Salon: Seymour Hersh's alternative history of Bush's war

[kskiska]

The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.

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(snip)

Let's talk about this anecdote about Vice President Cheney saying there would be no resignations . Your publisher emphasized this in the press release, and I wanted to know ...
Now, wait a minute. Are you asking about a press release? Excuse me. That's like asking me about a headline.

Just tell me why you feel it's important.
What? Tell me why I feel it's important that Cheney called up?

What does it reveal?
It's more complicated than you think. For one thing, it reveals that they're all as one. The notion that they're going to fire Rumsfeld, as people actually entertained, is comical. After 9/11 he gets in this swaggering mode and says we're going to smoke those terrorists out of their snake holes. And then it's clear there's prisoner abuse and torture going on. But does Cheney call up and say, "Oh, my God! What's going on over there, Don? What kind of craziness are you doing to those prisoners? This is devastating to our campaign. What's going on?" I don't hear that. What I hear is, "Let's all pull together and get past it." Very interesting.

(snip)

They thought it would happen quickly?
Very quickly. I don't have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That's why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in, which took them a long time, -- they would drive practice runs, somebody told me. Again, I'm just saying what was told to me; this is not something I reported, but I was told pretty reliably, they were doing practice runs that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It's my belief always -- again this is not empirical, it's sort of my heuristic view -- that the real reason Wolfowitz and others were mad at Shinseki when he testified before the war about 200 or 300 troops, it wasn't about the numbers. It was, "Didn't he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn't we explain to him in the tank what we told the chiefs? This is the way it's going to be. Didn't he understand what it's all about?" He didn't get it. He hadn't understood what they meant. This was all going to fall down. It was all going to be peaches and cream. And Shinseki just didn't get it! It wasn't about the numbers. He wasn't a member of the clan. He didn't join the utopia crowd.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/18/hersh_interview/index.html

[teryang]

1. Seymour is a little off in this interview

The neocons are ideologues but they are not in the Trotskyite mold, they are Leninists, elitists. They are not utopians, they are cynics, men of action in their imaginations, they make history.

They, like the fascists they are (like Ledeen), believe that might justifies all things, including uspeakable crimes. They trot out the propaganda and the lies about democratic objectives for foreign nations, and they don't believe one word of it. Their true belief is that human rights don't exist for foreignors. Lying is part of their elitist ethic of the end justifying the means.

And what is the end? It is maintaining themselves in power, indefinitely, a very venal goal. It is their empowerment and their unwillingness to share power with any but their corporate enablers that is the goal. They have more in common with Herman Goering, Albert Speer and Hjalmar Schacht, than they do with any obscure utopian theorist. The democratic utopian nonsense is for the domestic audience, not for foreignors. No foreignor believes it. When you are being invaded, robbed, bombed, tortured and shot at, how could you believe it? Iraq with its 75 percent unemployment and struggle for the daily necessities of life is the twilight zone of a Kozinski novel. The end for neocons is death and destruction to barbarians when it meets the vangard of the defense and energry lobbies' political agenda.

The problem with these fascist nerds is that they never had any professional military training so they don't have a clue what the limits of armed force are. Their fields are economics and business not war. They war they know about is what their professors told them in the classroom. They never served. Their knowledge of defense issues is limited to utility curves in defense procurement bidding. Their political ideology doesn't really call for a world order or nation building. Trashing barbarian societies is perfectly alright.

This is why they can so cavalierly waste incredibly huge levels of resources in a failed military adventure, they view most of it as ending up in the pockets of grateful supporters. They actually think that the resources temporarily conquered will end up on their side of the balance sheet permanently to justify their collosal waste. The more failed the overseas venture is, the more closely they are bound to reigns of power at home. When you are in a hole, you must keep digging. As the developing regional powers of the middle east and caucasus descend into chaos, the better things are for them, as more requirements, contracts and resources are routed directly to their supporters corporate accounts. Any critic can only be unpatriotic or a conspiracy theorist.

[bemildred]

3. All of the above.

I agree about the military ignorance, but may I suggest Ms.
Klein's piece called "Baghdad Year Zero" in Editorials, if
you have not read it yet? She elucidates a definite strain
of looney economic utopianism to go with the Straussian
neo-Platonist political moronism and the military hubris.

[teryang]

5. Thanks for this thread and the reference

I posted my comments on your "Baghdad Year Zero" thread.

[KoKo]

6. Where is the "Baghdad Year Zero" thread. I can't find it here in

Editorials...went back to page 7. Have a link?

[teryang]

7. Yes, here it is

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x74054

[Elidor]

4. I think Hersh has read them right

They do believe their own bullshit. No one else believes it, but because of their self-referential reality, the obviously false becomes perfectly realistic to them. Certainly they are cynical, but they're also incredibly naive, in a way that is astonishing to comprehend. They are totally fucking clueless. Your last graph supports this interpretation.

[Elidor]

2. Excellent. See especially the 3rd page regarding the Niger hoax

And this little gem:

Hersh:...These guys (Bushco), do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it (WMD), because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it's not! It's not about oil. It's about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it's idealism that's dead wrong. It's like one of the far-right Christian credos. It's a faith-based policy. Only it wasn't a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.

Salon: So you don't think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative ...

Hersh: I used to pray it was! We'd be in better shape. Is there anything worse than idealism that doesn't conform to reality? You have an unrealistic policy.
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I'm about 70 pages into his new book. As he says in the interview, about 2/3 of it is recycled from his New Yorker pieces, but rearranged, codified and and clarified, etc. It's detailed, devastating and dead-on: vintage Hersh. I hope he lives forever.