Sorry to have been silent for several days, but Barbara and I were on a cruise (courtesy of the wonderful people from Hillsdale College) in Alaska, and internet service was very random.

I always thought it was stupid to go to Alaska in August.  I love August in Washington, I adore hot and humid and so Washington is a dream come true for me.  Plus, no Congress, which means much less traffic, and you can get tables in restaurants.  Plus, I moved my office from AEI after twenty happy years, to Cliff May’s rising Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  It seems a good fit, it puts me in the same sandbox as Andy McCarthy and other terrific people, and I love the email address:  michael@defenddemocracy.org  I mean, that’s what I’m all about…

So I’ve been packing and unpacking and cleaning out my files, throwing out two decades’ worth of notes, urgent to-dos that ended up at the bottom of a pile, highlighted clips, you know.  And finally it got done.  Just in time to start a new book and sign up for a new parking lot.  I’ll be a better blogger for it.

Alaska, then.  Barbara has wanted to do it for a long time, and she was right, as usual.  It’s glorious, in a cold, almost monochromatic way.  The glaciers are aquamarine, a color you don’t see anywhere except in glaciers, it results from the compression of the ice.  And those glaciers talk, the guide called it “ice crispies,” and they really do snap, crackle and pop, as you sail past them, the water full of gigantic ice cubes.

Barbara went fishing and caught salmon and black bass, which we had shipped back to Chevy Chase and started eating tonight.  It is so much better than the “fresh” salmon in the market, kinda like the difference between pasta in Rome or Naples and pasta in…your home town.  While she fished, I walked around little villages like Sitka, which was full of Russian tourists having a fine time.  I suppose the exchange rate with the ruble is good, and the stores were full of Russian furs.  No Russian beer, however.

The state capital is Juneau, which has the highest concentration of bars I have ever seen.  Juneau is unique among American capitals:  you can’t get there in a car.  You have to fly or sail…or take your dogsled, I suppose, but this was the wrong season for that.  There’s snow on the mountains, but not in the streets.  Yet.

As I walked past all the bars, I thought back to the night I discovered peppermint schnapps in Madison Wisconsin.  I had just moved there from Claremont, California, and I couldn’t believe that life was possible at forty below.  Then one day my philosophy professor, Julius Weinberg, said to me, “you don’t know about peppermint schnapps?  If you drink it regularly, it makes your bloodstream impervious to the cold.”  And it did.  But it also made those eight o’clock classes harder and harder…

One final travel pointer:  the immigration/security lines at Vancouver Airport are the longest I’ve seen anywhere in North America.  Right up there with a bad morning at Heathrow.  It took and hour and twenty minutes standing on line.  Oy.  But it’s a nice airport, plenty of Chinese takeout, so you don’t need peppermint schnapps.

The Defense Department is stressing “humanitarian” missions alongside the usual shock and awe.  This al-AP story of course leaves out the rationale, and its only example is the assistance given to Indonesians smashed by the tsunami.  It mentions Iraq en passant, but I suspect that the full DoD document (which I have not yet read) has a lot to say about counterinsurgency, in which the support of the public is the determining factor in who wins and who loses.

It’s worthwhile, I think, to go through the logic once again:  counterinsurgency is a battle for both territory and “hearts and minds.”  The people will invariably strive to withhold their support from either side as long as they can, because when they choose one, they will be targeted by the other.   But once they do choose, their choice becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because they, the people, have the crucial information to win the war:  who is on the other side, where does the other side hide/organize/train/get its materiel, etc. etc.

This has nothing to do with ideology, by the way.  The people might prefer that the ‘nicer’ side win, but they’re going to join the side they expect to win.  In Anbar Province, the people decided a) that the Marines couldn’t be beaten, and b) that the Marines weren’t leaving.  Ergo, they went with the Marines.

Yes, they hated al Qaeda’s brutality.  But they’d have gone with the jihadis if they had thought the Marines could be beaten, or were planning to leave.

