Cheney urged Bush to bomb Syria

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney writes that he urged former President George W. Bush to bomb Syria's nuclear reactor in 2007

“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

Two of Cheney's closest advisers were David and Meyrav Wormser. David resigned to protest the Annapolis process (if it can be called that) in November 2007.

For two decades, we have called on Israel to take risks for peace and make painful concessions so that it will be accepted more broadly and solidly by the international community. And yet, after two decades, the voices questioning Israel’s very right to exist even in Europe are louder than ever. Polls there show that even the populations of even our closest allies revile Israel and Israelis more than even Iran or North Korea.

The prospects that this time will be different and that we will see real progress follow Annapolis, and that all these trends will be reversed, are bleak for several reasons. First, the concept behind Annapolis was divorced from the President’s forward strategy of freedom. Second, the Fatah leadership is so irredeemably weak that it cannot deliver. Third, we are ignoring the danger of the situation in Gaza. Fourth, the Annapolis framework “regionalized” the Palestinian issue when the historical record of regionalization of conflicts is tragic and violent. Finally, the Palestinian issue is not our highest national priority in the current strategic environment. Yet, it disproportionately occupies our attention at the cost of displaying commitment to more important causes, such as Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. In short, Annapolis failed to emerge from, and thus advance, our national interests.

David and Meyrav Wormser (they're married to each other) were the people who told the World that the Bush administration had given Israel a green light to strike Syria during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. If Israeli Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert had the guts to attack Syria in 2006, there may not have been a need to take out its nuclear reactor in 2007.

Did the administration expect Israel to attack Syria?

"They hoped Israel would do it. You cannot come to another country and order it to launch a war, but there was hope, and more than hope, that Israel would do the right thing. It would have served both the American and Israeli interests.

"The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space… They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its strategic and important ally should be hit."

As Defense Secretary during the first Gulf War, Cheney presented David Ivry, the commander of Israel's Air Force when the IAF took out Iraq's nuclear reactor, with a satellite image of the former Osirak reactor site, and a note of thanks for making America's job easier in the first Gulf War.