The Lamest Iran Story Yet

By Cernig It's become obvious that the Bush administration and it's tame military spokespeople intend providing the media with a new opportunity for stenography on Iran's alleged meddling in Iraq every single day. Thus are narratives for war built. However, it's inevitable that in such a full press for demonization some stories will be weaker than others and some will fall into the utterly ridiculous. Today we have one of the latter, so baseless as to be laughable. I almost didn't post about it at all but it seems the WormTongues over on the right will swallow any critical ability to help the narrative along so here we go. Various stenographers are running variants of an AP report that insurgents dropping mortar bombs and rockets on the Green Zone in Iraq have been getting more accurate - and the US military blames Iran. Currently, the AP has the following quote:: "We have seen in the last three months a significant improvement in the capability of mortarmen and rocketeers to provide accurate fires into the Green Zone and other places and we think this is directly related to training that is conducted in Iran," [General] Odierno said. But when I read this on the newswires last night, the word "think" was instead "believe". Both mean the same, however - "guess". The military have produced no evidence for the assertion. Nor have they explained why other more likely explanations - such as involvement from a few of the thousands of deserted Iraqi Army soldiers, or involvement by Ba'athist insurgents trained by Saddam's regime or even that the mortarmen have simply been getting a lot of practise - have been discounted. If we're being generous, the most we can say is that the narrative about Iran's supposed meddling in Iraq has reached the scale of a kind of obsessive/compulsive disorder. The warmongers so much want there to be a causus belli with Iran it's like someone who has decided there must be an elephant in their refrigerator and is now convinced they see elephant footprints in the butter. If we're being cynical, the best we can say is that intelligence is being deliberately invented, distorted and fixed around the policy of creating a reason to attack iran.