Bombing Iran while aiding Beijing.

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States," reported former CIA officer Philip Giraldi in the August 1 American Conservative. "The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons."

"As in the case of Iraq," continued Giraldi, "the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

While Vice President Cheney has reportedly begun preparing for a war with Iran, a potential nuclear power, he has also supported a deal that would send two nuclear reactors to China--which already has a nuclear arsenal and has intimated, at various times, that it would be prepared to use those weapons against the U.S.

Notes syndicated columnist (and former Reagan-era Treasury official) Paul Craig Roberts, "the chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced that the Commission will approve Westinghouse's sale of two nuclear reactors to China." That deal received Mr. Cheney's personal attention during a three-day visit to Communist China in April 2004. The three-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai, reported the New York Times, included the vice president "making a pitch for Westinghouse's nuclear power technology" to the Chinese regime.

"Iran will never again be a world power, even if it has a few nukes," comments Roberts. "China is a different matter. China already is a world power. China holds enough US government debt to have the dollar and US interest rates in its hand.... Why in the world is the Bush administration using up the US military and its weapons systems in Iraq, a country that was no threat whatsoever to the US, while aiding and abetting China's rapidly growing economic and military power?"