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.