Lying Us Into War Has Its Privileges

Just to put a coda on today's heartfelt welcoming back of Joe Lieberman to the Democratic caucus (I swear, all this bipartisanship and comity brings a tear to my eye), let's go over one loose end that Mr. Connecticut for Lieberman hyped endlessly throughout the election season. It was considered absolute by him that Iran was supplying weapons to Iraqi militia that were using them to murder American soldiers. This was the basis for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, which threatened to "combat, contain and stop" Iran if they continued these efforts against coalition forces. In fact, Kyl-Lieberman contained as evidence this language:

(2) Ambassador Ryan Crocker, United States Ambassador to Iraq, stated in testimony before a joint session of the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives on September 10, 2007, that "Iran plays a harmful role in Iraq. While claiming to support Iraq in its transition, Iran has actively undermined it by providing lethal capabilities to the enemies of the Iraqi state."

(3) The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, published in August 2007, states that "Iran has been intensifying aspects of its lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants, particularly the JAM [Jaysh al-Mahdi], since at least the beginning of 2006. Explosively formed penetrator (EFP) attacks have risen dramatically."

(4) The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, released on September 6, 2007, states that "[t]he Commission concludes that the evidence of Iran's increasing activism in the southeastern part of the country, including Basra and Diyala provinces, is compelling... It is an accepted fact that most of the sophisticated weapons being used to 'defeat' out armor protection comes across the border from Iran with relative impunity."

Set aside for a moment the fact that the current government in Baghdad is actively supported by Iran, and that Tehran was "in the room" during the recent negotiations on the status of forces agreement. Let's focus on the fact that Lieberman was promoting this idea that Iran was supplying lethal weapons to Iraqi militias to kill American troops, an act of provocation that he was willing to go to war over to stop.

(CBS) The United States should launch military strikes against Iran if the government in Tehran does not stop supplying anti-American forces in Iraq, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday on Face The Nation.

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Lieberman told Bob Schieffer. "And to me, that would include a strike into... over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

Funny story about those Iranian weapons - they were a complete fabrication, representing an infinitesimal fraction of the weapons used in Iraq.

According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi'a areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

The task force database identified 98 caches over the five-month period with at least one Iranian weapon, excluding caches believed to have been hidden prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

But according to an e-mail from the MNFI press desk this week, the task force found and analysed a total of roughly 4,600 weapons caches during that same period.

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi'a militia caches during that period.

The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi'a militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi'a militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.

These were pretty obvious lies, considering that the military could never manage to give a coherent briefing about the origin of those Iranian weapons. But there was one man in the US Congress willing to believe these lies and pass a resolution seeking to escalate tensions with Iran over them - Joe Lieberman. This false narrative of Iraqi arms running pushed us to the brink of yet another war based on erroneous information.

For this, George Bush was used as the foil throughout Barack Obama's Presidential campaign and one of the key reasons he will be 44th President. For this, Joe Lieberman got his Homeland Security Committee gavel and a hug.

And this is the kind of fearmongering, overhyping and agenda-driven bluster you can expect coming out of the Homeland Security Committee, in the name of "protecting Americans," over the next 2-4 years.

Can't say you weren't warned.

The Myth of Progress Gets Even Mythier

So I read the news reports of Iraq passing a change to its de-Baathification law with interest. It appeared to come out of nowhere. The Iraqi Parliament was off for a month in December, was no closer to this law before then, but all of a sudden, just when the President is tooling around the Middle East, this law gets passed. Indeed, he was the first to praise it:

Traveling in Manama, Bahrain, President Bush hailed the law as "an important step toward reconciliation."

"It's an important sign that the leaders of that country understand that they must work together to meet the aspirations of the Iraqi people," he said.

Obviously this was something spearheaded by the Shiite majority in the Parliament, otherwise it could not get done this quickly. What I did not know until reading deeper into the reports is that the law was actively opposed by the Sunni minority who you would think would be precisely those to benefit from its implementation. And the prime movers were the Sadrists, not likely to be those interested in unity and reconciliation.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat writes in Arabic that the parliamentarians who criticized the law were drawn from the National Dialogue Council led by ex-Baathist Salih Mutlak, from the Iraqi National List of Iyad Allawi (an ex-Baathist), and from two of the three parties that make up the Sunni Arab National Accord Front.

So the parties in parliament that have the strong Baathist legacy did not like the law one little bit. But they are the ones that it was intended to mollify!

Parliament has been unable to get a quorum on several recent occasions, and barely mustered a quorum on Saturday, with 143 members in attendance out of 275. The new law passed with a narrow majority. The vote count was not published anywhere I could find it, but it could have been as low as 72 [...]

