Drats! We can’t see the smoking gun evidence!
From the LAT …
The Bush administration has postponed plans to offer public details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq amid internal divisions over the strength of the evidence, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials promised last week to provide evidence of Iranian activities that led President Bush to announce Jan. 10 that U.S. forces would begin taking the offensive against Iranian agents who threatened Americans.
But some officials in Washington are concerned that some of the material may be inconclusive and that other data cannot be released without jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods. They want to avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that information the administration cited to justify the war was incorrect, said the officials, who described the internal discussions on condition of anonymity.
“We don’t want a repeat of the situation we had when [then-Secretary of State] Colin L. Powell went before the United Nations,” said one U.S. official, referring to Powell’s 2003 presentation on then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons program that relied on evidence later found to be false. “People are going to be skeptical.”
Concern that the evidence may be bogus would seem like a decent reason not to release it.
Brzezinski focuses us on the essential dynamic we face with this renegade president …
If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
This is the hinge on which everything now turns. Bush doesn’t want to be to blame for the mess in Iraq. So it has to be Iran. There’s a bright line leading from the crisis of accountability to the next stage of strategic disaster.
News breaking out of the Congressional Budget Office: While the president has been saying the ‘surge’ will be 21,500 troops. Actually it will be between 35,000 and 48,000. More momentarily.
Update: We’ve got the analysis for you here.
Last night a reader wrote in to say that whatever the signs of belligerence on either side of the Iraq-Iran border, there wouldn’t be any American attack on Iran because we simply don’t have the troops to mount the attack. We don’t have nearly enough troops available to mount an invasion of another Iraq. And Iran is a vastly larger country, both in geographical size and in population, with a formidable military. TPM Reader SG just wrote in to ask what the public rationale would be. Let me try to answer both questions in tandem.
The quick answer to this objection number one, I think, is that people who are looking to get into wars are seldom held back by not having the resources or the manpower to do it well or successfully.
The longer answer is that I doubt the United States will ever invade Iran if by that we mean an invasion in force to take over the capital, oust the government and occupy the country. Far more likely would be an aerial bombing campaign (where the US still has ample resources) aimed at Iran’s nuclear or missile facilities. Perhaps even more likely than that would be an escalating round of cross-border incursions growing out of US counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq but then taking on a life of their own.
McCain: Things were getting better in Iraq before they were getting worse.
A cool resource I didn’t know about. We all know that we can read newspapers all over the country and the world with the web. It’s worth remembering sometimes just how differently and more slowly information flowed in the pre-web era. But the Newseum has a section of their site where they have the daily front pages of 555 papers in 55 countries. Pretty cool.
Here’s Spencer on this morning’s hearing, where John McCain dished it out, General George Casey just took and took, and the commander-in-chief didn’t really come up.
Here’s a question: if it turns out the culprits behind the Karbala raid were not Iranian-trained but US-trained, should we attack ourselves? This just out from Fox of all places: “Several Iraqis have been detained for questioning in the ongoing investigation of at least two senior Iraqi generals suspected of involvement in an insurgent attack that killed five American soldiers on Jan. 20, U.S. officials told FOX News on Thursday.”
(ed.note: In the original version of this post I incorrectly referred to Najaf rather than Karbala. It’s hard for me to keep all the shady surge-era incidents straight sometimes. My bad.)
Encouraging news! The man nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence says there’ll be no cherry-picking on his watch.