Attacking Iran: what is the surprise? Old analysis still fresh news from 2005

US government has been working on this since the start of second Bush administration

The Coming Wars
by Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker, 24 January 2005
www.globalresearch.ca 18 January 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER501A.html

What the Pentagon can now do in secret

George W. Bush’s reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region.