The Sadrists had demanded that the De-Baathification Commission not be dissolved, but would accept a change in name for it. They had demanded that the Baath Party remain dissolved, and that the high-ranking members of the party be forbidden to enter the new political life or serve as bureaucrats. The Sadrists had also insisted that any high-ranking Baathists presently employed by the new Iraqi government must be fired!

The headlines are all saying that the law permits Baathists back into public life. It seems actually to demand that they be fired or retired on a pension, and any who are employed are excluded from sensitive ministries.

Essentially, this law forces a Baath Party member who wants a job in the government to appear before a judiciary board in public view and announce that they are an ex-Baathist, in a time where Shiite militias and death squads still operate. This is a death sentence that appears to be more about rooting out Baath Party members than anything else.

Critics of the legislation suspect the new body will be manipulated by the same parties that dominated the old committee. They also worry that any Baathists who seek jobs will be targeted by paramilitary groups.

"I wouldn't come back to my job because of this law," Sunni parliament member Saleh Mutlak said. "It's humiliating to the people. You have to condemn yourself, and then be investigated, and then you could be killed [by someone] after going to the committee."

It's very easy for Bush defenders and war supporters to conflate the sectarian elements in Iraq, so let's be clear. This is a law that everyone is saying is designed to help Sunnis that was opposed by most major Sunni groups. This is just the same as the return of the zombie lie that Iranian explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) are being used by insurgents and "Al Qaeda in Iraq," when Iranians are Shiites, Al Qaeda is Sunni and the "bombs" they described are no more than hand hammered ashtrays that could be made anywhere in the world.

While Republicans spin and lie and distort, Democrats appear unwilling to pick apart the arguments even a little bit, and so in the absence of a response, the lies stand.

Welcome to Iraq policy in 2008.

Iran Post

So White House automated robot Dana Perino was asked about the Sy Hersh article today, and she predictably refused to address the substance, simply going on about his "anonymous sources" (which are apparently terrible, unless the source is Scooter Libby). But this was the telling part to me:

PERINO: Look, the president has said that he believes there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that’s why we’re working with our allies to get there.

QUESTION: That’s what he said before we went to Iraq, too.

QUESTION: But what’s the — can you answer as to the substance of whether or not the White House asked? I mean, if it’s not true, then you can say Sy Hersh is wrong and CNN was wrong to air it. You can say it.

PERINO: We don’t discuss such things.

"We won't discuss such things" because if we did, you'd understand that it's full steam ahead on Iran, and you might actually report the same things the British press is reporting.

The American air force is working with military leaders from the Gulf to train and prepare Arab air forces for a possible war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

An air warfare conference in Washington last week was told how American air chiefs have helped to co-ordinate intelligence-sharing with Gulf Arab nations and organise combined exercises designed to make it easier to fight together.

Gen Michael Mosley, the US Air Force chief of staff, used the conference to seek closer links with allies whose support America might need if President George W Bush chooses to bomb Iran.

This apparently means the Air Force would have Arabs help on bombing runs in Tehran, flying side by side with American forces. Does anyone believe the Jordanians or the UAE would actually do that? I think this is more about operations and basing, but still it represents a step forward. Which is obviously where this is headed, just take it from the guy who sat with Bush last week:

Podhoretz, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush in 2004, met privately with the President for 45 minutes recently. During the course of the meeting, Bush listened diligently as Podhoretz laid out the “the case for bombing Iran.” Podhoretz seems to have come away convinced that he made the case.

"I believe President Bush is going to order airstrikes [on Iran] before he leaves office. Because he has several times said — at least twice to my knowledge — that if we allow Iranians to acquire nuclear capabilities, 50 years from now, people will look back at us the way we look back at Munich and say ‘how could they have let this happen?’"

Of course, N-Pod, who prays nightly for an attack on Iran, may just be saying that to continue the drumbeat.

But regardless, there's definitely some movement here. The generals have at least been mollified that this would be targeted and specific enough that they can grudgingly give their nod. By the way, this is all happening in the context of Iran helping the Iraqis to prevent precisely the thing that the Administration claims the Iranians are doing.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has secured a pledge from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to help cut off weapons, funding and other support to militiamen in Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said there were signs of a slight drop in the types of attacks associated with Shiite militants since the deal was reached last month, and he dangled the possibility that U.S. and Iraqi officials might be able to do something in return. But he said it was too early to tell whether there has been a real reduction in Iranian support.

