Cheney: I Wanted to Bomb Syria

And the revelations from Dick Cheney's new memoir just keep coming: yesterday, news of a secret resignation letter. Today, the New York Times, which obtained a copy of In My Time, reports that Cheney pushed Bush to bomb what the US believed to be a nuclear reactor site in Syria in 2007. But others in the White House, wary of a repeat of the Iraq/WMD scenario, balked, and Bush opted to take the diplomatic route. "I again made the case for US military action against the reactor,” Cheney wrote. "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.”

The memoir, which Charlie Savage of the Times describes as "often pugnacious in tone," paints Cheney as an "outlier" in the Bush administration. In the book, Cheney spills on conflicts with: Condoleezza Rice, who he saw as naive for pursuing disarmament agreements with North Korea; George Tenet, the timing of whose resignation as head of the CIA was "unfair to the president"; and Colin Powell, who Cheney wanted out after the secretary of state privately shared doubts about the Iraq war. Click for more revelations. (More Dick Cheney stories.)