Yesterday afternoon as I made dinner and cleaned up my house before my husband returned home, I listened to NPR’s Fresh Air and Terry Gross’ interview with Seymour Hersh regarding his article in The New Yorker about President Bush’s desire for war in Iran. It was so disturbing I had to listen to the full 44 minutes of it and then it was last night’s dinner topic.
Seymour reports that Democratic Congress gave Bush his requested funds for “covert operations” within Iran. These operations’ goal is to destabilize Iran’s government from within. According to Hersh’s New Yorker article Preparing the Battlefield he notes:
. . . 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. The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.)
Does this sound familiar? Iraq anyone? Very very disturbing!
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