CHENEY PLOTTED WAR WITH IRAN

J. Scott Carpenter, a former George W. Bush administration official, has said that Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for air strikes against Iran’s Islamic 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. 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 armed forces’ Joint Chiefs of Staff used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal. 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 a limited air campaign against 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 and that what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks.