=entire

[mac2]

1. Impeach Cheney too.

[JPettus]

3. Hell

Impeach him FIRST!

[rosesaylavee]

2. If it ain't pitchfork and torches time

when will it be?

These criminals need to be arrested, imprisoned and tried. No bail as they are flight risks. We go to war with Iran and there better be rioting in the streets. We have no money, no troops, and NO RIGHT to go to war with another country. This is INSANE!

[leveymg]

4. In the public sector, it's called "Working to the Rule". The Joint Chiefs went on strike.

Once you thoroughly consider the consequences of starting an "optional war" with Iran, any sane person would have to rule it out.

The military brass are sane, even if the CiC isn't. That part hasn't changed.