Plans Still Afoot to Invade Iran?

Drudge spent a lot of time on his radio show--which is really just a long string of brain farts interupted by commercials--last night deriding the journalism of Seymour Hersh on Iraq.

Hersh, who has been ringing the bell bigtime on a pending invasion of Iran for years has another article out in The New Yorker.

Hersh writes:

A month before the November elections, Vice-President Dick Cheney was sitting in on a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building. The talk took a political turn: what if the Democrats won both the Senate and the House? How would that affect policy toward Iran, which is believed to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? At that point, according to someone familiar with the discussion, Cheney began reminiscing about his job as a lineman, in the early nineteen-sixties, for a power company in Wyoming. Copper wire was expensive, and the linemen were instructed to return all unused pieces three feet or longer. No one wanted to deal with the paperwork that resulted, Cheney said, so he and his colleagues found a solution: putting "shorteners" on the wire--that is, cutting it into short pieces and tossing the leftovers at the end of the workday. If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran. The White House would put "shorteners" on any legislative restrictions, Cheney said, and thus stop Congress from getting in its way.

The White House's concern was not that the Democrats would cut off funds for the war in Iraq but that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government, to keep it from getting the bomb. "They're afraid that Congress is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, a la Nicaragua in the Contra war," a former senior intelligence official told me.

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For their part, The White House says Hersh is full of crap. Any denial by the White House equals confirmation in real life, so look out.

VIDEO: Hersh went on CNN and talked to the Wolf.

Tags: Seymour Hersh, Iran, Dick Cheney.