In Other News We Knew, Seymour Hersh Was Right

Raw Story is reporting that the WikiLeaks cables seem to support Seymour Hersh's reporting from 2006 that Israel believed Iran was only a year or two away from a functional nuclear weapon and that regime change in Tehran was necessary.  The cable in question involved Undersecretary Nicholas Burns from the State Department and Israeli Mossad head Meir Dagan.

The classified diplomatic cable outlining the meeting is part of a large cache of documents leaked to the whistleblower website Wikileaks, and released to the public on Sunday via several international newspapers, including The Guardian and The New York Times.

Dagan began the meeting by thanking the US for its support of Israel, as well as for a recent $30 billion aid package.

The Mossad chief then conceded that US analysis of Iran's alleged nuclear capabilities differed from Israel's, but remarked that such differences were essentially irrelevant and that if need be Israel would take action alone.

"The threat is obvious, even if we have a different timetable," he said. "If we want to postpone their acquisition of a nuclear capability, then we have to invest time and effort ourselves."

Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and the Central Intelligence Agency, who served for eighteen years in Turkey, believes Dagan's comment that Israel will have to "invest time and effort ourselves” in dealing with Iran was, in essence, a veiled threat.

"It is essentially setting up a situation in which the threat of Israel acting alone becomes a wedge issue to force the US to do something so that it will be able to manage the situation rather than respond to Israeli initiatives," Giraldi told Raw Story on Sunday. "It pushes Washington into planning a military strike to force the Israelis to stand down on their own plans."

The differences between how each nation viewed the Iranian nuclear program were not discussed by either the US or Israeli officials in the cable.

R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. envoy at the meeting -- who is now the Sultan of Oman Professor of the Practice of International Relations at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government – did not respond to requests for comment.

The Israeli embassy also did not respond to request for comment.

Again, anyone who was paying attention to Hersh's reporting in the New Yorker knew Israel was angling for getting the US to take care of their Iran regime change problem for them.  This isn't new information.  But the cables do solidly back up Hersh's story.  Israel was basically telling Bush that if we didn't act, Israel would.  The approach to destabilize Iran described in the cable is what our eventual plan came to be.

According to Hersh, in late 2007, "Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program."

This is precisely the approach Dagan and Burns discussed at August 2007 meeting, as described in the leaked cable.

And it looks like this strategy was discussed in this cable between Burns and Dagan.  If anything, this cable strongly suggests more Americans should have been listening to Seymour Hersh.  He knew exactly what he was talking about.