4
march 2007
Sy Hersh: the dark side of spun a lot
It's
become a habit to greet whatever journalist Seymour Hersh writes with
reverence. However, after his ludicrous claim last summer that Israel's war in
Lebanon was a trial run for an American bombing of Iran - an accusation
undermined by postwar narratives showing the confused way Israel and the United
States responded to the conflict - my doubts hardened. In his latest New Yorker
piece, Hersh maintains that he has unearthed more dirt on the Bush
administration: The US is involved in containing Iran by directly or indirectly
"bolstering Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam
and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."
The
broad tropes of Hersh's arguments are correct. The US has indeed abandoned the
neoconservative approach to the Middle East (which Hersh so loathed), to return
to political "realism" based on imposing a balance of power. Much
like the US did during the 1980s when it supported Iraq in its war against
Iran, the Bush administration is today using Sunnis against Shiites (though in
Iraq it is mainly using Shiites against Sunnis). The policy is risky - fiddling
with sectarianism may ultimately backfire - but the problem with Hersh is that
he offers little hard evidence for many of his controversial assertions. In
fact his discussion of Lebanon in particular and his broader charge that the
administration is engaging in clandestine activities without proper legislative
approval are ill-informed or partial. The New Yorker has signed off on a piece
shoddily constructed, often tendentious, and driven almost entirely by Hersh's
sources (most of the more significant ones left unnamed), rather than his own
independent confirmation of the details.
Let's
start with Lebanon, where the American and Saudi effort to counter Iran and its
allies is in full swing. Today, the US and the kingdom, but also much of the
international community and the Muslim world, are shoring up the government of
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which has
for the past three months been facing a serious challenge to its authority from
the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hizbullah. We learn from Hersh that, in the
context of this struggle against Hizbullah, "representatives of the
Lebanese government" have supplied weapons and money to a Palestinian
Sunni extremist group called Fatah al-Islam, which allegedly broke off from its
pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, before moving to North Lebanon.
Fatah al-Intifada was created by the Syrian regime in the early 1980s to oppose
Yasser Arafat. Hersh also points out that "the largest" of the Sunni
groups, Esbat al-Ansar, located in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp
in Sidon, in South Lebanon, "has received arms and supplies from Lebanese
internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora
government."
What
is Hersh's evidence for these extraordinary statements? Which
"militias" is he referring to? In the ongoing Lebanese standoff,
Hizbullah has used the term to describe pro-government supporters, without ever
substantiating that such militias even exist. The Fatah al-Islam story is based
entirely on a quote by one Alistair Crooke, a former MI6 agent, who, we learn,
"was told" that weapons were offered to the group, "presumably
to take on Hizbullah." The passage on Esbat al-Ansar is not even sourced.
The
Fatah al-Islam story is instructive, because it shows a recurring flaw in Hersh's
reporting, namely his investigative paralysis when it comes to Syria. In
articles past, Hersh has acted as a conduit for those defending the post-9/11
intelligence collaboration between the US and Syria, and lamenting the Bush
administration's subsequent isolation of Damascus in the run-up to and
aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Most Lebanese analysts believe that Fatah
al-Islam, far from being aided by the Lebanese government, is in fact a Syrian
plant, deployed to Lebanon to be used by the Assad regime to destabilize the
country and prevent formal endorsement by the Siniora government of a court to
try suspects in the February 2005 assassination of the former prime minister,
Rafik Hariri. Syria is the main suspect in the crime.
Nowhere
does Hersh mention two items that were all over the Beirut media: that the
Lebanese authorities have arrested several of the group's members, and that the
Lebanese and Palestinian security services have collaborated in opposing Fatah
al-Islam in the northern Palestinian refugee camps of Nahr al-Bared and
Baddawi. The mainstream Palestinian leadership in Lebanon has criticized the
entry of such groups into the country, fearing this will provoke tension
between Palestinians and the Lebanese state. Fatah al-Islam's leader, Abu
Khaled al-Amleh, is said to be under house arrest in Damascus, but for a number
of Lebanese analysts who closely follow Palestinian affairs the story is bogus,
designed only to provide Syria with plausible deniability.
As
for Hersh's Esbat al-Ansar allegation, so little is said that it's difficult to
know where to begin a refutation. The history of Esbat al-Ansar is convoluted,
but the group was, as French researcher Bernard Rougier notes in a book on the
rise of militant Islam in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps, "the first
armed group to claim a Salafist-Islamist orientation in ... Ain
al-Hilweh." Where Hersh stumbles is in his lack of knowledge of
Lebanese-Palestinian relations. First of all, it's not clear to whom he's
comparing Esbat al-Ansar when describing it as "the largest" Sunni
Islamist group. According to Palestinian sources, the group includes no more
than 70-80 men. If the Lebanese government, and Sunnis in particular, were to
collaborate with anyone in the camps, it would be with the main Palestinian
organizations, particularly Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas'
Fatah movement, which are more powerful militarily and represent far more
people than Esbat al-Ansar.
