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Article 5.
NYT
Cheney Says He Urged Bush to Bomb
Syria in ’07
Charlie Savage

August 24, 2011 — Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a
new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a
suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr.
Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still
stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.
“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.”
Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to
abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in
September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in
his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,”
which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy
was obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in
which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial
decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an
outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a
misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr.
Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding

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