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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (107984)	7/26/2003 11:52:05 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The post from me you are responding to was done in more than a little haste--I was late for an appointment--and was more than a little contentious. It should have said something like the following. There are two problems with your long take on Hersh's New Yorker piece. The first is your argument about the credibility of his sources. The bottom line is that neither of us can know, in any serious sense, about their credibility. Certainly your trashing them is based only on prejudice, not on serious information. That the sources are highly placed and very credible is evidenced by the willingness of David Remnick to continue publishing his stuff. Given the animosity Hersh generates from any administration, the second his sources are not the best, he will be attacked ferociously. We will all know. The second point is that Hersh argues the Bush folk, for ideological reasons, missed serious opportunities to gather Al Q intelligence from the Syrians. The "ideological reasons" portion of the argument is that some of the central players in the Bush team don't wish to deal with the Syrians at all. Which is distinctly unwise, given their position in the ME and given that the alternative of attacking them militarily is not only not on the table but wrong on pragmatic grounds, at a minimum. In my view, it's of a piece with the larger and more serious mistake that the Bush administration is making by taking it's eye off Al Q in order to pursue it's misshapen ME foreign policy. As for your point about my point about Iran, I don't recall saying that was Hersh's point. But I may have. It's certainly my point and I don't recall whether it's Hersh's point as well.