As the British whitewash investigation into the reasons that Blair supported Bush's invasion of Iraq continue, and as I have pointed out in the past how no one can really explain why the US invaded Iraq. To make up for that, there were efforts to blame the invasion -- and the subsequent failures -- onto a scapegoat. Hmmm....if you want to blame something that happened in the Mideast on someone, whom do you naturally chose ? Why, Iran, of course. It was IRAN'S FAULT that the US invaded Iraq, don't you know?
THere were three theories as to how Iran was really responsible for the US invasion of Iraq:
First, we had the "Double Agent Chalabi" justification: Iran, acting through Iranian double-agent Chalabi, had provided false WMD intelligence to the US, and so the Bush administration, being a bunch naive dupes who just fell off of the turnip truck, invaded Iraq and toppled Iran’s nemesis for them.
Second, the "Saddam was bluffing to deter Iran" justification: Saddam pretended to have WMDs in order to deter an aggressive Iran, but did this so well that he accidentally ended up inadvertently convincing the US that Iraq really had WMDs, which led to the US invasion of Iraq (nevermind that Saddam filed a 12,000 page report with the UN showing that he didn’t have WMDs – and was promptly vilified by Sec of State Rice for filing such a voluminous and detailed report.)
Third is the most convoluted justification: The NeoCons were dupes of Iranian intelligence: According to this justification for the US invasion of Iraq, "questions are raised" by a Senate report about whether "Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq" as Pentagon officials (Rhodes, Ledeen, Hadley, and Franklin, if I remember right) who met with Ghorbanifar may have been "used as agents of a foreign intelligence service to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government."
Oh those poor, innocent, gullible NeoCons that were so easily tricked by Iranian intelligence into pasing off that "bogus intelligence" from Iran about IRaqi WMDs!
Of course, it is just as possible (if not infinitely more so) that the "foreign intelligence service" that supposedly did this could have been Israel’s, since according to Israeli general Shlomo Brom, Israeli intelligence was "exaggerating the Iraqi threat" to push the US into attacking Iraq.
Or, the "foreign intelligence service" could have been Italy’s, since US intelligence agencies received several reports from the Italian intelligence service SISMI of a supposed agreement between Iraq and Niger for the sale of yellowcake uranium.
In fact, the whole idea that Bush was misled by "bogus intelligence" into invading Iraq is itself bogus — the "Uranium from Niger" documents were known to be crude forgeries, but were cited by the administration as a reason for the war anyway.
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