Vivid Opinion March 2005

Opinion
Riding on the Hersh: Another late-breaker by the bearer of bad news

by Sara Singer
March 2005

Although diametrically opposed in political ideology, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and President George W Bush have one thing in common: their affinity for shock and awe.

In late January 2005, The New Yorker published “The Coming Wars,” Hersh’s most recent contribution to expose media. The article, as it was intended, left a trail of mouths agape as it went from magazine feature to headline news.

Whether this is considered the “shock” reaction or the “awe” is dubious. What is important, however, is the validity of the information; what’s important is whether the United States really is carrying out reconnaissance missions for a multi-faceted attack on at least three dozen Iranian nuclear weapons development programmes, as Hersh reported.

The celebrated, though often censured veteran reporter, is well known for breaking the story on the Mai Lai massacre of the Vietnam war and more recently, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandals.

According to his article, which was sourced mainly by high-ranking yet anonymous government insiders, the US plans to step in with its infamous Bush-style brute force - regardless of global support - if current EU-Iran diplomatic talks fail.

France, Germany and Britain, among other EU members, continue to call upon Iran to ease up on its nuclear weaponry enrichment programme. In return for cooperation, they have offered economic aid and trade benefits, such as access to technology. Although Tehran signed an agreement that guarantees the benign nature of its fuel production, which could also be used to manufacture “weapons-grade missile material”, the EU wants Iran to take it a step further and dismantle its machinery. Hersh reported that the US has been invited, even urged, to join the talks, but has refused.

“If the US stays outside (these talks), we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse,” one unnamed Western diplomat told Hersh. The current US administration contends that Iran, like some other Arab nations, responds only to pressure instead of persuasion.

Cue - perhaps - US ground troops and air strikes.

Since the article dropped its bomb on the global consciousness, Hersh and the US and Iranian governments have gone rounds about the who’s, what’s, where’s and when’s of the report. White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett appeared on a CNN news talk show the Sunday following the article’s publication and announced, among mild criticism directed towards Hersh, that the US has been working with the EU and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). The repartee in the Pentagon’s formal written response was much harsher.

Pentagon Spokesperson Lawrence DiRita denounced Hersh’s article as, “so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed.” In the same release, he accused Hersh of building upon “the soft bigotry” of conspiracy theorists. Hersh, in turn, reduced these statements to mere “quibblings.”

The Pentagon’s response concluded without actually addressing whether or not the US is in the process of collecting intelligence to attack Iran, but senior officials later told CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr that there were no immediate plans to strike. Of course, Bush added later that day that military force was not out of the question.

On the other hand, Iranian Defence Minister Ali Shamkahani also made a statement to the semi-official Mehr news agency. He said that Iran was able to deter any attack made by the US, a country which doesn’t have accurate information on Iran’s military power.

Whether the article is accurate or not, the information cannot be stricken from the record. It is irrevocably in the minds of the jurors.

In certain Romanian circles, notably among university students, it has sparked discussion, theories, and poignant critiques of the US administration, whose actions wouldn’t have such penetrating implications if Romania’s government hadn’t recently pledged its allegiance to America’s ongoing campaign. Basescu’s statement that he will not pull Romania’s 730 troops out of Iraq until the country has reached a stasis has won him Bush brownie points and affirmed Romania’s continued participation in the war on terror. But it can be safely said that some young Romanians don’t agree with their president’s contribution. Many consider the US invasion of Iraq not as a war against terrorism, but a grotesque display of US muscle. An attack on Iran would be an extension of this showboating.

Despite minor differences in opinion, no one seems to think that the US is involved in the Middle East for its self-proclaimed noble reasons: spreading democracy or “freeing” the people. Adel Murrad, Iraqi Ambassador to Romania matter-of-factly stated during an interview in the Bucharest Daily News that the Americans went in to create a stable environment for commerce. “America was the best buyer of Saddam Hussein’s oil. America is a great market; they need a lot of oil.” By great, I assume he meant large.

But besides wanting to create a “safe” environment to extract oil, Adrian Valkovszky contends that the Iraq invasion was contrived to gain control of the region’s oil sceptre so the US could control the entire market. Iran would just be another notch on the proverbial bedpost. The 21-year-old economic engineering student likens the US to the Ottoman Empire, the conquistadors worthy of impalement. “They want to show everybody that they have the power,” he explains.

Undoubtedly, the US invasion is beyond a mere flex of the America’s strong-arm capabilities, and its consequences - especially if the war expands - more dire than isolated incidents of guerilla warfare. Dan Marinescu, a 22-year-old Romanian student currently studying in Germany fears that an attack on Iran would unite the Islamic nations on the grounds of religion, leading to an all-out war. This war, he theorises, is what the Middle Eastern clerics have been waiting for. For them, he says, periods of peace and prosperity tend to render nations more secular than in times of tumult. An attack on Iran would be the last straw, the kick that would rally entire nations in the name of Allah, and inevitably lead to extremist-led terrorism.

“If you look at these terrorist groups, they all fight in the name of Islam and consider themselves as religious leaders,” Marinescu says. “They do not kill people; they kill ‘infidels,’ ‘erratics.’”

Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar and senior fellow at a think tank in Washington, agrees with this assessment. Leverett, who also served on the National Security Council in the early 1990s, was quoted in Hersh’s article as warning that an American attack would, “produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around regime.”

Even non-Muslim countries would feel compelled to fight the US based on the threat of a US power monopoly, Marinescu says. The hypothetical roundup: Russia, China, the Middle East and North Korea against Western Europe, Britain and the US. If by chance this is realised, Marinescu says he will blame the Bush administration and citizens. “Americans are poisoned by their leaders,” he says. “You have to be poisoned in order to kill somebody.”

Although the news about the US government most often sparks anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment, not all Romanian youths are concerned with US foreign policy. Diana Mocanu, a 27-year-old graduate student in accounting, has more pressing subjects on her mind. With rising prices and low wages in the already shaky market, many Romanians like Mocanu are focused on personal survival, not the political idlings of the world’s one remaining superpower.

Whether the consequences of Bush’s policy are of the apocalyptic magnitude of nuclear war or merely enraging to antiwar citizens of the world; whether Hersh is a muckraking hero or the victim of a source’s ruse, now is the time to reasonably ask, “are we even safe in Switzerland?”

Sara Singer is a graduate of the University of Kansas journalism school and in Romania on a cultural exchange programme.