Ex-official Says DoD Nixed Iran Attack

[unhappycamper]

Ex-official Says DoD Nixed Iran Attack
June 10, 2008
Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases last summer by insisting that the administration make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former 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 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 proposed 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 against such an attack. Carpenter said the Defense Department 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 Defense Department officials involved not only the potential of the Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but also possible responses across the Middle East by Hezbollah and by Iran.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/ex-official-says-dod-nixed-iran-attack.html

[Hugabear]

1. Stupid fucking assholes

These idiots have no clue how the real world works. They actually think they could just attack Iran, and have no negative repercussions? They didn't think that Iran might not take too kindly to an attack on their soil?

Thank god there are some sane adults still working in the Pentagon.

[Dogtown]

3. The dominionists want to believe

the ridiculous meme that they can bomb a nation into submission.

Proven over and over to be completely fallacious, this dangerously wrong bit of propaganda has been so oft repeated that they believe it themselves.

Because they want to, and really don't care about the consequences.



Short of nuclear devastation, which the world will not tolerate, the Iranians would still be a tenacious enemy devouring more of our resources. They also have defense pacts with Syria and North Korea, and in our weakened state from our adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan we'd be unable to defeat them.

Without nukes.


I absolutely believe that such a course of action would destroy this country even if the civilized nations of the world didn't unite against us.

[didact]

2. Thinking ahead...what a great idea!

[peacetalksforall]

4. There are four groups pushing for a take-out of Iran - focus on them - help

them think straight forward using deductive logic. The are currently deficient in reasoning.

The Cheney-Barons group (those who will profit)
Certain segments of the people of Israel
People in this country who believe we have a right to invade and murder the people of another country on behalf of those who will profit - people of this country who support death out of righteous attitudes and don't know the real reasons for our invade and plunder actions against Iraq and other countries. They don't understand 'sovereign nation', including the sovereign-first nation of our land.