Israel's land-based aircraft carrier on the border with Iran?

Seymour Hersh has another mind-boggling article in the New Yorker this week which, if true (and so far, Hersh has a pretty good batting average), is another blockbuster as well.

In early November, the President received a grim assessment from the C.I.A.'s station chief in Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security situation in Iraq was nearing collapse. The document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that "none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country" or to hold elections and draft a constitution.

A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the violence and the new intelligence, finally attempted to change its go-it-alone policy, and set June 30th as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an interim government, which would allow it to bring the United Nations into the process. "November was one year before the Presidential election," a U.N. consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. "They panicked and decided to share the blame with the U.N. and the Iraqis."

A former Administration official who had supported the war completed a discouraging tour of Iraq late last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and found that the Israelis he met with were equally discouraged. As they saw it, their warnings and advice had been ignored, and the American war against the insurgency was continuing to founder. "I spent hours talking to the senior members of the Israeli political and intelligence community," the former official recalled. "Their concern was 'You're not going to get it right in Iraq, and shouldn't we be planning for the worst-case scenario and how to deal with it?'"

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq; according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel "had learned that there's no way to win an occupation." The only issue, Barak told Cheney, "was choosing the size of your humiliation." Cheney did not respond to Barak's assessment. (Cheney's office declined to comment.)

The story, "Plan B," or the Kurdish Gambit, lays out a convincing tale of growing Isreali unease at the chaos unleashed in Iraq and growing frustration with the Bush administration's conduct of the occupation in Iraq.

So the Isrealis decided to take out an insurance policy, one they'd used when Saddam Hussein was still in power, and one which, figuring the Americans were about to cut and run after the hand-over on June 30th, they decided to renew: The Kurds.

According to Hersh, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, is training the Kurdish Peshmerga in commando tactics, while also using Kurdistan to keep an eye on Iran and Syria, even running covert operations in those countries. Not only is this raising tension with Iran and Syria, but Israel's tacit support for an independent Kurdistan, has Turkey loudly complaining. Israel figures that Iran is providing support for the insurgency in Iraq and building a nuclear threat in Iran, and believes that both Iran and Syria are increasing their support for Palestinian terrorists.

The Kurds are sorely tempted to declare independence as they watch the Bush administration hand back more and more power to the Sunnis while containing to placate the Shi'ites -- leaving the Kurds hanging out to dry. But if they do, the entire region could explode -- it is not known what Turkey and Iran will do in response.

With their Wilsonian naive idealism and the Rambonian bluster, the Bush administration is doing a great job at creating another open sore in the middle east.

And if it is true that Israel is operating neatly in Iraq, then the conspiracy-minded in Iraq and the rest of the world will believe they've found their worst fears -- that this was all about oil and Isreal -- proven correct.

But wait, there's more.

Hersh has more intelligence on the man the Bush administration has been so eager to hand over the keys to, Iyad Allawi. It seems we may be replacing a murderous thug with one of the thugs who helped that other thug come to power.

The White House has yet to deal with Allawi's past. His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies -- Saddam became President in 1979 -- is much less well known. "Allawi helped Saddam get to power," an American intelligence officer told me. "He was a very effective operator and a true believer." Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, "Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he's a thug."

Early this year, one of Allawi's former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a "big husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students." Allawi's medical degree, she wrote, "was conferred upon him by the Baath party." Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.

"If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does," Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. "He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi's office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.

This is the man for whom the White House, not content with forcing him on the Iraqi people over the objections of the UN's Brahimi, is forcing on the American people as well, even going so far as to act as his booking agent.

How this administration manages to be both cynical and naive is beyond my powers of comprehension.