Robert Dreyfus says that the war’s supporters offered up a best case scenario–greeted as liberators, oil would pay for war, etc.–to justify the war. Now they are arguing a worst case scenario–al Qaeda takes over, terrible sectarian violence, etc.–to justify staying in Iraq. Why should anyone believe them? Aren’t they as likely to be wrong now as they were then?
It’s an intriguing article. Read it all here.
StevenD over at Booman Tribune has a few questions and observations about this morning’s news that the Pentagon is alleging that Iran is providing arms to groups in Iraq.
He notes the first thing I thought when reading the Post this AM, the mortar round has the markings “81 MM” and “3-2006″ on it. Then he asks:
What’s wrong about this picture? Several things. The absence of dating using the Iranian calendar for one thing. The use of the Roman alphabet for the markings on the shell, rather than the use of Farsi, for another. You see, in the past, Iranian armaments that have been captured or found had markings on them which were written in printed in Farsi (which uses a form of the Arabic alphabet) such as these:
[M]ost of the equipment the SAF captured from Eritrean Islamic Jihad in the Togan area of northeastern Sudan in April 1997 bore Farsi writing and was Iranian-made, from boots to light weapons.
Isn’t that odd? Iranian armaments have markings in the Farsi language on them when discovered in the Sudan in 1997, but Iranian arms alleged to have killed 170 US soldiers in Iraq have no Farsi markings on them when captured in 2007. Even odder, most US troop deaths (by far) have occurred in the Sunni areas of Iraq (e.g., Anbar province, around Tikrit, West Baghdad), but these Iranian arms are supposedly being delivered to Shi’a militias. What could possibly explain this seemingly counterintuitive inconsistency? It couldn’t possibly be a disinformation campaign by the Pentagon (like the one employed by the US Military in the run-up to the Iraq invasion) targeted at generating support for a military strike against Iran among the American public, could it?
Noooo, it couldn’t be that! Please make it stop!
UPDATE: An Iranian diplomat was challenged by Charlie Rose to back up his assertion that the evidence against Iran was fraudulent. He pointed to yet another inconsistency. The dates on the weapons are given in the U.S. style of Month/Date/Year instead of the rest of the world’s Date/Month/Year style.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020801680.html
Does anyone know this guy, Eric Fair? Brave a little too late but finally gaining an understanding of the damage Bush’s torture policies have caused.
Twenty below zero tonight with wind chills to forty below. I love the northwoods, uh, sort of.
The Dark Lord sat down with Frank Luntz. Luntz thinks that Republican’ts are not enamored with hearing the truth. Novak affirms Luntz:
“They do not want to hear the truth,” Luntz told me. While truth-telling is celebrated by Republican reformers such as presidential front-runner John McCain, it is a decidedly minority view in the GOP.
Who’d a thunk it?