Bomb the casbah

Seymour Hersh spoke slowly, his words dressed with an unexpected melancholy. “I think those are really strong arguments against Bush doing this.” He’s convinced, no doubt, of the perils of invading Iran. But his reassurances seemed more about assuaging a perennial disbelief than reaffirming an argument.

Will the U.S. bomb Iran? It’s a nightmarish scenario. “I’m here to tell you that doesn’t mean he won’t do it,” Hersh offered of our cavalier president.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter spoke with SN&R via telephone from his office in Washington, D.C., in anticipation of his upcoming local appearance.

Well, inside the American intelligence community and among our allies there’s a tremendous debate about what Iran is doing. The Brits think Iran is doing a lot, but the Brits have the same problem we do. They were driven out of Basra, and the Brits would like to think that it’s because of the Iranians.

And we are blaming the Iranians. And I think what the White House has done, from their point of view, is really pretty clever. They were trying to sell the American people and their allies on a major bombing campaign, and there was tremendous resistance. Forget about inside from Republicans and Democrats. The real issue was that our allies didn’t want it, and also the American people never bought the notion. …

So they’ve gone off the policy. That doesn’t mean they’re going to bomb. There’s been no order. It doesn’t mean that when they do bomb, they’ll decide to hit the hell out of everything. But, right now, there’s a new plan that involves cruise missiles, and involves the Navy for the first time. The Navy’s had a minor role in this war. Now they get a big one. And I do know that the new chairman of the joint chiefs [Mike] Mullen is an admiral, and maybe there’s a connection there or not. I don’t know. I heard there is, but I haven’t done the work on it.

And it does have some interest. The Australians are interested. The Brits are interested. That doesn’t mean anybody’s going to publicly endorse it. I see the British government today [in early October] denying they’re interested.

There may never be an executive order.

Of course. I’ve been doing this story for almost two years now. When I first wrote it, it was La-La Land. “Are you kidding? C’mon. What are you talking about?” And now, it’s no longer La-La Land. We’ve got enough people who have heard enough and seen enough, and you have Senator [Joe] Lieberman and you have [former U.N. ambassador] John Bolton—you have the president himself—making all these threats. You have [’60s leftist commentator turned ’70s neoconservative philosopher] Norman Podhoretz, all these neocons, running around saying we’ve got to do it. So, it’s gotten to the public.

Your recent New Yorker article describes a ramping up within the intelligence community, which similarly occurred months before the Iraq invasion. But this time there’s no multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign.

What you do see is that they are talking more and more about the Revolutionary Guards and cross-border attacks. And that they’re killing our boys. [Army General David] Petraeus said this in his testimony last month. The president says this a lot. Generals gave briefings in August and July saying how much the Iranians are involved.

If there are Iranian troops or Revolutionary Guards in the south killing, let’s see some. They don’t produce any. They talk about it. You know what the guys inside say? They say, “Look, if Iran wanted to, all they’d have to do is give the Shiites surface-to-air missiles and we’re done.” We’d fly with total impunity. You could do all the corkscrews you want with surface-to-air missiles coming, but they’ll get you.

Nah. No advanced weapons at all. Iran’s been supplying arms, money, support and humanitarian aid for three decades to the Shiites in the south, because Saddam was stamping them for three decades. They’ve been a big player there. But, again, I have to emphasize, as I did in the article, it’d be crazy to say that this means war, because the president’s getting a lot of pressure not to do it.

We’re dealing with some really bad guys, guys who are killing us and killing Shiites. First, there’s ethnic cleansing going on like crazy, all over the country, both sides. The country’s really looking like Bosnia, or Serbia-Croatia, during that war a decade ago. Ethnic cleansing is going on, and if anybody thinks the Sunnis are taking weapons from us and arms from us and money from us because they’ve changed their stripes, they’ve got to be kidding. They’re taking it because they want to kill the Al Qaeda creeps that are all over the place that nobody likes. …

I can tell you that Iraq’s very secular, and the Sunnis and insurgents aren’t interested in martyrdom. But, [in] any case, I don’t think there’s any question that when they’re done doing what they have to do, which is going after the Al Qaeda first and then the Shia, do you think they’re going to say, “Now, Americans, we’re really happy and want to share the grounds with you”? No. So I just think that we’re buying time.

I also think, by the way, in a way it’s smart. It’s something that I know a lot of guys on the inside were advocating three or four years ago. “Let’s cut deals with these guys. Let’s deal with the Sunnis.” This is long before the Shia became the big presence. But they couldn’t get General Ricardo Sánchez. He just wanted to fight it—search-and-destroy. … But we have a lot of guys in the young officer ranks who are really sophisticated, and who will come out of this with a tremendous sense of how to wage an insurgency war in a manner that doesn’t alienate the population. But, as Bob Haldeman used to say of the Nixon days: “TL-squared. Too little too late.”

