by D. Cupples | If so, it wouldn't be the first time that Administration folks misled us taxpayers about an important issue. The American Prospect reports:
"In the worst days of the Iraq War, the Pentagon launched a media campaign designed to convince the world that Iran was smuggling arms to Iraqi insurgents. Some of the claims strained credulity, such as the idea that Iran would supply Sunni insurgents fighting against its Shia allies. In particular, Iran was supposed to be the main supplier of deadly EFPs, or explosively formed projectiles. To some, these claims were alarming evidence of malevolent Iranian intentions. To others, they were a transparent effort to blame US failure on Iran."
"Turns out that the latter were right:
'The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi'a militia caches during that period.
'The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi'a militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi'a militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.'" (American Prospect)
I remember wondering last year if Administration officials were spinning facts in order to find justification for the bombing of Iran.
In late 2006 and early 2007, Bush Administration officials screamed accusations that Iran's government had been arming U.S. enemies in Iraq. In February 2007, a Washington Post article said this:
"Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called into question assertions by three senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad on Sunday who said the highest levels of Iranian government were responsible for arming Shiite militants in Iraq with the bombs."
The Bush Administration also spent much of 2007 screaming that Iran had nuclear weapons (therefore, we should attack that nation). In December that year, one of our own National Intelligence Estimates became public -- an NIE indicating that Iran had ceased its nuclear-weapons program back in 2003 (or so).
Given that the Bush Administration has given us cause -- on multiple occasions -- to doubt its claims and credibility, what are we to believe now regarding the question of whether the Iranian government had armed our enemies in Iraq?
Speaking or arming people, I haven't brought this up in a while: What happened to the 190,000 U.S. weapons that went missing in Iraq from 2004-05?
Seriously. How many of them ended up on the black market? How many ended up in enemy hands?
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