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THE ADMINISTRATION THAT CRIED WOLF. Props to Joe Klein for this demolition job on the false certainty offered in the administration's anti-Iran briefing. As Klein shows, only a fool or a propagandist would make the confidently declarative claims our shdaowy intelligence officers gave out the other day:
the government of Iran is purposely murky. There is no box and line chart that lays out the authority structure--there are, in fact, all sorts of doppelganger agencies, some religious, some secular, that have similar functions. This is especially true of the military and intelligence services. There is the official Iranian military...and then there's the semi-official Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has formal military operations like the Quds division, and less formal operations like Hizbollah.Who funds the IRGC is also a mystery. U.S. intelligence sources--but apparently not the dudes who were giving the briefing--believe much of the IRGC's money comes from the enormous semi-private charities called Bonyads that were the recipients of the Shah's confiscated wealth. The Bonyads have close ties to the mullahs and also to the bazaaris. [...]The point is, if we have "no clue about what's going on inside Iran," as several high-ranking diplomatic and intelligence sources in the Bush Administration have told me...how on earth do we know that the IEDs have been authorized by the Iranian leadership? The answer is, we don't. The authorization could have come from Ahmedinejad (who has close ties to the IRGC), from the Supreme Leader, from the head of one of the Bonyads, from the military...or it could be a stand-alone bit of lethal entrepreneurship from the IRGC-Quds.What this smells like is the Bush administration beating the war drums. As I said, it's perfectly appropriate to display the ordance coming across the border from Iran, and to take action against IRGC operatives we find working in Iraq, but this Administration has a fabulously phony record when it comes to cooking intel and I'd say that (1) "inferences based on general intelligence assessments" just won't cut it here and (2) if you're going to implicate the Iranian leadership, I want to see satellite photos of Ayatollah Khamenei personally lugging the bombs across the border before I come to any conclusions.These guys have no credibility left. That, by the way, doesn't merely make them a bad administration, it makes them ineffective. By squandering their capital on the lies and deceptions necessary to heave the country into Iraq, they basically exhausted the willingness of Americans to assume the credibility of their intelligence. The end point of this is actually dangerous: You could end up with a scenario where the administration's presented intelligence is too sketchy to clear the bar raised by their past falsehoods, and so the country is inactive or incredulous before an actual threat. That's not, in any way, to suggest Iran is that threat. But as Joe says, I'll need to see photos of Khamenei drugging Anna Nicole Smith while wearing a "Death to Amerikkka" t-shirt before I trust the administration's insinuations. And even if I did get pictures, I might still hold out for video.--Ezra Klein
