Seymour Hersh exposed for the idiot he is

As were other people, I was disturbed when Seymour Hersh, in The New Yorker purported to expose America's covert operations in Iran, a place that I think needs to be covertly checked out and then de-fanged. If you shared my worries, Michael Ledeen comes to the rescue in an article where he points out that Hersh said exactly the same thing (almost verbatim, it seems) regarding Pakistan and was wrong, wrong, wrong:

Last week I noted that Sy Hersh, the celebrated New Yorker writer who specializes in getting things backwards, had been warning the world that secret Pentagon teams, in tandem with secret Israeli units, had been unleashed on the Iranian countryside to identify and target nuclear facilities. I also confessed that I rarely read Hersh's stuff, because so much of what he has written has proven wrong, and I prefer not to cloud my mind with material likely to be padded with disinformation. It's the same principle I apply to the evening network news and the New York Times: I'm better off without them. Had I read more of Hersh, and did I not suffer from an onslaught of senior moments, I might have remembered that Hersh had written the same story before. I'm grateful to one of NRO's thoughtful readers for pointing me in a useful direction. Slightly more than three years ago (in the issue dated November 5, 2001), he wrote something for the New Yorker (lightheartedly labeled 'FACT') called 'Watching the Warheads.' It's about Pakistan; and Hersh warns us that our hunt for Osama 'has evolved into a regional crisis that has put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at risk, exacerbated the instability of the government of General Pervez Musharraf, and raised the possibility of a nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India.' And of course, Hersh darkly notes that the smart guys in Washington (the 'government's intelligence and diplomatic experts') and the fools in town ('the decision-makers of the Bush Administration') are at odds over the matter. Indeed, it's led to 'a serious rift.'

After pointing out each parallel assertion issue then make regarding Pakistan and now makes regarding Iran, Ledeen wraps up the article thusly:

But not to worry. Most everything in the 2001 prophecy turned out wrong. Musharraf didn't fall, India-Pakistan relations have much improved, and the most obvious result of the liberation of Afghanistan is a happier country living in a remarkably freer polity. With free elections coming up in Iraq, and the Iranian people asking themselves why their neighbors are free while they are enslaved, it might well turn out that the entire vision of the Middle East was wrong. Which would make the recent purge at CIA look pretty good. It would also make the oracle of the New Yorker look pretty silly. Yet again.

Read the middle of his article, which I have not included here, for the good stuff.