Sunday, May 16 2004
SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't pretend to be an expert on Sy Hersh. However, about a week into the war with Iraq I remember reading a Hersh piece in The New Yorker. I remember the article so vividly because it was at the height of the press hysteria that the war was turning into a disaster; sandstorms, not enough troops, Rumsfeld, Myers and Bush had no idea what they are doing, etc....
Here's a little sample from Hersh's appraisal on the Iraq War posted on March 31, 2003.
Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. Supply lines?-inevitably, they say?-have become overextended and vulnerable to attack, creating shortages of fuel, water, and ammunition. Pentagon officers spoke contemptuously of the Administration's optimistic press briefings. "It's a stalemate now," the former intelligence official told me. "It's going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines. The carriers are going to run out of jdams" Much of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended. "The Marines are worried as hell, they're all committed, with no reserves, and they've never run the lavs"?-light armored vehicles?-"as long and as hard" as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. "The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come."
The 4th Infantry Division?-the Army's most modern mechanized division?-whose equipment spent weeks waiting in the Mediterranean before being diverted to the overtaxed American port in Kuwait, is not expected to be operational until the end of April. The 1st Cavalry Division, in Texas, is ready to ship out, the planner said, but by sea it will take twenty-three days to reach Kuwait. "All we have now is front-line positions," the former intelligence official told me. "Everything else is missing."
Last week, plans for an assault on Baghdad had stalled, and the six Republican Guard divisions expected to provide the main Iraqi defense had yet to have a significant engagement with American or British soldiers. The shortages forced Central Command to "run around looking for supplies," the former intelligence official said. The immediate goal, he added, was for the Army and Marine forces "to hold tight and hope that the Republican Guard divisions get chewed up" by bombing. The planner agreed, saying, "The only way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle?-that the Republican Guards commit themselves," and thus become vulnerable to American air strikes.
"Hope," a retired four-star general subsequently told me, "is not a course of action." Last Thursday, the Army's senior ground commander, Lieutenant General William S. Wallace, said to reporters, "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against." (One senior Administration official commented to me, speaking of the Iraqis, "They're not scared. Ain't it something? They're not scared.") At a press conference the next day, Rumsfeld and Myers were asked about Wallace's comments, and defended the war plan?-Myers called it "brilliant" and "on track." They pointed out that the war was only a little more than a week old.
That, of course, was nine days before the fall of Saddam's statue in Baghdad and the collapse of Hussein's evil regime. The war plan was in fact "brilliant" and "on track" and Hersh's reporting and characterization of the war was about as wrong as you can get.
This brought back a memorable recollection from Bob Woodward's, Bush at War:
Musharraf said his deep fear was that the United States would in the end abandon Pakistan, and that other interests would crowd out the war on terrorism.
Bush fixed his gaze. "Tell the Pakistani people that the President of the United States looked you in the eye and told you we wouldn't do that."
Musharraf brought up an article in The New Yorker by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, alleging that the Pentagon, with the help of an Israeli special operations unit, had contingency plans to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons should the country become unstable.
"Seymour Hersh is a liar, " Bush replied.
To people who think President Bush is a liar, this opinion of the President's might not hold that much weight. But the directness of his answer to Woodward coupled with Hersh's article on the Iraqi War plan has made me extremely skeptical of anything Seymour Hersh has to say.
Which takes me to his latest from The New Yorker, with the heading:
FACT: The Gray Zone - Did secret Pentagon decisions trigger the Abu Ghraib scandal? by Seymour M. Hersh:
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.
That is the first paragraph from this week's article. Hersh lays out a plausible story of how Rumsfeld and Under-Secretary for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, are ultimately responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The big question is whether Hersh has this story as wrong he had the story from March 31, 2003 of the "faltering ground campaign against Saddam Hussein."
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." Di Rita went on to say:
No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos. This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense.
There is no question that Rumsfeld and the Bush White House have made many mistakes as far as the postwar administration of Iraq. The biggest mistake may have been the idea that the war was over last spring. However, mistakes are an inevitable part of all wars, even successful wars. But the enemies of Bush and his policy in Iraq, which like it or not happens to also be America's policy, are willfully using those mistakes to misrepresent and exaggerate the reality of the overall war.
I suspect there is a good chance we have seen the peak of the Abu Ghraib hysteria, and people should read Hersh's latest "investigative report" with a good deal of skepticism and remember he has gotten a great deal very wrong in the past.
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