Seymour Hersh was interviewed by a Canadian journalist producing a fair number of disagreements and cuss words. From a less odd part of the interview:
M: Now the debate over the war has come down to how best to pull out of Iraq. What do you think the way out of Iraq is?
SH: There are two options. One is everybody out by midnight tonight, and the second option is everybody out by midnight tomorrow. I don’t think it’s cutting and running, I think it’s getting out. Two years ago, I was pretty sure that the 200-octane fuel that was driving the “insurgency” was us, and the faster we get out, the better. The country was not terribly sectarian before we got on the premises. The Sunnis and the Shi’ites intermarried, many tribes are 50-50. We’ve fostered a great deal of sectarian work. Even the awful, evil Saddam, by the mid-1990s, began to put all kind of Shia into the senior officer corps, in an effort to make it less dominated by the Sunnis. I’m no longer sure who the insurgency is. It’s all so screwed up. If I lived in a country and a bunch of people came in and started raiding my house, and capturing people and killing willy-nilly, I think I would take up arms against those people. Am I an insurgent then? Are the insurgents insurgents or are the Americans insurgents? I think the whole nomenclature is bizarre. We’re the insurgents. It’s their country. It’s a disaster. It’s been a civil war for a year.
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