Seymour Hersh went on Fresh Air this afternoon plugging his latest article in the New Yorker on Bush/Cheney plans for an Iran war. The upshot of the New Yorker article, already diaried by Turkana yesterday, is that the Bush administration is continuing its plans to attack Iran but that the rationale for that attack has shifted and so have the targets now being developed inside Iran. The new plans are much more insidious than the old ones, and Hersh is extremely worried that US actions could lead directly to a massive conflagration stretching from Lebanon to the Indian Ocean.
More on the flip
The point Hersh stressed in the radio program this afternoon were that the Bushies are clearly committed to an attack on Iran, even though they have come to accept that Iran is still years away from producing a nuclear bomb. In fact, Hersh seemed to suggest the administration now realizes its harsh rhetoric about the Iranian nuclear program is a fiction. Given this new realization, the administration is now insisting that Iran's supposedly hostile actions in Iraq justify sweeping attacks on Revolutionary Guard installations throughout the country, including inside Tehran itself. The theory the Bushies have been selling to the Europeans -- France and Germany, especially -- is that these installations are "insurgent training camps" promoting anti-American attacks in Iraq, and apparently the Europeans are buying.
Such an attack would almost certainly produce collateral damage: Hersh quoted an anonymous European diplomat to the effect that a raid in Tehran would probably hit a school or a hospital, and lead to an enraged Iranian populace. It would also take up to a thousand US ground troops to take out Iranian air defense installations prior to launching bombing raids. Hersh is concerned those troops might get bogged down, perhaps even captured by the Iranians.
More troubling is the likelihood that Iran would counterattack asymmetrically, attacking oil installations in the Gulf that could lead to $100 a barrel oil. The gulf states have no protection for their off-shore fields, which therefore make an especially appealing target, and that's not to mention the always popular option of mining the Straits of Hormuz. Hersh sees that leading to US counterstrikes against Iran, and an escalating conflict ending in that great conflagration involving Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iraqi Shia militias, and Pakistani fundamentalists.
The US, he sees, should be attempting to put out this fire now. Instead, we are literally throwing gasoline on the flames.
The New Yorker article is essential reading. Listen to the Terri Gross interview as well. It's only thirty minutes, and there are several key points that Hersh notes he did "not put in the article."