[Salon] Waiting for war on the other side of the Atlantic

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

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LETTER FROM LONDON

Waiting for war on the other side of the Atlantic

Seymour Hersh

Feb 27

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President Donald Trump gestures as he concludes his remarks during the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol on Tuesday. / Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images.

I have been in London for the past week, once again not winning a prize at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, for Cover-Up, the documentary on my career directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. I still resent losing while clad in a tuxedo. Returning to Washington was delayed for days by the storms that walloped the Northeast.

I missed the live broadcast of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, an extended Mel Brooks’ imitation that aired in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, London time. Edward Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times, had a good go at it: “As Trump readies a US armada for a Middle Eastern war whose aims he cannot articulate,” Luce wrote Wednesday, “an honest reckoning of geopolitical risks would place his wayward psychology high up. That Trump often lies is, in itself, not proof of irrationality. That he is encouraged to believe his own lies is more serious. . . . Whether foreign or American, people who tell him what he wants to hear, not what he needs to know, are playing a dangerous game. The road to Trumpian recklessness is paved with flattery.”

America’s fleet and Air Force are being dispatched, once again, in a show of force—to do what? Attack an Iranian nuclear weapons program that no longer exists, except for the remote possibility that some partially enriched uranium might be stashed in a tunnel? That possibility, or fantasy, has been shared with Trump by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who knows a sucker when he sees one.

There is a lot of reporting on the president’s latest antics that I could not do, obviously, from London, but here are some important facts, as told to me someone with the requisite experience and data to know:

• A brief attack lasting only a single night will not be enough to bring an end to the religious regime that continues to rule Iran. Last month its Revolutionary Guards were authorized to murder—there is no other word for what happened—thousands of protesters.

• If no troops are sent in on the ground, an air war against the entrenched Ayatollahs and their army would involve at least two to three weeks of air assaults by the Israeli and US air forces, possibly more.

• Most significant, perhaps, is the fact that both the United States are Israel are in contact with senior officers in the Iranian national army, a non-religious group that has the capability and manpower of standing up to the Revolutionary Guards that has terrified dissidents as well as the general population since the Ayatollahs took over after the ousting of the Shah, and his American supporters, in 1979.

• The fear among some in the leadership in Israel, I was told, is that Trump might come to his senses about the need to attack the Iranian leadership now and that he would make what one informed Israeli called “a lousy weak deal with Iran” and then announce it as “a much better deal” than Barack Obama made when in office.

• The Israeli, who was wounded in combat, ended a message with these words: “to be continued.”