Posted on 09/24/2007 2:32:54 PM PDT by presidio9
US Vice President Richard Cheney has considered provoking an exchange of military strikes between Iran and Israel in order to give the United States a pretext to attack Iran, Newsweek magazine reported in its Monday issue.
But the weekly said the steady departure of neoconservatives from the administration over the past two years had helped tilt the balance away from war.
One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney's Middle East adviser, the report said.
A spokeswoman at Cheney's office confirmed to Newsweek that Wurmser left his position last month to "spend more time with his family."
A few months before he quit, Wurmser told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz -- and perhaps other sites -- in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out, the magazine reported, citing two unnamed "knowledgeable sources."
The Iranian reaction would then give Washington a pretext to launch strikes against military and nuclear targets in Iran, Newsweek reported.
When Newsweek attempted to reach Wurmser for comment, his wife, Meyrav, declined to put him on the phone and said the allegations were untrue, the report said.
A spokeswoman at Cheney's office told the weekly the vice president "supports the president's policy on Iran."
Sounds like classic muckraking.
LOL, these radical conspirazoids crack me up!
Yawn..........
Probably one bullet point on a list of ideas. Was rejected outright, but since it was listed it was “considered” or “mulled over.”
What exactly do you suppose two unnamed “knowledgeable sources” would be, and how would they differ from, say, “unnamed sources within the White House?” For instance, I consider myself to be a fairly “knowledgeable source.”
He would rock the political landscape if he said he was going to run for President given the complete lack of men with nuts.
Wasn't
NewsWEAK
the "journalist" rag that reported Americans flushed the Koran down the toilet at Gitmo?
Oh yeah, real reliable, that
NewsWEAK!
Probably the “knowledgeable sources” were 2 in the WH press corps.
actually, that’s a good idea.
I love Cheney!
Only in this administration can nothing have actually happend, but it be a bad thing that it had ever supposedly been contemplated according to some chicken-$h*t un-named source.
I’d say Iranian proxies in Lebanon fighting Israel would be enough of a “pretext”.
Who thinks up this crap?
We had pretext to attack Iran in 1979.
Do not underestimate the power of the force!
Oh No evil Cheney...oh please total BS...
Cheney is addicted to oil. Energy independence from foreign energy suppliers is needed. No more purchasing and importing oil from the Mideast. Has he admitted this yet?
That's just silly, we don't need a reason, we've got plenty from the 1979 invasion of our embassy (sovereign US territory), the kidnapping and holding of our diplomats and military personnel, to the supplying of EFP and SAMS to be used to kill Americans (and Iraqis!).
We don't need an excuse, we need the cojones. And I think our Commander in Chief has them.
High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]
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Those Republicans, always warmongering.
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