As I Mentioned Before, Bush/Cheney Has Been Planning An Attack On Iran For Some Time

Graphic from Andy Davey's cartoons and caricatures


The following is an excerpt from an interview with Seymour Hersh, veteran investigative journalist from the New York Times. The entire interview can be read at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/1358255

AMY GOODMAN: Hi. Can you just start off by telling us what you know at this point of what Washington's interests in Israel's war are?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, when you say Washington, you have to talk about Dick Cheney. I can tell you pretty firmly that it's his office. I guess you could say it's sort of the home of the neoconservative thinking in Washington -- some of his aides and the people close to him in the White House: Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser, others.

What I understand is this: our military, our Air Force has been trying for a year to get plans for a major massive bombing assault on Iran pushed through the Pentagon, pushed through the process. And there's been sort of an internecine fight inside the Pentagon over just basically the idea of strategic war against Iran. They're very dug in Iran. The Persians have been digging in for -- what? -- centuries and centuries. And the Marines and the Navy and the Army have said, No way we're going to start bombing, because it will end up with troops on the ground. So there's been a stalemate. I've written a lot about it.

And in this spring, as part of the stalemate, the American Air Force approached the Israeli Air Force, which as you know is headed by General Dan Halutz, who is an Air Force -- I think the first IDF commander, the commander of the Israeli Defense Forces, to be an Air Force guy, and another believer of strategic war, and the two had a lot of interests. And so, out of these meetings in the spring became an agreement, you know, sort of we'll help you, you help us, and it got to Cheney's attention, this idea of Israel planning a major, major strategic bombing campaign against Hezbollah. And for -- I can't tell you where Bush is, but you have to assume he’s right with him. Obviously everything he's done makes that clear.

Cheney's idea was this, that we sort of -- it's like a three-for. We get three for one with this. One, here we're having this war about the value of strategic bombing, and the Israeli Air Force, whose pilots are superb, can go in and -- if they could go in and blast Hezbollah out of their foxholes or whatever they are, their underground facilities, and roll over them, as everybody in the White House and I'm sure everybody in the Israeli Air Force thought they could do, that would be a big plus for the ambitions that I think the President and Cheney have for Iran. I don't think this president, our president, is going to leave office with Iran being, as he sees it, a nuclear threat.

The second great argument you have, of course, is if you are going to do Iran, you're going to need -- you can't attack Iran without taking care of the Hezbollah missiles or rockets. They're really rockets. They're not independently guided. Even their long-range rockets that go a few hundred kilometers, you cannot attack Iran without taking them out, because obviously that's the deterrent. You hit Iran, Hezbollah then bombs Tel Aviv and Haifa. So that's something you have to clean out first.

And thirdly, of course, is if you get rid of Hezbollah and Nasrallah, why, you get rid of a terror -- a man who’s considered to be, as somebody famously said, Richard Armitage, the “A-Team of terrorism.”

So on that basis, there was a tremendous interest in Israel going ahead. There were meetings. There were an enormous amount of contacts. I should add, Amy, that of course -- and this is reflected in the story -- Israel doesn't need the United States to know they have a problem with Hezbollah. And so, they were going to do something anyway. But it's a question of timing, and that's one of the big issues.

This summer, earlier this summer, there was -- and late, I guess after the Israelis began their reoccupation -- occupation of Gaza, after the first Israeli soldier was captured, a soldier named Shalit, I think, June 28th, after he was captured, the traffic, the signals traffic that the Israeli signals community gets showed an enormous amount of talk about doing something on the northern border. That is, on the border between Syria -- I mean between Lebanon and Israel.

And so, on that basis, it was clear this summer, the next time Hezbollah made a move, and there's been a cat-and-mouse game between Israel and Hezbollah for about six years, since the Israelis were kicked out or driven out by Nasrallah in 2000. It’s been cat-and-mouse. Both sides have been going against each other, nickel-dime stuff. And the next time Hezbollah made a move, the Israeli Air Force was going to bomb, the plan was going to go in effect. The move came very quick. It came about ten days after or twelve days after the first Israeli soldier was captured.