Congressional leaders late last year secretly agreed to fund and expand a Bush administration push for covert operations against Iran, according to a new investigative piece by Seymour Hersch in the New Yorker.
Considering the administration’s track record in Iraq, one must ask: Why?
The White House objective, according to Hersch’s inside sources, is to destabilize Iran’s religious leadership, foment regime change, and lay the groundwork for a possible U.S. military strike before President Bush leaves office. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other Pentagon leaders are said to have strongly opposed a military strike.
It’s startling that Democratic congressional leadership would sign off on such an operation, given a National Intelligence Estimate in December that concluded Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. One source is quoted as saying that the oversight process had been “co-opted” by the White House: “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Hersch’s piece portrays a president who remains committed to regime change in the Middle East and isn’t going to go quietly from office.
Vice President Dick Cheney is busy these days “casting the Iranian leadership as apocalyptic zealots who yearn for a nuclear conflagration,” Dan Froomkin wrote for the Washington Post. Froomkin noted how Cheney’s claims ignore the last National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. And he said that the prophecies about “the 12th Imam” marked Cheney’s “revival of an old neocon chestnut.”Â
It’s not reassuring that World War III could have been caused by a ham radio prankster.
The tense incident on Jan. 6 involving Iranian speedboats buzzing U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz almost erupted into armed conflict when a radio transmission, allegedly from the Iranians, said in English, “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes.â€
Navy gunners came within seconds of firing on the boats. Now the Navy says the strange message likely was the work of the longtime high-seas prankster known as the “Filipino Monkey,†who has been harassing ships for years with radio abuse.
It’s a reminder of the dangers of hair-trigger tensions between nations. This could have been an international incident had not cooler heads prevailed.
Congressional leaders late last year secretly agreed to fund and expand a Bush administration push for covert operations against Iran, according to a new investigative piece by Seymour Hersch in the New Yorker.