"Honestly, and I really mean this, all of us would really welcome the opportunity to see this, confirm it and even - in whatever way we could - to reciprocate," Petraeus told reporters on a visit to the Baghdad neighborhood of Karada. "But it really is wait and see time right now still."

Here's the deal. This may be more of Petraeus' the surge is working crap, even though it has nothing to do with establishing a political solution, the entire point of the surge (and 1,000 dead a month in a country of 30 million, the equivalent of 100,000 dead of political violence on our streets, is nothing to write home about). But as Juan Cole noted, there are Iranian equivalents to Blackwater, nasty mercenary elements that have nothing to do with the central government who may be bad actors within Iraq. And tentatively, at least, Iran is doing what it can to interdict their shipments of weapons. The notion that all EFPs in Iraq are coming from the Ayatollah's secret stash is ridiculous; in fact, I doubt they'd be that stupid. But the Cheney Administration is counting on American ignorance and our willingness to lump together all Muslims as one big bad guy.

As Digby notes:

So, there we have it. All the months of screaming into he void by many bloggers and others on this subject, culminating last week in the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment in which many Democrats, including our presidential frontrunner, signed on to the fundamental premise Cheney is using to justify the attack. (What an excellent move on their part.) [...]

Cheney isn't really a politician anymore and hasn't been one for a long time. He represents the people who really run things at times like this, the big money boyz, and their concerns are not so parochial as a Republican win. They run things no matter who's in office. (And anyway, they've set certain things in motion, pillaged the treasury so thoroughly and solidified their hold on the media and the Democrats sufficiently enough that they think a few years of GOP R&R is probably a good idea. They need to allow the Democrats just enough power to be blamed, in any case.)

The subtext of that, of course, is that they will browbeat the American people into either stifling their dissent against this action or risk being called traitors to the troops. Only treasonous betray-up bloggers would dare say a word.

Michael Gordon Strikes Again

Judy-In-Disguise pens another neocon mash note, claiming that Iran is totally killing every American in Iraq, based on... military sources.

Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.

The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said in an interview.

I thought nobody was dying in July, wasn't that last week's talking point?

This is absurd. The idea that EFP's can only be made in Iran has already been debunked. They're not really that hard to make. Accepting the military statements (and they're the only ones in the article) from commanders, perpetually looking over their shoulder to wonder if the Bush Administration will fire them, is not good enough. Especially when the military is kind of fucking up all over the place when it comes to weapons:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

How in the world can a media figure trust the same government sources that have dissembled again and again and have a clear agenda to continue the war machine? I guess I don't understand because I'm not a member of the liberal media.

The Deadly Shiite-Sunni Alliance That Doesn't Exist

According to the RNC fax that went out today and got reprinted by the Associated Press, now the Shiite militias receive training on how to build EFPs from Iran. See, before American military leaders claimed that the EFPs could only be built in Iran, until they found bombmaking factories inside Iraq. So now, they've changed the story to fit the new facts. Subtle.

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell would not say how many militia fighters had been trained in Iran but said that questioning of fighters captured as recently as this month confirmed many had been in Iranian training camps.

"We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees debriefs," Caldwell said at a weekly briefing.

I don't doubt that some Shiite militia has been trained in Iran; heck, a lot of them, including Sistani, were EXILED in Iran before the war. But here's the thing: we know that the EFPs are mainly being used by SUNNI groups. The vast majority of American troops who have been killed by EFPs were killed by Sunni insurgents. So, the question remains, who's training them? Who's supplying them? And who's manufacturing them? It certainly isn't Iran. It probably is Saudi Arabia. But we can't say that out loud.

Here's some more darling news.

Also Wednesday, Iraqi Cabinet ministers allied to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to quit the government to protest the prime minister's lack of support for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.

Such a pullout by the very bloc that put Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in office could collapse his already perilously weak government. The threat comes two months into a U.S. effort to pacify Baghdad in order to give al-Maliki's government room to function.

Meanwhile, bodies lay scattered across two central Baghdad neighborhoods after a raging battle left 20 suspected insurgents and four Iraqi soldiers dead, and 16 U.S. soldiers wounded, witnesses and officials said.

The fighting Tuesday in Fadhil and Sheik Omar, two Sunni enclaves, was the most intense since a massive push to pacify the capital began two months ago.

This gun battle apparently lasted throughout the day in central Baghdad, where it's so safe you can stroll hand-in-hand with John McCain. By the way, the surge is going so well that 15,000 more National Guard troops are going to be called up, because the numbers have to get larger to really undertake this counterinsurgency strategy. In other words, we were lied to about the eventual size of the escalation, which continues to escalate.

