Did Dick Cheney Consider Staging a Fake Battle to Start a War with Iran?

Much like the Gulf of Tonkin incident which triggered the United States involvement in the Vietnam War, saber rattling with Iran about a possible invasion over an alleged weapons programs may been a prelude to a similar incident, according to Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist Sy Hersh who was famous for exposing the Mai Li Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War.

According to Hersh's July article in The New Yorker, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed a dozen ideas about how to trigger a war with Iran during a meeting held at Cheney's Office. Although he did not mention any specifics in his New Yorker article, he did become more forthright during a video tapped interview with the Progressive website Think Progress.

Hersh claimed that Cheney placed on the table the idea of staging a battle in the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. Navy Seals dressed as Iranians as bate. Cheney wanted four or five boats built to look like Iranian PT boats, and the next time a U.S. Navy ship entered the straight he wanted to have a shoot out. Hersh said the idea was ultimately scrapped because Cheney and members of his staff agreed that "you couldn't have Americans killing Americans."

Nevertheless, if Hersh's claims are true, the fact the such actions were discussed is incredibly disturbing but not unprecedented most Americans now know and accept that the story of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda which were used as pretensions for the Iraq invasion were false at best and fabricated at worst. What many in the American public may not know is that throughout history, provocations, lies and false flag operations (a military term for creating a staged conflict or battle to rally a country to go to war) have been a large part of U.S. military history, according to prominent authors such as Gore Vidal and Howard Zinn along with other prominent historians.

It is this ignorance of history, or learning of revisionist history, that has allowed hoaxes such as the weapons of mass destructions, and possibly a future false flag in Iran to catapult the United States into another war. However, with the outrage and protest over Vietnam, the pentagon probably knows that it might be a tougher sell this time.

The following is a brief history of some famous alleged false flag operations or provocations to get a reluctant populous to rally around the flag to go to war.

The first such incident was probably the Mexican American War in which the United States seized a great deal of territory. President James K. Polk sent Zachary Taylor to the Mexican border with 1500 U.S. troops to bait Mexicans into fighting. They took the bait, fought back, and this was all that was needed to propel the United States into war with Mexico

Another famous incident was the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine which sparked the Spanish American war in 1898. It is a commonly accepted theory that the United States sunk its own ship, blaming the Cubans, to "rally the troops" around a war with Spain under the slogan "Remember the Maine". Although it was never proven that it was an inside job, there was no evidence of a Cuban attack and the Maine was sunk by an explosion inside its hull.

Although the United States public had little to no desire to entire World War I, which proved to be one of the worst and bloodiest wars in history, that attitude quickly changed after the sinking of the British ocean liner the RMS Lusitania. The public was never told that the civilian passengers where human shields for U.S. ammunition being sent to Great Britain, which is probably why a German U-Boat sunk the ship. Some historians theorize that Great Britain used this as a method to bait the United States into joining the war so they wouldn't lose. The war was so brutal that Americans vowed to never fight again and President Woodrow Wilson deemed it "the war to end all wars".

Even World War II, the so called "good war", was largely opposed by the United States public in the lead up and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt calmly reassured the public that their sons would not but heading off too some foreign country to fight a war. After the attack on the Naval ships in Pearl Harbor, all of that changed and young men enlisted in droves to fight Japan and Germany in a war that cost 90 million lives. What the public wasn't told was that the attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked by an earlier U.S. Naval blockade of one of Japan's major ports, and that word of the attack was allegedly known to Roosevelt before hand and that he mysteriously moved the naval fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor to the objections of the Navy captain. "The question was: how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot." - Secretary of War Henry Stimson

Perhaps the most notorious incident was the alleged Vietnamese attack on the Gulf of Tonkin, which then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted was staged years later in a speech at Harvard University. Tapes released during the freedom of information act shows that then President Lyndon Johnson knew that there were no attacks by Vietnamese PT boats, however he still claimed on national television that the attacks actually took place and escalated support for the most unpopular war in U.S. history.

Besides false flags that actually occurred, others, much like the alleged Cheney call for fratricide, have been considered and are now on public record and declassified through the Freedom of Information Act. In 1962, the Joint Chief of Staff set up a covert plan they called Operation Northwoods along with the Pentagon. It involved talks of staged terror attacks on U.S. soil, hijacking a passenger plane, and even using a drone airplane to shoot it down, claiming it was filled with vacationing college students. All of this centered on a plan to blame Cuba and rally Americans around the flag to wage war against Fidel Castro and Cuba. According to Freedom of Information Act documents, the plot was failed only because President John Fitzgerald Kennedy refused to authorize it.

Herman Goering, during the Nuremburg trials, once said that "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works in any country"

If there is another false flag to trigger public support for an attack on Iran, will the American people fall for it again. If we fail to learn from history, unfortunately, the answer may be yes, and the consequences could be catastrophic for the U.S. economy, incident Iranians, and perhaps the whole world as it could ignite a conflict with China and the Soviet Union.

Sources -

ThinkProgress.com
Zinn, Howard Howard Zinn On War Seven Stories Press, New York, NY