Home
  
Cheney reportedly wants war with Iran
Beijing News.Net
Monday 24th September, 2007
A former official on the staff of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, has reportedly confirmed the vice president has been pushing for war with Iran.
David Wurmser, Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs since 2003, according to two knowledgeable sources, told a group of people Cheney was considering having Israel launch missile strikes on the Iranian nuclear site at Natanzto, to provoke Iran into lashing out.
In its October 1 2007 issue, Newsweek magazine says it has corroborated Wurmser's comments, which were first reported last week by Washington foreign-policy blogger Steven Clemons, who described Wurmser as, "one of the Vice President's most dedicated neoconservative spear-carriers."
Newsweek says it approached Cheney's office to speak to Wurmser but was told he had quit his post in July.
Asked to comment on the claims a spokesman for the vice president said Mr. Cheney "supports the president's policy on Iran."
Contacted at home Wurmser's Israeli-born wife, Dr. Meyrav Wurmser, said her husband was unavailable and in any event the allegations were not true.
Prior to joining Cheney's office in 2003 Wermser was part of a Pentagon intelligence operation organized by Douglas Feith which ventilated intelligence on Iraq, whilst employed as an aide to the then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton.
According to the Right Web web site, Wurmser participated in a 1996 study group that produced a report for the incoming Likud-led government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, that urged the country to break off then-ongoing peace initiatives and suggested strategies for reshaping the Middle East. Among its proposals, it argued that "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right."
Right Web says Wurmser in 2000 worked on a strategy document for a Free Lebanon that advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon. The study, "Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?" called for the U.S. to end Syria's occupation of Lebanon.
Wurmser also advocated a regime change in Syria. According to Source Watch, he spent the late 1990s pressing for a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez el-Assad in hopes of destroying Ba'athist rule, and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by "tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments."
Separately former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has told CNN he is concerned the Bush administration is putting America on a path to war with Iran. "I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq," Brzezinski told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" on Sunday.
"When the president flatly asserts they are seeking nuclear weapons, he's overstating the facts," he said. "We are suspicious, we have strong suspicions, but we don't have facts that they are."
"I think it's quite possible that they are seeking weapons or positioning themselves to have them, but we have very scant evidence to support that," he said. "And the president of the United States, especially after Iraq, should be very careful about the veracity of his public assertions," he told CNN
Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, however put forward an opposite view.
"I believe they are building a capability to build a nuclear bomb," Kissinger told CNN. "I don't think they're yet in a position to build a nuclear bomb, but they may be two or three years away from it."
While the two former national security advisors were putting their views across on CNN, on CBS' 60 Minutes program, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was dismissing allegations his country was producing a nuclear bomb. "If it was useful, it would have prevented the downfall of the Soviet Union," he said. "If it was useful, it would have resolved the problem the Americans have in Iraq. The time of the bomb is passed."
Have your say on this story
|
|
