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Feature: Journalist Hersh says US planning to bomb Iran

Seymour Hersh's reputation as an investigative journalist means his latest report on US policy in the Middle East will fuel worries that, despite Washington's insistence on using diplomatic means to end the nuclear crisis with Iran, confrontation is still on the cards.

US Vice President Dick Cheney underlined this at the weekend when he warned that "all options were on the table."

Hersh fleshes this out by revealing that a Pentagon special unit is planning a bombing campaign that could be implemented within 24 hours of getting a White House go-ahead.

The article in the New Yorker magazine sets the wider scene by describing how failure in Iraq has led the Bush administration to see the Islamic republic as the chief strategic beneficiary of the war. The so-called "redirection" of US policy starts from that point.

Elements of this shift have been clear for some time. The US "moderates" versus "extremists" agenda was laid out publicly by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, last month; Israel and Saudi Arabia have been driven together by shared hostility to Iran and its Lebanese Shia ally, Hezbollah, since last summer's war. Tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims are now part of everyday political discourse across the region.

Blending analysis with revelation, Hersh reports that the US is now operating secretly in both Lebanon and Iran, though he provides little detail from sources that include government consultants, former diplomats, former intelligence officials or academics. The overall picture is convincing enough, but it is hard to judge either the scale or the significance of some of what he writes.

Experts will not be surprised by the key role he attributes to the Saudi national security adviser, Prince Bandar, who is close to Cheney, or by the claim that the funding and execution of some clandestine activities is being left to the conservative kingdom. That would mirror Saudi support for the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

One fascinating revelation is that "budgetary chaos" in Iraq is creating "pots of black money" for covert purposes -- with echoes of the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s.

Another is that some cash for Fuad Siniora's beleaguered pro-western government in Beirut "to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence" has found its way to Sunni radical groups with ideological ties to al-Qaeda.

Hersh's report has accused the US, UK and Israel of fomenting separatist attacks in Arab-majority Khuzestan in the southwest of Iran.
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