On the one hand Hersh tells us we are targeting Iran's nuclear/military facilities. On the other hand, Ken Pollack says there are no plans to invade Iran and that we can tolerate their nuclear capabilities.
So...is this just another product of White House disinformation? Hersh
provides the threat so that Pollack's idea of working with Europe to put pressure on Iran through "sanctions" is what eventually happens?
I'd hate to think that Hersh is being used, since he broke the Abu Graeb scandal. Could it be that "other powers" are working to keep us out of Iran and this is a coordinated effort between Hersh/Pollack and a couple of other writers who are out putting out the same hints on both sides as Hersh and Pollack?
How do we know what the hell the TRUTH of anything is these days? :shrug: Somehow I think it's still important for "The People" to know what their tax dollars are up to with endless war.
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Salon Interview with Kenneth Pollack(Author of "The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America," Pollack arrives at a far more dovish conclusion. He argues that coordinated pressure from the United States and Europe is the best strategy to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program.)But in the case of Iran in the second Bush administration, it's actually true. The principals have never sat down and met and decided on an Iran policy. Senior administration officials will tell you that their policy is to refer the problem to the Security Council, but that's not a policy. They know damn well that the Chinese will veto any measure directed against Iran in the Security Council. So at best, they're kind of kicking the can down the road.
I think that this is a huge mistake. I think there's a real shot at influencing Iran's decision making over the next couple of years, and I don't think we're going to have this shot for very long. If we work with the Europeans and present the Iranians with a fundamental choice about what kind of a country they want, and what they want their country's role in the world to be, I think there's a very good likelihood that they'll be forced to make the choice we want them to. But the Europeans aren't going to stick with this policy forever if the United States doesn't come around, and at some point, the Iranians are going to become self-sufficient in terms of acquiring a nuclear weapon. Once that happens, our ability to shape their decision making goes out the window. We'll wind up being forced to choose among a bunch of really bad options, air strikes, or invasion, or just trying to live with Iran.
You wrote that "living with a nuclear Iran will not be easy, but it will not be impossible, either." If Iran becomes a nuclear state in the next four years, do you think the Bush administration would reach the same conclusion?In a perverse sense, I think the administration agrees with that sentence of mine. When you hear from even the most hawkish senior administration officials, they don't believe that invasion is a good option.
I've had a couple of fairly senior neocons outside of the government tell me that at the end of the day Iran's going to get nuclear weapons, and there's no way to stop them. The only difference between our policies, they say to me, is that you're going to make concessions to them and we won't.
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U.S. planning for possible attack on Iran(CNN)
White House says report is 'riddled with inaccuracies'Iran has refused to dismantle its nuclear program, which it insists is legal and is intended solely for civilian purposes.
-- The Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.
Hersh said U.S. officials were involved in "extensive planning" for a possible attack -- "much more than we know.""The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids," he wrote in "The New Yorker" magazine, which published his article in editions that will be on newsstands Monday.
Hersh is a veteran journalist who was the first to write about many details of the abuses of prisoners Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.
He said his information on Iran came from "inside" sources who divulged it in the hope that publicity would force the administration to reconsider.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/16/hersh.iran/
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