In spite of Ryan Crocker's decent reputation, my reaction to his comments [reported on NPR this afternoon] about the meeting with the Iranians in Baghdad was "liar liar pants on fire." Crocker leaned heavily on the "discovery" of Iranian weapons in Iraq. Disingenous. Misleading. And, damn it, lying.
The presence of Iranian weaponry in Iraq is even less surprising than finding, say, American-made weapons available to Iraqis. Not to mention the vast stores of weaponry we failed to secure just after the invasion in 2003.
The witless policy of aggression towards Iran is coming mostly from the Cheney side of the White House family. Here's part of a post from Juan Cole in February which helps us understand what's going on:
The big briefing planned by the Bush administration on supposed Iranian weapons shipments to Iraq had to be postponed because the presentation was judged exaggerated and unsubstantiated by Secretary of State Condi Rice and by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. So that raises the question of who was spearheading this presentation inside the Bush administration? Getting Iran is an obsession of the Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and their plants inside the administration, such as Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams in the National Security Council and David Wurmser and John Hannah on Cheney's rump Veep national security council. Many Neoconservatives and other sorts of wingnut have a secret alliance with the Marxist Islamist MEK terrorist organization, which feeds them allegations about Iran in Iraq just as Ahmad Chalabi used to with regard to the Baath regime in Iraq.
So have the Cheney Neoconservatives been at least somewhat reined in by a new Rice-Gates axis of Realists?
And the beat goes on...
