By PHK
I read Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article "The Redirection" on the Bush administration’s Middle East policy shift while much of the rest of this country settled down to a night at the Oscars. (It's not that I don't like films; it's just that I don't like the Oscar night television hype.) Anyway, when two people from opposite sides of the US e-mail me a copy of the same article within hours of each other on a Sunday afternoon and CKR adds it to WhirledView Choice early Monday morning, alarm bells go off that this must be really important. They’re right. It is. It is also so packed with information that I’m only going to highlight seven of Hersh's observations that particularly resonated for me.
They corroborate, flesh out, and put into context various reports I have read over the past several weeks and months on the changed directions of the Bush administration’s muddled Middle East policies that take on ever more tortured Byzantine-style twists and turns as the minutes pass. "The Redirection" is 12 single spaced pages and available on the New Yorker website. The print edition should appear on the newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes sometime next week.
So here goes:
• The administration’s current preoccupation with undermining Iran and Syria has public and clandestine aspects. The clandestine aspect has been kept secret by “leaving the execution or funding to the Saudis or by finding other ways” to keep Congress in the dark. This also includes tapping into some of the “billions of dollars” of “black” greenbacks unaccounted for in Iraq as a result of the budgetary chaos there.
• Administration pronouncements that the US is “not planning for a war with Iran” as Secretary of Defense Bob Gates stated recently, are not corroborated by other evidence. According to Hersh, “current and former US intelligence and military officials say that American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and have crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq.” And there’s more.
• The administration’s latest wave of intelligence on Iranian weapons programs came from Israeli agents operating in Iran. This includes a disputed claim that “Iran has developed a three-stage solid-fuelled intercontinental missile capable of delivering small warheads – each with limited accuracy – inside Europe.”
• The Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran and a special Pentagon planning group - uncannily like the special planning group that ushered in the Iraq invasion – has been set up in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create a contingency bombing plan that can be implemented upon presidential order within 24 hours. This group has now also been tasked with “identifying targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding” Iraqi militants.” Further, “there is worry in the military” that the two carrier groups now in the Arabian Sea will be ordered to remain in the area even after new carrier groups are scheduled to arrive in early spring.
• Not only is this beginning to look like winter 2002/3 all over again, but so too is an updated and revised Iran-Contra scandal type plan to keep the covert side secret from Congressional approval or oversight. In the 1980s, Saudi money was in play. Now two of the major Iran-Contra players – Saudi Prince Bandar and Elliot Abrams – are back again and intimately “involved in today’s dealings.” The chief lesson they “learned” apparently was not to stop doing the illegal but to run the clandestine operations from the Vice President’s office while keeping them away from the uniformed military and the CIA.
• This was one reason John Negroponte decided to leave as Director of National Intelligence. According to a Hersh source, Negroponte said: “No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the NSC running operations off the books, with no findings” and that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East” even though “he shared the White House’s policy goals.” Personal note: If this is correct, it corroborates with my knowledge of Negroponte the year I worked for him as Cultural Affairs Officer when he was Ambassador to the Philippines. Remember the adage: “once burned, twice shy?”
Finally, a small light at the end of the tunnel:
• Since the November elections, Congress has begun to take oversight seriously and the Senate Intelligence Committee has a hearing scheduled on March 8 on Defense Department intelligence activities. Another personal note: With the Democrats in control now, the members of Congress and their staffs should at least be asking the tough questions. But how effective they’ll be able to be against the inevitable stonewalling of an incompetent president and a vice president who has anointed himself king remains to be seen.
A post script: Meanwhile, it’s quite clear that a large majority of the US public and at least some of the media are far more skeptical of Bush administration “rush to war” rhetoric based on questionable intelligence than during 2002. Further, The London Times reported this weekend that four or five US generals and admirals plan to resign if the administration orders an attack on Iran. This doesn’t mean our lame duck president and our Rasputin- like vice president won’t opt to do so – and if so, the Congress will be unable to stop them - but it does mean that if I were a Republican running for re-election in 2008, I’d sure be distancing myself as far as possible from the White House, and if I were a K Street lobbying firm, I’d start hiring Democrats even faster than now.