“There
is a large body of evidence including some of America’s most highly
classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United
States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one
made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago–allowing
anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our
estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions.”
Seymour
Hersh on prospect of U.S. attack on Iran, Democracy Now, June 3
Seymour
Hersh is probably the best-known investigative reporter in the United
States today. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in
1970 and helped expose the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq in 2004.
These and other articles critical of U.S. government actions, and a
network of connections inside the national security state, have made
Hersh a listened-to figure in progressive circles and beyond.
Since
2005, an imminent U.S. military attack on Iran has been a central
theme of many of Hersh’s articles. This theme is repeated in his
latest article for the New
Yorker magazine, “Iran and the Bomb: How Real is the Threat.” In the
article, he correctly points out that, contrary to U.S. contentions,
there is no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but
warns of a U.S. assault along the lines of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Some
of Hersh’s earlier predictions of U.S. military action against Iran
have been quite time-specific. None have proven accurate. Much of his
writing on the U.S. and Iran has been based on “insider”
information from Pentagon and other intelligence agency sources, whom
he often praises. In such a relationship, the question must be asked:
Is the writer using the sources or is it the other way around?
Another
question: How could the U.S. military, already bogged down in the
Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan wars, undertake another war, against
Iran, a much larger and stronger state?
There
is no question that the Obama administration, like its predecessor,
is seeking regime change in Iran. It has been using a variety of
methods to contain, divide and subvert Iran through economic
sanctions, covert operations and surrounding the country with U.S.
military power. Washington is strongly supporting the “Green
Movement” in Iran, which has a mass base mainly within the upper
and middle classes.
Psychological
warfare, too, is being waged as another aspect of the regime-change
campaign. Is Hersh being fed disinformation by psychological warfare
units aware that because of his credibility his articles will be read
far and wide, including by the Iranian leadership?
Iraq
war: No ‘mistake’ based on ‘bad intelligence’
In
“Iran and the Bomb,” Hersh reinforces a fundamental fallacy about
why the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003: namely, “bad
intelligence.”
He
expresses worry that U.S. leaders could be about to replicate the
“mistake” that led to the Iraq invasion, suggesting that the
“mistake” was caused by “allowing anxieties about the policies
of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s
military capacities and intentions.”
The
idea that the 2003 invasion was a mistake based on faulty
intelligence information has been thoroughly discredited.
The
U.S. has carried out a Twenty Years War against Iraq, with shifting
pretexts. The George H.W. Bush administration launched the first
U.S.-Iraq war in 1991 in order to “liberate Kuwait.” Iraq had
occupied Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, following a long and bitter dispute
between the al-Sabah royal family and the Iraqi government. In the
short war that followed, the United States, Britain and other allied
forces destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure as well as
inflicting massive casualties on an outmatched Iraqi army.
Washington
then imposed a devastating sanctions/blockade on the country that
killed more than a million Iraqis over 13 years. The blockade was
maintained by the Clinton administration for its entire reign,
1993-2001, during which Iraq was subjected to constant bombing by
U.S. and British warplanes. The supposed reason for the lethal
blockade was to force Iraq to give up its “weapons of mass
destruction.”
In
1998, Clinton signed the “Iraq Liberation Act,” making “regime
change” the official goal of U.S. policy. The ILA clarified that
the real aim of the sanctions and bombing was to overthrow the Iraqi
government.
Regime
change was “Topic A” of the first meeting of President George W.
Bush’s National Security Council on Jan. 30, 2001, according to
then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neil: “From the very
beginning, there was a conviction, that [former Iraqi President]
Saddam Hussein … needed to go.” (O’Neill interview, 60
Minutes,
Jan. 11, 2004)
The
purported WMD threat posed by Iraq was a complete fraud, as top U.S.
and British government officials and their spy agencies well knew.
Nevertheless, in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Vice
President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair repeatedly made statements to the
media about the grave threat of Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons: “We
don’t want the smoking gun [‘proof’ of Iraq’s possession of such
weapons] to be a mushroom cloud,” said Rice in September 2002.
After
Iraq was occupied in April 2003, Bush, Blair and other officials
feigned surprise and dismay when no WMD turned up, but their acts
were hardly convincing.
The
gears shifted once more. Defending “human rights and democracy,”
became the new justification for an occupation that has continued now
for eight years, killed more than a million Iraqis and thousands of
U.S. soldiers, and torn the country apart.
None
of this—the invasions, bombings and blockades—had anything to do
with “anxieties” about Iraq’s “capacities and intention.”
Iraq never threatened the United States. Its military was decimated
in the first U.S. Gulf war, and had been reduced to 15-20 percent of
its 1991 strength by the time of the second war.
‘Downing
Street Memo’ shows that ‘intelligence’ was fixed to support policy
The
argument that “intelligence failure” caused the U.S. and British
invasion of Iraq was dealt a fatal blow by the release of the
“Downing Street Memo” in May 2005. The memo is really the minutes
of a meeting with Blair and other top British officials at the prime
minister’s residence in London on July 23, 2002, nearly eight
months before the assault on Iraq began.
At
the meeting, Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain’s MI6, Secret
Intelligence Service, reported on a meeting he had just attended in
Washington with top U.S. national security officials: “Bush wanted
to remove Saddam, through military actions, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But
the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
(DowningStreetMemo.com)
In
other words, it was not faulty intelligence or bad information that
led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The decision was first
made to launch a new war and then a deliberately falsified story was
cooked up to justify the attack.
There
is no mystery about what has driven the relentless war against Iraq,
the sanctions and threats against Iran, and the blanketing of the
entire area with U.S. military bases. The goal has been domination of
a key strategic region that holds two-thirds of the world’s known
petroleum reserves.
In
seeking to attain this objective, U.S. policy over the past six
decades has sought to destroy any independent state or progressive
movement, while propping up the most regressive and aggressive
regimes in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Israel.
Iran’s
real “crime” in the eyes of Washington has nothing to do with
“democracy” or a purported weapons program. It is that Iran
refuses to accept the dictates of the Empire.
To
believe that the current aggressions against Iraq and Iran are due to
“mistakes” is an expression of liberalism, of faith in the
inherent goodness of what is in fact a system inherently driven to
war and conquest—imperialism.
