Bush's Plans for Iran

[Editor's Note: This is the edited transcript of an interview between Amy Goodman and Seymour Hersh. It originally aired on Democracy Now! on Wednesday, April 12. The full transcript and audio of the interview are available from Democracy Now!.]

Amy Goodman: We are joined today by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Hersh reports that the Bush administration has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Sources told Hersh that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

One of the military's initial option plans calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon against suspected underground nuclear sites.

On Monday, President Bush dismissed Hersh's article.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: What you're reading is wild speculation, which is -- it's kind of a, you know, happens quite frequently here in the nation's capital.

AG: Meanwhile, reporters questioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday about Hersh's report.

REPORTER: In recent weeks or months, have you asked joint staff at Central Command, possibly through General Pace, to update, refine, modify the contingencies for possible military options against Iran?

DONALD RUMSFELD: We have, I don't know how many, various contingency plans in this department, and the last thing I'm going to do is to start telling you or anyone else in the press or the world at what point we refresh a plan or don't refresh a plan and why. It just isn't useful.

REPORTER: Are you satisfied with the state of planning for Iran options right now?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I am never satisfied.

AG: That was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday. Meanwhile, Iran's moving forward on its nuclear program. On Tuesday, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the country had succeeded for the first time in enriching uranium on a small scale. The Iranian president insists the country's nuclear program is for peaceful means and not to build nuclear weapons. We're joined right now in Washington by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Welcome to Democracy Now!

Seymour Hersh: Good morning.

AG: It's good to have you with us. Well, talk about what you have found and written about in your piece, "The Iran Plans."

SH: Well, very simply, as you said in the introduction. This is not wild speculation. It's simply a fact that the planning has gone beyond the contingency stage, and it's gone into what they call the operational stage, sort of an increment higher. And it's very serious planning, of course. And it's all being directed at the wish of the President of the United States. And I can understand why they don't want to talk about it, but that's just the reality.

AG: You say that it's a pretty widespread -- or that there's a growing conviction among members of the U.S. military and the international community that President Bush's ultimate goal is regime change in Iran.

SH: There's no question that there's a lot of skepticism, particularly among our former allies -- the allies we now have, the European allies who have been with us. The United States joined late after the negotiations began, but England, France and Germany have been talking to the Iranians for years, three years now, about doing something about -- to keep them away from the nuclear edge. Our allies there are frankly skeptical about what this president really wants to do. They don't think necessarily, although there's -- it's not that the President isn't concerned about any enrichment. He's set that as a red line. He's publicly said many times that when Iran begins to enrich, that's a line we won't let them do. It's that they really think that beyond -- the whole issue is really predicated on a belief that we've got to get rid of these ruling clerics and replace it with Bush's idea, that he thinks he's still pushing very hard, which is of a democratic Middle East.