Iran-Contra Redux

Technorati Tags: Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, Iran-Contra, John Negroponte

The big take-away for me after reading Seymour Hersh's new piece in The New Yorker, is how incredibly complex and shifting the political alliances are in the Middle East -- and how much damage the United States has done to its own interests by pulling strings without any understanding of how, where, and to whom those strings were connected. The explosive revelation in "The Redirection," on which Sy Hersh elaborates in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, is that the Bush administration is engaged in a covert policy of funding Sunni extremist groups that are in turn supplying Al Qaeda with material aid. The stated purpose of the policy, which is being run out of Dick Cheney's office, is to weaken Hezbollah and radical Shiites supported by Iran and Syria, but the whole thing is surreal: having toppled the (Sunni) government that was keeping Iran (Shiite) in check, we are now trying to defeat Iran's power in the region by supporting Sunnis who are allied with the organization that brought down the Twin Towers and killed 3,000 people!

Digby nails it:

Think about this for a moment. The crackerjack Bush administration --- which failed to anticipate the rise of Iran once they removed its dangerous enemy from the scene --- is supposed to be able to recognize who's who among these various Muslim players and deftly play all the factions against one another in a very discrete and high stakes game in which they finesse a final outcome that brings about peace and security.

Oh. My God.