Today’s Must Read: Hersh Article On Iran

At the moment, the economy may be the number one issue, however, it won’t be the only thing that gets attention for the rest of the summer.  At some point, the subject of Iran will take center stage for a while.  That said, Seymour Hersh has an excellent article in the New Yorker on the subject that is definitely worth a read.

I’ve excerpted some of the more interesting bits of information especially those that have a relation to election politics…

On the Democratic congress supporting the Bush administration’s decision to increase clandestine military operations against Iran:

In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

Secretary gates discussing the consequences of a preemptive strike:

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.”

A commentary on how the Democrats in Congress are doing:

The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”

And some closing thoughts on the subject:

There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”

Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.

Between McCain singing bomb Iran earlier in 2007 and Obama getting some criticism for his statements on negotiations, the topics discussed in Hersh’s article will become a factor at some point later in the election, one way or another.