john-mccain.JPGBush and Cheney and their friends are looking for a pretext to attack Iran, and aren’t above making one up, as Dan Froomkin reminds us:

The Bush administration’s latest story line about Iraq — that Iran is now the primary problem there — should be greeted with profound skepticism.

Not only is it the latest in a series of rationales for U.S. involvement in Iraq, most of which have turned out to be based on flawed intelligence, misrepresentations or outright dishonesty.

But there are at least two illegitimate reasons why the White House would want the American public to see Iran as a threat right now.

One is that President Bush needs a definable, demonizable enemy for public-relations purposes, to take attention away from the reality that U.S. troops remain perilously and indefinitely astride several civil wars and resistance movements.

And the other is that the White House — or at least the Cheney faction within it — is still eager to do something definitive to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions before the end of Bush’s term. With a preemptive strike off the table, advocates of a military attack could be looking for a provocation they could turn into a casus belli.

And so, nothing these people say at this point should be taken at face value — even when it’s supported by military officials on the ground. Many sincere people with plausible-sounding assessments have turned out to be selling a bill of goods when it comes to Iraq.

Juan Cole adds more reality to counter the "Iran is behind everything wrong in Iraq" bull.

Which is yet another reason why letting John Sidney McCain III, the fake-folksy heir of a wealthy Southern military family, anywhere near the White House would be a grave and disastrous mistake.

He has been repeatedly — and most likely deliberatelyconflating (Shia-dominated) Iran with (Sunnigroup) Al-Qaeda in order to further the "Iran iz in ur Iraq base, killin ur dudes" nonsense. He’s also been trying to play the "right policy, wrong implementation" game on Iraq and Iran, a way to pretend to distance himself from Bush even though he’s voted for Bush’s Iraq plan over and over and over again.

Unfortunately, we can’t count on the mainstream media to do this, because they’re generally too busy covering for him. (This well-informed Boston Globe blast at McCain’s Bush-cloned economic non-policy is a rare and welcome exception to the rule.) Which is why we’re here.

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