Failing The Truthiness Test

By Cernig

Serious question - why does anyone believe a single thing the Iraqi government says when it comes to trying to keep their American protectors happy?

Just in the last couple of days, we've had three massive examples of flat lying from Iraqi officials - all of which played directly into either Bush administration wishes for victory in the War On Terror or wished-for reasons to hype the Iranian threat.

Yesterday, we had the Iraqi government claim it had arrested the number one man of Al Qaeda In Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri. That turned out not to be true - it was just some Iraqi with a similiar name.

Then we had a major hiccup in the "weapons from Iran" narrative (via Kevin Drum):

There was something interesting missing from Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner's introductory remarks to journalists at his regular news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday: the word "Iran," or any form of it. It was especially striking as Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman here, announced the extraordinary list of weapons and munitions that have been uncovered in recent weeks since fighting erupted between Iraqi and U.S. security forces and Shiite militiamen.

....A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin.

When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.

And finally we had an outrageous bit of lying to the Iraqi people about the risks posed by some of those allegedly-Iranian weapons.

On Monday, state-owned al-Sabah published a statement by the minister in which he spoke of the capture of a certain type of rocket that was never found in militia-held caches until now:

Defense minister Abdul Qadir Mohammed Obeidi revealed that army troops found a 200-mm ground-to-ground rocket manufactured in 2007 during a search operation by the troops north of Basra. Obeidi told al-Sabah in an exclusive interview that, under international laws and norms, this kind of rocket can be traded only with the approval of parliaments and is used only at times of extreme necessity during wars … and wondered how this rocket entered the country. Obeidi added that this rocket can be launched only from a special platform and by specialized crews.

From what I read in Iraq’s two biggest newspapers, it seems that the government is trying to step up the rhetoric against Iranian interference in Iraq and to induce uproar among the Iraqi public. Azzaman had the following information about the found rocket, provided by “intelligence officials“:

The rocket was manufactured in 2007 in Iran and is called Falaq-1. Falaq-1 is a strategic missile of immense destruction power and was used by Hezbollah against Israel in the July 2006 war. … The sources mentioned that launching this type of rocket requires a crew of several people with advanced technological expertise. … The sources, who preferred to remain unnamed, said that if this rocket was launched at a target, it could obliterate an entire city and kill all of its inhabitants even if those numbered by the tens of thousands. … The same sources added that increasing the range of the rocket is not a complex process and can be done inside Iraq and clarified that the discovery of this strategic rocket in Basra poses a threat to security in Iraq and the Middle East. The sources expressed fear that large numbers of this rocket might have entered Iraq with crews to launch them. If that happens then we’d be on the brink of a domestic and regional security crisis.

As even the fanatically pro-occupation Omar of Iraq the Model, author of the cited post above, realises - there's no way the Iraqi defense minister and intelligence officials are that ignorant about the difference between artillery rockets and city-killing strategic missiles. Omar says they're deliberately exaggerating to send a message to Tehran, which seems a feeble rationalisation on the face of it since Tehran already knows that the main customers for Iranian weapons smuggled into Iraq are the militias allied with the Iraqi government's Dawa and ISCI parties. It seems more likely it's a deliberate lie to the Iraqi people - particularly Sunnis - to get them onside with attempts to destroy the Sadrist movement, while at the same time ham-handedly trying to curry favor with the U.S. occupation.

Now - it should be noted that none of these three lies by the Iraqi government passed the U.S. administration's truthiness tests - they were all too outrageous and too easily disproven. But they should make you wonder just how many other lies have passed those tests and been used to bolster Bush administration narratives. How many independent experts have seen the allegedly Iranian-sourced weapons seized from the Mahdi Army in Basrah, for instance? How many people have independently confirmed confessions arrived at by enhanced techniques that Iran has training camps for Iraqi insurgents?