The NYT’s Michael Gordon has developed an unfortunate habit. Bush administration officials and U.S. military leaders will pass along sensational tips about Iran intervening in Iraq to the detriment of American troops. Gordon, who wrote several wrong articles about Iraqi WMD before the invasion, dutifully passes along the administration’s line with minimal scrutiny. (E&P noted this morning that the NYT has found it necessary to re-edit Gordon stories to “provide a little balance,” in addition to “toning down” Gordon headlines.)
With that background in mind, here’s an item on the front page of the Times today.
Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.
The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.
“July was an all-time high,” Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said in an interview, referring to strikes with such devices…. American intelligence officials have presented evidence that the weapons come from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran, although Tehran has repeatedly denied providing lethal assistance to Iraqi groups.
That one phrase sounds rather passive: officials “have presented evidence.” To whom? How reliable is it? Has the NYT seen it?
Well, that’s where it gets a little tricky.
Here’s how Gordon described the situation, well after raising the inflammatory charges:
American intelligence says that its report of Iranian involvement is based on a technical analysis of exploded and captured devices, interrogations of Shiite militants, the interdiction of trucks near Iran’s border with Iraq and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iran and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.
Some critics of Bush administration policy, saying there is no proof that the top echelons of Iran’s government are involved, accuse the White House of exaggerating the role of Iran and Syria to divert attention from its own mistakes.
As Ezra noted, the reader never learns from the article whether “these are Iranian-made in the governmental sense, rather than simply produced by Iranian splinter groups that don’t much like our country.” (I’d only add that with the administration having lost track of 190,000 AK-47s in Iraq, the country of origin of some of these weapons can be a controversial point.)
For that matter, Gordon mentions the concerns of White House critics in passing, without noting whether or not, you know, they’re right.
Yglesias is also under the impression that “the administration is lying … and Gordon is passing on what his sources tell him.”
Iran is charged with supplying a bit more than 100 explosive-formed penetrator bombs to Iraqi militants per month. Iran is also a bit of a rinky-dink third world country. But even they clearly could be providing a lot more weaponry than that were they so inclined. Hezbollah’s armaments are, for example, much more sophisticated than that. If the Iranians ever were to reach the conclusion that the US were in danger of achieving its goals of creating a stable Iraq happy to play host to large US military installations and serve as an anti-Iranian bulwark in the region, Iran could easily step up its assistance and then you’re back to square one.
The issue here, then, really isn’t where, exactly, these EFPs come from and why. The issue is whether you think it serves US interests to try to reach an accommodation with Iran so they we can fight terrorism by trying to fight the al-Qaeda terrorists who want to come here and kill or, or whether you think it serves US interests to continue picking unprovoked fights with tangential adversaries.
Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, and Michael Gordon’s sources are apparently convinced, but that doesn’t make me feel better.