Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Seymour Hersh

The Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker should be mandatory reading for every member of Congress. Hersh details the massive screw-up of our changing loyalties amid sectarian violence and the push for war with Iran, and it's enough to make me scream. Basically, we're going to aid Sunni's who are killing our troops in order to oppose the Iranian Shia who aren't:

"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration
has
decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In
Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government,
which
is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken
Hezbollah, the
Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also
taken part in
clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A
by-product of these
activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist
groups that espouse a
militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America
and sympathetic to Al
Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the
insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni
forces,
and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective,
the most
profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is
the empowerment of Iran.

"http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa_fact_hersh

Hersh has a long history of accurate reporting on the middle east, so I recommend reading the whole article.

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