Hersh on US in Iran…how bad can it get??
Sy Hersh’s recent piece (New Yorker Magazine, July 7 & 14 , 2008 Issue) is one of the most frightening pieces I have read in years. In it, with his deft storytelling, he paints a picture of a struggle between the military command structure and the White House (primarily Dick Cheney) that has been pursuing an independent strategy to destabilize Iran.
Two things astonish: first, what was long thought a settled matter about the ability of the military command structure to oversee all field activities involving the use of lethal force, particularly important in a theater of operations such as the Middle East where what happens in a neighboring country can have very direct impact on our troops on the ground, turns out not to be the case. After all the scandals involving White House sanctioned “special operations,” Congress finally locked down the ability for independent action outside the military lines of command via the 1986 Defense Reorganization Actl…or did it? Remember the Iran Contra debacle? That was when Reagan’s NSC operative Ollie North engineered the sale of 1000 TOW missiles to Iran (that 6 years earlier had taken hostage our entire Embassy), diverted funds to guerillas fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, all authorized by a “Presidential Finding,” no copy of which could be found. Planes delivering the arms to the Contras are widely believed to have delivered cocaine back to the US. And there have been many other such escapades over the years: Guatamala in the 1950’s, Chile in the 1960’s, Iran (remember the Shah we helped install and then supported?), and many more examples. In his extraordinary book, Blowback, Chalmers Johnson (below right) did an extraordinary job of
demonstrating how these unofficial, clandestine adventures almost always come back to blow up in our faces. Well, evidently, we are returning to our old and evil ways if Mr. Hersh is to be believed.
The second, and in some ways even more incredible, revelation by Hersh is that Cheney’s obsession with destabilizing Iran has led us RIGHT BACK where we started – funding and arming fundamentalist Sunnis who comprise the core elements within Al Qaeda. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the US is backing with guns and dollars some pretty wacko Iranian groups in order to foster conflict with the Iranian government. Seems to me we did this before….let me see…oh, yeah: Afghanistan! That’s what led to Al Qaeda the first time, and here we have our beloved “war president” and his #2 turning around and secretly arming the same kind of folks who…..started the war in the first place (if you accept that it’s a war) by flying planes into buildings here in the sweet US of A.
But most disturbing of all was to learn that Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle signed off on $400 MM to pay for it all. In secret, mind you. Don’t you love this “transparent” democracy we all live in??
With all respect, we’ve known that the US secret ops forces have been in Iran since 2005. There have been pundits on all the major news programs who gleefully proposed that US secret forces have been all over Iran since then. This is nothing new. Sy Hersh and others have been discussing the internal battle to attack Iran for some time. Cheney and Israel have been asking for a surgical strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities for years, and they have been instrumental in removing the barriers to such a strike, both personnel and strategic. Scott Ritter and others have been naming dates of supposed implementation with each one coming and going with tense apprehension.
The 163 interventions into other countries’ internal affairs since 1801 is well documented and painfully obvious for all those nations who’ve had to weather the wrath of US foreign policy implementation without their acquiesence.
http://www.adbusters.org/files/media/flash/hope_and_memory/timeline.swf
John Perkins has quite deftly annotated his role in regime change to placate the Central World Banks. Without stating exactly why the slice-and-dice method has not been performed on Iran, we know that such an event, and its intended responses, would alter world economic paradigms immensely, irreversibly, and uncontrollably. Perhaps that is the real pause in this modern day Tehran death march to confrontation. We have arrived at a moment where even an angstrom’s length change in balance could set off cataclysmic events changing the global structure in unforeseen and undesirable ways.
I do appreciate Mr. Hersh’s timely repeat of information afforded him by the current admin to remind us of our current position with Iran. Since My Lai he has been instrumental in giving us the tidbits of information each admin wanted leaked to the masses in a provocative manner. We are now located on a precipice where each side appears to be steeper and deeper than the preceding one. Perhaps Mr. Hersh could also give us the tidbits of data letting us in on the admin’s path through this firestorm. It would be nice to see something forward-looking from him rather than mere repeats of past dilemmas.
Comment by toeg — July 8, 2008 @ 12:56 pm
Mr. Drummond, just learned of the conference for progressives from Alternet emailing. I’m hoping that you or someone will check out the free, downloadable 36 page pamphlet I wrote on intelligent use of emotion in political decision-making. LET’S PRACTICE LOVING POLITICS is a guide to establishing political “support groups” for using the emotions triggered by political events and personalities. Emotions are intelligently used when we feel them to their full intensity while sitting down (to avoid violent expression, in the attentive company of a friend or ally or group of same. (Its best if people give one another equal-length turns for doing this.) When the emotions are experienced fully and the emerging thoughts noticed, we get a clearer picture of what we think and why we think it (past experiences). We also get stress relief from not holding in our emotions. The guide provides specific skills we can apply if we wish to control our emotions in a new way - by feeling them rather than by ignoring, discounting, denying, and burying them. We think more clearly, as a result, and are less rigid and defensive. The ideas are nothing new. The pamphlet packages the rationale for this “practice” and details the skills involved that anyone can relearn. Pamphlet could be distributed free at the conference or emailed to people before the conference. It’s at: loving-politics.com
Comment by Pam Maccabee — July 17, 2008 @ 4:37 am