More Bullshit Spread on Iran

Well, here we go again. I guess the first time around, when the Bush Administration claimed that Iran was constructing EFPs for Iraq (even though most of the EFPs have come from Sunni insurgents, not the Shia with whom Iran is in close concert), fell appart upon scrutiny. So it was time to make a new claim, now that the Iranian government has been arming the Taliban. It sounded ridiculous, the two are mortal enemies; Iran even helped the US rescue downed pilots during the Afghanistan invasion in late 2001. And now the bullshit peddling has been confirmed (h/t The Left Coaster).

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Afghanistan's defense minister on Thursday dismissed claims by a top U.S. State Department official that there was "irrefutable evidence" that the Iranian government was providing arms to Taliban rebels.

"Actually, throughout, we have had good relations with Iran and we believe that the security and stability of Afghanistan are also in the interests of Iran," Abdul Rahim Wardak told The Associated Press.

On Wednesday, U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said in Paris that Tehran was directly supplying weapons to the Taliban. He told CNN there was "irrefutable evidence" that arms shipments were coming from Iran's government.

The State Department later appeared to step back from Burns' assertion, but stressed that the United States has proof that weapons from Iran were reaching Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

This is how it's always gone, a bold assertion followed by hedging and denials. Common sense dictates that there was no way the Iranians would undermine their own interests and try to put an enemy back in power. We know who's arming the Taliban: Pakistan. This obvious fact is rarely uttered by State Department flacks like Nick Burns or warmongers like Joe Lieberman, who's using fake stories like this to push for attacks on Tehran. Wes Clark smacked him down on this one.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Lieberman said, "If [the Iranians] don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing." [...]

Senator Lieberman's saber rattling does nothing to help dissuade Iran from aiding Shia militias in Iraq, or trying to obtain nuclear capabilities. In fact, it's highly irresponsible and counter-productive, and I urge him to stop.

This kind of rhetoric is irresponsible and only plays into the hands of President Ahmadinejad, and those who seek an excuse for military action. What we need now is full-fledged engagement with Iran. We should be striving to bridge the gulf of almost 30 years of hostility and only when all else fails should there be any consideration of other options. The Iranians are very much aware of US military capabilities. They don't need Joe Lieberman to remind them that we are the militarily dominant power in the world today.

Only someone who never wore the uniform or thought seriously about national security would make threats at this point. What our soldiers need is responsible strategy, not a further escalation of tensions in the region. Senator Lieberman must act more responsibly and tone down his threat machine.

The conventional wisdom among those predisposed to view any global situation in a military context, the so-called "liberal hawks," is that we have to "do something" about Iran. It's never suggested WHAT; you know, what facilities should we specifically target, what ground troops should we deploy, etc. This is what Ezra Klein explores in a story for The American Prospect.

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on." [...]

The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position [...]

Baer's dodge is not rare. A while back, The New Republic demanded that "the West finally get ruthlessly serious about Iran." Unless "ruthlessly serious" describes some subset of containment theory that I'm unfamiliar with, this seems like mercilessly frivolous advice. But such is the sorry state of discourse on Iran: lots of hyperventilating, but relatively little in the way of actual diagnosis or prescription.

This, of course, plays into the hands of those who will articulate a strategy involving bombs and guns and indiscriminate murder against the citizens of a country that does not represent a threat. If anybody who actually stakes out a position against war with Iran is seen as irresponsible, it stands to reason that those on the opposite side are then completely responsible, despite the fact that they have no idea what they're talking about. There's a lot of deliberate lying designed to push us into yet another tragic mistake of a war. The useful idiots in places like the Brookings Institution that greased the wheels for the last mistake seem to make a fetish of "sounding tough" and disassociating themselves from the dirty fucking hippies than acting in the best foreign policy interests of the country. Here's hoping they wake up and understand that their enabling of a renegade President will be yet another disaster.