And all along, the Marines were working with the people, not just killing bad guys.  That made the choice a lot easier.  They saw the Marines in the streets and on the soccer fields, which reinforced the conviction that the Marines were going to win.

Let’s start with Arthur Herman, a wise and eloquent writer who wrote an important piece for Commentary a while back.  Herman’s overall argument was that our attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq could not have been avoided, and in the course of explicating all the reasons, he raised the issue of deception.  Were we deceived by our own lousy intelligence?  His answer was no, we were deceived by Saddam himself:

    by far the most important deceiver was Saddam himself. For more than a decade, he had consistently acted like a guilty man, evading inspections and moving trucks from palace to palace in the dead of night. Even his own army officers, Feith writes, believed he was hiding biological and chemical weapons. And as became clear from his post-capture interrogations, this was precisely the impression he intended to convey, assuming that it would be enough in itself to deter not only an American invasion but an insurrection by Iraqi Kurds or Shiites, or even—his most consistent worry—an attack by Iran.

    It never seems to have occurred to Saddam that an American President would take him seriously enough to decide that his supposed WMD stockpiles and programs had to be destroyed by any means necessary.

Actually, I think that the interrogations show that Saddam was also deceived, but that is beside the point here.  He rightly stresses that the Americans bought in to the deception, and as a result Saddam was destroyed.  Deception is a multi-edged sword.

Somebody might point that out to the mullahs in Tehran.  Of late, they have trotted out deception after deception:

By far the most hilarious–bringing back memories of al Qaeda’s claim early in the war to have captured an American soldier, only to have the “hostage” turn out to be a G.I. Joe toy–was the recent photo of a “new warplane,” which on examination was another plastic toy.

This was of a piece with the Photoshopped “evidence” of “new Iranian missiles,” which was doubly deceptive: it was an old missile, not (as claimed) a new one, and there was only one of “them,” not (as claimed) four launched simultaneously.

They have many other deceptions, and this sort of trickery is so common–and our actual knowledge so poor–that it’s sometimes very difficult to sort out the gold from the dross.  A few days ago, the Iranians informed Mr. al Baradei that they would no longer permit his UN inspectors to look at their nuclear program.  And then Ahmadi-Nezhad tells the world that Iran has doubled the number of centrifuges humming away to enrich uranium.  Is it true, or just another plastic toy?  We don’t know.

And so we are facing a situation vis-a-vis Iran that is remarkably similar to the one we had to contend with re: Iraq.  A hostile dictatorship, actively attacking American soldiers, sponsoring terrorism, and crushing its own people.   Oddly enough, Iran’s greatest risk is convincing us they are on the verge of an atomic bomb.  And they’re trying.

Of course, we’re not their only audience, a lot of their deception is aimed at their own people.  They are trying to convince Iranians that there is no hope for them from the West, because the Islamic Republic is just too potent.  But that, too, runs the risk of backfiring.

And that’s why they’re killing anyone who steps out of line.  Thirty in one day today.

How will this play out?  I don’t know.  This administration certainly doesn’t want to attack Iran.  But we may be deceived into doing it.

Henry Kissinger once remarked that if an intellectual gets it wrong, all he has to do is write another book, while if a policy maker gets it wrong, people may die.  To which I would add that our pundits have learned that they don’t have to pay any attention to getting the past right;  they can ignore it.  Hardly anyone bothers with history, so the scribblers simply look at the headlines and think as deeply as they can.  And so, in all the commentary on the latest “negotiating” fiasco with Iran, I look in vain for someone who points out that we have just witnessed the umpteenth iteration of Western diplomats getting kicked in a tender spot by the mullahs.  Nothing new at all.  But nobody seems to know that.  They think it’s all about these Americans, or these Iranians, these Brits and these French.  Not so.  It’s part of a well established pattern.  And to make matters worse, our leaders don’t seem to know that, either.

