The Sanford Project

"Eh, about yeah big"

I'm calling bullsh*t on Rummy's latest pronouncement:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that weapons recently confiscated in Iraq were "clearly, unambiguously from Iran" and admonished Tehran for allowing the explosives to cross the border.

How stupid does he think we are (ok, we are stupid, but I'm saying...)? We've allowed the election of a pro-Iranian Shi'a government in Iraq. We've got Iraqi PM Ibrahim al-Jaafari meeting with Iranian leaders and laying flowers on the tomb of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The insurgency is being led by Sunnis who hate the Shi'a. As Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria explained, the message coming from Sunni insurgents is that the U.S. "is not our strategic enemy. Our strategic enemy is Iran. We want to end the war with America." And as Juan Cole explained, if there's one winner from the Iraq war, it has undoubtedly been Iran.

So why in the hell would Iran be giving bombs to Sunni insurgents? They have a decided interest in seeing the insurgency end, not continue.

Now, might there have been bombs crossing from Iran into Iraq? Possibly. But there's no way they were meant to be used by insurgents. A more likely possibility is that they were moved across the border by one of the pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

But it also wouldn't surprise me at all if the story were pure bullsh*t. After all, it was Rumsfeld's Pentagon that announced it was going to start lying to us to further its goals. And Rumsfeld himself has been known to get in front of the cameras and lie right to the American people.

The lesson: don't let Rummy and the batsh*it-insane, pro-war crowd use this as an excuse to invade Iran. You all know how well wars built on false premises end up...

(hat tip to Ubell)