Attack Iran? Cheney's Already Tried | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet
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.

Carpenter suggested that DoD officials were shifting the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.

The former State Department official said DoD "knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on that question".

The Joint Chiefs were fully supportive of the position taken by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the Cheney proposal, according to Carpenter. "It's clear that the military leadership was being very conservative on this issue," he said.

At least some DoD and military officials suggested that Iran had more and better options for hitting back at the United States than the United States had for hitting Iran, according to one former Bush administration insider.

Former Bush speechwriter and senior policy adviser Michael Gerson, who had left the administration in 2006, wrote a column in the Washington Post on July 20, 2007, in which he gave no hint of Cheney's proposal, but referred to "options" for striking Iranian targets based on the Cheney line that Iran "smuggles in the advanced explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers".

Gerson cited two possibilities: "Engaging in hot pursuit against weapon supply lines over the Iranian border or striking explosives factories and staging areas within Iran." But the Pentagon and the military leadership were opposing such options, he reported, because of the fear that Iran has "escalation dominance" in its conflict with the United States.

That meant, according to Gerson that, "in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs".

Carpenter's account of the Pentagon's position on the Cheney proposal suggests, however, that civilian and military opponents were saying that Iran's ability to escalate posed the question of whether the United States was going to go to a full-scale air war against Iran.

Pentagon civilian and military opposition to such a strategic attack on Iran had become well-known during 2007. But this is the first evidence from an insider that Cheney's proposal was perceived as a ploy to provoke Iranian retaliation that could used to justify a strategic attack on Iran.

The option of attacking nuclear sites had been raised by Bush with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in "the tank" at the Pentagon on December 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs, according to a report by Time magazine's Joe Klein last June.

After he become head of the Central Command (Centcom) in March 2007, Admiral William Fallon also made his opposition to such a massive attack on Iran known to the White House, according Middle East specialist Hillary Mann, who had developed close working relationships with Pentagon officials when she worked on the National Security Council staff.

It appeared in early 2007, therefore, that a strike at Iran's nuclear program and military power had been blocked by opposition from the Pentagon. Cheney's proposal for an attack on IRGC bases in June 2007, tied to the alleged Iranian role in providing both weapons - especially the highly lethal explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) - and training to Shi'ite militias appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm resistance of military leaders to such an unprovoked attack.

Although the Pentagon bottled up the Cheney proposal in inter-agency discussions, Cheney had a strategic asset which could he could use to try to overcome that obstacle: his alliance with General David Petraeus.

As Inter Press Service reported earlier last week, Cheney had already used Petraeus' takeover as the top commander of US forces in Iraq in early February 2007 to do an end run about the Washington national security bureaucracy to establish the propaganda line that Iran was manufacturing EFPs and shipping them to the Mahdi Army militiamen.

Petraeus was also a supporter of Cheney's proposal for striking IRGC targets in Iran, going so far as to hint in an interview with Fox News last September that he had passed on to the White House his desire to do something about alleged Iranian assistance to Shi'ites that would require US forces beyond his control.

At that point, Fallon was in a position to deter any effort to go around DoD and military opposition to such a strike because he controlled all military access to the region as a whole. But Fallon's forced resignation in March and the subsequent promotion of Petraeus to become Centcom chief later this year gives Cheney a possible option to ignore the position of his opponents in Washington once more in the final months of the administration.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

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"Dissent is the Highest form of Patriotism" -- Howard Zinn

great story the truth is we would destroy iranian military infrastructure purey from the sea if we so desired

they are killing our soldiers it is not our right but our DUTY to kill the killers of our deployed soldiers,

tell the world they started it...

once they know we are not fuckin around they can either make us hurt and then die

or negotiate and lose power and thier clamp on the throat of Irans young population

damn facists

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"They must find it difficult...Those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than the truth as authority"

You are so full of shit ... they didn't start shit ... it's the US that illegally invade a sovereign nation ... and their is no proof Iran has killed our soldiers that shouldn't even be there ...

stupid ass war mongers ...

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911 ... inside job!

whatever dude they are killing our freinds and neibors, iran has nothing to do with iraq they are not even an arab nation we are fixing this broken country of iraq and they are killing our boys.

theres nothing confusing here except your own denial of the truth

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"They must find it difficult...Those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than the truth as authority"

Who fucking fault is that? They wouldn't be killing anyone if "we" hadn't illegally invaded a sovereign nation ... and "we" ain't fixing shit ... "we" have fuck up that country so bad it's not funny ... Iraq was in much better shape before "we" illegally invaded ... and committed war crimes ...
... their a denial of the truth alright and you're doing it ...

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Our Beautiful Ladies ...
Keep Them Safe Keep Them SECRET!
911 ... inside job!

the fact is iraq is not iran they are 2 different nations, one is an arab nation the other is a persian nation

u act like the 2 coutries are the same people, they are as different as the USA and mexico

its like if our country went crazy with no laws and our gov collapsed and canada came in with its toops to bring order and peace, and then mexico comes into america and starts killing the cannadian troops!!

i know they are all dark and arab looking to you but they are 2 totally differnt countries and cultures

but lets take your analogy for a second, u say that we are taking over iraq and u hate your own country for doing this, but you seem to give a complete pass to the Iranians for doing it all the while they killing your own countryman,

look in the mirror my freind and see what u are

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"They must find it difficult...Those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than the truth as authority"

war blame the us goverment they have blood on there hand cowerd s murder there own defenless people id be ashamed to call myself a yank they dont even mind empting theres boumbs on the brits ???how did they kill all those people in the towers and get away with murder ??a war crimes trial should hang em all ???bushes family was involed in the gas suplied 2 the gas chambers???? destoy these perverts and war mongers ???i hate neo conserzehedd

"u act like the 2 coutries are the same people, they are as different as the USA and mexico"


In fact the majority of shias in Iraq have a very favorable opinion of iran, many of then have family Iran, they look up to the religous leaders, many of them speak Farsi. Many Iraqi religous leaders go to Iran for religous studies........I know this because I spent alot of time in iraq speaking with Iraqis.............they would often tell me that Iran was good and Saudi Whabbii were bad. the most deaths in iraq are from saudi nationals

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would America do if china invaded and occupied Canada and Mexico, and China declared USA as a axis of evil and threaten military force, the USA would be supporting an insurgency in Canado and Mexico.......................remember when we supported the muj in Afganistan............with your logic the russian should have right to attack the U.S for there support of the Muj

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Lets hope some cooler heads in Washington prevail over Cheney. I'm sure Cheney would love to get shit started with Iran before he left, after all, he can hide in an underground bunker when the nukes come our way, and I believe the neo-cons are looking to reduce the world population by a couple of billion. I wonder if irradiated oil would make my hotrod faster,~LOL~. Fuck Cheney, maybe we'll get lucky and that pacemaker will blow up.

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