AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, when did you meet him?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, I’ve met him a lot. I mean, I’ve interviewed him. I’ve interviewed him in the New Yorker. And I just spent time with him over this winter.

AMY GOODMAN: In Lebanon?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, sure.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you describe your sense of him?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I think he believes in -- he's religious, in the sense that -- I’ve met religious leaders, Archbishop O'Connell here in New York. One of these people who you really, you know -- for an agnostic like me, you come away from a meeting with those people believing that there is something to this business of religion, because these people are so devout. He is very much a believer, Nasrallah, in his own religion, and he doesn't have dead eyes. He's got alive eyes, and he's got humor.

The reason I started seeing him, I see intelligence people around the world and some of the intelligence people in the Middle East, when the Iraqi war began to start, they encouraged me to see him, on grounds that this guy has a better feel for what's going on in Iraq, as a Shia -- he's very close to the Shia leadership, to Sistani, also to the Iranians, who have a lot of juice inside Iran. So just as a reporter, I would go see him, and we’d talk about mostly Iraq in the beginning, and obviously.

In any case, the whole point here is, Rumsfeld -- to get back to Rumsfeld, there's no question that Iran has enormous influence inside Iraq, dominated now by the Shia, Shia Iran, and I think Rumsfeld’s concern, I was told, is that a protracted war against Nasrallah will only cause the Iranians, in support of Hezbollah, to start squeezing our troops in Iraq.

And we're -- you know, as I say, it's an untenable position in Iraq. And nobody quite knows -- this government has no idea on how to get out, just like I don't think the Israelis -- you know, the same pattern you saw in Israel as you saw with this Bush White House going into Iraq: they were so sure of victory that they never looked at the downside. Actually, I quote somebody in this article in the New Yorker, a really high-level guy in one of the military services, saying, “You can't get this White House to think about the downside of anything.” And you saw that with the Israelis. They had no idea, once they got into the quagmire, of how to extract, except to add more forces and increase the death toll to themselves, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, you've also written about the U.S. rejecting overtures from Syria in dealing with the war on terror. Can you talk about that, as, of course, you can't talk about Lebanon or Iraq with this administration without talking about Syria and Iran?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, look, this is an administration that still refuses to deal with people it doesn't like. You know, I don't know. When my children were in pre-nursery, you know, little boys will get into a fight, and the nursery school teacher would take the two little boys who were fighting and say, “You two shake hands and go back to the sandbox,” and they would. And so we have a president that won't talk to the Iranians, although they’ve wanted to, and there’s been a lot of stories written about that. And they won't talk to the Syrians.

And I’ve obviously -- maybe not so obviously, but I’ve interviewed the President of Syria, Bashar al-Asad, a couple of times. And one of the last times, with great pain he told me -- I think he showed me, even showed me, he was -- this was in 2005. He's written letters to George Bush, saying, “Let's get together. Let's talk. We have a lot in common. We can help you. We and Iran basically both have more -- we can do more for you in Iraq than any other country. Why aren't you using us? We don't need a Somalia on our borders. We're not interested in chaos there.” And this White House doesn't believe it. And the letters weren't answered, he told me. His ambassador here in Washington, Imad Mustafa, is absolutely isolated. All this talk that the White House has made, Condoleezza Rice, about having openings to Iran, to Syria, are just, you know -- they're not worth much. There's been some low-level talk. Nobody has made any efforts.

Syria has, as I’ve written in the New Yorker years ago, was one of the biggest helpers we had after al-Qaeda struck us, because Syria is -- the old man Asad, the father of the current president, hated Jihadism. He did not like the Muslim Brotherhood. They were his opponents. And he kept the best books going on the Muslim Brotherhood, which is very closely connected to al-Qaeda. In fact, we learned more about al-Qaeda from Syria after 9/11 than from any other country. Asad, the president, gave us thousands access -- agreed to give us access to thousands of files. And I wrote a story, I think in ’02 or ’03 for the New Yorker, in which I quoted a senior intelligence official of Syria saying, “We're willing to even talk about our support for Hezbollah with you. We want to see you win the war on terror.”

So it's been an amazingly horrific performance by this White House, which is of par. You know, I don't think any of us -- I certainly won't breathe easy until we get to 2009, inauguration of a new president. But there's just no question that if we were to approach Syria right now, something else I didn't write at the time -- that's because I wasn't writing about it -- I don't think there's any question that Israel was interested in talking to Syria in ’03, even about the Golan Heights, which is a tough issue for them, and --

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Sy --

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me finish this. And we discouraged Israel from doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't know. I guess we didn't want our friends to talk to our enemies.

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote in 2003 about the U.S. bombing of a convoy inside Syria that once and for all smashed the attempts of Syria to communicate with Washington.