Evidence And Argument

By Cernig

On Tuesday, retired Admiral William Fallon gave his first interview as a civilian to CNN. In it, he said "I don't believe for a second President Bush wants a war with Iran."

That is a true statement - Bush and others are awash with War Party position papers that say a limited strike on training camps or nuke plants won't lead to an actual war or that such an attack might actually be good for the US economy. An attack and a war are two different things in their minds. They want the former, not the latter, and actually believe that it's doable without serious blowback.

Then comes this:

Phillips: So when talk of the third war came out, a war with Iran, the president didn't say to you, "This is what I want to do," and did you stand up and say, "No, sir. Bad move"?

Fallon: It's probably not appropriate to try to characterize it in that way. Again, don't believe for a second that the president really wants to go to war with Iran. We have a lot of things going on, and there are many other ways to solve problems. I was very open and candid in my advice. I'm not shy. I will tell people, the leaders, what I think and offer my opinions on Iran and other things, and continue to do that.

That's what is known as a non-denial denial.

This belief that an attack on Iran is "doable" is what I've been trying to get those who know it isn't to understand. The Bush administration has a long track record of believing its own propaganda and making policy as if the narrative were reality. Their narrative says that two carriers and a bunch of land-based aircraft are enough for the strike, and that there will be no serious repercussions. That their narrative is idiotic doesn't enter into their calculations.

Thus we see the twin threads of justification - Iran's alleged nuclear weapons push and its providing weaponry to kill US troops in Iraq - being pushed so hard that both seem to have been accepted  even by non-neocon commentators. yet in both cases, the evidence is that their justifications are as trumped up as those for invading Iraq.

Matthew Yglesias and Columbia Journalism Review both noted an excellent McClatchy piece which pointed out that the two presumptive presidential nominees have both followed the White House line on Iran's nuclear program even though all the evidence points to that line being false. That McCain does so is predictable, but that Obama does so is a dangerous failure on his part. Matt writes:

It's worth considering how the refusal of American politicians to acknowledge this must look in Teheran. In the hawk faction of the U.S. politics you have radical clerics musing about the apocalypse playing a key role in the process to determine who the GOP standard-bearer will be. And even in the more dovish faction, the lead contenders won't acknowledge our own intelligence findings about the Iranian nuclear program. Someone, someone in Iran is penning a furious blog post or article or memo about how you just can't appease the Americans, how we're irrational and our political system is dysfunctional, about how we were determined to invade Iraq irrespective of the facts and we're not invading Iran right now just because it's not logistically feasible and that restarting a crash weapons program before it does become feasible is Iran's only hope.

And I noted the other day that even progressive foreign policy experts have made the same mistake.

Indeed, even Matt isn't immune to taking the White house's framing for granted when it comes to allegations of Iranian weapons in Iraq. Yet again, the preponderance of evidence contradicts the White House line. Former CIA analyst (and Barcelona station head during the olympics there) Phil Geraldi writes that there's good reason to be sceptical:

There is considerable evidence that both the British and U.S. governments believed that the so-called explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) used against coalition troops starting in 2004 were produced locally from the armaments left over from Saddam Hussein's regime. But then, as the desire grew to implicate Iran in the problems inside Iraq, the weapons were increasingly described as sophisticated and of Iranian origin. In reality, experts on munitions believe that the EFPs can be made in any reasonably competent machine shop. Now Gen. David Petraeus would have the U.S. public believe that Iran is going far beyond even that role by training, funding, and equipping both the Sunni and Shi'ite insurgents in Iraq. Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials have also asserted that Iran is engaged in "secret negotiations" with al-Qaeda.

The charges against Iran are ominously similar to those that were made against Iraq in 2002 � weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing the region, and supporting terrorism. It is completely credible that Iran, confronted by 160,000 U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq, a flotilla in the Persian Gulf, and threatening language from the media and politicians in the U.S., would try to keep U.S. forces off balance and disrupt any intended attack. That interference may be a reality, and many observers believe Tehran's influence is strong in Iraq, but the specific charges that are being made are curiously lacking in any supporting evidence. This is particularly surprising as Iranian-supplied weapons are allegedly a major element in the insurgency, meaning that many of them should have been captured if Tehran were truly a major player in the Iraqi security problem. If so, where are they? The United States has, in fact, produced some weapons alleged to come from Iran, at a press conference in Baghdad in February 2007. The display was unconvincing, however, with some weapons experts noting that the few pieces on display were from Iranian export stocks that could have come from anywhere. Since then there have been more claims of captured weapons with Iranian markings. Most recently, in early May, the U.S. command announced that it would display Iranian weapons captured in Basra and Karbala. The dog-and-pony show was abandoned when it was determined that the weapons in question were not, in fact, traceable to Iran. That the United States appears desperate to prove Iranian interference in Iraq yet cannot produce unambiguous evidence supporting that claim should set many alarm bells ringing.

While journalist Gareth Porter traces the EFP narrative to Cheney's office.

I've long believed that conceding either evidence or argument to the Bush administration over Iran is a dangerous move. If we allow the Bush administration to argue by innuendo and from insufficient evidence, using leading statements and poor logic, then we will be paving the way for a "limited strike" that they do not believe will turn into an actual war and repeating the mistakes that led to the invasion of Iraq.