Sy Hersh in the New Yorker on what's really going on between us and Iran. I attach a couple of tidbits, but I'd encourage you to read the whole thing.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
[L]ate last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.”
1 comment:
Yup. As someone who has spent time in Iran, I can state that the Iranian people are as close to "our friends" as we're likely to get in that part of the world. The idea of military involvement there just because the head of state is a whacko is true ignorant gamesmanship of the worst level. And it would make Iraq pale in consequence, as difficult as that might be to imagine.
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