(February 14, 2007 -- 05:03 PM EDT)

We've been trying to bring you news in real time this morning on President Bush's comments on the Iran weapons issue and how those comments are being repeated, vouched for and interpreted by reporters. Some of the points and critiques we're making require a lot of unpacking and explanation. So let me try to review the key points in this post.

First, let me state what I take to be one of the most important lessons of the lead-up to the Iraq War and the debate over weapons of mass destruction. One reason there was too little scrutiny of even the least controversial of the White House's claims is that a climate was created in which it was viewed as untoward, irrational or simply naive to critically pick apart the details of these claims as long as it was clear that the alleged bad guys were bad guys.

Why focus on the minutiae of the details as long as the big picture is clear? Why be a nitpicker when the people in question are such bad guys? Things were the unstated terms of the debate.

In retrospect, of course, there were vast gaps in the claims and many of them were fairly obviously false if you just yanked on a few dangling threads.

Often, seemingly subtle or minor errors in reasoning or gaps in evidence turned out to have huge implications.

With that lesson in mind, carefully consider what we're hearing from the White House on this issue of Iranian arms.

much more with embedded links at TPM

...about the stuff we're talking about whether these things are EFPs or not? That's the sort of technical argument that can go on for a long time without any real resolution as to who's correct (and it favours the side that holds the classification reins - i.e., "them"). If we acknowledge that they are EFPs and that there's maybe some Iranian role in their production and acknowledge that there are Iranian weapons present in Iraq and that there's likely some Iranian role in that as well, then we can get on to a discussion of what it means and what we should do about it and that's an argument that can be won.

The administration points at Iran and says "see, see, evildoers!" then nail their feet to the ground with the fact that all of it is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of invading Iraq and the trainwreck that is the administration's policy towards Iran. In my view we should always return to the prime mover - bad policy in Iraq drives almost all of this. Iran is involved in Iraq because of bad Iraq policy. Iran has leverage on the nuclear issue because of bad Iraq policy. It doesn't stop with Iran, either. Afghanistan is much worse than it should have been at this point because of bad Iraq policy. The europeans are pissed at the United States because of bad Iraq policy (combine Gitmo and the constant stream of images coming out of Iraq and you've got an endless wellspring for disaffected marginalized Arab-extraction youth in Europe).

"Iran, bad or worse" is a winning debate for them. "Iraq, what do the real grownups do now" is better one.

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