Sy Hersh: US Attack On Iran Is Being Planned

Apologies to wherever I read about this earlier today! I wasn't going to write this article but it has been bugging me all day!

UPDATE: Found a related even scarier post at booman.

Seymour Hersh's new article Watching Lebanon in New Yorker magazine explains the US' strange lack of action concerning Israel's attack of Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to Hersh, President Bush et al were very careful to link Hezbollah with Syria and Iran, who W said were Hezbollah's main source of support. Additionally, the US helped plan the attack on Lebanon in order to test the bunker buster bombs that would be used on Iran's nuclear facilities. All of these actions were to act as a prelude to a US preemptive attack on Iran.

As frightening as this all seems, read this, from the article:

The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top at the insistence of the White House and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely, he said. It's an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.'s strictures, and if you complain about it you're out, he said. Cheney had a strong hand in this.

The article goes on to say that the US and Israel are surprised at the resilience of Hezbollah,

Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff
remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive
assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence
official said. There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right
conclusion about this, he said. When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a
success, and they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.

There is much more to the article so I'd recommend that you read the entire thing. Hersh does close with this:

The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and
expecting a different result.

Couldn't agree more!