In an article in the New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, wrote about how President Bush and Vice President Cheney were convinced that “a successful Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prototype for a potential US preemptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.” This helps to confirm many long held suspicions about Israel’s motives in Lebanon. Concurrently, the US backing of Israel’s disproportionate military aggression is also explained. After all, why would the US be opposed to operations it helped plan? Citing unnamed experts in the Middle East and the Pentagon, Hersh addressed the fact that a large-scale military attack of any kind requires a substantial amount of planning, often weeks or even months beforehand. This illuminates the absurdity of the argument that Israel’s war against Lebanon was the immediate result of Hezbollah kidnapping two soldiers.

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo - it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, “Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.” A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a pre-emptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.”

“We (the US) worked closely with them (Israel) months before, not necessarily… knowing when it was going to happen, but when there was an incident they will take advantage of the incident, what I call a fortunate timing’,” Hersh said. Another reason for US silence in the face of Israeli aggression is because, according to one of Hersh’s military sources, “before the Hezbollah kidnappings, several Israeli officials visited Washington ‘to get a green light’ for a bombing operation following a Hezbollah provocation, and also to find out how much the United States would bear.” Hersh also quoted another military official within the Pentagon that suggests a growing concern among the military officers regarding the administration’s “far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should [have].” In what could be called a psychic moment, Hersh stated on CNN, “This White House will find a way to view what happened with the Israelis against Hezbollah as a victory, and they’ll find a way to see it as a positive for any planning that is going towards Iran.” This sentiment was confirmed by Hersh’s military sources, which went further by iterating, “There is no way that (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this.”

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thanks to PapaFigue for the article