Fool Us Twice? From Iraq to Iran

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted February 14, 2007.

It's déja vu. This time the Bush gang wants war with Iran. Following a carefully orchestrated strategy, they have ratcheted up the "threat" from Iran, designed to mislead us into a new war four years after they misled us into Iraq.

Like its insistence that Iraq had WMD, the Bush administration has been hyping claims that Iran seeks nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), however, has found no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says there is plenty of time for negotiation with Iran.

Bush has sent two battle carrier groups, replete with nukes, to the Persian Gulf, and a third is reportedly preparing to follow. In support of Bush's case that Iran poses a danger to the U.S., three unnamed American officials ceremoniously trotted out metal parts found in Iraq and claimed Iran supplied them to kill our soldiers in Iraq.

This "evidence" -- or "packaging," as the Associated Press calls it -- doesn't pass the straight face test with most reputable observers. "The officials offered no evidence to substantiate allegations that the 'highest levels' of the Iranian government had sanctioned support for attacks against U.S. troops," according to Monday's Washington Post.

Saturday's New York Times cited information gleaned from "interrogation reports" from Iranians and Iraqis captured in the recent U.S. raid on the Iranian embassy in northern Iraq. They allegedly indicated money and weapons components are brought into Iraq over the Iranian border at night. If those people indeed provided such information, query what kind of pressure, i.e. torture, might have been applied to encourage their cooperation. Recall the centerpiece of Colin Powell's 2003 lies to the Security Council about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda came from false information tortured out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

Any Iranian weapons in Iraq may belong to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite resistance group the U.S. used to support. There could be old Iranian munitions lying around which are left over from the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. A former high-level U.S. military officer told me it was not uncommon to find large caches of weapons around Iraq. He cited the 2004 discovery of 37,000 American Colt 45 handguns in a warehouse near the Iranian border on the Iraq side, likely procured "when Saddam was our friend." The United States armed both sides in the Iran-Iraq conflict.

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, released last week, concluded that Iranian or Syrian involvement is "not likely to be a major driver of violence" in Iraq.

Paul Krugman wrote that even if Iran were providing aid to some factions in Iraq, "you can say the same about Saudi Arabia, which is believed to be a major source of financial support for Sunni insurgents -- and Sunnis, not Iranian-backed Shiites, are still responsible for most American combat deaths." Indeed, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. But as Krugman mentions, the Bush administration's "close personal and financial ties to the Saudis" have caused it to downplay "Saudi connections to America's enemies."

American troops are still fighting in Afghanistan. Yet the Bush administration hasn't complained about the Taliban attacks on Afghanistan that originate in Pakistan, a country with documented nuclear weapons. Of course the Bush administration is cozy with the Pakistani regime.

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Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in June.

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