After all, every president from Jimmy Carter to George W.  Bush sooner or later  become convinced that it is possible to strike a grand bargain with the mullahs, if only we could find the right formula.  I devoted a long chapter to this sad story of self-deception in “The Iranian Time Bomb,” noting that the most egregious example came during the Clinton years, which in many ways prefigures the current embarrassment.  Clinton had been very critical of Bush-the-Elder during the presidential campaign, and, once elected, talked very tough about Iran.  But then Khatami was elected president, and Clinton, Gore, Albright, Lake and Berger decided that they had a glorious opportunity to make a deal.  No doubt the “intelligence” supported that fanciful conclusion, and the administration went all-in (I’m writing this in Las Vegas and that’s a common expression in these parts) to sweeten the pot for the mullahs.

Iranian assets were unblocked, wrestlers got visas, the president and the secretary of state fell all over themselves talking sweetly, apologizing for sins real and imagined, trade deals were offered, etc. etc.  Just like today.  And then, one fine day, the Supreme Leader–the same as today–dissed the Americans and that was the end of it.

We just won’t accept the fact that Iran is at war with us.  From time to time I ask an audience:  “you’ve all seen demonstrations organized by the regime in Iran, thousands of people in the streets, chanting ‘death to America,’ right?”  And they agree, yes, they have seen it.  And then I ask them, “what do you think they mean?  Is it some subtle nuanced message to us, or what?”

They’ve been trying to kill us since 1979, and yet we still think we are one little clever move away from the Grand Bargain.  We’re not.  They don’t want a bargain, they want to destroy us.  And they will keep at it until they have either won or lost.  Yes, there are various tactics now and then, but they don’t really matter much.  At the moment they just want to get to November, when they think Obama will be elected, and Obama has already bought into the deception;  he’s good for a few years of folly, at a minimum.  They don’t know about McCain (nor do I), but they suspect he’d be more of a problem.

They have plenty of willing allies in the scribbling community.   Thus, Elaine Sciolino, of the New York Times, commenting on the BS the Iranians provided the Western diplomats:

The Iranian document, which has not been made public, offered a snapshot of Iran’s negotiating style. It put the burden on the other parties. Its imprecise language and misspellings were in sharp contrast to the rigorous approach by Iranian negotiators, many of them career diplomats, who were in charge in 2003 when France, Britain and Germany began the initiative of incentives in exchange for suspension of major nuclear activities. Those diplomats have since been replaced.

Yeah, those more disciplined spellers were a lot better, weren’t they?  They kicked us with good grammar.

Pfui.

I’m talking about Iran, of course.  Here Robert Fox of The Guardian looks at the mullahs’ endless flipflops about nukes, negotiations, and so forth.  His bottom line is that they are too tricky by half, and they are quite possibly headed down the same suicidal road as Saddam took when he kept sticking his finger in Western eyes and noses.  Fox is certainly no advocate of military action against Iran, but he is smart and realistic enough to know that military action happens, and as often as not it happens because of confusions, suspicion and ambiguity, rather than because of strategic calculation.

Not that strategic calculation is irrelevant.  Peter Brookes takes a clear-eyed look at the recent Iranian missile show, and concludes that it was staged (and by now everyone’s seen Charles Johnson’s pictures that suggest the mullahs photoshopped at least some of their images of the missiles) for several reasons, from driving up oil prices to pounding their chests for the benefit of domestic and regional audiences, to fending off possible attacks from us or the Israelis.

All that “makes sense.”  The Iranians atop that unhappy country have every reason to believe that they are immune to attack for the next many months, and so they use all the tools at their disposal to buy time for all their nefarious purposes:  develop the bomb and related delivery systems, increase the repression of the Iranian people,  and move terrorists out of Iraq, where they have been decisively defeated.

But the boy who cried wolf came to an unhappy end, as in the case of Saddam Hussein.

Way back at the beginning of this war, and continuing through tomorrow, we have debated how to win the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East.  I have always viewed this discussion as important, but perhaps ultimately unknowable, because as Machiavelli loves to remind us, these things are all about winning and losing.  The war, not the debate.

During the Cold War there was an endless discussion about our enemy, just as there is today.  Back then, the main question was:  are we fighting a global movement (international communism), and its attendant ideology, or are we fighting an imperial state (the Soviet Empire)?

