News reports about the administration’s new claims about Iranian arms transfers have repeatedly noted the shadow of shattered credibility hanging over the Bush White House. But this isn’t some unfortunate obstacle for a White House now doing its best to stick to the facts. Look closely and you can see all the signs of misleading claims and carefully crafted phrases that paved the path to the current quagmire in Iraq.

First, remember one of the most important lessons of the lead-up to the Iraq war. One reason there was too little scrutiny of even the least controversial of the White House’s WMD and Iraq-al Qaeda connection claims is that a climate was created in which it was viewed as untoward, irrational, unpatriotic or simply naïve to critically pick apart the details of these claims as long as it was clear that the alleged bad guys were really 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? Those were the unstated terms of the debate. In retrospect, of course, there were vast gaps in the claims and many revealed themselves to be obviously false if you just yanked on a few dangling threads. 

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

That DOD briefing in Baghdad presented evidence of Iranian-manufactured super-IEDs  being used against U.S. troops. It is now being claimed, but with little or no evidence the administration is willing to share, that the Qods Force of the Iranian Republican Guards is responsible for bringing these super-IEDs into Iraq.

In his press briefing this week, President Bush said “with certainty” that the Qods forces are giving these weapons to fighters for use against American troops. The only question, he claimed, was whether the leaders of the Iranian government at the highest level directly told them to do so.

But this claim was intentionally framed to duck the key issue of who the Iranians are really arming and why.

First, as the University of Michigan professor and blogger Juan Cole has noted, there’s a logical disconnect in these charges, since the Iranians are supporting their Iraqi Shi’a co-religionists and most U.S. casualties are at the hands of the Sunni insurgents they oppose. So are we supposed to believe that Iran is arming its mortal enemies, the Sunnis?

Indeed, the only direct evidence the administration has been willing to publicize comes from December, when we found Qods force personnel at the headquarters of our allies, Abdel-Aziz al Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

That was hardly a surprise; the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been SCIRI’s prime sponsor for a quarter-century. And remember, the SCIRI folks are our allies in Iraq.

Given the black-market traffic in arms in Iraq right now, it’s not at all a stretch to believe that weapons are dispersing from Iranian proxies like SCIRI to Sunni insurgents who are in turn using them against U.S. troops. Indeed, it seems like a more probable theory than the administration’s assumption that Iranians are acting in concert with the Sunni militants who are involved in an ongoing campaign of indiscriminate slaughter of Iraqi Shi’a civilians.

President Bush’s phrasing is meant to give Americans the impression we know something we don’t — namely, that the Qods force is providing weapons for use against U.S. forces. In fact, if we go on the information the administration has made public, we know no such thing.

Recently, a reporter friend told me that the administration is saying on background that the really slam-dunk evidence is stuff it’s not yet able to release. But as I told this person, after the experience of 2002 and 2003, mere self-respect prevents me from putting any credence whatsoever in such claims.

If they had the evidence, we’d be seeing it.

After the Iran war, we’ll probably be walked back and shown that President Bush never really said that the Qods force was giving these weapons to the people using them against U.S. troops. He didn’t fib. We just didn’t listen closely enough. He was just saying that the Qods folks gave them to someone. But he wasn’t saying who.

So before all our soldiers die and before the president makes yet a million more screw-ups for which we’ll pay for decades to come, let’s look closely at what he’s actually saying.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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