Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Plan

Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Plan
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard 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 Defence 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 the Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but possible responses by Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/07/9471/

Fool me once, shame on ...... fool my twice; won't get fooled again !

Iran is no push over, and our military is exposed in Iraq to an Iranian response .... GREAT on them that they want to see the whole scenario represented ....

Cheney and his PNAC cohorts are such warmongering assholes ....

I think that this is why we've seen * go to Israel recently - to begin the set up. Think about it - Israel hits Iran - there will be retaliation that will draw the U.S. into the fight. Barack Obama is backed into a corner in that he wouldn't have wanted to get into it with Iran - but - he has said that he would protect Israel in his campaign.

The losers are the American people and the Dems - because it this attack on Iran goes down this way - IMHO it strengthens McCain's chance for winning the '08 GE. The Repugs will launch a fierce campaign that will tout McCain's toughness and military experience as being the best candidate to handle this.

This will happen before Nov and be the catalyst to get McCain elected.

I believe I heard that Israel has recently threatened Iran. Sorry but I don't have the link.

Any other thoughts on this?