We’ve been trying to bring you news in real time this morning on President Bush’s comments on the Iran weapons issue and how those comments are being repeated, vouched for and interpreted by reporters. Some of the points and critiques we’re making require a lot of unpacking and explanation. So let me try to review the key points in this post.
First, let me state what I take to be one of the most important lessons of the lead-up to the Iraq War and the debate over weapons of mass destruction. One reason there was too little scrutiny of even the least controversial of the White House’s claims is that a climate was created in which it was viewed as untoward, irrational or simply naive to critically pick apart the details of these claims as long as it was clear that the alleged bad guys were bad guys.
Why focus on the minutiae of the details as long as the big picture is clear? Why be a nitpicker when the people in question are such bad guys? These were the unstated terms of the debate.
In retrospect, of course, there were vast gaps in the claims and many of them were fairly obviously false if you just yanked on a few dangling threads.
Often, seemingly subtle or minor errors in reasoning or gaps in evidence turned out to have huge implications.
With that lesson in mind, carefully consider what we’re hearing from the White House on this issue of Iranian arms.
Defense department officials presented evidence of Iranian manufactured super-IEDs that were being used against US troops. There’s also long been evidence that the Qods force of the Iranian Republican Guards are operating in Iraq. And it is being claimed that Qods force personnel are responsible for bringing these super IEDs into Iraq.
Let’s assume for the moment that all these points are true.
President Bush says “with certainty” that Qods forces are giving these weapons to fighters for use against American troops. The only question, he says, is whether the leaders of the Iranian government at the highest level directly told them to do so. CNN’s Barbara Starr says that this is the same thing that Gen. Pace is saying.
But they’re actually not saying the same thing. And President Bush’s remarks are intentionally framed to duck the key issue of who the Iranians are really arming and why.
First, as Juan Cole has discussed at length, there’s a logical disconnect in these claims since the Iranians are supporting their Iraqi Shi’a coreligionists and most of our casualties are from the Sunni insurgents they oppose. So are we supposed to believe that Iran is arming their mortal enemies, the Sunnis?
Indeed the only direct evidence the administration has been willing to publicize comes from December when we found Qods force personnel at the headquarters of our allies, Abdel-Aziz al Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), delivering weapons to Hakim’s group.
From Agence France Presse …
He added that the Al-Qods force’s top operations officer was detained in December in the compound of leading Shiite politician Abdel-Aziz Hakim with an inventory of weapons to be shipped, including mortars and sniper rifles.
Hakim’s party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told the Americans that the weapons were meant for their protection, he added.
“We assess that these activities are coming from the senior levels of the Iranian government,” he said, noting that the Al-Qods brigade reports to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei.
This would hardly be surprising since the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been SCIRI’s prime sponsor for a quarter century. And remember, the SCIRI folks are our allies in Iraq.
Now, given the black market traffic in arms in Iraq right now, it’s not at all a stretch to believe that weapons are dispersing from Iranian proxies like SCIRI (who we’re holding up as our allies) through black market channels to Sunni insurgents who are in turn using them against US troops. Indeed, it seems like a more probable theory than the conclusion that the Iranians are acting in concert with the Sunni militants who are involved in an on-going campaign of indiscriminate slaughter of Iraqi Shi’a civilians.
So, to summarize, as Gen. Pace said, we seem to know that Iranian-made weapons are turning up in Iraq and being used against Americans.
For context, how many US-made weapons do you think are now being used against US forces. Indeed, how much US weaponry sent to Iraq specifically by the US are in turn being used by insurgents against US forces.
What Pace said was “We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran. What I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se [specifically], knows about this. It is clear that Iranians are involved, and it’s clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit.”
And look what President Bush is saying …
As of late this afternoon, we’re being told that the briefers in Baghdad went beyond what they were supposed to say and that the president is now dialing the claims back. In fact, President Bush is intentionally giving Americans the impression that we know something we don’t — that the Qods force is providing weapons for use against U.S. forces. This makes all the difference in the world. So even as Wolf Blitzer says just after 5 PM this afternoon that President Bush is “backing off” the claims, he’s actually still trying to fool Americans into believing something that we not only can’t prove but that is more than likely false.
A reporter friend told me recently that the administration is saying on background that the really slam-dunk evidence they’re not yet able to release. But as I told this person, after the experience of 2002 and 2003, mere self-respect prevents me from putting any credence whatsoever in such claims.
If they had the evidence we’d be seeing it. But without any solid evidence, the president still wants to fool the American public into believing these bogus claims.
After the Iran war, we’ll probably be walked back and shown that President Bush never really said that the Qods force was giving these weapons to the people using them against US troops. He didn’t fib. We just didn’t listen closely enough. He was just saying that the Qods folks gave them to someone. But he wasn’t saying who. So before all our soldiers die and before the president makes yet a million more screw ups for which we’ll pay for decades into the future, let’s look closely at what he’s actually saying.
