reach disclosure of Iranian meddling approach the level of Stevenson in front of the United Nations during the Cuban Crisis? Or even the faux seriousness nature of Colin Powell's presentation? I mean, it was an anonymous dump of a powerpoint presentation. How pathetic.

^{"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination."}

...from an intelligence perspective is pretty different. In Cuba, they were able to fly a U2 over and collect imagery which showed what was there (As an aside, have you ever seen those overheads? The ones that I've seen have a lot of arrows and text, but it is still something of a leap of faith to accept the conclusions drawn.) in Iraq, the issue's a lot more thorny. This is probably the best that you're going to get in open source, unless they decide to cut loose the technical collection stuff, which I very seriously doubt they're going to do.

As I see it focussing on this as the means of forwarding an alternative perspective on Iran and Iranian involvement is not a great strategy. The evidence looks to me to pretty clearly support the notion that there has been movement of materiel across the Iranian frontier, probably in low but not insignificant quantities. Advancing modes of argumentation that seek essentially to deny this seems to me to be less effective than seeking to put it in broader context and ask why it is that the administration's policy is so screwed up, even accepting that these assertions are true. Iran has valid national security concerns in Iraq - movement of weapons is one means that they use to address those concerns. The administration should be pilloried for the fact that they've actively fought against meaningful dialogue on this issue, leaving the Iranians little alternative means of addressing their issue and furthering our cause not at all.

In my view the administration is playing primarily a domestic political game, primarily to avoid real substantive debate on Iraq - the way that one keeps the pressure on them is not to fall into the trap of asserting that they are manufacturing Gulf of Tonkin II, but rather to repeatedly hammer them on the fact that the way out of this is to disarticulate the nuclear and Iraqi security issues and talk to the Iranians about enhancing stability, as Baker and the boys concluded. You've clearly advanced the notion of the latter, but in my view the key to making it work is not boxing yourself in by narrowly looking at the evidence and saying "is that all you've got, I don't believe it". You do that, and the discussion will never really get beyond the "yes it is, no it isn't" point. For me the true similarity between this and the run up to Iraq isn't the manufacture of evidence, it's the reactions to the evidence asserted and the mistake of too narrow a focus on that evidence.

"Political Islam is a dream or a nightmare, but not a sociological reality." - Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

And what do we know about their source(s) of arms? And where exactly did the PowerPoint objets d'art actually turn up? And by whom? Enquiring minds are very curious to know.

any chance some of it could be captured munitions from the Iran/Iraq war?

Or would it have degraded too much by now.

It also seems coincidental that the method of marking the date of manufacture on the mortar rounds, apart from not being written in Farsi or following the Shia calendar, seems to be written in the american format of month/day/year.