Cheney, Israel and Iran

Frustrated with Bush, the Veep Urges Israel to Attack Iran

By GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch

"......Clemens cites a Cheney aide as indicating "that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake" by supporting the diplomatic approach to Iran apparently favored by the State Department. So Cheney plans to deploy an "end run strategy" around the president (who's more swayed at present by Condi Rice's "realists" than Cheney's neocons) if his flank doesn't prevail and Bush resists the demand of the neocons and the AIPAC lobby for a bloody showdown.......

This is the most frightening piece I've read some time, along with Justin Raimondo's latest column on antiwar.com that draws upon it. Raimondo citing a recent CNN interview with Seymour Hersh links Cheney and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams (the most powerful neocon presently in the administration) to U.S. support for the Sunni Fatah al Islam militia in Lebanon as a means to weaken Hizbollah. "George W. Bush," he declares, "is totally out of the loop" in what Raimondo calls "the Cheney administration."......

It's been clear for five years at least that Cheney, the key figure in this administration formally headed by a hopelessly confused little boy still learning to talk, wants to get the boy to issue the orders necessary to bring down the Iranian and Syrian governments and crush their allies in Lebanon and Palestine. He and his chief of staff "Scooter" Libby, along with Perle and the whole cabal, seemed so in charge until the Iraqi people through their resistence to occupation caused the American people to realize the costs of imperialist aggression and created some space for critical journalism in an incipiently fascist atmosphere. Now there is indeed a "race underway" not just between two factions of the administration but between the antiwar movement and the Apocalypse Now movement spearheaded by Cheney....."