We’re not going to pull it out. And I don’t know anybody on the inside who sees any hope. And they’re all worried sick about Afghanistan by the way, I should tell you.

How so?

Ah, it’s a mess there. The Taliban are stronger than ever. We’re whacking a lot of Taliban. Every time they poke their head up, we whack them. But they’re stronger than ever.

President Hamid Karzai recently met with the Taliban.

I actually think there are people in this White House, in this government that would want to meet with the Taliban themselves. A friend of mine who’s in the community sent me a draft farewell cable from the chief of station in Kabul. It was very funny. It was a joke, but it read: “They’re outside the gates now. They’re coming. We’re burning our files. Karzai’s been assassinated by one of his guards. We fought the good fight, but here’s the problem: The problem all along was … that although we’re on the right side of a lot of stuff, in terms of many people in Afghanistan that didn’t like the Taliban, there’s so much overkill in the American system, so much gratuitous violence, that the people got very tired of it.”

You wrote about Iran’s increased involvement in Afghanistan. Is Iran trying to pull in Pakistan?

Iran, which most people don’t want to know, supported Karzai until about three years ago. The Iranians are Shiite. Taliban are Sunni—fanatical Sunni in their eyes. And the Shiite don’t like the Taliban. They supported Karzai.

Podhoretz talked about this in the article I wrote. If we do go into Iran, the first thing Iran’s going to have to do is beef up, which means they’re going to have to do something about the two countries on each side that we have a lot of power over, which are Iraq and Afghanistan. And if they start messing around with a buffer zone between them and the Taliban, they could bring in the Pakistanis on the side of the Taliban. I mean, it’s really crazy. It’s just crazy, some of the options.

So I think those are really strong arguments against Bush doing this. Really strong. But I’m here to tell you that doesn’t mean he won’t do it.

Does the intelligence community have hard information as to how Iran would react to a bombing campaign?

Anybody in the military will tell you that when the military presents an option, they also give you a paper with the other side. “Branches and sequels” is what it’s called. And so, there’s no question the military has submitted a paper about the downside of going in, and others have. I know that some former very conservative people who worked in the White House were asked to do studies and came up with negative studies. So they have the other side of it, and I know our allies, German intelligence in particular, have been warning us about what they call asymmetrical warfare.

Iran has a lot of options. They don’t have to bomb America or bomb Israel to cause a lot of trouble. They can start hitting oil depots in the Middle East. And so, you know, that’s the argument against it. It’s pretty big. It’s pretty huge. Does that mean they’re not going to do it? I just don’t know.

But, you know, I think the people who talk to me talk to me in the hopes that I’ll write stories that’ll stop this from going on. I do believe that’s their motive.

Are people more willing to speak to you during these Bush years?

No. [Laughs.] No, I’m still a vampire. I work at night. The bite of death would be me calling somebody during the day.

Aw, c’mon. I don’t know the answer to that. And it doesn’t matter what I feel, it doesn’t, because I don’t follow the politics that closely. There is a touch of terror. Clinton-Bush-Clinton—that does strike a little terror in my heart.

And it doesn’t matter who comes next. I think the next government will be more rational, will want to deal with some of the people in the Middle East. Here’s the thing that drives me nuts: Why don’t we talk to people we don’t like? What the hell is this about? What are we doing not talking to the Syrians and the Iranians and Hamas and Hezbollah? It’s so crazy. I don’t understand why there’s not more pressure on this president. He keeps talking about how he’s interested in a diplomatic solution to the Iranian problem. Then go talk to them.

Sure. I did a piece with him last year. I went to him and talked to him and he said sure, of course. He wouldn’t talk if there were conditions. And the White House likes to put conditions on everything. So, you know, we might have to wait for the next government. I just don’t understand anything. I just hope we don’t do something really stupid.

You told Adbusters that you’ve been working on the same story for six years and you hate it.

Yeah, I hate it. You bet. How can you like this story? First of all, I’m totally averse. I’m in a hole. When I worked for the New York Times, I used to write these stories that’d be splashed all over my newspaper. If anything, I’m certainly as good a reporter, and now I write stories and the mainstream press looks the other way. Do you think I like that? I’ve said many times 15 years ago you’d be in trouble if you wrote a story that the Times and Post didn’t touch.

But now the Internet’s amazing. Cable TV. I mean, you can just do amazing things now. So it’s really OK. The New Yorker gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day, and sometimes more over a week because the Internet picks it up. But the mainstream press, I don’t understand where they are on this stuff.