[Antiracism] Re: [Sage] Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker

[Kathleen Bridgewater]

Additionally, Seymour Hersh was on Democracy Now explaining this even  
further this morning.
Here is the link to the on-line streaming of either audio only or  
complete video:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/1358255

He's convinced that Bush wants to make his mark on history.

Kathleen

On Aug 14, 2006, at 12:06 PM, Marty Nathan wrote:

> Dear Friends,
> You may have read this, but I got it through Democracy Now's  
> posting linked to the New Yorker. Thanks. Marty
>
>
>
>
>
>
> WATCHING LEBANON
> by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
> Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
> Issue of 2006-08-21
> Posted 2006-08-14
>
> In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on  
> July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack  
> on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed  
> strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President  
> George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July  
> 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle  
> East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its  
> supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of  
> instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those  
> countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from  
> several governments for the United States to take the lead in  
> negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza  
> Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions  
> are conducive.”
>
> The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the  
> planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice- 
> President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former  
> intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful  
> Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily  
> fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in  
> Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a  
> prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s  
> nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
>
> Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized  
> that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to  
> confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration  
> wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset  
> who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from  
> 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if  
> it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a  
> relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth  
> and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare.  
> It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”
>
> Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist  
> organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal  
> that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the  
> Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s  
> leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that  
> Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the  
> outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred  
> medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range  
> Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred  
> kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day  
> after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand  
> shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three  
> thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
>
> According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current  
> thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had  
> devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush  
> Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings.  
> “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,”  
> he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that  
> sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”
>
> The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several  
> reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the  
> State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese  
> government so that it could assert its authority over the south of  
> the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on,  
> “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its  
> missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against  
> Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that  
> Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush  
> wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of  
> Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after  
> Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon  
> as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”
>
> Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for  
> the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of  
> questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security  
> Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the  
> Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to  
> believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July  
> 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A  
> Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains  
> committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s  
> clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did  
> a State Department spokesman.
>
> The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed  
> close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring,  
> according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level  
> planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White  
> House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s  
> nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the  
> Israeli Air Force.
>
> “The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard  
> targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence  
> official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in  
> its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that  
> Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and  
> underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the  
> Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate  
> on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on  
> Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and  
> Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
>
> “The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,”  
> a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why  
> oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels,  
> and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”
>
> A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been  
> agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow  
> against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah  
> diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this  
> article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a  
> ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change  
> the situation on the ground.)
>
> According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of  
> State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah  
> “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon,  
> which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism,  
> may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran.  
> “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel  
> Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a  
> population of four million, you should think carefully about taking  
> that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of  
> seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing  
> has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”
>
>
> Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East  
> told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the  
> opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against  
> Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something  
> small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties  
> to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas,  
> the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating  
> southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas  
> also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the  
> border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive  
> bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
>
> The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border  
> incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for  
> some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either  
> side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to  
> war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”
>
> David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington,  
> said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to  
> attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was  
> forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was  
> pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks  
> every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers  
> raised the stakes.
>
> In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired  
> military and intelligence officers all made one point: they  
> believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had  
> decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls  
> showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice.  
> “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to  
> be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of  
> Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz,  
> who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence  
> community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that  
> opportunity.”
>
> “We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime  
> Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local  
> response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to  
> really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his  
> decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue  
> efforts failed.
>
> The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me,  
> however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take  
> strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the  
> Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200,  
> picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer,  
> involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now  
> living in Damascus.
>
> One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political  
> and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone.  
> “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel  
> had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before  
> its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had  
> curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted  
> conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said  
> that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among  
> the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s  
> go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle  
> concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me  
> that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did  
> so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale  
> response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the  
> tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up  
> signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying,  
> in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In  
> one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert  
> and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in  
> comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud  
> Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought  
> Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in  
> the past.”
>
>
> Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S.  
> government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited  
> Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing  
> operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.”  
> The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be  
> sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the  
> Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that,  
> “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,”  
> the consultant said.
>
> The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major  
> bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation,  
> according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and  
> Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s  
> infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the  
> civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade  
> Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against  
> Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official.  
> The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been  
> hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost  
> nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli  
> spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to  
> Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent  
> the transport of weapons.)
>
> The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence  
> official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been  
> planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an  
> air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the  
> option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside  
> Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the  
> Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former  
> officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and  
> will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the  
> insertion of troops on the ground.)
>
> Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told  
> me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the  
> Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my  
> meetings and conversations with government officials, never once  
> did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United  
> States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the  
> Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen  
> a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go  
> through long analyses.”
>
> The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the  
> I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air  
> Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran.  
> Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor  
> leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
>
> In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the  
> Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis  
> repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what  
> Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army  
> General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only  
> military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and  
> elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian  
> forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as  
> its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told  
> Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of  
> that—thirty-five days.’ ”
>
> There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo.  
> Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran  
> as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the  
> analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the  
> American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to  
> use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing  
> people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it  
> was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing  
> that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my  
> experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the  
> will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”
>
> Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists  
> since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert,  
> responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese  
> civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel?  
> European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand  
> civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer  
> before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to  
> intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the  
> treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number  
> of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the  
> Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five  
> thousand.)
>
> Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams,  
> a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and  
> current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams  
> had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its  
> air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We  
> told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all  
> the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the  
> longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for  
> Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
>
> Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was  
> “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s  
> really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran  
> by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
>
> The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah  
> and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way  
> intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the  
> Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass  
> destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community  
> is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top 
> —at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at  
> all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all  
> of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re  
> out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
>
> The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab  
> coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt— 
> that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling  
> Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that  
> Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with  
> close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at  
> the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks,  
> that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel  
> and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war.  
> Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the  
> wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli  
> bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last  
> month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to  
> Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to  
> intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported  
> that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an  
> effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the  
> Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
>
>
> The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its  
> continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face  
> of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me,  
> “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use  
> force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create  
> internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”
>
> Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff  
> remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far  
> more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the  
> former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that  
> Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he  
> said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and  
> they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”
>
> In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many  
> officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is  
> working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the  
> government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration  
> have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is  
> too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the  
> attacks on infrastructure.”
>
> Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli  
> spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early  
> August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed  
> more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range- 
> missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles,  
> without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,”  
> Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations— 
> which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if  
> the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however,  
> there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the  
> progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe  
> Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation,  
> supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that  
> Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv.  
> “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict  
> to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv,  
> what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling  
> Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and  
> to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years.  
> We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”
>
> A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been  
> caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the  
> belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But  
> now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need  
> different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The  
> problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence  
> officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in  
> southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs,  
> where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various  
> charities.
>
> A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of  
> vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the  
> effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and  
> on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the  
> Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the  
> Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended  
> consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of  
> oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking  
> that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an  
> irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be  
> successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political  
> leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to  
> hear the best case.”
>
> There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against  
> Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is  
> a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at  
> the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said,  
> “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as  
> part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for  
> the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah— 
> anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their  
> use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the  
> Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so  
> it fomented trouble.”
>
> Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the  
> Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that  
> the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate  
> political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer 
> —to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate  
> and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria.  
> “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,”  
> Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,  
> a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the  
> U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may  
> end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of  
> the Arab street.”
>
>
> Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most  
> outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly  
> about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his  
> aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a  
> debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.
>
> Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed  
> for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and  
> Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and  
> Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel  
> said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his  
> approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a  
> few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it  
> again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought  
> that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not  
> work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift  
> that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”
>
> A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not  
> know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried  
> about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in  
> the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from  
> which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see  
> something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern,  
> the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran  
> could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by  
> pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
>
> At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd,  
> Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications  
> for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration  
> was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his  
> meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to  
> the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces  
> put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between  
> Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we  
> face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”
>
> The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the  
> Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team.  
> He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for  
> less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The  
> former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as  
> being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”
>
> There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her  
> initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has  
> reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on  
> Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she  
> began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for  
> permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far,  
> without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had  
> directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian  
> foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results.  
> The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be  
> not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending  
> parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide  
> between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives  
> in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing  
> for strong American support for Israel.”
>
> The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has  
> emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah- 
> Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively  
> diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic  
> trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go  
> if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”
>
> Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime  
> Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a  
> former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular  
> limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an  
> immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair  
> stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a  
> lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy.  
> “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in  
> Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the  
> diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline  
> to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”
>
> Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah  
> agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally  
> the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a  
> failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all  
> over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst  
> at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been  
> campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change  
> the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass  
> on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a  
> network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when  
> that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The  
> definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and  
> expecting a different result.”
>
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