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Reading a Seymour Hersh article is a bit like panning for gold: You have to dig through a lot of dirt to find any nuggets of possible value. Relying almost exclusively on vaguely described anonymous sources, he makes sweeping claims about top-secret operations that can only be known to a small number of people inside the government with access to the relevant “sensitive compartmented information” and “special access programs,” and they aren’t allowed to comment one way or the other. And his “reporting” is always colored by a sixties-leftist, anti-American, conspiratorial worldview.

In his latest New Yorker article, “Preparing the Battlefield,” the most valuable information is right there in the very first paragraph:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.

That sounds plausible to me. The probability that it’s true is enhanced by the non-denials from the White House and CIA. It’s harder to know what to make of Hersh’s next claim:

United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of ‘high-value targets’ in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, has issued a sweeping denial of this claim: "I can tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else." That does not exclude the possibility that U.S. forces are operating in Iran based out of Afghanistan—which is what Hersh’s article claims.

For my part I am skeptical that there are a lot of Special Operations raids occurring in Iran. It’s probable that there are small penetrations of Iranian territory by CIA and Special Operations teams as part of the covert destabilization program to meet with Iranian “assets.” There may even have been a few operations carried out against the Quds Force, but, given the risk-averse culture of the U.S. government, I doubt that it amounts to very much.

I find David Ignatius’s analysis plausible. He writes:

In the new cold war between America and Iran, the U.S. appears to be running some limited covert operations across the Iranian border. But according to knowledgeable sources, this effort shares the defect of broader U.S. policy toward Iran--it is tentative and ill coordinated, and undermines diplomacy without bringing serious pressure on the regime.

He quotes “one Arab official familiar with the covert program” as saying, "There are attempts to cause mischief inside Iran and go after the Quds Force. Some things are being done, but not with the seriousness that's needed."

That exhausts the valuable information in Hersh’s article. The rest of his piece is a combination of innuendo, hearsay, and opinionizing that detracts from the sum total of public knowledge.  For instance, he claims there have “been questions about the accuracy” of administration claims “that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq.” What those questions are he doesn’t say, because Iranian involvement has been about as well-documented as anything can be: Coalition forces have captured everything from Iranian munitions to Iranian operatives in Iraq. Perhaps Hersh thinks all this evidence was manufactured by a cabal of Pentagon neocons?

He also perpetuates a myth that there is a major policy divide between the White House which supposedly favors a “military strike” on Iran and the armed forces which supposedly oppose such a move. It would be more accurate to say that there are some political appointees in the administration who favor a strike on Iran because they don’t think that any other action will stop or even significantly slow its nuclear program. But there are also political appointees who oppose such a move. A similar division exists in the military, but you would never know it from Hersh who paints a crude caricature of hawkish civilians and dovish soldiers. No doubt he is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources: Since it’s pretty obvious that no one who is reasonably hawkish or conservative will speak to a journalist with Hersh’s reputation, he must be reliant on those who favor a softer line.

Thus his sources often lead him astray, as for instance when he quotes a “former senior intelligence official” who claims that “a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’ he said.” Uh right. That’s the kind of meeting which only takes place in the fevered imagination of Hersh and his leftist cohorts. 

Undoubtedly there have been meetings in the Vice President’s office regarding how to deal with Iran, but I very much doubt that any of them was concerned with creating “a casus belli”—especially when Iran has already supplied no end of reasons for war with its illegal nuclear program and covert attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps the Vice President and/or his staffers were discussing how to respond to Iran’s provocations, but that’s a very different matter.

It is no more likely that “the former senior intelligence official” (the same one?) is right when Hersh quotes him as saying, “Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets” to be hit inside Iran. Anyone with any knowledge of how the administration actually operates knows that Cheney’s office is not where policy gets made, much less where military targeting decisions are made. The only people who think it’s the nerve center of the entire operation are subscribers to the Nation—or the New Yorker.

The biggest misunderstanding, or outright deception, in the entire article is its very premise: that the covert action program that Hersh describes is a prelude to a larger military action against Iran—that it is, as the headline has it, “Preparing the Battlefield.” Actually it’s far more likely that such a program, if it exists, is designed to be a substitute for military action. That was certainly the case with the not-very-covert U.S. program to destabilize Saddam Hussein that was pursued by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. it was only because it failed that the Bush administration decided on an invasion. Those who want to avoid an actual armed showdown in the near future between the U.S. and Iran should embrace rather than disparage the use of proxies to battle the mullahs.

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