Seymour Hersch's "Coming Wars" that have never come

Like many of his stunt predictions, this one from

The New Yorker have never amounted to anything but a display of his own paranoic search for a demon outside his ideological bunker. He should be looking within.

So deep is his paranoia that he ate up the European press releases about "doing something" about Iran's nuke program:

«For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against timeand against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material.»

Which they "dramatically" showed later their great indignation about something or other and fired up the process all over again.

Thanks Seymour - thank you for hoping that the popular will will delay the Bush administration, and that the Iranians who internally have more factions than dental fillings get nukes to threaten the powderkegs of civilization with.
The Umma is at war with the entire world, and Hersch thinks the least stable of the lot need to be taken seriously while they buy time to build nuclear weapons.

Oddly enough, his use of a single, anonymous source withing the US department of Defense didn't just smack of a lie, it forced the DoD to refute his allegations with facts:

«Mr. Hershs source(s) feed him with rumor, innuendo, and assertions about meetings that never happened, programs that do not exist, and statements by officials that were never made.

A sampling from this article [The coming wars] alone includes:

The post-election meeting he describes between the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not happen.

The only civilians in the chain-of-command are the President and the Secretary of Defense, despite Mr. Hershs confident assertion that the chain of command now includes two Department policy officials. His assertion is outrageous, and constitutionally specious.

Arrangements Mr. Hersh alleges between Under Secretary Douglas Feith and Israel, government or non-government, do not exist. Here, Mr. Hersh is building on links created by the soft bigotry of some conspiracy theorists. This reflects poorly on Mr. Hersh and the New Yorker.

Mr. Hersh cannot even keep track of his own wanderings. At one point in his article, he makes the outlandish assertion that the military operations he describes are so secret that the operations are being kept secret even from U.S. military Combatant Commanders. Mr. Hersh later states, though, that the locus of this super-secret activity is at the U.S. Central Command headquarters, evidently without the knowledge of the commander if Mr. Hersh is to be believed.

By his own admission, Mr. Hersh evidently is working on an alternative history novel. He is well along in that work, given the high quality of alternative present that he has developed in several recent articles.»

I'm not sure if he can be taken seriously again in the U.S. He sould just move to London where he can get all the strokes he wants, provided that he keeps performing for unquestioning Guardian readers.

Like the marchers in New York who were protesting a non-existant military draft, he is trying to construct a story that places his scoop at the center. As for motive, he should look within and wonder why he wants to relive his salad days and prop up his illusion that he has a reliable inside source anywhere where the work of nations actually takes place.