Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, tells us that,

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh threw Washington, Islamabad and Tehran into consternation Monday with his report in the New Yorker on the activities of Bush’s Pentagon with regard to Iran. He said that the Pentagon had alread sent some special ops teams into Iran to look for evidence of a nuclear weapons program, with Pakistani help. Bush used the Pentagon instead of the CIA, Hersh alleged, because Bush maintains that there are no reporting requirements with regard to Congress this way. Using the CIA would have required informing the Senate Intelligence Committee, by law. Probably Pentagon intelligence gathering falls under the same statute, but that is an untested theory and for the moment Rumsfeld is acting as though the Pentagon is unconstrained.

As for Bush and his DoD hawks, they have been quite clear about their intentions. They announced that Iraq and Iran were part of an axis of evil, and we have already seen what happens to regimes so categorized.

Here is the Seymour Hersh report.

The Coming Wars
What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
by Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31

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.

Democracy Now! has an interview that you can listen to: Seymour Hersh: U.S. Conducting Covert Operations in Iran For Possible Military Strike.

For more information, the award-winning publications The Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq made an announcement today saying, “Hopefully, we won’t have to bring you… ElectronicIran.net. ElectronicIran.net contains the sections ‘Current Causes for Concern’ and ‘Background On Iran’.