Sy Hersh: Biden Doesn’t Understand Netanyahu’s Depravity
Aug. 7—The core issue underlying the crisis in the Middle East, Seymour Hersh wrote in a new column Aug. 5 “has been [President Joe] Biden’s inability to understand the recklessness and depravity of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hatred of Palestinians has now brought the Middle East and America to the brink of a war that is neither desired nor necessary.” The fault is not only Biden’s, Hersh points out, but also the majority of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress who “routinely vote to send billions of dollars to support a corrupt and failing government in Ukraine and similarly approve the bombs and tank shells supplied to Israel for use in Gaza. Hamas … is far from defeated and it is now clear that Netanyahu has been the one resisting a ceasefire there….”
Hersh reports that senior U.S. officials had cautioned Netanyahu against a massive attack in response to Oct. 7 and even proposed alternative courses of action. However: “The enraged Israeli leadership instead chose collective punishment, a decision that has led to tens of thousands of deaths—the numbers are impossible to measure amid the societal collapse—and growing worldwide condemnation of Israel. In America that has meant a political backlash among college students and the young against the Democratic Party, whose candidates are at peril in the November elections.”
Hersh goes on: “The Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran … was a clear message that there will be no ceasefire in Gaza, as long as Netanyahu is in power. It also could turn out to be what no one, except perhaps Netanyahu and his political colleagues in Israel, wants: a very deadly international game changer.”
As for retaliation for the assassinations of Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr, Hersh reports that a close associate of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah told him that “an attack could take place at any time.” Nasrallah’s missiles can reach “possible American and Israeli targets” throughout the Mideast. “All of the major military American ports and Navy bases in the Mediterranean are within range. He has the weapons and people trained to handle the weapons.” He further claimed that Russia was currently resupplying Iran with thousands of advanced anti-aircraft missiles “along with the experts to handle them.”
“Nobody but a madman,” he said of Netanyahu, “would have done what he did in these last days,” referring to the assassinations near Beirut and in Tehran. “He killed the negotiator to ceasefire talks while he was an official visitor to the swearing in of a new President in Tehran. He discredited all of the negotiators.”
Hersh, however, refuses to recognize the reality of the situation in Washington. It hardly matters what "Sleepy Joe" Biden thinks, or if he is even capable of understanding the complexity of situations. He has been stripped of all but ceremonial power and does not even run his own government. While there are some sane elements in what is called in name only, the "Biden Administration," such as the able diplomat , CIA Director Willaim Burns, they are pushing pebbles up the mountain, against the lunatic Global NATO factions in State, the National Security apparatus, and Defense. It is not that Biden underestimated Bibi and his messianic madness; there was really no force in Washington willing to oppose him, by threatening to cut off all weapons and other support for Israel, which would have cut his balls off in Jerusalem. Instead, he was covertly given the green light for what he did. The madness extends far beyond the White House.
Hersch should have realized this by how official Washington has refused to seriously investigate what he reported, in great detail, on how the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipeline two years ago, on behalf of Global NATO.