We are at war with Iran (and really, have been for almost thirty years now), but we apparently have to continue to pretend otherwise.

Twice before the military has tried to present to the press overwhelming evidence of Iran’s involvement in the Iraq war, only to be met by hostile skepticism. The skepticism basically takes the form of three questions:

1. Couldn’t these weapons have been made anywhere?
2. Isn’t it fishy that these weapons were marked in English with American-style dates?
3. Isn’t all of this a ploy to justify a neocon war with Iraq [sic]?

As you will see from the video, Maj. Weber can definitively answer the first two questions. As for the Daily Kos-inspired third question, well, who can address questions from planet Paranoid? And who should bother?

As noted in comments, point (3) is almost certainly meant to be "...war with Iran."

3) Isn’t all of this a ploy to justify a neocon war with Iraq?

Huh?

The neocons are going to war with Iraq AGAIN?

Hey, you know, when you're one of those Evil Neocons™, you just can't go to war with Iraq too much.

That's pretty funny Rand.

Well, that's what I'm here for. Sorta...

Anyway, I'm sure it was a typo. There's only one letter different, after all. And being an Evil Neocon™, I'm sure that Richard Miniter had Iraq on the brain.

I've emailed him to correct it. Assuming it needs correcting...

Anyone who does not believe that the Iranians are activly helping the "bad people" in Iraq and are engaged in a war of negation with the US is not on this planet.

Sadly that includes a great many people in the Dem party who should know better but are captives of their base.

Sadly as well this administration has zero credibility to engage them.

That comes from calling WMD one to many times.

The Iranians are engaged in fanning the flamess of an Islamic war against our civilization.

Robert

My pet theory is that Iranian intelligence helped plant false intel about Saddam's WMD and people such as Douglas Feith took the bait -- hook, line, and sinker. Iraqi exiles such as Chalabi were well situated to tell Rumsfeld, Wolfie, et. al. whatever they wanted to hear.

Thus, Tehran won a two-fer:

(a) The long hated Saddam was deposed and later executed. Recall that the Persians had greater reason to hate Saddam than we in the US ever had;

and

(b) When no evidence of Iraqi WMD surfaced Bush became the boy who cried wolf, less able to challenge a very real Iranian threat.

Finally, I have read rumors that Paul Wolfowitz (among others) was fed rumors by Iraqi exiles that Saddam had located massive new oil reserves in western Iraqi desert -- larger than Saudi Arabia's reserves -- but Saddam couldn't exploit them because of sanctions. Recall his testimony that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for reconstruction.

Perhaps this too was a Tehran based intelligence operation to goad us into Saddam removal with Shia ascendancy being the inevitable consequence.

Yup. We are at war with the Iranians and they are playing us like a violin.

My pet theory is that the sanctions were progressively weakening Saddam's hold on power, and that Iran (through its proxies, Iraqi Shia refugees, etc.) was setting up a Shia-based shadow government to take over once Saddam fell.

Saddam used his demonstrated WMD capabilities, plus the continued existence of the ability to regenerate his production capabilities rapidly, plus whatever bluffing he did concerning actual weaponizable assets, to forestall more aggressive moves by Iran.

The US upended Iran's creeping takeover in 2003, and the fight since then has been a combination of convincing Iraq's Sunni to shed their fantasies of recovering their dominance, separating Iranian proxies from Iran, and building a new politics in Iraq.

Success in this endeavor vastly complicates Iran's strategic goal of regional dominance, and therefore of the continued viability of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the status of Iran's corrupt cleric class, and finally, the stability of the Persian Empire.

The biggest large-scale problem has been (publicly, at least) a huge underestimation of the advanced decrepitude that 3 decades of Saddam had created in the individual communal psyches of the Shia and Sunni. And of course, in the physical / social infrastructure.

But, such is war.

MG

Posted by Bill White at May 8, 2007 03:02 PM

Those probably are "not" to far from wrong. A rumor that I have heard from friends who are in a position to know is...remember the "phone call" that Colin played at the UN, the one that says "Have you removed the specials, the special weapons so the INspectors cannot find them?"

Remember that one? (it is a close paraphrse)...it was the strongest bit of intel that Colin was able to produce.

