AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, his latest piece appears in this week's issue of the New Yorker magazine. You say the Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits, quoting a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, sure. I mean, believe me, Israel thought, you know -- I guess the only other time in history where you can look back on such misguided optimism or one of the more recent times was, of course, us going into Iraq. Shades of Iraq, deja-vu or however you want to put it. Israel was convinced it would be easy. The Air Force was going to go and clean them out.

There was another element, and you mentioned that in your intro and also in your news report. One of the things that struck me right away, as soon as I saw how Israel was bombing, and my instinct told me there was something there, because in one of the Air Force plans that I knew about but didn't write about, one of the Air Force options for taking out Iran was, of course, shock and awe, a massive, massive bombing well beyond any of the nuclear facilities. Go hit the country hard for 36 hours, drive people into underground bunkers. Don't target civilians, necessarily, but hit their infrastructure, hit the roads, hit the power plants, hit the water facilities.

And so, when they come out of their bunkers after 36 hours, they look around. In the American neo-con view, they were going to say to each other, “Oh, my god, the mullahs did this to us, the religious mullahs who run the country. We're going to overthrow them and install a secular government.” That was the thinking for the last year. That is the thinking for the last year inside some elements of the Pentagon, the civilian side, and also in Cheney's shop.

So when you watch what Israel did in its opening salvo, the first targets, I remember vividly, was -- and everybody should -- they took out the civilian airstrip. They took away civilian -- the ability to use aircraft to travel. They took out highways. They took out roads. They took out petrol stations. They basically isolated Southern Lebanon. But I think part of the reason they did so much damage to the infrastructure was they believed -- and I think the Israelis have been very clear about it -- that the Christian population and the Sunni population -- don't forget Hezbollah is Shia -- would rise up against Hezbollah, and it would be a great feather in the cap, etc., etc., etc.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His latest piece is called "Watching Lebanon: Washington’s Interests in Israel’s War."

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with Seymour Hersh. His piece in the latest New Yorker is called "Watching Lebanon: Washington's Interests in Israel's War." So, can you take us through the timeline, as you understand it, that started before the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, the meetings that were taking place?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I don't know an awful lot about it, because, obviously, this is secrecy cubed here in this town, Washington, this White House. I don't even know how much Bush was involved in the direct planning. Certainly he’s carrying out the policy. The best guess I have is that this spring there was a tremendous fight in the Pentagon over a nuclear option for Iran, with the generals standing up, standing up quite a bit against this White House. And I think it's a sign, I guess, of the perceived weakness, political weakness, of the Bush administration at this point. And nuclear option was taken off the table for Iran.

Iran's underground. The nuclear facilities, the alleged nuclear facilities, I’ve also written, we can't find any evidence of a significant weapons program. But in any case, they're certainly doing research in Iran, and they may indeed have intentions, but they're deep underground, buried under a lot of rock, 75 feet, etc. etc. We've all heard that. And at that point in the spring, when the nuclear option was gone and there was a lot of concern about how do you drive down 75 feet and guarantee knocking out a potential weapons system, it was then that our Air Force began to talk with the Israeli Air Force, because the Israelis have been shipped -- we have sent them an awful lot of large 5,000-pound bunker busters. And they’ve done a lot of research into the idea of using two or three bombs on top of each other, etc.

And so, spring is when I began -- I think you can really trace the American military involvement with the Israeli military. And the way it was described to me, eventually this talk, the planning between the two of them, the sharing of intelligence, which is sort of normal -- we and Israel are very close, a lot of stuff is shared with their military and their intelligence service -- eventually it bubbled up, is the way it came to me, into the Pentagon, into the top leadership, Donald Rumsfeld, and eventually got to Cheney, whose idea was, “Let's push this. This is a great idea.”

I’m not suggesting that Washington forced Israel to go more quickly than it wanted to, but I don't think there's any question that the Israeli Defense Force, the Air Force, was surprised by how quickly Nasrallah, Hezbollah moved into the business of capturing. As I said, the first Israeli soldier was captured in Gaza on June 28. There was traffic about going, heating up the north. But for Nasrallah to move on 12th of July was very quick. But it was agreed that the next step he made, whenever, and I think the best guess people had is it could have been as late as fall, September or October, that they would go. They went quickly. And people I talked with in Israel -- I spent a lot of time in this story talking to people in Israel -- one of the things that everybody remarked on was the quickness with which the Air Force moved, not that they didn't have plans in effect, but it was very quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about Elliott Abrams, and you talk about Donald Rumsfeld's role.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, what's interesting about Rumsfeld, because for the first time -- and not everybody agreed, but people that -- you know, I’m long of tooth, Amy, and I’ve been around this town a long time, and obviously, since 9/11, a lot of people talk to me. And for the first time, Rummy doesn't seem to be on board, is what I’m hearing. Actually, somebody even suggested he's getting a little bit like Robert McNamara. If you remember, McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who, under both Kennedy and Johnson, was a great advocate of the Vietnam War and its chief salesman, basically, one of its chief salesmen all during the ’60s, and by ’67, he decided it wasn't winnable and ended up being shoved out and put in the World Bank.

Rumsfeld is very concerned about the 150,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq, who are potentially in a very untenable position. There's no question Iraq’s lost. There's a lot of question about what we're doing in Afghanistan. We're sort of 0-for-2 in those two. And so, Rumsfeld was not happy about this policy, about going in in a protracted war in Southern Lebanon with Nasrallah, because, of course -- I think Nasrallah is his own man. None of us really know. I think he decides what he wants to do. I don't think Syria and Iran control him the way Washington, this White House seems to believe everything comes from Iran. You know, anybody who meets Nasrallah, as I have a couple of times, he's rather formidable. In any case --