The President Has Accepted Ethnic
Cleansing
Der Spiegel interview with Seymour
Hersh
http://www.spiegel.de, September
28, 2007
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.
For now, American troops are on the Iraq
side of the border with Iran. Might that change?
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?
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."
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...)?
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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
Seymour Hersh page
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