JIM W. DEAN intro at The Intel Drop: I had been hoping to see Sy Hersh digging into what the back story was on the Iran retaliation attack after the Zionist decapitation strike. The dearth of media on how in the hell did Biden keep crazy Bibi from starting a full blown Mideast war. Biden opened the US taxpayer coffers to the IDF to carpet bomb Gaza into oblivion, and Old Joe stuck his neck out to risk losing a few close election states to Crazy Donald, simply by losing the youth, Muslim, and Palestinian voters.
In hindsight we are all educated how drone warfare has had a huge effect on modern war. My eyes were blown wide open watching main battle tanks, Western and even Russia’s best T-90, all getting blown up with low-cost drones, to the point now where Russia has made hunting Ukie drone operator positions vis signals intelligence a top priority. It does not take a genius to figure that Biden does not want two major wars going on in the middle of an historical election where he is running against a modern version of Atilla the Hun, in terms of crazy Donald.
Seymour Hersh: A Military Solution to a Political Problem
How the Pentagon engineered a fake war to prevent a real one
Posted April 17, 2024:
Seymour Hersh: I’ve spent much of my career reporting on the American military’s misdeeds and worse, especially during the Vietnam War, but 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.
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.
I am not allowed to name the American senior military officers and advisers who made the unusual faux missile attack happen. But it’s important to say that President Joe Biden, whose foreign policy team was not involved in the process, accepted the high-risk plan and publicly urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career and personal freedom depend on keeping the war in Gaza going, and the rest of the Israeli leadership not to respond to Iran. That they might launch a counterattack remains a possibility, of course, according to press reports in Israel.
“The Pentagon planning staffs were asked to come up with a military solution to a political problem,” one involved official told me. “Otherwise the Ayatollah would attack and Bibi would do ‘his thing’ in response. We had to get involved now, and not later. And so we thought about where we are and where we wanted to be. And we got to be involved now, and not later. That meant we had to control the Iranian response.”
The obvious fear was that Netanyahu’s response to a successful drone and missile attack would be, as in Gaza, overwhelming. A major Israeli retaliation could easily lead to an unwanted war in the Middle East.
The senior planning staffs throughout the Pentagon had direct contacts with their peers throughout Europe, and there was immediate consultation with air force leaders in Europe that circumvented dealing with the political leadership there. “And who knew the Iranians the best?” the official asked rhetorically: “The Russians and the Brits.” Iran’s strongest ties in Europe are in fact with Britain and Russia, whose military leaders shared the concern about the extreme danger of an Iranian response to Israel.
There was an informal chat between the Americans and a ranking general in Russia who was asked what he thought Iran wanted. The answer was very Russian, so I was told: “They just want revenge and to prove that their dicks were just as big as anyone else’s.” There was a similar, and more conventional, chat with a senior British officer.
Out of these conversations evolved the ingenious plan: Why not get the air forces of our allies in Europe and the Middle East to agree to work together, under American leadership, and, with Iran’s approval, take advantage of the rapid progress in anti-missile and anti-drone defenses to let the Ayatollah fire off this missiles and have his revenge, while understanding the that air forces of America, Europe, and the Middle East would track and destroy them all?