I am not sure we know the answer today.  But we do know that when the Soviet Empire fell, communist ideology was discredited.  That is why, in “The War Against the Terror Masters,” I argued that we shouldn’t worry so much about “exposing the evils of radical Islam” as about winning the war.  I said that nothing is more devastating to a messianic ideology than the defeat of the messianic leader.  And so it seems to have been in Iraq.

Yes, I know it isn’t really over yet.  I know–I insist–that we are fighting a regional war, and that we must still contend with Iran and Syria.  However, we have defeated al Qaeda and al Mahdi in Iraq, and that’s a huge event.  I am sure that the jihadis are having more trouble recruiting volunteers, because that’s the way it works.

For quite a while now, Nibras Kazemi has been one of the keenest analysts of the Iraq situation, and he’s written a serious essay about it.  His blog, Talisman Gate, has an excerpt, although you really will benefit from reading it all.

Here’s the excerpt (the last paragraph says it all):

My paper on the failed jihadist attempt to resurrect the caliphate in Iraq was published online today, [cue trumpets and cymbals] so without further ceremony, here it is:

The Caliphate Attempted: Zarqawi’s Ideological Heirs, their Choice for a Caliph, and the Collapse of their Self-Styled ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (opens up as a PDF document).

Here are a few paragraphs from its conclusion that may give you all a feel as to its relevance:

It has been the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that not only did al-Zarqawi (who was killed in June 2006) and his successors choose to turn Iraq into a battleground on their own initiative but that they subsequently chose Iraq as the incubator for their grand vision of a unified Islamic empire under the aegis of a ruling caliph. They did so without instructions from or consultations with the traditional leaders of Al-Qaeda hiding out in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Rather, they presented the jihadist world with a fait accompli: the Islamic State of Iraq, thereby capturing the imagination of a new generation of jihadists who were already enthralled by the alleged victories of the Zarqawists in Iraq.

The Zarqawists believed that they were winning at the time when they declared their state, taking the gloomy forecasts of an American ‘quagmire’ and ‘defeat’ in Iraq, as peddled by the U.S. media, as a sign that they were about to turn a corner in the war. As far as they were concerned, there was no greater service to Islam—not even ‘Servitude of the Two Holy Shrines’ of Mecca and Medina—that would compare with what the jihadists were proffering in Iraq, a distinction that ranked them as the elite and vanguard of a victorious Islamic regeneration. The merit of a successful jihad, waged against the world’s greatest power, earned them the authority and responsibility for resurrecting the caliphate, since they alone were the rightful ahl ul-hel wel-’aqd of their time…Their ‘state’ would be the “real caliphate” once again, set to expand under Muhammad’s own banner from the very heart of the Dar al-Islam, from ancient Baghdad and its environs; a venture far more ambitious and daring than a marginal emirate within the remote folds of the Hindu Kush.

The Islamic State of Iraq was to be the shield and spear of Islam, facing down infidel foes from within and without. It was to be the harbinger of glory and redemption, the “ummah’s hope” for an avenger to its many humiliations. And should the jihadists meet some slight setbacks here and there, then that too shall pass, for as al-Baghdadi says when giving his reasons as to why he is confident that the Islamic State of Iraq shall persist: “we are certain that Allah will not break the hearts of the embattled monotheists and turn us into the object of ridicule by the oppressors.” Yet, it does not seem as if the Islamic State in Iraq is about to make a comeback, especially since the Iraqi Sunnis that it claimed to be fighting on behalf of, and to whom its laurels shall accrue in victory, seem to have irreversibly turned against it. So could it be, after all the blood, treasure and prayers that went into the Islamic State of Iraq, that Allah too had turned His back on the jihadists?

