Dick Cheney Desperately Wants to Bomb Iran

Posted by Satyam Khanna, Think Progress at 8:45 AM on May 13, 2009.

Yesterday, former Vice President Cheney “swung quietly” through New York City to watch Liz Cheney, his daughter and a former State Department official, debate Iran policy. Continuing his long advocacy for military strikes to halt Iran’s nuclear program, Cheney said at a dinner after the debate that the only way for President Obama’s diplomacy with Iran to work is if Obama also threatens to bomb the country:

The former Vice President characterized the Iranian goal in negotiations on ending that country’s nuclear program as mere stalling for time, and the Europeans as trying to “restrain the U.S.” from military action. “Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve,” Cheney said. The negotiations are “bound to fail unless we are perceived as very credible” in threatening military action against Iran, he said.

“If they believe the threat of military force is on the table that’s frankly the only thing I’ve seen that convinces them they’d better get serious about sanctions,” Liz Cheney said during her debate.

Satyam Khanna is a Research Associate for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.