Tram Trainor (USMC ret) says that we sent special ops teams to that particular "place" mentioned in the conversation, and that there was unloading of bunkers going on, but it wasnt WMD it was vacumn cleaners! and my intel friend (a classmate) says that the runor is that Chalabi had a few of his minions run some cell phone calls that went along with the planned movement of the vacumn cleaners.

It didnt take much to play Cheney, and the rest of the Niedemeyer gang. They had already made up their mind about what they wanted to do and the only thing was to find a fig leaf to allow them to do it.

I honestly dont think that Iranian intel thought we were "this dumb". What I think that they were hoping for was to get a US financed insurgent movement going that could turn more or less like the AFghan one did and that coupled with the sanctions which were holding amazingly well. Find Saddams props of power being pulled out.

There was a plan presented at the USN war college in the summer of 2000 to do just that. IE start an insurgency movement capitalizing on the Kurds in the North and some folks in the South. The Saudis were "go" with the plan. Clinton wasnt interested in it and Cheney flatly rejected a briefing he got on the plan pre 9/11 as "to timid" (his words).

I know that Dicky was briefed because a classmate/friend briefed him.

Robert

"We are at war with Iran"

Sure we are, Rand. No doubt yesterday we had "been at war for thirty years" with someone else, and tomorrow you'll invent another make-believe history for whatever target you find most promising then. As long as the Pentagon checks clear, who cares who the enemy is? Just dig up foreign policy reports from previous "enemies" and replace the pronouns. I'd find your insanity comical if it hadn't already contributed to mass murder.

Posted by Bill White at May 8, 2007 03:02 PM

It was "Brother" Zinni who refered to Chalabi among other things as a "Silk suited fatso who would sell his own mother for the right price".

Robert

We have always been at war with EastAsia

I think the doubts about the Iranians being a significant source of arms in Iraq are well-founded. First of all, we know for a fact that weapons caches of ridiculous size were left hither and yon all over Iraq after the fall of the regime and the disbanding of the military. You still read about these being discovered from time to time, over 4 years into this thing. There is not now and has never been a shortage of domestic weapons in Iraq. With respect to the shaped charges that "could only have been supplied by Iran," we have uncovered homegrown factories where these very shaped charges were being made, showing that claim by US officials to be false.

But let us say the weapons do come from Iran. Are we surprised that the Iranians would try to influence events in a neighboring country occupied by an army hostile to it? Would we not do the exact same thing? And, again assuming the weapons do come from Iran, how does this justify going to war with Iran? Why would Iranian shaped charges in Iraq mean we forego any other cost-benefit analysis with regard to "bomb bomb bombing Iran"??? The Soviets provided untold support of all kinds to the North Vietnamese, but we never used that fact as a reason to go to war with the USSR, for bleeding obvious reasons. The wages of a war with Iran would not be global obliteration, granted, but they would almost certainly be very severe for US interests.

Are we surprised that the Iranians would try to influence events in a neighboring country occupied by an army hostile to it? Would we not do the exact same thing?

Yes, we would. I'm not sure what your point is.

And, again assuming the weapons do come from Iran, how does this justify going to war with Iran?

My point is that, like it or not, we are at war with Iran, and have been since 1979 (just as we were at war with the Soviets for over half a century, even if we weren't flinging missiles at each other). We just pretend otherwise.

The question is not whether to go to war with Iran, but the best means of doing so, because a war with Iran isn't even inevitable--it's ongoing. It's just that (barring some Special Forces shenanigans of which we're unaware) they're the only ones waging it.

Reduce global humanity's dependence on oil and we could smite the Iranians with impunity.

In the meantime the collateral damage that would arise from our whacking Tehran (mines in the straits of Hormuz & ballistic missiles landing on Saudi oil terminals & a general Shia uprising in Iraq) gives the Persians a viable strategic deterrent.

Not unprecedented as we were "at war" with the Soviets for more than 30 years, right?

To embrace the global warming advocates and move vigorously towards a carbon neutral energy policy (nuclear electricty for example) both for ourselves and the rest of the world would do much to remove the Iranian strategic deterrent and that would give us the freedom to whack them, hard.