Played?
Via The Corner at NRO comes Roger L. Simon's suggestion that the Bush Administration may be using Seymour Hersh to scare the mullahs with tales of targeting Iran.

When I heard about his latest infusion of goo in The New Yorker this morning, to wit that the US is spying on Iranian nuclear installations and trying to figure out what to do about them (planning special ops, air raids, etc.), I thought "Here he goes again, leaking top secret information!" But then I thought - duh, what top secret information? Is it possible that any US administration, Democrat or Republican, at this juncture in history would not be directing its intelligence agencies to take a long hard look at Iranian nukes and game plan how to deal with them?

Of course, if Iran were to lash out against us or the Israelis or anybody else, the evil Bu$hitler War Machine, Inc. would be branded a bunch of incompetent and unprepared idiots who hadn't planned on such an obvious contingency. And don't tell the kids putting flowers in their hair and in the rifle barrels around them that we have plans in place to go to war with Sweden, if need be. We've only been thinking that way for the past 60 years, you know.

So then why The Big Leak? Well, if I were someone in the government who wanted to announce that we were taking a tough line and had some nasty surprises for the mullahs (to scare them, of course), but didn't want to make this an official public policy statement, what would I do? I'd leak it to Seymour Hersh and count to five.

It sounds like a plan to me. What did Lenin say about useful idiots?