The corollary to the military defeat now being experienced by the jihadists is the even more agonizing prospect of doctrinal collapse: the heralded caliphate is stillborn; the glorious vision of a reinvigorated Islamic State has been smashed. The anguish and demoralization brought about by this byproduct of battlefield victory cannot be overstated, for to smash the dreams of a man who lives for a cause, who endures cruel deserts and damp caves while awaiting martyrdom, is a fate far worse than death. In a battle of wills where a young man is able to summon the necessary willpower to press a button and to detonate himself among innocent bystanders for the cause of jihad and for a deferred utopia of a resurrected and avenging Islamic world power, nothing breaks the will of the individual jihadist than to see, in real time, his ideology bear fruit and to watch that fruit rot away right before his eyes. Such has been the impact of the ‘Zarqawist’ Islamic State of Iraq—the caliphate to be, under the Commander of the Faithful Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi the Qurayshite—and the bitter aftertaste of its ruinous downfall.

Read this letter from a woman in Zimbabwe, and weep.  Weep for the dying and the starving and the penniless in Africa, and weep for the bureaucrats in the “centers of power” who just cannot find a way to bring an end to the terrible evil that is Robert Mugabe’s tyranny.

Years ago I wrote a little book called “Freedom Betrayed” in which I decried the fecklessness of the West–above all, the Clinton Administration of the time–in combating tyranny, after we had led a global democratic revolution that had transformed much of the world.  On this anniversary of the great democratic revolution that created America, it is clear that the West remains feckless.  If anything, it is worse today than it was then, because back then the threats to freedom seemed remote, whereas today they are manifest and imminent.

If we cannot support a fine nation that clearly expressed its wishes in a difficult election, it is unlikely we will find the will to fight the vicious tyrants in the Middle East, even though they daily promise to destroy us.  And what will they be thinking in Beijing and Moscow and Pyongyang?

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for informing the blogosphere that Iran’s most famous dissident, Ahmad Batebi, is now here with us.  And what better time to break the news than the 4th of July weekend?  Batebi is the student leader whose picture ran on the cover of The Economist, holding up the blood-stained tee shirt of one of his friends, who was killed by the regime’s thugs in 1999.

Batebi did an interview with the Voice of America, and I’m told it had a record audience, as I’d expect.  Follow the links, you’ll find the VOA’s press release and other useful items.

The Fourth is the birthday of the modern world, the day we became free, and ever since that day we have inspired freedom-loving people all over the planet.  It’s a wonderful holiday, an inspiration to us and our friends.  And there’s a great symphony to celebrate it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghz4_kikLkE&feature=related

Nobody else can say it better than that.

Once again Seymour Hersh wastes our time with an essay that would have been more suitable for a psychiatrist’s couch, accompanied by the question, “Doctor, why do I keep making up these things?”

The doctor might say, “what things?”

And Hersh would say, “you know, these stories saying that America is preparing to go to war with Iran, that we’re going to bomb them, that secret military units are running all over Iran, that we’re supporting killer fanatics. That sort of thing.”

It’s some sort of wacky compulsion with him. Back in the spring of 2006 Hersh told us that the Bush Administration, a.k.a. the Great Satan, “has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack…teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups…(Hersh’s sources) say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.”

Last summer, he announced again that we were on the verge of war with Iran. “This summer, the White House…requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran…The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere…”

We did not bomb, of course, and those alleged plans have vanished from the latest “revelations.” This time around he tells many of the same stories, except without the bombing. And this time he refers to a secret Presidential “Finding,” approved with bipartisan Congressional support, that makes all these things legal. Now it’s just the alleged support for ethnic minority groups, the collection of information about the Iranian nuclear program, and generally seeking to “destabilize the…leadership.” For extras, he suggests that some of our Special Forces have sneaked into Iran, kidnaped some members of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, and dragged them across the border into Iraq for interrogation. But he just can’t help himself. In the midst of discussing these alleged operations, he suddenly and inexplicably erupts in yet another of his “we’re going to bomb them!” seizures.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates…warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preemptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America…” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization)…

