Hersh: 'Shifting targets' in Iran

When I called Seymour Hersh last month, he was rewriting his next piece for The New Yorker. That story is online now, and it happens to deal with the first question I asked in the interview: Does he still believe President Bush is gunning for Iran?

Yes and no, Hersh writes. The U.S. is no longer looking to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Instead, the attacks will be more tit for tat regarding Iranian meddling in Iraqi bloodshed and the killing of American soldiers.

Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Hersh was on Wolf Blitzer this morning, embedded below, talking about these "shifting targets." As for handling Iraq, Hersh told me: "There are only two issues: Option A is to get out by midnight tonight, and Option B is to get out by midnight tomorrow."

My interview with Sy Hersh goes global

So my interview with Seymour Hersh brought 3,000 visitors to JewishJournal.com yesterday. LAObserved, Romenesko, Huffington Post and War and Piece all linked to it. My Web editor just called to say he heard it quoted on Nick Madigan's "Minding the Media" program on KCRW this afternoon. Here's a link to the transcript:

What will the journalism of the future look like? Will it continue to obsess over absurd, half-in-the-bag teenybopper celebrities, and insist on making up silly headlines to describe criminal sports figures and tin-pot dictators?

With fewer and fewer jobs available in traditional journalism, will aspiring reporters and editors dedicate their energy to the fluid, often irresponsible blogosphere, where opinion is king?

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In an interview with the Jewish Journal, another veteran journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who is 70 and writes for the New Yorker, said he has embraced the new order.

"There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism, and it is online," said Hersh, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for uncovering the My Lai massacre.

"I hate to tell this to The New York Times or The Washington Post," he said. "We are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism."

"We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America," Hersh said. "We haven't come to terms with it. I don't think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff."

When I was learning the difference between a nut graph and a set-up and why "lede" is spelled so oddly, Hersh was a journalistic hero of mine. (I think I always related because of the glasses he wore.) What I found most interesting from our conversation was this bit of honesty:

JJ: You turned 70 this year. Why keep working so hard?

SH: I don't work that hard. I write four or five pieces a year. Secondly, what do you want me to do? Play professional golf? I can't do that. You do what you can do. And I'm in a funny spot because I have an ability to communicate with people I have known for a number of years. They trust me, and I trust them, so I keep on doing these little marginal stories.

JJ: That's all they are? Marginal?

SH: With these stories, if they slow down or make people take a deep breath before they bomb Iran, that is a plus. But they are not going to stop anybody. This is a government that is unreachable by us, and that is very depressing. In terms of adding to the public debate, the stories are important. But not in terms of changing policy. I have no delusions about that.