SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it didn't really. At the time, it did. But there he is again, the President of Syria, Mr. Asad, tried again and certainly in ’05, the letter he sent me, I saw, had just been written. He was still trying to make contact with Washington, because, obviously, in his view, he had a lot to offer us about resolving the crisis in Iraq. And it's a crisis for Syria, too, in Iraq, because there's now 400,000 or 500,000 Iraqi refugees living in Damascus and elsewhere, a couple hundred thousand now of Lebanese. And so real estate property has gone out of sight there.

The irony is that as much as we can't stand Syria, for the first time in their life, the Syrians are getting an awful lot of foreign investment, because, you know, with the oil at $75 a barrel, all of the Gulf countries, which are -- they're just washed with money. They don't know what to do with the money they're making every day. And they don't want to invest anymore in America, because some of them have contributed money to charities that have been put on a watch list by the United States. So there's a fear in some of the Gulf countries that if they invest the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve collected in Washington or real estate here, they might have the property seized for being aiders and abetters of terrorism, so they're dumping money into Syria right now. They were dumping a lot of money into Lebanon, too, but not any more.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry writes at “Consortium News,” that it was U.S. neo-cons who pushed Israel even further than Israel wanted to go around this issue of the attack of Hezbollah. Do you agree with that?

SEYMOUR HERSH: The Israelis I talked to said, “Look, you know, there might have been a question being pushed on timing, but Israel certainly wanted to go.” I just don’t -- Bob Parry was right in so many things back in Iran-Contra. I just don't have the same information he does on that. But that there was certainly a decision that -- I quote somebody as saying, we told them basically, “You know, guys” -- in this article I quote somebody as saying in effect -- the Americans telling the Israelis, “Sooner than later, we want this to happen before this president is out of office,” -- that is, taking out Hezbollah so you can take out Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Just a few months ago, you wrote the piece, "The Iran Plans: How Far Will the White House Go?" talking about the U.S. plans to bomb Iran. Where do you think the current situation now leaves the United States and the Middle East?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you can't apply rationality to it, because I think it's simply something Bush and Cheney want to do. As I said earlier, they want to take out Iran. They don't want to talk to it. They believe it’s, you know, the axis of evil cubed. And so, frankly, my real worry is what's going to happen -- I think nothing's going to happen before this election. That's impossible. My real worry is what's going to happen when George Bush is a lame duck. He's talking about, privately now, so I’m told and so I’ve written, about Winston Churchill. If you remember, after leading England to war in World War II, he was turned out by the voters, and he wasn't fully appreciated until years later. So I think he sees himself in the position of “I know I’m right. They don't quite believe me. But I’m going to do the thing I think is right, the right thing. And maybe in 30 or 50 years, they'll come to accept me for the great president I think I am.” And so, that's what we really have as leadership right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does Condoleezza Rice fit into this picture?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you know, my guess is that she was smart enough to know this going -- this last trip she made to the Middle East, I've written that she didn't want to go, because she knew she had nothing to offer anybody. And I think there was a story the other week in the New York Times that was, clearly she inspired to her people about how Cheney is plotting against her, and Elliott Abrams, when he was on the trip with her, he was constantly calling up the White House behind her back and filling them in.

You mention Abrams. Abrams is sort of the key intellectual player, I think, of this policy that Cheney's involved in. He's not in Cheney's office. He works directly for the President as a Special Assistant in the National Security Council office, but there's no question, his influence is enormous on this.

AMY GOODMAN: And Seymour Hersh, for young people who don't remember Iran-Contra, can you just fill people in on who Elliott Abrams is, his history?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Elliott Abrams was one of the key players in this incredibly wacky scheme we had in the Iran-Iraq war of two decades ago. Between 1980 and 1988, Iran and Iraq fought each other, and we supported Iraq. We supported Saddam Hussein, the United States did, with a lot of secret arms, secret intelligence, even shipping him secret formulas that could be used to make biological weapons and chemical stuff and intelligence, etc, etc. And that was because of course, Khomeini -- we had been kicked out of Iran, when our Shah, the Shah was overthrown.

We were terrified of the Shiite leadership there. And so, one of the plans, one of the schemes was, in the middle of all of this hostility, Ronald Reagan was so committed to the Contra War in Latin America, that is, defeating what he thought was a communist-led insurgency in Nicaragua in an election there, that he cut a deal to ship arms -- let's see. It's complicated. They sold arms to Israel, which they were shipped, I think, into Iran. You help me out on this.

Anyway, the bottom line was that it was a policy that brought us into contact with Iran, secret trading. We were going to get weapons that were going to -- the Israelis were going to buy weapons. Money was -- they were going to sell weapons to Iran. Money was going to be generated from that sale to support covertly, outside of Congress's knowledge, to support aid for the opposition in Nicaragua that we favored --

AMY GOODMAN: For the Contras.

SEYMOUR HERSH: The Contras, yes, and so there we are. It was totally a crazy policy. When it unraveled, it should have probably led to, in a normal process, an impeachment proceeding for Ronald Reagan, but by that time, he was -- everybody understood he was -- he wasn't well with Alzheimer's or whatever.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that some of the weapons Hezbollah is using today could have come from that sale from the United States?

SEYMOUR HERSH: No. I think what's happened is, if you really want to know, I think the best guess is, and again, this is -- I quoted somebody to this effect, Vali Nasr, who is a professor at one of the Navy post-graduate schools, very competent guy. What really probably happened is this: once we made our move, the Bush administration and the French, to drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, that famous 1559 you always hear about -- we always hear about 1559. We never hear much about UN Resolution 242, which called for Israel to go back to its original borders. Anyway, 1559 called for Syria to get out of Lebanon and Lebanon to take control, a civilian government come in and also take -- disarm Hezbollah. That was what it called for. Well, of course, it's impossible in Syria, because the Lebanese army is probably 50% Shia and very close to Hezbollah. It was -- that's an impossibility. And so -- wait, I've lost my track of thought. What was I saying?

AMY GOODMAN: You were just saying that after --

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, yes, I remember. I'm sorry, Amy. So what happened is, once it was clear that the White House and French were getting our way with the UN, and Syria was going to get out, which only could only be interpreted by Iran and by Syria and by Hezbollah, as the pressure was going to be on them to be disarmed -- at that point, Iran really began to step up its support for Hezbollah, not so much in terms -- yes, there's always been close support of aid and arms, but they sent a lot of technicians into Hezbollah to help them dig and help them to improve their ability to mask what they were doing, hide their weapons, their launchers for their rockets, go deeper underground, build command and control bunkers, build a lot of facilities that fooled the Israeli's intelligence.

The Israelis -- some commando units did go into the war early on and hunter-killer teams, and they were completely bamboozled and hurt hard, because everything they thought would be in place was not. The intelligence stunk, and I think Iran, in the last 18 months, probably played a role in improving Hezbollah's intelligence or its capability to withstand a bombing attack.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for joining us. His latest piece, "Watching Lebanon: Washington's Interests in Israel's War" is in this week's issue of the New Yorker magazine.

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