Richard Whalen

Less than two months after President Bush’s trip to the Middle East, Vice President Dick Cheney left Sunday, on a trip that will take him to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank and Turkey. Bush said March 10 that Cheney would “reassure people that the United States is committed to a vision of peace in the Middle East.” What is really going on?

Cheney, who has always played his cards close to his vest, is saying very little about his itinerary and what if anything the Bush Administration is planning to deal with the potentially nuclear-armed Iran. Rumors among the Middle East media and wild speculation of a wider war here in the U.S. naturally follow the super-hawkish Cheney, who has publicly advocated planning an attack that would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Cheney is sure to face many questions about the sudden resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of the U.S.’s Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East. An article written by Thomas P.M. Barnett in the March 11, 2008 edition of Esquire says: “As the White House talked up conflict with Iran, the head of U.S. Central Command, William "Fox" Fallon, talked it down. Now he has resigned.

“If, in the dying light of the Bush Administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance.”

Esquire quotes Fallon as opposing war with Iran and urging the renewal of diplomatic relations, broken off by Washington 29 years ago. Fallon, a 41-year-Navy veteran, retired to avoid the appearance of conflict with the White House. General David Petraeus insisted on reporting directly to the White House and Admiral Fallon insisted on the chain of command. Petraeus won, for now.

My contacts with senior retired military officers who remain close advisers and mentors to their younger active-duty colleagues in the services, as well as with senior retired civilian Pentagon and State department officials, reveal a broad, deep consensus opposed to U.S. military action against Iran. The obvious reason: there is no casus belli.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a onetime Navy Seal and one of the most knowledgeable covert warriors in Washington, has been quoted by The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh as flatly ruling out a direct U.S. assault on Iran: “You cannot use the Iraq template,” for many obvious reasons.

Iran backs the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas inside Lebanon where they launch rockets on Israel. But it is difficult to eliminate them. A direct U.S. attack on Iran itself could be expected to trigger both regional and global terrorist retaliation, including within the U.S. say American security experts. “We think Hezbollah sleeper cells are in Brooklyn,” says a New York counter-terrorism expert.

I recall Richard Nixon enjoyed putting out stories that he was thinking about doing this or he might do that to throw governments off balance. Hopefully, the Cheney trip is just another Bush ploy to scare the Middle East region into thinking that we might possibly attack Iran now that Fallon is gone.

Stirring up a war with Iran would be suicidal for the United States and would assure that the Republican Party would be out of office for at least a generation.