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Whitehouse denounces iran attack story { May 20 2008 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://video1.washingtontimes.com/potusnotes/2008/05/white_house_denounces_war_with.htmlhttp://video1.washingtontimes.com/potusnotes/2008/05/white_house_denounces_war_with.html
White House denounces war with Iran story
Posted on May 20, 2008 9:29 AM
The White House this morning stridently rejected a report from the Jerusalem Post today that President Bush plans to attack Iran before he leaves office next January.
"An article in today's Jerusalem Post about the President's position on Iran that quotes unnamed sources — quoting unnamed sources — is not worth the paper it's written on," said White House press secretary Dana Perino this morning, in a statement e-mailed to the press around 9 a.m.
At 9:30 a.m., the story was splashed across the Drudge Report in a banner headline.
The story quotes a "senior official in Jerusalem" who alleged that "a senior member of [President Bush's] entourage" mentioned the war plans in meetings last week, when Mr. Bush was in Israel.
Reporters such as the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have written stories for years accusing the Bush administration of planning an attack on Iran because of the Islamic Republic's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
But the president has insisted that he wants to resolve the issue diplomatically, though he has also refused to rule out the rule of force. Administration critics believe this means he intends to attack.
"Let me respond by reaffirming the policy of the Administration," Mrs. Perino said this morning.
"We, along with our international allies who want peace in the Middle East, remain opposed to Iran's ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon. To that end, we are working to bring tough diplomatic and economic pressure on the Iranians to get them to change their behavior and to halt their uranium enrichment program," she said.
Vice President Cheney, who has been targeted by critics as the main war hawk inside the White House, had served in President Ford's White House as chief of staff and was a member of Congress in 1979 when Iran took fifty-two hostages from the American embassy in Tehran and held them for 444 days.
Mr. Cheney said in an 1980 interview that his "major criticism" of President Carter's response to the hostage-taking was that he made "repeated public statements that he will not use force to resolve the situation."
"Although he might not decide to use force, he should not make his decision known," Mr. Cheney told the Pinedale Roundup, as quoted in Stephen Hayes' book, "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President."
"Once you remove the threat of force you remove any incentive for the Iranians to free the hostages," Mr. Cheney said then. "Every single president for the last half-century at some time has had to use force to safeguard American lives."
Mrs. Perino echoed that sentiment this morning: "As the President has said, no president of the United States should ever take options off the table, but our preference and our actions for dealing with this matter remain through peaceful diplomatic means. Nothing has changed in that regard."
— Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times
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