Hersh describes a “sea change” in American foreign policy

Seymour Hersh authored a major piece in the New Yorker dated Mar 4/07 and titled Redirection.

[..] To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. [..]

[See also US or Israel will attack Iran by March, and Showdown and The new Quartet: China, Saudi Arabia, US and Israel]

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said. [..]

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”)

The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.

The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy—it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.”

“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.” CONTINUE

[All this is discussed in an Asia Times article, A bombshell that nobody heard.]

[..] Since Hersh published “Plan B” in The New Yorker in June 2004 in which he claimed that the Israelis were “running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria”, he has been on the other side of this story.

In “The coming wars” in January 2005, he first reported that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had been “conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since” the summer of 2004. Last April in “The Iran plans”, he reported that the administration was eager to put the “nuclear option” on the table in any future air assault on Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at least temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran).

He also reported that US combat units were “on the ground” in Iran, marking targets for any future air attack, and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also “working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Balochis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. ‘The troops are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,’ the consultant said. One goal is to get ‘eyes on the ground’ … The broader aim, the consultant said, is to ‘encourage ethnic tensions’ and undermine the regime.”

[..] In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added: “We have been deeply involved with Azeris and Balochis and Iranian Kurds in terror activities inside the country … and, of course, the Israelis have been involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan … Iran has been having sort of a series of back-door fights, the Iranian government, because … they have a significant minority population. Not everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Balochis and Kurds, you’re really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country.”

In addition, he reported that “a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, within 24 hours” and that its “new assignment” was to identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime-change targets, but “targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq”. [..]