'Let slip the wolves'

To all appearances, the US is gearing up for the long awaited attack on Iran.

Never before displayed in public, the weapons included squat canisters designed to explode and spit out molten balls of copper that cut through armor. The canisters, called explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s, are perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here. (NY Times)

Presumably, Bush spent his childhood so steeped in Christianity that he missed out entirely on the pagans, like Aesop,

A Shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, "Wolf! Wolf!" and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: "Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep"; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock.

We can only hope that it’s just him and that the American people remember how Bush and the neocons sucked them into the Iraq adventure just four short years ago. It would be a terrible embarrassment for them to believe this mob of liars again, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’

In a hopeful development, even the usually gullible NY Times has expressed a degree of healthy scepticism,

In a news briefing held under strict security, the officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments.

That inference, and the anonymity of the officials who made it, seemed likely to generate skepticism among those suspicious that the Bush administration is trying to find a scapegoat for its problems in Iraq, and perhaps even trying to lay the groundwork for war with Iran.

Lenin puts it somewhat less diplomatically,

Leaving aside the dirty cheek involved in America decrying another country's involvement in violence in Iraq, everyone knows that there is a huge black market in weapons in Iraq, and that many of them are likely to have been produced in Iran. That's how black markets work. It's extremely likely, by the way, that many of the car bomb attacks use cars produced in America. What does this prove?

The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn also finds plenty of reason to doubt the Pentagon’s claims,

The allegations against Iran are similar in tone and credibility to those made four years ago by the US government about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of 2003…

The evidence against Iran is even more insubstantial than the faked or mistaken evidence for Iraqi WMDs disseminated by the US and Britain in 2002 and 2003. The allegations appear to be full of exaggerations…It implies the Shias have been at war with the US while in fact they are controlled by parties which make up the Iraqi government.

The officials speaking in Baghdad used aggressive rhetoric suggesting that Washington wants to ratchet up its confrontation with Tehran. It has not ruled out using armed force and has sent a second carrier task force to the Gulf…

The White House may have decided that, in the run up to the 2008 presidential election, it would be much to its political advantage in the US to divert attention from its failure in Iraq by blaming Iran for being the hidden hand supporting its opponents.

Furthermore,

The allegations by senior but unnamed US officials in Baghdad and Washington are bizarre. The US has been fighting a Sunni insurgency in Iraq since 2003 that is deeply hostile to Iran.

The statements from Washington give the impression that the US has been at war with Shia militias for the past three-and-a-half years while almost all the fighting has been with the Sunni insurgents… It is unlikely that the Sunni guerrillas have received significant quantities of military equipment from Tehran…

The US stance on the military capabilities of Iraqis today is the exact opposite of its position in four years ago. Then President Bush and Tony Blair claimed that Iraqis were technically advanced enough to produce long-range missiles and to be close to producing a nuclear device. Washington is now saying that Iraqis are too backward to produce an effective roadside bomb and must seek Iranian help.

Finally, David Swanson, makes a couple of widely overlooked points, enjoining,

But let's keep one thing in mind as we demand a thorough investigation of both sets of lies -- lies made by the same set of people: In neither case, even if every single claim were 100 percent true and accurate, would there have been an established a legal case for war. If a nation's possession of WMDs were grounds for launching a war against it, the United States would be subject to legal invasion immediately.

So, while debunking the fanciful claims of Bush, Cheney, and Gates may be entertaining, we may actually do more good if we brush them aside and point out that it does not matter whether their claims are true or not. Aiding a nation in repelling a foreign occupation is not grounds for war. The U.S. still brags about having done this in France 60 years ago. If Iran were doing it in Iraq now, which no evidence yet suggests, the crime would lie in the foreign invaders' refusal to leave, not in the aide supplied by the Iranians.