It's just interesting that the US military would try to pin all Iraq's problems on meddling from Iran at this point, when we know this:

An Iranian opposition group based in Iraq, labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, gets protection from the U.S. military despite Iraqi pressure to leave the country.

The U.S. considers the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, a source of valuable intelligence on Iran.

The group also is credited with helping expose Iran's secret nuclear program through spying on Tehran for decades.

Iranian officials tied the MEK to an explosion in February at a girls school in Zahedan, Iran.

We are shielding an Iranian terrorist group responsible for bombings inside their country, while yelling about Iranians responsible for bombings inside Iraq.

Poetic.

UPDATE: Apparently they're now saying that Iran's ACTUALLY arming Sunnis. Too much. They're all swarthy people, right, so who cares if they're mortal enemies with 1400 years of historical feuding? They want to come to our house and kill us!

Those Damn Iranians of Iraqi Origin Living In Iraq

Funny story about those explosively formed penetrators:

"Iraqi army soldiers swept into the city of Diwaniya early this morning to disrupt militia activity and return security and stability of the volatile city back to the government of Iraq," the U.S. military said in a statement.

Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.

I thought they all came from Iran. It simply can't be possible that the Bush Admnistration would stretch the truth to serve their political goals, right?

Of course, we'll see this spinned into how Iran just supplied the "technology and know-how" for the EFPs, which have been mostly used in Iraq by Sunnis, so somebody tell me why Shiites in Iran would be aiding Sunnis in Iraq who kill Shiites.

Meanwhile, another Iraqi-made weapon favored by insurgents, the chlorine bomb, killed 30 in Ramadi. We're doing an excellent job providing the training ground for the terrorists of the future.

And While You're Studying, We Create Our Own Reality

Scott Ritter spoke at the local public library last night, and while the auditorium was full and I had to go to the multi-purpose room upstairs and watch a video feed, I guess i can say that I saw him speak. And he was forceful and adamant, the kind of insistence one gets from someone who was proven right about so many things, yet still gets marginalized in the public debate (he talked about how the media got it wrong in Iraq, and how they're trapped by their own record, forcing them to put idiots like Ken Pollack on their shows, when he was in fact wrong about everything in the Middle East).

But he was most forceful about Iran, and this coming war which is moving at the speed of a freight train, with little or no resistance from anyone who can stop it. Ritter said that Iran and Iraq are part of the same policy of regime change in the Middle East. Iran is listed 16 times in the National Security Strategy of the US as the number one threat to security, and Bush feels that he already has all the authority he needs to go to war yet again. You don't put three carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf simply to pull back. And there are wanton lies being told about the actual threat that Iran poses. First it was that they we're ten years away from a nuclear weapon; to quote Ritter, EVERY COUNTRY on Earth is ten years away from a nuclear weapon. As to the more recent accounts of the IAEA saying that Iran could produce enough enriched uranium for a warhead in a year, this is theoretical and not actual practice; realistically, Iran can't do it and everybody knows this.

As for the casus belli that Iran is supplying Iraqis with weapons that kill Americans, not only could these EFP (explosively formed penetrator) weapons be made by anyone with a bare minimum of machine tools, but revelations in recent days show that this is exactly what Iraqis may have been doing:

The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.

But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.

So we have a country, Iran, which is likely not to be arming Shiites in Iraq, is likely not to be able to acquire nuclear weapons in as urgent a time frame as was assumed, but a country which is under threat of attack at any moment by a US government making the exact opposite claims. And in the process, as Seymour Hersh explains in his bombshell piece for The New Yorker, we are actually doing the arming of insurgents who mean to kill American troops OURSELVES.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites [...]

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

So the Administration is running an off-the-books series of covert operations, aligned with the Saudis - the "16 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11" Saudis - to crush the growing Shiite sphere of influence that WE TOUCHED OFF by eliminating both of Iran's major rivals in the region, Iraq and Afghanistan. This, frankly, is unbelievable. We created a mess in the first place, and now we're creating a bigger one. We are literally IN LEAGUE WITH SUNNI RADICALS, not unlike those which make up Al Qaeda. Josh Marshall explains the incoherence at work here.

But wait ... Only a short time ago we were told that Cheney and his crew at the White House wanted to take the side of the Shi'as in Iraq's burgeoning civil war. In other words, for all the attention to who we're going to attack and how and how many soldiers we need to do it, there appears to be a basic debate (to be generous) or confusion (to be less generous) within the administration over which side we're even on.

