No doubt Muqtada al-Sadr has ties with Iran—his religious mentor is Kazem al-Haeri, a prominent Shia leader, exiled to Iran by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s. Of course, the real problem here is that al-Sadr and al-Haeri are advocates of an Islamic state in Iraq. Moreover, al-Sadr considers the current puppet government in Iraq illegitimate and demands an immediate end to the occupation.

Earlier this month, Richard Clarke, who famously stated in 1999 that Osama would “likely boogie to Baghdad” (as noted in the nine eleven whitewash commission’s tumescent fairy tale), kicked off the bogus Iranian IED campaign by stating “the evidence is strong that the Iranian government is making these IEDs, and the Iranian government is sending them across the border and they are killing U.S. troops once they get there…. I think it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that, in all probability, the Iranian government is knowingly killing U.S. troops.” Clarke provided no evidence of this, as he provided no evidence that Osama visited Saddam in Baghdad, a claim thoroughly discredited as wishful neocon thinking. Clarke, “counterterrorism tsar” during the Clinton and Bush Senior administrations, however, should know something about Osama bin Laden, since he gave the final OK to allow the Bin Laden family to fly out of the country in the wake of nine eleven, thus allowing them to avoid the sort of difficult questions asked of the families of criminal suspects.

It appears the Bush neocons are building a case against Iran based on accusations made by the Pentagon and amplified by Richard Clarke, although we are told there is no love lost between Clarke and the Bushites. “US military intelligence sources have said that increasingly powerful IEDs, with greater armor-piercing power and sophisticated triggers, have been traced to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon…. Bush said that there was evidence that some components in the most powerful IEDs came from Iran, and that coalition forces had ’seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran,’” a claim, naturally, minus any sort of evidence, as the Bush neocons in the Pentagon and the White House are in the habit of not providing corroboration, nor does the corporate media ask for any.

Since the Shia of Iraq are not attacking occupation forces, Bush’s claim is more than absurd—it is another calculated lie we are expected to believe, as too many of us believed previous lies about Iraqi WMD and easily discredited links between Saddam and Osama. Bush’s neocon handlers are simply recycling tactics, demonstrably effective, as until recently millions of Americans believed Saddam had something to do with the attacks of nine eleven, even though there was zip evidence of this and, in fact, the claim was so absurd as to be laughable. If the Shia are not attacking occupation forces with IEDs, as Bush claims, then the assumption must be Iran is providing the IEDs to the Sunni insurgency, a dubious claim considering the relationship between Iraq’s formerly Sunni dominated government and Iran (recall Iran and Iraq fought a bloody war for most of the 1980s, costing more than a million lives and around a trillion dollars U.S.).

Finally, Bush complained about Shia infiltration of the Iraqi police. “There have been some reports of infiltration of the national police by Shia militias. And so we’re taking a number of steps to correct this problem,” said Bush. “We are working with the Iraqi leaders to find and remove any leaders in the national police who show evidence of loyalties to militia.” It would appear the Iraqi police, set up and trained by the United States, is so porous both Shia and Sunni elements are able to infiltrate its ranks. According to the CFR, the premier globalist organization with a keen interest in pacifying Iraq, Sunni infiltration of the Iraqi police and military is “widespread” and compares this to “Vietcong subversion of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army,” an apt comparison since the U.S. occupation of Iraq will end up little different than the situation in Vietnam, with helicopters ferrying VIPs and their dependents out of the Green Zone, leaving behind the poor dupes who cooperated with Bush’s cronies to be slaughtered, as the Shah’s were in Iran a generation ago.