After meeting with Vice president Cheney, Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, made use of that phrase regarding Iran that we first heard from the Bush administration in early 2004. I’ll bet you already know what he said:
“Israel believes that financial sanctions against Tehran could still prove effective, but all options should remain on the table,” Barak told Cheney, according to a defence ministry statement.
Well, all options except direct negotiations. In other words, we all know what Barak was saying: war against Iran is still a very real possibility. And you wonder why Cheney had to visit the Middle East at this particular time. I can assure you it wasn’t to further the peace process between the Palestinians and Israel. And while the Saudis may have discussed the price of crude oil “in passing” when they met with Big Time, Cheney wouldn’t fly all the way to Riyadh just to discuss the need to lower gas prices for the benefit of ordinary Americans. As he made abundantly clear, our needs and wants don’t count for a hill of beans as far as he’s concerned.
Meanwhile, Cheney himself continued to push the lie that Iran may be building a nuclear weapon during his trip, despite the fact that the last National Intelligence Estimate on Iran confirmed that work on its nuclear weapons’ program ended in 2003:
”What it (the NIE) says is that they have definitely had in the past a program to develop a nuclear warhead; that it would appear that they stopped that weaponization process in 2003. We don’t know whether or not they’ve restarted,” he said.
”What we do know is that they had then, and have now, a process by which they’re trying to enrich uranium, which is the key obstacle they’ve got to overcome in order to have a nuclear weapon,” he added. ”They’ve been working at it for years.”
Naturally he conveniently forgot to mention that the NIE also stated (caution: pdf file) “Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007”, which is standard operating procedure for this most audacious of Bush administration liars. After all, he’s still claiming that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were the best of best friends despite the fact that the Pentagon has confirmed what everyone else who has looked into the issue had already determined: that there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda regarding the 9/11 attacks.
So the best that can be said about this latest news is that the Bush administration and its allies in the Israeli government continue to play a game of chicken with Iran, to coerce concessions from the Iranian government, or perhaps to bully others into agreeing to a tougher sanctions regime (the “Madman is loose again” ploy). The worst? Cheney was sent to Riyadh, Tel Aviv and other destinations in the Middle East to shore up support to a plan to strike Iran before the end of President Bush’s term in office. I’d like to believe the former, but with the recent dismissal of Admiral Fallon as CENTCOM’s commander, the one man who was the primary critic of, and obstacle to, the implementation of any plan to strike Iran, coupled with the refusal of the Pentagon to allow the good Admiral to testify to Congress, I greatly fear the latter is closer to the truth.
