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Frank Rich, of the NY Times, has done it again (as he is so often able) in this week's column. His ability to pick apart the Bush Propaganda Machine, as it were, is uncanny. For instance, as we're watching the Bushies pump up Iran, making them the bad guy in Iraq, most pundits think that we're on track to provoke a fight with Iran. They might be correct in the end, but Rich thinks it's all just a diversion right now:

The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.

In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles. Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called E.F.P.'s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Bush Team has pulled this stunt before:

Let's not forget that the White House's stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing news for public consumption has long track record. Its reason for doing so is always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the White House's political interests. When the Democrats were gaining campaign traction in 2004, John Ashcroft held an urgent news conference to display photos of seven suspected terrorists on the loose. He didn't bother to explain that six of them had been announced previously, one at a news conference he had held 28 months earlier. Mr. Bush played the same trick last February as newly declassified statistics at a Senate hearing revealed a steady three-year growth in insurgent attacks: he breathlessly announced a thwarted Qaeda plot against the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles that had already been revealed by the administration four months before.

Finally, Bush huffs and puffs about Iran:

"My job is to protect our troops. And when we find devices that are in that country that are hurting our troops, we're going to do something about it, pure and simple."

The problem is, as Rich points out, that it's all just another lie:

The Washington Post reported on its front page last Monday - the same front page with news of the Baghdad E.F.P. briefing - that there is now a shortfall of thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs. Worse, the full armor upgrade is not scheduled to be completed until this summer. So Mr. Bush's idea of doing something about it, pure and simple, is itself a lie, since he is doing something about it only after he has knowingly sent a new round of underarmored American troops into battle.

Finally, as Rich is so adept at doing, he tracks the shifting reasons we are in Iraq, as well as the embarrassment involved in supporting our Iraqi "allies":

Oh what a malleable war Iraq has been. First it was waged to vanquish Saddam's (nonexistent) nuclear arsenal and his (nonexistent) collaboration with Al Qaeda. Then it was going to spread (nonexistent) democracy throughout the Middle East. Now it is being rebranded as a fight against Tehran. Mr. Bush keeps saying that his saber rattling about Iran is not a pretext for war. Maybe so, but at the very least it's a pretext for prolonging the disastrous war we already have.

What makes his spin brazen even by his standards is that Iran is in fact steadily extending its influence in Iraq thanks to its alliance with the very Iraqi politicians that Mr. Bush himself has endorsed. In December the president welcomed a Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to the White House with great fanfare; just three weeks later American forces had to raid Mr. Hakim's Iraq compound to arrest Iranian operatives suspected of planning attacks against American military forces, possibly with E.F.P.'s. As if that weren't bad enough, Nuri al-Maliki's government promptly overruled the American arrests and ordered the operatives release so they could escape to Iran. For all his bluster about doing something about it, Mr. Bush did nothing.

It gets worse. This month we learned that yet another Maliki supporter in the Iraqi Parliament, Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ebrahimi, was convicted more than two decades ago of planning the murderous 1983 attacks on the American and French Embassies in Kuwait. He's now in Iran, but before leaving, this terrorist served as a security adviser, no less, to the first Iraqi prime minister after the American invasion, Ibrahim al-Jafaari. Mr. Jafaari, hailed by Mr. Bush as a strong partner for peace and freedom during his own White House visit in 2005, could be found last week in Tehran, celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution and criticizing America's arrest of Iranian officials in Iraq.

Read the entire article to get the full impact of what's really going on with Bush and Iraq and America.

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