We talk a lot about the 'surge' and that's important since it assumes a intensive military commitment in Iraq for years into the future. We worry about tactics and strategy and whether the White House is going to plunge us into another war as a way to wriggle out of the blame for the current one. But this is a level of folly that transcends all of that: at the most basic level, the folks running the show can't even decide who's side we're on. There's no real strategy here or grand aim or even stable aim -- more like a rather panicked set of improvisations aimed at finding a way to retrospectively justify the mistakes that got us here in the first place.

I think it's incoherent only to the reality-based community. For those that create their own reality, this is perfectly logical. It's time for another war to show everybody in the world who's boss, and it's time to plant some evidence proving that Iran is the gravest threat the world has ever known. America has allowed for strange bedfellows in the past (though ones who repeatedly and rampantly kill thousands of Americans as part of their ideology, well, that's a new one). So the neocons are creating their own reality, hoping that fear and ignorance will get the public on their side once again.

It's a sad irony that the only thing which may be standing between peace and war in Iran is a military coup, as five top generals are prepared to quit in the event of a strike:

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

But generals have resigned their posts before under this Administration, most notably Gen. Shinseki, and the military machine has moved mightily along. Until the public and the leaders in Congress are engaged on this issue BEFORE it happens, we will be moving inexorably toward war. Arthur Silber has a powerful post about this, about the need to speak out right now, about the need to tell the truth.

1. The criminal and immoral nature of an attack on Iran in the present circumstances and in the foreseeable future must be identified and stated with all the force imaginable, without qualification, in virtually every interview, every television appearance, and every news story that any politician (or any other public figure) takes part in, beginning tomorrow. THE INSANITY AND CRIMINALITY OF SUCH AN ATTACK MUST BE MADE NATIONAL TOPIC NUMBER ONE, UNTIL THIS ADMINISTRATION FULLY AND COMPLETELY DISAVOWS ANY AND ALL SUCH INTENTIONS AND PLANS -- AND UNTIL THE MAGNITUDE OF PUBLIC OPPOSITION CONVINCES US THAT THEY MEAN IT.

2. In every statement about an attack on Iran, no opponent of this administration can accept any of the terms of debate chosen by the administration. Such opponents must argue on completely different terms. If you argue within the framework they prefer to any extent at all, you will lose -- and the next global war may begin.

It's time to call your Representatives on this one. They're speaking in general terms about Iran, wary of Administration motives and wanting them to get authority from Congress before any attack. But the President doesn't feel like he needs that authority, the Congress is immobilized by partisanship (particularly in the Senate), and a lot of this stuff is being done without Congressional oversight anyway. Stop the Iran War is a clearing house of activism and information. The time is right now. We have to end this endless re-creation of reality. The purpose of citizenship, of our intelligence community, is to challenge everything and view every official source with suspicion, precisely the opposite of what this lapdog Lieberman suggested today. It's time to challenge the Administration on Iran.

Fake But Accurate

Those EFPs that are "unquestionably" of Iranian origin? One thing about that.

Iranian Ambassador: The evidence that has been produced, in fact fabricated, is preposterous. The dates. If you look at the evidence, the dates that are used in this mortars are written in American date format, putting month first and date second. Whereas nowhere in the world people use month first and date second. Everywhere in the world except for the U.S. And those who fabricated this evidence should listen and learn. Everybody else in the world uses date, month, year. That is the order.

CHARLIE ROSE: That says what to you?

That this evidence is fabricated, as was the evidence that was fabricated before the Iraq war in order to launch an aggression. This evidence is fabricated and it points to a very dangerous policy that is being pursued by this administration.

I'll go you one further. The letter script is Roman and not Farsi, and the date refers to the Roman calendar instead of the Farsi one.

This evidence is fake. It's clearly fake. And via Digby, the President let his Freudian slip show this morning:

Q: What assurances can you give the American people that the intelligence this time will be accurate?

BUSH: Ed, we know they're there, we know they're provided by the Quds force. We know the Quds force is a part of the Iranian government. I don't think we know who picked up the phone and said to the Quds force, go do this, but we know it's a vital part of the Iranian government. What matters is, is that we're responding. The idea that somehow we're manufacturing the idea that Iranians are providing IEDs is preposterous.

[...]

I suspect that's what came up at his morning briefing and he just blurted it out because he's an idiot.

Still, it's hard for me to believe that even these people can be this inept, but it appears they can. There can be no reasonable explanation for the "bad coordination" between Baghdad on Sunday and Pace and now Bush today. And the "proof" is so suspicious that you honestly cannot take it seriously.

Hillary Clinton said the right thing today about Iran, warning the Administration that they would have to come back to Congress before attacking. But I think we have to step back a piece and put aside the notion of attack, by beginning an immediate set of hearings into whether or not this evidence has been deliberately falsified, as it now appears is likely.