Hersh on Iran

The best advice I can offer tonight is to go read Sy Hersh's New Yorker report on the White House's ever-changing reasons for attacking Iran. Some of it is really harrowing stuff, especially in light of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that the overly deferential Democratic party passed last week, ratcheting up the rhetoric against that country. It all seems vaguely familiar, searching for a viable justification (that can be successfully sold to the voters) for a decision that's already been made. Fearmongering about a potential Iranian atomic bomb hasn't been successful, so the Bushies are trying to come up with some sort of counter-terrorism argument. Hersh has a rundown of instances in which they've already started salting the cover story into the national conversation.

But what's perhaps the most distressing part of this story (and another part that has an uncomfortable ring of familiarity to it) is the fact that there seems to be little planning for any kind of contingency plans if everything doesn't come off perfectly. And what kind of contingencies are we talking about? Hersh quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski:

Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack "by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years."

But what's twenty years of war among friends?

Hersh also reports that Britain is getting on board, which means that Tony Blair's trashed reputation over the Iraq War is serving as no warning sign whatsoever to Gordon Brown. France, which recently elected a more conservative government, is friendlier to these plans than it was four years ago.

As Hersh lays it out, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of obstacles to the Prez striking into Iran if that's what he chooses to do. While many of us are looking to the future and the next president, the current one still has a lot of fight left in him.

If you want to listen to Hersh make his arguments rather than reading them, take a listen to Tuesday's Fresh Air, where he talked to Terry Gross.