In an
interview in Salon, Seymour Hersh talks to one of
my pet conspiracies: Iran's manipulation of the neocon war machine. Just the other day general Hoar opined that the main winners of the adventure in Iraq are Iran and Al Quaeda. Hopefully this facet of Bush's Blunder will become more widely known. It certainly contributes to the 'Bush as incompetant and reckless' meme nicely... part of any good catalog of the ways in which Bush's reign has been catastrophic for U.S. national security.
It seems that they are very selective not only about what kind of information they present to the public but even in what they decide to believe in themselves.
I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by -- not the Israelis -- but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there's a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi's disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD]. I think there were people in the CIA who suspected this all along, but of course they couldn't get their view in. I think the Senate Intelligence Committee's report's a joke, the idea this CIA was misleading the president. They get some analysts in and say, "Were you pressured?" And they all say, "No, excuse me?" Is that how you do an investigation? The truth of the matter is, there was tremendous pressure put on the analysts [to produce reports that bolstered the case for war]. It's not as if anybody issued a diktat. But everybody understood what to do.
Talk about the ...
Wait. You're missing something now. The Iranian stuff. I think Iran probably had more to do with Chalabi's information than people know.
We know that Chalabi had Iranian agents on his payroll.
Yeah, but, well, he admits to that. He had a villa in Tehran. But basically I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block.
Are you working on this now?
Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'm reporting on it. But I'm not working on it. I'm just -- it's too cosmic.
Was Chalabi the conduit?
I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don't forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it's a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything -- vavoom! -- into the president's [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it?