April 18, 2024 (EIRNS)—Seymour Hersh posted yesterday what seems to be a fantastic story on how the Pentagon supposedly engineered a “fake war” in order to avoid a real one. He claims that “it’s time now to applaud the brilliance of the Pentagon planning staff and the operational officers who did what America assured Iran’s religious and military leadership it could do: allow Iran to respond to yet another Israeli assassination by flinging more than three hundred drones and missiles toward Israeli targets that as many as possible would be shot out of the sky before hitting ground there. It was a huge gamble, and it paid off.”
“The Pentagon was essentially resisting—a word I choose to use—the foreign policy of the Biden White House and NATO by secretly approaching one of Iran’s closest allies—Russia—and persuading a senior general there to reassure Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s 84-year-old Supreme Leader, that America had the know-how to make the strategy succeed,” Hersh writes. “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.”
In effect, Hersh’s sources are claiming that the strategy executed by the Iranians was actually born at the Pentagon, not in Tehran. Hersh is likely accurately reporting what his sources told him, but whether they are embellishing the U.S. role or not is not clear. Hersh is evidently satisfied that they’re telling him the truth.
