After the long dirge from the 9/11 commission about America’s failure to act on early warnings about the threat from Islamic terror, the news out of the war front suddenly contains an encouraging dispatch. It was brought in this week by the New Yorker magazine, whose Seymour Hersh reports that President Bush has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces to “conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.” Mr. Hersh reports that the administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer, with, he reports, the focus being “on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected.”

There’s a tone to Mr. Hersh’s report suggesting that he and some of his sources might not be entirely happy about this discovery and the secrecy surrounding it. The Pentagon rushed out a blunt statement denouncing Mr. Hersh’s report, questioning its accuracy and even Mr. Hersh’s motives. But we’re happy to leave all that aside. Going back to before the Battle of Iraq, the New Yorker has published some of the most important and admirable war reporting out of the Middle East. Our interest here is the Bush administration’s policy. We’re confident that as the disclosures in Mr. Hersh’s dispatch are sorted out, American voters will feel reassured that Mr. Bush and his war Cabinet are not going to repeat the mistakes of an earlier time.

Here we speak not only of the years when, as cataloged by the Kean commission, the government failed to act on all sorts of warnings and chatter in respect of the problem of Islamist terror and the impending attacks of September 11. We also speak of 1981, when Israel came down out of the skies over Baghdad and dropped into Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor sophisticated bombs that devastated his capacity to build an atomic weapon. All too many rushed to condemn the attack. For those of us of a certain age, the episode was one of the formative moments, and there are many who will never forget the chagrin of picking up the New York Times to read its denunciation of Israel – and will always savor Menachem Begin’s famous retort, “never again.”

It is good to read that we have a president who understands that episode and is taking steps against the contingency that diplomatic efforts with Iran will not be successful. To many of us, the New Yorker article will be encouraging in this respect. Mr. Hersh reports that despite the “deteriorating security situation” in Iraq, the Bush administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy of establishing democracy throughout the Middle East. He suggests that the administration is reaffirming the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign,” he quotes a former high-level intelligence official as telling him. “The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone.”

Mr. Hersh quotes the former official as predicting that there is going to be an Iranian campaign, with the goal of being able to say, in four years, that the war on terrorism has been won. It seems the president has taken to heart the criticism he received from Senator Kerry’s camp for saying, during the campaign, that the war couldn’t be won. It reminds us of all the talk during the Cold War about peaceful co-existence. The very concept was a recipe for slavery in one half of the world and fear and cowardice in the other. It will not be possible to have peace in the Middle East, let alone democracy, with the mullahs in power in Iran and in possession of nuclear weapons – or even working toward them. And efforts at a diplomatic solution will be barren absent the availability of the kind of military solution for which the Bush administration is now reportedly preparing.