A
Very Good Reason To Get Worried
Seymour Hersh's Advice: Keep
Your Second Passport Alive
Seymour
Hersh doesn’t like to speculate. The legendary
investigative reporter has a reputation for sticking to the facts.
That’s why he has won more than a dozen major journalism
awards, including the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
But when I was interviewing
Hersh on Weekly
Signals,
a KUCI talk radio program
I co-host with Mike Kaspar, I decided to ask the journalist who
broke the My
Lai Massacre story what the future holds — or more
specifically, does he think Bush will ease back from Iraq as
a 2006 election
year ploy?
“You’re
asking me to guess about the future,” Hersh
warned.
Yes
I am. Speculate away.
“I
don’t think Bush gives a wit about ’06,” Hersh
said. “He does care about ‘08. So whatever business
he’s going to do — whether he wants to go into
Iran; he wants to go into Syria; he wants to take care of
Lebanon or
Hezbollah — whatever he’s going to do, he will
do by the end of ’07. That’s because I do think
he’d
like to see somebody who’ll carry on his policy elected
in ‘08. But in ’06? I don’t think he cares
at all.”
What?
Bush doesn’t care about electing
a Republican Congress this year?
“I
think he sees his mission as a much higher plain than day-to-day
politics,” Hersh continued, “because he’s
certainly left the Republican Party in a real shambles for
this fall.”
The
blowback from Enron, Plamegate, Katrina, the Medicare fiasco,
Abu Ghraib,
illegal
surveillance and the “long war” against terrorism
has discombobulated the GOP. Conservatives
are coming unscrewed even in the pro-Bush bastion of Orange
County, California where
Hersh is lecturing Friday and Saturday, February 10
and 11 at the upscale Newport
Beach Public Library. Blowback may be why Hersh’s
dates at the library have been sold out for weeks.
Is
the OC beginning to question itself? Is the hometown
of Richard Nixon, hollowed ground of John Wayne and birthplace
of the modern
conservative movement losing faith in the Dub? Hersh
will be
at the Fashion
Island locale discussing his book Chain
of Command: The Road
from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
and Beyond. His remarks about
the absurdity of
this
Republican presidency
will
certainly sting some Orange County pro-Bush/Cheney
ears.
"We
have this amazing position,” said Hersh about Bush’s
Middle East policy. “We’re hostile to Iran
and yet the people we support in Iraq — the people
who’ve
been elected; the people we’ve been working with
all along — are
the Shi'a and the Shi'a in Iraq are pro-Iran. So the
logic of it is confounding. You hear recently about our
government trying
to talk to the Sunnis. We could end up negotiating with
the Sunnis and end up being their allies — the
same Sunnis that are involved desperately with the insurgency.”
Bush’s
foreign policy grows curiouser and curiouser.
While the situation in Iraq was presenting fundamentalists
with affirmation
of their belief in Armageddon, our fundamentalist
president was using his State of the Union address to boast
about bringing democracy to the Middle East. Which is
it? End times
or good times?
“It’s
hallucinatory, of course,” said Hersh. “That
speech was a little scary because, among other things,
besides glossing over the mess in Iraq that’s pretty much intractable
at this point, Bush also talks about regime change
in Iran as opposed to simply slowing down the nuke process there — the
nuclear weapons system that they seem to be building.”
Is
there a logic to these regime change threats? Is
National Intelligence Director John
Negroponte really truly cross-his-heart
concerned about Iran’s
nuclear program or is he part of another mega-hoax? Are
we about
to be distracted by
Weapons of Mass Destruction yet again?
“I’m
doing reporting on it,” said
Hersh. “If
you want to get worried, that’s a very good
reason to get worried. The future isn’t bright.
It’s just not.
We do have a president who thinks he has a mission.
And it’s
not clear how intelligence or other issues are going
to matter.”
Iran
is three times the size as Iraq. It has three times
the population. Its military, unlike Iraq’s,
wasn’t destroyed
in a war and then saddled with a decade of economic
sanctions. Iran
is a functioning oil-based economy with serious
ties to the global economy. Simply put, Iran is
not Iraq.
And yet, Hersh
seems to be
speculating that the Bush administration might be
crazy enough to attack Iran.
We
asked Hersh to speculate some more. He laughed.
“I
guess what I would say to you is that if any of you have
another passport, keep it alive,” he said.
Mike
and I aren’t ready to become a expatriates — at
least not yet. But as things continue to unravel
stateside, having a second
passport sounds like a pretty
good Plan B. Passports
in hand, we pose some more speculative questions to Hersh.
“Let
me go. You guys are torturing me,” he said.
Speaking
of torture, Has the Bush administration blown that issue
away? Is torture off the table? Last week’s
news?
“The
policy has been to get rid of it. Drop it. Let it go,” said
Hersh about Bush’s attitude toward Abu
Ghraib and extraordinary-rendition. “I
think there’s been a conscious effort
to tamper it down by the administration. It’s
been quite successful. The next question is:
Are we still torturing? Has anything really
stopped because of the legislation signed
by McCain and passed by the president? You
remember
the president issued a statement
when he signed it saying this is well and
good, but he can decide what he wants to do
based
on his inherent power as Commander-in-Chief.
I think the answer is: Nothing’s really
changed. It’s
just nobody’s talking about it anymore.”
Shouldn’t
someone — like Congress — bring
the matter up again? Is there a chance that
a
majority of our 535 representations will grow
a backbone, stand up to the president and
try to restore our standing in the world?
“Here’s what I say about Congress when I’m asked,” Hersh
said. “On
any given day I can’t
tell you whether they’re supine or
prone, but they’re down.”
The
future isn’t bright. Speculate on
that for awhile — even if you live
in Orange County. When Hersh
brings his message to the
Newport Beach Library, the sold-out crowd
might not like what it hears, but my guess
is
that
at
least some of them
will keep their second passports
alive.
— Nathan
Callahan, February 8, 2006
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