Next invasion: Iran?

[Adora]

Seymour Hersh is at it again.

Or, if you don't feel like reading it all, here's the condensed version.

[livius drusus]

Salon's War Room suggested an interesting possibility wrt the motivations of Hersh's sources.

Hersh has a knack for sensationalist flair -- and a formidable track record from My Lai to Abu Ghraib -- so it's hard not to read the piece and, in spite of its overwhelming reliance on unnamed sources, come away with the sense that the U.S. is secretly planning a major operation of some sort against Iran in the near future.

And that may be precisely the intention of Washington's chattering hawks -- and perhaps even of some of Hersh's high-level sources. With regard to the former at least, Hersh himself acknowledges this possibility in one telling passage of his report:

"It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran's nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the 'axis of evil,' is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. 'We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,' the President said at a news conference late last year. 'Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of … nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.'

"In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. 'We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,' the former high-level intelligence official told me. 'They've already passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it.'"

The dissonance Hersh points to in the administration's message could be quite purposeful: How do you effectively negotiate with a notoriously uncooperative regime without shaking a big military stick for leverage?

Meanwhile, Cheney has started talking about Iran's sponsoring or terrorism and nuclear program. Sure sounds an awful lot like the speeches he made in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.