Journalist blasts U.S. foreign policy

Journalist blasts U.S. foreign policy

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Noted investigative reporter Seymour Hersh was highly critical of President George W. Bush’s handling of U.S. foreign policy during his Nov. 15 speech at the Rice Memorial Center.

Calling the war in Iraq intractable, Hersh advocated two plans for the U.S. military: ”Get out by midnight tonight” or ”Get out by midnight tomorrow night.”

Hersh’s speech, titled ”Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” was part of the President’s Lecture Series. His reporting on Vietnam, Cambodia, the Nixon White House and, more recently, the war in Iraq has made him one of the most famous journalists in the country.

Along with CBS News, Hersh broke the story of U.S. military abuses at the Abu Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad. After the exposé, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was called to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rumsfeld told the senators he informed President Bush months earlier about the events at Abu Ghraib and the existence of photos that were likely to spark outrage in the Muslim world.

”’This is the story,’ I thought to myself,” Hersh recounted. ”Man — banners! Because what did the president do? He didn’t know about Abu Ghraib before then, but what did he do when he learned? What’s the answer? Nada, nothing.

”Instead, over the next couple of months, they start prosecuting a couple of the kids, and to this day, they’ve prosecuted no officers. That’s what he did. Now what else do you need to know about what the president thinks about torture?”

JEFF FITLOW

Journalist Seymour Hersh gestures to make a point during his Nov. 15 lecture.

Returning repeatedly to President Bush, Hersh surprised some in the audience when he said, ”I don’t believe he’s a liar.” He said the U.S. president was not being deceptive when he launched the war in Iraq to find alleged weapons of mass destruction. Instead, Hersh attributed Bush’s raft of international problems to other character issues. ”He’s a believer,” he said. ”He’s a radical. He’s a revolutionary. But he’s a revolutionary without any ability to change course, to learn, to adjust.”

That inability is having repercussions beyond Iraq, Hersh argued. The war in Afghanistan is expanding, he said, citing U.S. government sources who note a steady increase in the size of Taliban fighting units. And last summer’s clashes between the Israeli military and Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon produced the remarkable outcome of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a Shiite, becoming the most popular political figure in much of the Sunni world, Hersh said.

Earlier this month, Hersh wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine that explored the Bush administration’s dispute with the Iranian government. Relying on his trademark sources within the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, Hersh described a CIA report that casts doubt on the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Nevertheless, Hersh found powerful forces within the Bush administration that want to bomb Iran before Bush leaves office in two years.

Some members of the administration, however, appear to be willing to pursue diplomatic avenues with Iran, Hersh wrote. The problem with that approach, Hersh said at the lecture, is that the ”incredible morass” of Iraq has limited the ability of the United States to influence events in the region, especially with regard to Iran. ”I’m just presenting the possibility that the Iranians may not choose to play the way we want them to play because we have lost so much status and so much standing,” he said.

The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 is something ”historians are going

to have to really wrestle with,” Hersh said. His ”thesis,” he told the Rice audience, is that ”somehow after 9/11, eight or nine neoconservatives took over the government and convinced Bush the pragmatist and [Rumsfeld] and Cheney that the road to solving international terrorism … led through Baghdad.”