Helene Cooper of the New York Times has a big article on the front page of the “Week in Review” that discusses all the buzz about the so-called Shiite Option or “80 Percent Solution” in Iraq.
SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal… that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni…
Unnamed government officials with knowledge in the matter say the proposal comes from his office, but they stop short of saying it comes from Mr. Cheney himself…
[S]omewhere deep inside the Beltway, someone has laid out the intellectual basis for the Shiite option…
An even more far-fetched offshoot of the [plan] is floating around… It holds that America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq’s Shiites…
Wow.
This is all very important, etc. even though Cooper predicts that the Shiite Option “most likely not going anywhere.”
Why all the mysterious references to “someone” without ever venturing a guess? Why does Cooper refuse to even speculate that David Wurmser–who handles the Middle East portfolio on Cheney’s National Security staff–is the special “someone” promoting this option?
I mean, it is not like it is a big secret. Wurmser published a whole book way back in 1999–entitled Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein (AEI Press) that “laid out the intellectual basis for the Shiite option.”
That book serves as the backbone for my ZNET article, “Beyond Incompetence: Washington’s War in Iraq.”
Why no name? Is Cooper afraid of mentioning that Wurmser is a prominent Right Zionist?
