A Hersh Warning on Iran

The latest from Seymour Hersh. Go, read, now, impeach before we have Iraq x 10. Let's call it, say, "Preventive Impeachment."

I can't do a fuller post on this right now, but a few bundled comments anyway:

What if we took the view that Robert Gates' insertion into the upper echelon is a gentle coup d'état by the Bush Sr. "Old Guard"?

First, Bush is incompetent and, taking up Hersh's suggestion, Cheney is driving the US towards the brink of war with Iran. By pretty much any conceivable view, bombing Iran would be insanity. Iraq is in chaos and beyond US control. Afghanistan is rapidly approaching chaos and the return of an empowered Taliban. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, billions of dollars have been spent, American moral legitimacy has plummeted, we are now an official torturing nation, a nation eroding one of its crowning achievements - civil rights, a nation that disdains the international community and international law, and a nation of citizens who - fortunately, but belatedly - no longer wants this administration in power.

Rumsfeld is fired after the Democratic sweep in the midterm elections. The firing seems to say, "sorry, we messed up." Rumsfeld is the scapegoat, but a real sacrifice nonetheless, given his key role in manufacturing and operating the Iraq War. Underlying Rumsfeld's exit is another power struggle.

Cheney’s relationship with Rumsfeld was among the closest inside the Administration, and Gates’s nomination was seen by some Republicans as a clear signal that the Vice-President’s influence in the White House could be challenged. The only reason Gates would take the job, after turning down an earlier offer to serve as the new Director of National Intelligence, the former high-level C.I.A. official said, was that “the President’s father, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker”—former aides of the first President Bush—“piled on, and the President finally had to accept adult supervision.”

In other words, Cheney is out of control. Knowing that Bush 2 cannot do the job, they worry first about the 2008 election, and then, perhaps, ever so slightly, upon reflection, they worry about the US entering a disastrous zone of no return. They've read their Hobbes - the war of all against all is in the interests of no one. There are realists among them - they know that nations cannot survive on sheer military and economic power alone. The tragic Bush 2 assumption that they can has been proven tragically wrong. American power, Bush 2 has proven, does not transcend the conditions of war of all against all. So, they push Gates into the Department of Defense. Gates, the loyal servant, after years of declining offers, accepts the position.

Bush 2, of course, has no idea what to do with downward-spiraling foreign policy and popularity (the latter which he does appear to understand). He can't control Cheney - Cheney has been the foreign policy brains in the administration all along. Evil brains, but brains nonetheless. The coup d'état is one against Cheney, not Bush 2 (that would be too much for a father), by attempting to isolate Cheney from influence.

Gates is a former CIA Director, an insider. But I recently read a speech by him to CIA analysts in 1992 devoted entirely to making the argument against the politicization of intelligence. Gates said, "[i]n the short time that I have been back at the Agency, I have become more aware of the profound impact the issue of politicization has had on the morale of analysts and managers alike. It is not a concern to be dismissed with token gestures. Politicization is a serious matter, and it has no place at CIA or in the Intelligence Community.... In no instance should we alter our judgments to make a product more palatable to a policymaker."

The administration apparently sees otherwise, some say, according to Hersh.

"Cheney knew this was coming. Dropping Rummy after the election looked like a conciliatory move—‘You’re right, Democrats. We got a new guy and we’re looking at all the options. Nothing is ruled out.’ ” But the conciliatory gesture would not be accompanied by a significant change in policy; instead, the White House saw Gates as someone who would have the credibility to help it stay the course on Iran and Iraq. Gates would also be an asset before Congress. If the Administration needed to make the case that Iran’s weapons program posed an imminent threat, Gates would be a better advocate than someone who had been associated with the flawed intelligence about Iraq...."

And the endgame unless we have indeed had the gentle coup d'état? Frightening.

...many in the White House and the Pentagon insist that getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. “It’s a classic case of ‘failure forward,’” a Pentagon consultant said. “They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq—like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt to revive the concept of spreading democracy in the Middle East by creating one new model state.”

So, will we have Gates' moment of anti-politicization truth? Or another disgraced or insane Old Guarder?

The Administration’s planning for a military attack on Iran was made far more complicated earlier this fall by a highly classified draft assessment by the C.I.A. challenging the White House’s assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb. The C.I.A. found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The C.I.A. declined to comment on this story.)

The C.I.A.’s analysis, which has been circulated to other agencies for comment, was based on technical intelligence collected by overhead satellites, and on other empirical evidence, such as measurements of the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data have been gathered, intelligence sources told me, by high-tech (and highly classified) radioactivity-detection devices that clandestine American and Israeli agents placed near suspected nuclear-weapons facilities inside Iran in the past year or so. No significant amounts of radioactivity were found...

A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the C.I.A. analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it. The White House’s dismissal of the C.I.A. findings on Iran is widely known in the intelligence community. Cheney and his aides discounted the assessment, the former senior intelligence official said. “They’re not looking for a smoking gun,” the official added, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. “They’re looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission.” The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency also challenged the C.I.A.’s analysis. “The D.I.A. is fighting the agency’s conclusions, and disputing its approach,” the former senior intelligence official said. Bush and Cheney, he added, can try to prevent the C.I.A. assessment from being incorporated into a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities, “but they can’t stop the agency from putting it out for comment inside the intelligence community.” The C.I.A. assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it. The former senior intelligence official noted that at the height of the Cold War the Soviets were equally skilled at deception and misdirection, yet the American intelligence community was readily able to unravel the details of their long-range-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. But some in the White House, including in Cheney’s office, had made just such an assumption—that “the lack of evidence means they must have it,” the former official said....

Oh, and one final, ironic warning:

The former senior intelligence official added that the C.I.A. assessment raised the possibility that an American attack on Iran could end up serving as a rallying point to unite Sunni and Shiite populations. “An American attack will paper over any differences in the Arab world, and we’ll have Syrians, Iranians, Hamas, and Hezbollah fighting against us—and the Saudis and the Egyptians questioning their ties to the West. It’s an analyst’s worst nightmare—for the first time since the caliphate there will be common cause in the Middle East.” (An Islamic caliphate ruled the Middle East for over six hundred years, until the thirteenth century.)

UPDATE:
See also Cheryl's take on the Hersh piece here at Whirled View.