War Plans?
Today's edition of the Guardian has a troubling article regarding the Bush administration's advanced plans to bomb Iran, which refuses to cease the uranium enrichment that may or may not be for the purposes of creating a nuclear weapon; in fact, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has gone so far as to claim that the work is so far advanced at this point as to be "irreversible." To be more specific, the article is about an article, a coming piece by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Of course, the piece was greeted with denials from the White House who insist that no such planning is under way and that it is in fact absurd to even suggest such a thing, and Hersh continues to stand by his reporting that, as usual, was gleaned mostly from unnamed sources.

Now, herein lies the problem. Someone is not telling the truth, right? How is it that this operation, which has been hinted at before by Hersh in previous New Yorker columns, has been in the planning stages for so long, but at the same time is being sprung upon an unknowing public that has neither the stomach for another war nor removed the bitter taste of the previous run up to our current situation in Iraq? It just doesn't make sense. It's apparent that our leaders are very adept at the art of saber rattling. Cheney has been doing pretty much as long as he's been in office, and Bush himself is no stranger to the tactic. However, as much as I'd like to say that this all stinks and Hersh is revealing a dirty secret that no one wants to acknowledge, I can't do that. I just don't buy it.

As I alluded to above, this isn't the first time Hersh as written about this subject. Looking back, this operation has been in the works for a better part of the last year, a year in which Bush and his various henchmen have alternately either pushed for tougher sanctions, more diplomacy, or military threats, sometimes, it seems all at once. Hersh, though, was writing about it after the Israeli war with Hezbollah and earlier. In fact, one can go back as far as January 2005 and read a Hersh article about impending military action against Iran.

I've written about it before, but I have a hard time trusting articles that rely on so many unnamed sources and former officials. The New York Times is just as guilty. You can count on one hand the number of named sources that appear in either the Times or New Yorker. Unnamed sources seem to reveal anything, a lot of which seems overly dramatic and that hardly ever comes to fruition.

I guess what it comes down to is that it's easy to get blinded by either mistrust or hatred regarding politics. You can say, "That damn Bush and Cheney," all you want, but at some point it reaches a critical mass where it's too easy to absolutely never read between the lines or see through the doom and gloom scenarios that these various unnamed sources and star reporters like Hersh traffic in. Hersh made a comeback of sorts with the Abu Ghraib scandal, and, like any reporter, he's probably searching for the next big story. Our secret war with Iran seems to be what he's settled on.