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On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow legal pad and in careful longhand sketched out a list of possible responses to a damaging investigative report in The New York Times. "Problem," the aide wrote. "Unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT." He then laid out five options, ranging from the most ominous (an FBI investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment) to the least offensive ("Discuss informally with NYT" and "Do nothing"). Number three on the list, however, read, "Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt."
The note's author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for the Republican White House after the Watergate disaster. Coming so soon after Nixon was burned at the public stake for similar targeting of political enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the next generation of GOP leaders had emerged from the Watergate scandal regretting only one thing: getting caught.
This year, an almost identical note in Cheney's same tight-looped, anal script appeared as a key piece of evidence in the trial of another powerful White House aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's handwritten ruminations on how best to dispose of an Iraq War critic named Joe Wilson are an eerie reminder of how little has changed in America in the past three decades. Then as now, we have been dragged into a bloody massacre in the Third World, paying the bill for the operation with the souls and bodies of the next generation of our young people. It is the same old story, and many of the same people are once again in charge.
But some of the same people are on the other side, too. In the same week that Libby was convicted in a Washington courthouse, Seymour Hersh outlined the White House's secret plans for a possible invasion of Iran in The New Yorker. As amazing as it is that Cheney is still walking among us, a living link to our dark Nixonian past, it's even more amazing that Hersh is still the biggest pain in his ass, publishing accounts of conversations that seemingly only a person hiding in the veep's desk drawer would be privy to. "The access I have -- I'm inside," Hersh says proudly. "I'm there, even when he's talking to people in confidence."
America's pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us -- and that still pisses Hersh off.
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During the Watergate years, you devoted a great deal of
time to Henry Kissinger. If you were going to write a book about
this administration, is Dick Cheney the figure you would focus
on?
Absolutely. If there's a Kissinger person today, it's Cheney. But
what I say about Kissinger is: Would that we had a Kissinger now!
If we did, we'd know that the madness of going into Iraq would have
been explained by something -- maybe a clandestine deal
for oil -- that would make some kind of sense. Kissinger always had
some back-channel agenda. But in the case of Bush and this war,
what you see is what you get. We buy much of our fuel from the
Middle East, and yet we're at war with the Middle East. It doesn't
make sense.
Kissinger's genius, if you will, was that he figured out a way to get out. His problem was that, like this president, he had a president who could only see victory ahead. With Kissinger, you have to give him credit: He had such difficulties with Nixon getting the whole peace package through, but he did it. Right now, a lot of people on the inside know it's over in Iraq, but there are no plans for how to get out. You're not even allowed to think that way. So what we have now is a government that's in a terrible mess, with no idea of how to get out. Except, as one of my friends said, the "fail forward" idea of going into Iran. So we're really in big trouble. Real big trouble here.
Is what's gone on in the Bush administration comparable
or worse than what went on in the Nixon
administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very
avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he's doing the
right thing. I think he's a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He's a
believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he's very dangerous,
because he's an unguided missile, he's a rocket with no ability to
be educated. You can't change what he wants to do. He can't deviate
from his policy, and that's frightening when somebody has as much
power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as
committed to democracy -- whatever that means -- as he is in the
Mideast. I really do believe that's what drives him. That doesn't
mean he's not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks
democracy is the answer.
A lot of people interpreted your last article in "The
New Yorker" as a prediction that we're going into Iran. But you
also make clear that the Saudis have reasons to keep us from
attacking Iran.
I've never said we're going to go -- just that the planning is
under way. Planning is planning, of course. But in the last couple
of weeks, it has become nonstop. They're in a position right now
where the president could wake up and scratch his, uh --
His what?
His nose, and say, "Let's go." And they'd go. That's new. We've
made it closer. We've got carrier groups there. It's not about
going in on the ground. Although if we went in we'd have to send
Marines into the coastal areas of Iran to knock out their Silkworm
missile sites.
So the notion that it would just be a bombing campaign
isn't true at all?
Oh, no. Don't forget, you'd have to take out a very sophisticated
radar system, and a guidance system for their missiles. You'd have
to knock out the ability of the Iranians to get our ships.
So this is the "fail forward" plan?
I think Bush wants to resolve the Iranian crisis. It may not be a
crisis, but he wants to resolve it.
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The other implication of your piece is that we went into
Iraq as a response to Sunni extremism, and now we are realigning
ourselves with Sunni extremists to fight the Shiites. Is it really
that simple? Are we really that stupid?
