Another Cheney-Linked Hawk Down

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-dreyfuss/another-cheneylinked-haw_b_57538.html

Robert Dreyfuss| BIO | I'M A FAN OF THIS BLOGGER

Vice President Cheney is losing a trusted aide: David Wurmser, Cheney's chief adviser on Middle East affairs and perhaps the Bush administration's most radical hawk. According to multiple sources, Wurmser will leave the office of the vice president (OVP) in August for the private sector, where he will start a risk-consulting business.

Wurmser's departure is just the latest in a long series of neoconservatives who've bailed out of the Bush administration since 2005, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Robert Joseph, and J.D. Crouch, along with Richard Perle, who earlier resigned under pressure from the Defense Policy Board, and Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president's daughter, who left the State Department's Near East affairs bureau last summer to have her second child.

Wurmser's departure is not totally a surprise. "He's been looking for a way out for a year," said a conservative friend of Wurmser's, who added that former vice presidential staffers don't necessarily command a premium in the job market. In addition, said this source: "He thinks there's a purge going on, and that people are out to get him."

In June, Wurmser's name appeared in a front-page New York Times story. In that account, based in part on reporting that first surfaced in Steve Clemons' blog, The Washington Note, Wurmser was alleged to have told thinktanks and conservative policy analysts that Vice President Cheney disagreed with President Bush's decision to use diplomacy to dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons. According to the Times, Wurmser said "that Mr. Cheney believed that Rice's diplomatic strategy was failing, and that by next spring Mr. Bush might have to decide whether to take military action."