Here we go again

So Seymour Hersh says

[t]he Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there,

reports CNN on Sunday. The "extensive planning" dates back to last summer, he said. Now, readers of Lotus would have been aware of some rumblings about Iran during that time, but Hersh is talking about much more, including detailed plans for air strikes.

The goal[, he went on, ]is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids....

The guys on the inside[, meaning Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith,] really want to do this.

The White House and the Pentagon issued what amounted to a non-denial denial. White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said the story was "riddled with inaccuracies" and CNN reported that Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita called the article "so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed." (Apparently "riddled" is the Word of the Day.)

But the errors claimed were things like a certain meeting didn't happen. In the light of past examples where meetings were labeled with "didn't happen" because, it turned out, they were in a different room or on a different day than described, those "credibility-destroying errors" actually amount to the "quibbling" Hersh called them. What really makes it a non-denial denial, though, is that DiRita said nothing about Hersh's central charges that there is planning for raids on Iran and, in fact,

[t]he president assigned a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other special forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

That is, they attacked details and ignored the thrust of the argument, as both CNN and Reuters noted in their coverage. CNN also quoted former Secretary of Defense William Cohen as saying that while contingency plans would not be unusual, the issue is

"whether or not that decision's already been made and they're actually planning a military operation."

Cohen noted that Hersh's article has not been "categorically denied" by the Bush administration.

"So there seems to be some confirmation that there is a fairly serious effort under way to gather this kind of information for potential military operations," he said.

(You might also want to take a look at this post from November 23, 2003 referring to a Los Angeles Times article from the previous July in which Feith was quoted as saying that

he and other Pentagon officials ... are studying the lessons of Iraq closely - to ensure that the next U.S. takeover of a foreign country goes more smoothly.

"We're going to get better over time," promised Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Rumsfeld. ...

"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," he said. "We'll get better as we do it more often."

Yes, it's the same DiRita.)

What's more, some of those "quibbles" were - well, let's be generous and call them misguided.

The statement also disputed Hersh's assertion that "Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies ... will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations."

"The only civilians in the chain of command are the president and the secretary of defense, despite Mr. Hersh's confident assertion that the chain of command now includes two department policy officials. His assertion is outrageous, and constitutionally specious."

If we're speaking military chain of command, constitutionally the Secretary of Defense isn't in it, either. If we're speaking administrative chain of command for directing and carrying out policy, which is what it would seem Hersh meant, it can include anyone they damn please. It's DiRita's assertion that's "specious."

DiRita also said

ties between Feith and Israel "do not exist."

The Defense spokesman added, "Mr. Hersh is building on links created by the soft bigotry of some conspiracy theorists."

But Hersh didn't claim Feith had "ties" with Israel but rather that he

oversaw Defense Department civilians who "have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons and missile targets inside Iran."

Because a number of leading neocons (although by no means all) are Jewish, of late it's become a common tactic to label criticism of them as anti-Semitism. As patently absurd and offensive as that is, it's what DiRita is doing here with his reference to the "soft bigotry" of "conspiracy theorists." DiRita isn't "quibbling" here, he's engaging in a vicious lie.

But there are lies behind lies, lies we tell others and lies we tell ourselves - and the latter can be the most dangerous for those around us: Self-deception, it has been said, is the worst kind.

Hersh said U.S. officials believe that a U.S. attack on Iran might provoke an uprising by Iranians against the hard-line religious leaders who run the government. Similar arguments were made ahead of the invasion of Iraq, when administration officials predicted U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators.

And Hersh said administration officials have chosen not to include conflicting points of view in their deliberations - such as predictions that any U.S. attack would provoke a wave of nationalism that would unite Iranians against the United States.

"As people say to me, when it comes to meetings about this issue, if you don't drink the Kool-Aid, you can't go to meetings," he said. "That isn't a message anybody wants to hear."

Sadly and frighteningly, that description of an administration that simply refuses - outright refuses - to face reality is echoed in other sources. Tom Engelhardt notes two examples (link via Buzzflash). As one, he says "the invaluable Washington insider e-service The Nelson Report"

wrote the following in the first week of January after various officials had returned from discouraging inspection trips to Iraq:

There is rising concern among senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear "bad news."

What's more, he says, the Financial Times says that

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a "brutally accurate" picture of the deteriorating situation in Iraq and "its potential dangers." But ... "a member of an influential neoconservative policy group said that such warnings 'stop well short of the president.'" Well, actually, not completely short....

According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr. Bush recently asked [Secretary of State Colin] Powell for his view on the progress of the war. "We're losing," Mr. Powell was quoted as saying. Mr. Freeman said Mr. Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.

I say again, this is frightening, especially when you note that, including Hersh, this is three different accounts from three separate sources working three different angles, all of which come to the same conclusion: The White House in general and Shrub in particular are like a seven-year old sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalalala - I can't hear you!" No, that's not right, it's worse: The seven-year old knows they're hiding from something, but the Shrub team wants to pretend that the something - the bad news about anything from Iraq to the economy to global warming - does not even exist and they may to a very real extent have convinced themselves of just that.

Some people may be trying to save them from themselves (and us along with them); Hersh suggested as much when he said that people leaking the information about the planning for attacks on Iran to him were doing it in the hope that the publicity could help to head them off. But delusion always dies a hard death - and with some in Congress eager to share that delusion, it will be that much harder.

The one thing this means is that when the implosion does come - and it will come, somewhere, somehow - they will be utterly unprepared for it and utterly incapable of dealing with it in any rational or effective manner. And it means we as a people, many of who have bought into the delusion out of a natural desire to believe in your leaders and who simply can't deal with the notion that those leaders are themselves deluded, will react in predictable ways when it happens: We will panic, we will turn even more inward, we will cling, as people under stress do, ever more tightly to what seems simple and clear and safe and familiar, even though the clinging we have done already will have helped bring us to that very state of national emotional crisis.

We are in trouble, particularly because so many don't even realize that we are in trouble. I must tell you that I am afraid for my country, I am afraid for our freedoms, I am afraid for what we in our hubristic desperation will inflict on the peoples of the world, afraid that their response will only deepen our crisis in a downward spiral of chaos.

No, that doesn't mean it will happen and I freely and happily acknowledge that my worst fears of times past did not come to pass. But in those cases it was a combination of political action, outside actors, and luck that brought us through. The first is in too short supply these days, I'd say; the next is always iffy; and the latter - well, we just can't keep counting on the latter. We are in trouble.

Footnote: You can read Hersh's New Yorker article here.