Second,
in its dealings with the Palestinians, the Lebanese government tends to work
through the mainstream Palestinian parties, given that the camps are largely
autonomous areas. This may vary depending on the region, but the idea that
Lebanon's internal security forces would directly arm Esbat al-Ansar, which is
hostile to Fatah, is not credible. The Lebanese would not spoil their
relationship with Fatah over Esbat al-Ansar, and it is utterly implausible that
Esbat al-Ansar could or would "take on Hizbullah," with which the
group was close in the mid-1980s, before it moved away from Iran, toward
Salafist-Islamism. Nowhere does Hersh prove his point; worse, nowhere are
readers given a larger context that would affirm how weak his contentions
are.
Hersh
errs in trying too hard to somehow tie the Bush administration in with the most
militant groups. In fact, it is true that the Lebanese government is allied
with Sunni Islamists - most notably Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya, the Lebanese branch
of the Muslim Brotherhood. It may indeed have allowed "some aid," as
Hersh writes, to end up in the hands of "emerging" Sunni militant
groups, though this is very imprecise language. The reality is that amid the
sectarian polarization in Lebanon today, most Sunnis have rallied to the
government's side, against the Shiite Hizbullah. Al-Jamaa is close to Saudi
Arabia, and in 2005 the Saudis intervened prior to parliamentary elections that
followed the Syrian withdrawal to ensure the group would not vote against
candidates in North Lebanon backed by Saad Hariri, Lebanon's most powerful Sunni
leader who enjoys American and Saudi backing. However, Al-Jamaa is nothing like
Esbat al-Ansar or Fatah al-Islam; it has integrated into the state and has had
members in Parliament. Doubtless it holds views of Israel and the West that the
Bush administration would find distasteful, but so too do the Saudi, Jordanian,
and Egyptian clergy. Is Hersh suggesting that the US end ties with Riyadh,
Amman, and Cairo?
What
is going on today is power politics at their most essential. While Hersh may
consider his disclosures news, he must make a better case that the American
shift to a Sunni-centric policy against Iran is strengthening violent
Islamists. The evidence he presents is scant.
What
about Hersh's belief that the Bush administration is illegally hiding aspects
of its pro-Sunni regional strategy? "The clandestine operations have been
kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution of the funding to the
Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional
appropriations process." The administration's point man in this endeavor
is purportedly Vice President Dick Cheney.
This
revelation is noteworthy, but when we turn to the final part of Hersh's text in
which he addresses congressional oversight issues, we find little meat. Unexplainably,
the piece jumps from Hersh's interview with Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan
Nasrallah to a flashback on how the Iran-Contra affair undermined the oversight
process. That's because two of those involved in the mid-1980s
arms-for-hostages deal, Elliott Abrams, a senior official in the US National
Security Council, and Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the US
who heads his country's National Security Council, are key players in the tilt
toward the Sunnis.
But
Iran-Contra was then. When it comes to now, all Hersh can tell us is that
"the issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from
Congress." Is that it? Other than quoting unnamed skeptical sources, Hersh
doesn't enlighten us on specific instances where the administration broke laws.
He does mention, not for the first time, that US military and special
operations teams "have escalated their activities in Iran to gather
intelligence" and to pursue Iranian operatives from Iraq. This merits more
investigation, but it is not directly related to his more disturbing point that
the US is somehow bolstering extreme Sunni Islamists.
Hersh
goes on to remind us that any administration, in order to engage in clandestine
activities, "must issue a written finding and inform Congress." The
argument is a fair one, if the Bush administration has failed to do so. But in
that case why does Hersh not mention a Daily Telegraph report published in
January, which suggested that "senators and congressmen have been briefed
on [a] classified 'non-lethal presidential finding' that allows the CIA to
provide financial and logistical support to the [Lebanese] prime minister,
Fouad Siniora" to oppose Hizbullah? Did The New Yorker's fact checkers
miss that one? If Bush is so keen to hide his hand in Lebanon and elsewhere,
then this news item implies that the picture is more complicated. And if Hersh
disagrees with the Telegraph, shouldn't his editors have asked him to place a
rebuttal in his article?
But
the editors, I suspect, weren't really looking. Sy Hersh has written some
remarkable pieces in the past, but his latest is not one of them. It is badly
argued, displays shaky knowledge of the details, and seems mainly propelled by
antipathy for the Bush administration. When there are serious political repercussions
in the Middle East from Hersh's much-read pieces, it would help for him to know
better what he's talking about.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=80105#
Seymour Hersh article :
Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on
terrorism?