A new report in The New Yorker magazine by intrepid reporter Seymour Hersh asks whether "the [Bush] Administration's new policy [is] benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" In sum, the report says that the Bush Administration, in order to "undermine Iran," has been "redirecting" resources and indirectly "bolstering...Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."As if that's not crazy enough, the Bush Administration reportedly has used the Iran-Contra scandal as a sort of model for the current operation, with a key conclusion being that "even though the [Iran-Contra] program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress." Other key conclusions from Iran-Contra include "you can't trust our friends," "the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it," "you can't trust the uniformed military," and "it's got to be run out of the Vice-President's office."
For those of you who don't recall, the Iran-Contra scandal was "one of the largest political scandals in the United States during the 1980s." Once again, it involved Iran and a Republican Administration acting without the knowledge or oversight of a Democratic Congress. Once again, it involved an Administration with people like Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams (currently Deputy National Security Advisor), Robert Gates (currently Secretary of Defense), and John Negroponte (currently Deputy Secretary of State).
Anyway, these people appear to be up to their old tricks, such as aiding Al Qaeda - which they did during the 1980s and early 1990s (via our buddy Saudi Arabia) in Afghanistan. According to Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran, Iraq and the Shi'ites who is currently a senior fellow the Council on Foreign Relations:
...compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.
We know how THAT story ended up. As the saying goes, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." Or perhaps, ominously, the more appropriate lesson here is that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Over and over this nest of neocons does not seem capable of looking more than one move ahead. They never get the idea that The Other Side might react to their machinations, and change their game in mid-move. Wonder what Senator Webb thinks of this story.