Booting Hersh

Last week, Cheat Seeking Missiles went after Seymour Hersh for an recently written “expose” in the New Yorker. What troubled me is that CSM took everything Hersh wrote at face value. Hersh cherry picks some stuff, confuses some stuff, makes some stuff up and exaggerates the rest. It’s hard to know exactly what’s true in a Seymore Hersh story.

Max Boot read the same article and concluded that there’s probably a nugget of truth in the article but the rest is speculation.

For my part I am skeptical that there are a lot of Special Operations raids occurring in Iran. It’s probable that there are small penetrations of Iranian territory by CIA and Special Operations teams as part of the covert destabilization program to meet with Iranian “assets.” There may even have been a few operations carried out against the Quds Force, but, given the risk-averse culture of the U.S. government, I doubt that it amounts to very much.

I find David Ignatius’s analysis plausible. He writes:

In the new cold war between America and Iran, the U.S. appears to be running some limited covert operations across the Iranian border. But according to knowledgeable sources, this effort shares the defect of broader U.S. policy toward Iran–it is tentative and ill coordinated, and undermines diplomacy without bringing serious pressure on the regime.

He quotes “one Arab official familiar with the covert program” as saying, “There are attempts to cause mischief inside Iran and go after the Quds Force. Some things are being done, but not with the seriousness that’s needed.”

Boot adds:

He also perpetuates a myth that there is a major policy divide between the White House which supposedly favors a “military strike” on Iran and the armed forces which supposedly oppose such a move. It would be more accurate to say that there are some political appointees in the administration who favor a strike on Iran because they don’t think that any other action will stop or even significantly slow its nuclear program. But there are also political appointees who oppose such a move. A similar division exists in the military, but you would never know it from Hersh who paints a crude caricature of hawkish civilians and dovish soldiers. No doubt he is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources: Since it’s pretty obvious that no one who is reasonably hawkish or conservative will speak to a journalist with Hersh’s reputation, he must be reliant on those who favor a softer line.

Boot also attacks a major premise of Hersh:

The biggest misunderstanding, or outright deception, in the entire article is its very premise: that the covert action program that Hersh describes is a prelude to a larger military action against Iran—that it is, as the headline has it, “Preparing the Battlefield.” Actually it’s far more likely that such a program, if it exists, is designed to be a substitute for military action.

Hersh unfortunately isn’t the only writers engaging in such speculation. Tim Shipman of the Telegraph writes (via memeorandum):

American commanders worry that Israel will feel compelled to act within the next 12 months with no guarantee that they can do more than slow Iran’s development of a weapon capable of destroying the Jewish state.

Gaps in the intelligence on the precise location and vulnerabilities of Iran’s facilities emerged during recent talks between Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Israeli generals, according to an official familiar with the discussions who has briefed Iran experts in Washington and London.

The assessment emerged as Iran in effect thumbed its nose at proposals by the West to freeze its uranium enrichment programme in exchange for easing economic sanctions. In its reply, sent to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, Iran said it was prepared to negotiate but only from a position of equality – and made no reference to the specific proposals.

Israel Matzav thinks that there is a gap between what Israeli and American intelligence know and that Israel may have better knowledge of where it needs to hit. Arthur Herman wrote that destroying the nuclear facilities may not be as important as crippling Iran economically and conventionally.

Still one gets the impression that Shipman cherry picks his sources to reach his conclusions and fills the rest in with speculation.

I wonder how much of the military threat against Iran is real and how much is Israeli or American disinformation. I can’t believe that planning of a potential attack on Iran is such an open book in either country.

Two years ago I speculated that Israel would have a difficult time carrying out a raid on Iran as it did on Iraq, if for no other reason because it couldn’t have the same secrecy that surrounded the attack on the Tamuz reactor.

All this speculation about what Israel might do, does nothing to alleviate my skepticism that Israel could pull off the same sort of attack again.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.