[wvns] Bush Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way
in telling the story of what's really going on in Iraq and Iran.
SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke to him about America's Hitler, Bush's Vietnam,
and how the US press failed the First Amendment.
INTERVIEW WITH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST SEYMOUR HERSH
'The President Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing'
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,508394,00.html
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has consistently led the way in
telling the story of what's really going on in Iraq and Iran. SPIEGEL
ONLINE spoke to him about America's Hitler, Bush's Vietnam, and how
the US press failed the First Amendment.
SEYMOUR HERSH
Seymour Hersh began his career as a police reporter. But since then,
he has risen to become one of the most important investigative
journalists in the history of American journalism. Hersh first made a
name for himself in 1969 by uncovering the My Lai Massacre during the
Vietnam War, for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Hersh has
worked for the New Yorker since 1992 and in 2004 was instrumental in
uncovering the US military's abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq. Hersh was in Berlin this week to accept the Democracy
Prize handed out by the political journal "Blätter für Deutsche und
Internationale Politik."
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New
York (more...) for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he
said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of
atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear
program in Iran?
Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what
(IAEA head Mohamed) ElBaradei (more...) and the various reports have
been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to
higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a
peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are
at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what
they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that
they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course
the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case
scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger
in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to
the Iraq War?
Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people.
We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev
and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our
Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not
nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The
Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and
if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not
Ahmadinejad.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has
with Iran come from?
Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That's just their game.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What interest does the White House have in moving us
to the brink with Tehran?
Hersh: You have to ask yourself what interest we had 40 years ago for
going to war in Vietnam. You'd think that in this country with so many
smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again. I
have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no
learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover
things for themselves.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Even after Iraq? Aren't there strategic reasons for
getting so deeply involved in the Middle East?
Hersh: Oh no. We're going to build democracy. The real thing in the
mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make
it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry
Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and
you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time
around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness
would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what
you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So what are the options in Iraq?
Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out
by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow.
The fuel that keeps the war going is us.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence
there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House
listening?
Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the "Surge" (eds. The
"Surge" refers to President Bush's commitment of 20,000 additional
troops to Iraq in the spring of 2007 in an attempt to improve security
in the country.) as if it's going to unite the country. But the Surge
was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically
Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from
Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of
the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?
Hersh: I think that's a much better reason than the fact that there
are a couple more soldiers on the ground.
SPIEGEL ONLINE:So what are the lessons of the Surge (more...)?
Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has
accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When
he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to
bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he
now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen.
You're going to have a Kurdistan. You're going to have a Sunni area
that we're going to have to support forever. And you're going to have
the Shiites in the South.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely
going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?
Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and
doesn't know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain
point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War
was no longer tenable. But these guys now don't care. They see it but
they don't care.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: If the Iraq war does end up as a defeat for the US,
will it leave as deep a wound as the Vietnam War did?
Hersh: Much worse. Vietnam was a tactical mistake. This is strategic.
How do you repair damages with whole cultures? On the home front,
though, we'll rationalize it away. Don't worry about that. Again,
there's no learning curve. No learning curve at all. We'll be ready to
fight another stupid war in another two decades.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of course, preventing that is partially the job of the
media. Have reporters been doing a better job recently than they did
in the run-up to the Iraq War?
Hersh: Oh yeah. They've done a better job since. But back then, they
blew it. When you have a guy like Bush who's going to move the
infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he's going to put everybody in
jeopardy and he's secretive and he doesn't tell Congress anything and
he's inured to what we write. In such a case, we (journalists) become
more important. The First Amendment failed and the American press
failed the Constitution. We were jingoistic. And that was a terrible
failing. I'm asked the question all the time: What happened to my old
paper, the New York Times? And I now say, they stink. They missed it.
They missed the biggest story of the time and they're going to have to
live with it.
Interview conducted by Charles Hawley and David Gordon Smith
*********************************************************************
WORLD VIEW NEWS SERVICE
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