In other words, Gates denies the senator’s account. Hersh can’t quite bring himself to say that, so he sticks it between parentheses. You have to parse Hersh very carefully, because he carefully uses words that don’t exactly admit that he doesn’t have much of a case, but show it nonetheless. Take his remark at the top of the story, in which he leads the reader to conclude that we’re spending a mountain of money to destabilize Iran. “These operations,” he writes, “for which the President sought up to (my emphasis) four hundred million dollars…” But the question is not what he asked for, but what he actually got. Inquiring minds would like to know the actual budget, but it seems Hersh does not know it. The language he uses covers everything from zero to four hundred million. The “operations” he describes (most of which I doubt) are pretty small potatoes, like providing funds for Iranian dissidents in order to fight back against the brutal repression (missing from Hersh’s account) that Tehran has directed against its own people, with particular savagery against the Ahwaz Arabs and the Balouch, along with religious groups such as the Baha’i. I think even the frolicsome crowd at CIA’s Directorate of Operations would have trouble crafting a four hundred million dollar invoice for such things.

As so often in Hershian lore, you can pretty much forget about solid information or identifiable sources. His favorite source, who provides many of the juiciest quotations, is simply called “a Pentagon consultant.” Those who don’t live in Washington can’t possibly imagine a)how many of these characters work the city’s streets or b)how many of them claim to know absolutely everything of significance. If you take Hersh seriously, this guy is privy to conversations among small handfuls of people in the Oval Office. I suppose there may be such a person, but it’s hard to take it on blind faith, especially when Hersh quotes him as being pretty incoherent. The Consultant shifts tense and substance in a single paragraph:

Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. (ML: an anti-mullah group under American arrest in Iraq) coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts…

So first we hear that the bad guys “may well” get money from the USG, because a new task force “WILL work” with them. Then, one baited breath later, he says that they are already “getting,” and indeed stashing lots of it away in their own bank accounts.

One wonders why Hersh didn’t at least get the tenses consistent. One wonders why The New Yorker editors didn’t insist on it. In fact one wonders if anyone at The New Yorker did any checking of Hersh’s “facts.” As Roger Simon pointedly asks, who are these sources? Does The New Yorker even know?

Hersh even makes sources of on-the-record statements look bad. He fancies that lots of senior military officers in the Pentagon are fighting a desperate war against warmongers like Bush and Cheney, going all-out to stop tomorrow morning’s bombing run against the Iranian nuclear reactors. In this month’s episode, Hersh’s hero is Admiral William Fallon, briefly in charge of our Central Command until he was suddenly terminated. Hersh would have us believe that Fallon was fired because of his opposition to Administration policy. Hersh cites the following statement by Fallon as the sort of thing that got him into trouble in the White House:

…late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

But President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said precisely that, numerous times. Whatever the reasons for the firing, it certainly wasn’t a statement that was totally in sync with announced Administration policy. If Fallon was indeed fired for something he said, it’s more likely this sort of thing, which Hersh admiringly reproduces:

“Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

Again, one wonders where the editors have gone. Sure, everyone’s an individual; but in a dictatorship of the sort that rules Iran, only a few people matter. If I were the president, and I heard the head of Centcom talking like that, I too would want him out of there.

That leaves us with Hersh’s encouraging claims that we’re striking back at Iranian military forces on both sides of the border, that we’re supporting some minority groups against the regime, and that our Special Forces guys are running around Iran, gathering information on the nuclear program. We should be so lucky.

I would be delighted if American soldiers were (finally) taking steps against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on their own turf. It has been known for some time (although Hersh, not having heard it anonymously from his omniscient consultants, somehow doubts it) that the Iranians have been training terrorists on their own territory, and then sending them into Iraq and Afghanistan to kill as many people as possible, above all, our troops. Until quite recently, our soldiers were not permitted to initiate action against the Iranian officers who sometimes accompanied the terrorists, even in Iraq. But then, roughly about the same time as the change in doctrine that accompanied the surge, we and the Iraqis started to operate against the so-called “Special Groups” that were in cahoots with the Iranians, and the Quds Force officers who supported al Qaeda. It seems logical that these operations should extend to the training camps across the border, and to the Iranians who run them and command the terrorist squads. Otherwise, one tacitly accepts the legitimacy of Iranian attacks across the border, but denies our right to fight back on their terrain.

