UP IS DOWN, REDUX. People have been rightly concerned for a while now about seeing, in the current domestic discussion of Iran, a twilight-zone repetition of the dynamics of the prewar Iraq debate. Greg, looking at today's Washington Post piece confirming Iran's desire for direct talks with the United States and delineating a policy divide between intelligence experts and Bush administration officials, raises a particularly nauseating possibility: that we might soon see Iran hawks pointing to the Iraq debacle as a way to discredit the cautionary advice intelligence experts are now offering vis-�-vis Iran. "Look at how they screwed up the Iraq WMD intelligence, why would you trust them?" -- that kind of thing. The sheer audacity of such a move is precisely what makes me pretty sure it's going to be deployed by these folks; it's best to be prepared.
--Sam Rosenfeld
