Hersh said that journalists are doing a better job now than they did in the run-up to the war against Iraq, however he criticized his "old paper" saying it stinks.
"When you have a guy like Bush who's going to move the infamous Doomsday Clock forward, and he's going to put everybody in jeopardy and he's secretive and he doesn't tell Congress anything and he's inured to what we write. In such a case, we journalists become more important. The First Amendment failed and the American press failed the Constitution. I'm asked the question all the time: What happened to my old paper, the New York Times? And I now say they stink. They missed it. They missed the biggest story of the time and they're going to have to live with it."

On the options in Iraq, Hersh said he believes there are two very clear options.
"Option A: Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B: Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us. The Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites."

The "Surge" refers to Bush's commitment of 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the spring of 2007 in an attempt to improve security in the country.

"The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not," Hersh said. The investigative journalist criticized what he termed as the lack of a learning curve in Washington. "No learning curve at all. We'll be ready to fight another stupid war in another two decades."

He first made a name for himself in 1969 by uncovering the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Hersh has worked for the New Yorker since 1992 and in 2004 was instrumental in uncovering the US military's abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Hersh was in Berlin this week to accept the Democracy Prize handed out by the political journal "Bl?tter f?r Deutsche und Internationale Politik."

Hersh said in the interview that the real thing in the mind of US President George W. Bush is that he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model.
"He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work," Hersh told the Der Spiegel.