"Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military intelligence and congressional sources. In his recent article "Preparing the Battlefield," Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist and famed author for The New Yorker, says that the leadership of the Democratic Party has authorized spending over $400 million in support of a presidential finding that greatly expands the use of secret operations inside Iran, including perhaps the use of lethal force. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program. "This president has read it this way: anything that has to do with the military, even if it's intelligence collection by the military, is part of warfare, preparing the battlefield," Hersh tells The Real News Network. "And they don't have to tell Congress anything." In this three-part interview with Paul Jay, Hersh says that a Gallup poll suggests that most Americans would rather the nation talk to Iran rather than go to war, in light of the current conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The problem lies in getting more public support. "So one of the things the special operations troops are doing is trying to escalate the amount of incidents inside Iran, trying to get more stuff going, more terrorism, more bombings, more internal disturbances, and hopes, maybe, in the fantasy football world in the vice president's office, in hopes that the Iranian government would crack down on the minorities big time" which would not only mean bad press for them, but give America a vehicle for going in."
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