From what I gather, there's no real mechanism in the
administration for looking at the downside of things. In the
military, when they do a major study, they say something like "We
give it to you with the pluses and minuses." They usually show it
to you warts and all. But these guys in the White House don't want
the warts. They just want the good side. I don't think they know
all of the consequences.
This seems to be something that Bush has in common with
Nixon: the White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a
government unto itself.
One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile
democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us
-- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy,
the Congress -- they have failed. The courts . . . the jury's not
in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would
normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would
argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.
In the Nixon years, you had the press turning against
the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive, you had Watergate, you had
all these reasons why the press became involved in bringing the
Nixon administration to an end. But it hasn't performed that
function in Bush's case. Why do you think that is?
I don't know. It's very discouraging. I've had conversations with
senior people at my old newspaper, the Times, who know
that there are serious problems there. It's not that they shouldn't
run the stories that they run. They run stories that represent the
government's view, because there are people at the Times
who have access to senior people in the government. They see the
national security adviser, they see Condoleezza Rice, and they have
to reflect their view. That's their job. What doesn't get reported
is the other side. What I always loved about the Times
when I worked there is that I could write what the kiddies down the
line said. But that doesn't happen now. You're not getting broad,
macro coverage from the White House that represents anything like
opposition. And there is opposition -- the press just doesn't know
how to deal with it.
But why isn't there more of an uproar by the public at
atrocities committed by American troops? Have people become inured
to those stories over the years?
I just think it's because they are Iraqis. You have to give Bill
Clinton his due: When he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first
president since World War II to bomb white people. Think about it.
Does that mean something? Is it just an accident, or is it an
inevitable byproduct of white supremacy? White man's burden? You
tell me what it is, I don't know.
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You talk a lot about the similarities between Iraq and
Vietnam: how Lynndie England is the new Lt. Calley, how it's
lower-middle-class white kids from America killing nonwhite people
overseas. Yes, there's this similarity -- but why is this same kind
of war happening again? Is this a pattern that's built into the way
our government works?
I don't know. Why would you go to war when you don't have to go to
war? It takes very little courage to go to war. It takes a lot of
courage not to go to war.
I once had a friend -- this was thirty years ago -- from a major university. He studied the scientific problem the government had of detecting underground missile tests in Russia. It took him a couple of years, but he solved the problem. At that point the Joint Chiefs of Staff was against any treaty with the Russians on testing, because we couldn't detect when they cheated. My friend attended a meeting of the Joint Chiefs and demonstrated conclusively that there was a technical way of monitoring missile explosions inside Russia, even without being on-site. But when the meeting was over, the Joint Chiefs just issued a sigh and said, "Well, we better go back to a political objection to the treaty now." Where there had been a scientific objection to a treaty, now there was a political objection. So you begin to see that pushing for peace is very hard. There is safety in bombing, rather than negotiating. It's very sad.
Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a
lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this war
from starting?
You mean learn from the past? America?
Yes.
No. We made the same dumb mistake. One of the arguments for going
into Vietnam was that we had to stop the communist Chinese. The
Chinese were behind everything -- we saw them and North Vietnam as
one and the same. In reality, of course, the Chinese and the
Vietnamese hated each other -- they had fought each other for 1,000
years. Four years after the war ended, in 1979, they got into a
nasty little war of their own. So we were totally wrong about the
entire premise of the war. And it's the same dumbness in this war,
with Saddam and the terrorists.
On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years.
From the press?
Oh, come on, how hard is it to hide things from the press? They
don't care that much about the straight press. What these guys have
figured out is that as long as they have Fox and talk radio,
they're OK in the public opinion. They control that hard. It kept
the ball in Iraq in the air for a couple of years longer than it
should have, and it cost Kerry the presidency. But now it's over --
Iraq's done. A lot of the conservatives who promoted the war are
now very much against it. Some of the columnists in this town who
were beating the drums for that war really owe an apology. It's a
sad time for the American press.
What can be done to fix the situation?
[Long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent
of the editors and executives. You'd actually have to start
promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn't
think you could control. And they're not going to do that.
What's the main lesson you take, looking back at
America's history the last forty years?
There's nothing to look back to. We're dealing with the same
problems now that we did then. We know from the Pentagon Papers --
and to me they were the most important documents ever written --
that from 1963 on, Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lied to us
systematically about the war. I remember how shocked I was when I
read them. So . . . duh! Nothing's changed. They've just
gotten better at dealing with the press. Nothing's changed at
all.
[From Issue 1024 — April 19, 2007]