So far as I can discover, no such operations are taking place. A high-ranking intelligence official in the United States Government, who has proven reliable for many years, told me categorically that we do not capture, kill, or kidnap anyone in Iran, and that our troops have been told they cannot cross the Iranian border, even in “hot pursuit.” So unless Hersh has real evidence, I’m going to doubt it, even though I wish it were true.

Are U.S. Special Forces collecting information about the Iranian nuclear program? I sure hope so, even though Hersh seems to think there’s something wicked about it. In this connection, he seems to me to reveal a great deal about the sources of his information. He praises the linguistic and cultural skills of CIA “agents and assets,” implying that Special Forces don’t have such skills. Nothing could be farther from the truth; Special Forces have excellent linguists. Indeed, many CIA officers do their language training at Monterey, at the celebrated language school run by the military. Hersh thinks CIA is somehow culturally superior, which it isn’t. It’s the kind of idea that is more likely to come from an Agency employee than from someone in uniform, from the sort of guy who thinks our military is composed of untutored lunkheads, while the CIA–with its long record of failure that even Inspector Clouseau would envy–is composed of MENSA members.

I don’t know anything about support for the minority groups (although I do know that a program with one of the major tribes was totally shut down more than a decade ago), but I’m against it. The regime in Tehran is hollow, having lost the support of the vast majority of the Iranian people. The Iranian people are in fact the greatest threat to the regime, and we should support them all, not group by group or tribe by tribe, but as an entire nation. Our support should be almost entirely political, not military. It must start with an open declaration that we wish to see the end of the regime and that we will support a peaceful democratic revolution. Just as in the successful Reagan strategy against the Soviet Empire, the revolutionaries’ most urgent requirements are communications devices, and we should get them cell and satellite phones, laptop computers, servers, and anti-filtering software to beat the filters the mullahs have obtained from the Chinese censors and other friends. And we should turn our own broadcasts, as in VOA, into sources of accurate information about the latest developments inside Iran.

Hersh doesn’t know very much about Iran, judging from the sources he quotes to bash the alleged support for the two tribes and the M.E.K. Iran is a far cry from the description approvingly quoted from Professor Vali Nasr, who holds forth at Tufts and the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic”

Professor Nasr studied with Frank Fukuyama, but apparently never heard that Germany is younger than the United States, by nearly a hundred years. And Iran is ethnically very different from France or Germany, which have long had basically homogeneous populations. Only half of Iranians are Persians; the rest range from Azeris, Kurds and Balouch to Ahwaz Arabs, and many other tribes. But Nasr is quite right (as is Hersh, who uses him as a proxy) to oppose any American policy that supports ethnic separatism. It’s worse than a crime; it’s stupid. When you’ve got most of the population on your side, you want to embrace it as a whole, not divide it into smaller units that might spat with one another.

It’s hard to even raise this kind of consideration while talking about Hersh, because he lives and writes in a world in which you only get half the story at best, and that half consists of sliming the United States. One would never know from reading Hersh that Iran has been waging war against us for nearly thirty years, and we have yet to respond. He seems not to know that there are military documents, photographs, confessions, and captured laptop computers proving that Iranians operate inside Iraq. If he does know, he doesn’t inform his readers. He writes as if anyone who acknowledges the murderous role of Iran in the world, and wants an end to its evil regime, automatically favors armed war against it, even though many of us are unstinting in our criticism of the mullahs, favor regime change, but oppose a military campaign.

And so I imagine his doctor saying to him: “Well, Mr. Hersh, it seems you’re an obsessive/ compulsive neurotic, doesn’t it? You keep writing the same story over and over again, with minor variations, year after year.”

And I hear Hersh saying: “Yes, but it feels so good when I finish writing it, Doctor. Every time. And they even pay me for it.”

UPDATE:  Ron Rosenbaum adds more,  focusing on Hersh’s botched description of the infamous NIE on the Iranian nuclear program.  You should read it.