Sy Hersh Reports Pentagon Helped Plan Iranian Missile Strike Against Israel
If true, a success story of initiative from below
Seymour Hersh just published a story on his Substack describing how US military people in the Pentagon were tasked with finding a way to prevent the Israelis from doing something crazy after Iran responded to yet another Israeli assassination of Iranian officers, and how they succeeded.
For those of you who have a paid subscription to Sy Hersh, please read his article. For those of you who don’t, I’ll summarize as best I can.
In order to avoid the wider war that Netanyahu clearly wants, US military officials secretly contacted Russian and British officers with Iranian contacts. They were receptive. As Hersh describes the Russian response,
There was an informal chat between the Americans and a ranking general in Russia who was asked what he thought Iran wanted. The answer was very Russian, so I was told: “They just want revenge and to prove that their dicks were just as big as anyone else’s.” There was a similar, and more conventional, chat with a senior British officer.
The Iranians were contacted, and agreed to work with the Pentagon. As Hersh enthusiastically describes,
Imagine it: two of the Biden administration’s most entrenched enemies—Russia and Iran—trusting and working with the Pentagon and its leadership to prevent a deadly retaliation for yet another Israeli assassination of an Iranian general and six other Iranians in Damascus.
The plan was for Iran to launch a known number of drones and missiles at the Israeli military bases from which the fighters that assassinated the Iranians in Damascus were launched, and for the US, its allies, and Israel, to shoot nearly all of them down with none landing in any Israeli cities.
What did the Israelis think of this? According to Hersh, they were given a stark choice,
There was a tough session with a senior Israeli official who was informed, the American official said, that Israel had two options: one,”win easy” and let the American coalition destroy the missiles; or two, “lose the hard way” and respond with violence to the failed attack. “If you chose the hard way,” the Israeli was told, “you’re on your own.”
What is most interesting is that Hersh’s sources tell him that the Biden White House was left out of the loop until, well, he doesn’t say.
Throughout the process, Pentagon leaders were assembling their plan without formally consulting President Biden or anyone in the White House. “The White House only knew that the Iranians” wanted to respond in kind to the Israelis, the official said. At that early point in the military planning, he added, “the White House had no need to know more.”
Hersh doesn’t say why the White House had no need to know more, but I’m going to go ahead and guess it was so they wouldn’t have the chance to muck things up.
Hersh also doesn’t say anything about the obvious military conclusion. In spite of foreknowledge of when and where the Iranian missiles and drones were going, at least nine of them got through and hit their targets anyway. It isn’t difficult to conclude that a larger, unannounced strike could do incalculable damage and there’s not a damned thing the Israelis can do to stop it.
That, I think, was what both the Iranian and American military wanted to drive through the thick skulls in both Washington and Jerusalem, and they were willing to work with both Moscow and Teheran to do it.
It also shows me that some pretty high-ranking people in the US military are willing to go around bumbling, indecisive, or corrupt superiors to try and avoid World War III. IMO, that’s upholding their oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, because if there’s World War III there will be no more Constitution.
Good for them.
It also tells me that the Russians and Iranians love their children, too.
Please feel free to tell me what you think.
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I don't buy it. This is spin within spin imo. An attempt to preserve the notion of American military superiority when the simple fact is drones have changed war and America is not and can never be prepared. It's like how cannons obviated castles. And as a result we no longer even attempt to enclose our cities anymore.
My read is that Iran now knows and has shown the world it can pierce any existing ballistic missile defense. I strongly suspect this will always be true for the simple reason that throwing a rock is always easier than hitting a thrown rock with a rock. It's like division always being harder than multiplication.
This story is about America basically scrambling to hide the fact that all our bases everywhere are useless wastes of money, which everyone sane has known for decades, but now even more so. Iran or anyone else with a real army can simply crater the lot of them at range.
This is our near bloodless Agincourt. The era of the longbow has arrived.
If true, those officers deserve medals for courage, integrity and intelligence ... and one of them should replace that stooge, Sec. of War Lloyd Austin. If true it also underscores the complete collapse of any kind of leadership, intelligence, humanity, creativity or humanity at the top of our corrupt government.