Thursday, June 12, 2008

Pentagon blocked Cheney attack on Iran last summer

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.
Given that Iran, unlike Iraq, would have struck back, the Department of Defense may have prevented WW3 or at least another major war. Some of the pentagon officials who opposed the attacks last year are no longer there. Note how Bush the figurehead was not mentioned in these discussions.

See also how Cheney and General Petraeus are ginning up a case for war with Iran with disputed explosively formed projectiles as the cause. Like last year, another war is being pursued by our current leaders. A war with Iran would be an even bigger foreign policy disaster than our Iraq occupation.

McClatchy Newspaper Group: Strike on Iran nuclear sites under discussion again.

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