We Don't Need No Stinking Proof

"President Bush said Wednesday he's convinced that the Iranian government is supplying deadly weapons to fighters in Iraq, even if he can't prove the orders came from the highest levels in Tehran," the Associated Press is reporting.

Sure, whatever. Just don't start another war. That kills people. But feel free to let conjecture bounce around the corners of your cranium.

Plus, Spencer Ackerman:

Bush declares himself deliberately agnostic as to why these Iranian munitions are in Iraq and who the Iranians may be giving them to. This is, however, the central issue at hand: not whether the al Quds force is operating with or without the approval of the Iranian government, but whether the al Quds force itself is actually responsible for arming fighters using the weapons against American soldiers and marines.

At stake is whether or not the Iranian government is pursuing what amounts to an act of war against U.S. troops.

Any number of alternative explanations are possible: renegade Qods Forces could be trying to make money on the lucrative Iraqi black market for weapons. Iran could simply be arming its Shiite proxies in the civil war as opposed to seeking attacks on U.S. forces. And those proxies could in turn be unloading some of the weapons on the very active black market. (Remember, some of them were discovered in December at a compound belonging to U.S. "partner" SCIRI.) An element of the Qods Forces could be attempting to attack U.S. forces without the knowledge of their leadership. And so on. These are contending theories that require additional information to be compelling. And there should be some explanation of why most of the deaths of US forces from these IEDs are coming from Sunni insurgents who are opposed to the people Iran supports -- a fact that some believe points to the black market.

Three things are significant about this. First, it's deliberately an argument by innuendo. Without specifying even what the U.S. is alleging about Iran, viewers (and journalists) are invited to draw their own inferences -- inferences understandably likely to be alarming. Second, we've been here before. It's exactly the sort of innuendo put forward by the administration before the Iraq war, when officials endlessly told us that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was "in Baghdad" -- and so we were to believe that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had the sort of operational relationship they never had.

Plus, Pat Lang on "Late Edition":

Well, anyone who has been studying this knows that the Iranians are playing a significant role in Iraq, because they are interested in the political outcome there. And the combat situation, of course, directly effects what the political outcome will be.

I think there is not much doubt that they probably have been supplying materiel of one kind of another to the Iraqi Shia. I don't have a problem with believing that.

What I have difficulty understanding, and maybe Ray does, too -- I don't know -- is the idea that all of a sudden, things which have probably been going on for months and months and months have taken on a whole new significance and now we are beating the drum over and over again about the degree of Iranian participation in the war and combat casualties amongst our troops when, in fact, the Iranians have been an ever-present factor from the beginning.