Nuking Iran
Posted by B. Preston
JunkYardBlog
Why does anyone believe anything Sy Hersch writes? He is the journalist who wrote a dark note early in the Afghanistan war about a US commando raid that went south and got lots of US troops killed. It was fiction. Didn’t happen, not the way Hersch wrote about it, and in fact not at all. He was either making it up or fed disinformation by someone who was against that war—and if the latter is true Hersch bought the tale hook, line and sinker. Much of what Hersch has written in the past few years has been likewise fiction—stuff that either he or his prolific anonymous sources are just making up to serve an anti-war agenda. It almost never turns out to be true.
So now that he’s writing about an alleged Bush plan to nuke Iran’s nukes, bloggers should pause a second before posting and ask themselves a simple question: “Why would Hersch be right this time, when he’s been wrong so often lately?” And here’s a second question that’s worth asking: “If Hersch really has a source who is telling him about a US plan to nuke Iran, what is that source’s agenda?”
That’s relevant because Hersch never gets his sources for these cloak and dagger stories on the record. They’re always anonymous. They could, therefore, be anyone from Dick Cheney to Joseph “It’s all about me!!!” Wilson. And as you might surmise, the difference in credibility and agenda between those two sources is as vast as the distance between Pluto and the Sun. If Cheney’s the source, for instance (and please—I’m not saying Cheney is the source, this is just a hypothetical), the story could be intended to get the mullah’s collective attention and perhaps get them to see that we’re deadly serious about stopping their nuclear program. But if Wilson is the source (again—hypothetically), well, you have a whole different set of options. Wilson lied about the Iraqi intent to acquire yellowcake. We could surmise that he’s lying to Hersch too to support his long-standing anti-war and anti-Bush agenda. If the source is one of Hersch’s usual CIA types, then it’s very likely that that source belongs to the same group that fed him his Afghanistan nonsense and may be connected to the Wilson Iraq-related trip. But we don’t know and can’t evaluate the source, because Hersch has granted them invisibility.
Because Hersch keeps his sources guarded, we can't check them for anything. We have to go on Sy Hersch’s word. And as far as I’m concerned, his word is worthless.
AND ANOTHER THING: If the plan is real—which it probably isn’t—it’s comical that liberal bloggers are among the most veklempt about it. They’re the ones who pre-emptively killed off any chance of us expanding the military via a draft when it might have made sense to at least think about having one (we are at war, after all, and Iran and North Korea won’t just magically solve themselves). And liberals make any military action involving a single US troop so controversial that it’s almost become unthinkable to deploy any troops against any enemy no matter how threatening, and Iran, with its apocalyptic president pursuing nukes, is about as threatening as enemies come. So we’re left with options like massive airstrikes that may even involve tactical nukes. If libs have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.
There are consequences to every action and choice. By politically removing ground troops as an option available to the president as liberals have pretty much done over the past couple of years, we’re left with worse options. It’s one more reason to keep liberals as far away from the levers of real power as possible for the foreseeable future. They Cannot. Be. Trusted.
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