We know what President Bush thinks of the National Intelligence Estimate which inconveniently concluded "with high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. As he put it, the intelligence community sometimes comes to conclusions "separate from what I may or may not want."

But John Bolton has a way of striking to the heart of the issue. From The Jerusalem Post:

The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, as well as the skewed reporting around it, is a sign of the "illegitimate politicization" of the American intelligence establishment, according to former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton....

"I know the people who wrote this intelligence estimate," Bolton continued. "They are not from our intelligence community. They're from our State Department. It was a highly politicized document written by people who had a very clear policy objective."

Hypocritical as it might seem for a former Bush administration official to decry "politicization" of the government, Bolton is actually quite canny in his phrasing here. His problem is with "illegitimate" politicization, not politicization in general. That's because, as he explains, "in our system, constitutional legitimacy flows from the president, who was elected, through his officials."

For the record:

The small, boxlike objects dropped in the water by Iranian boats as they approached U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday posed no threat to the American vessels, U.S. officials said yesterday, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the incident reflects Iran's new tactics of asymmetric warfare.

After passing the white objects, commanders on the USS Port Royal and its accompanying destroyer and frigate decided there was so little danger from the objects that they did not bother to radio other ships to warn them, the officials said.

At least now a more complete picture of what happened one week ago in the Strait of Hormuz has developed. The Iranian speedboats maneuvered aggressively, dropped white boxes in the water, and a menacing threat was heard over the radio, so the initial alarmed reaction of Naval commanders was certainly reasonable. But commanders apparently quickly determined that the boxes weren't mines or any other kind of threat, and the radio transmission likely came from a prankster. And it took a week for that to become clear.

It just gets more and more bizarre. From The Navy Times:

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”...

In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets....

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Here again is the audio (mp3) of that radio transmission.

On a more serious note, the BBC reports that "Iranian speedboats approached US warships in two previously undisclosed incidents in the Strait of Hormuz in December."

As far as international incidents go, this one's a little baffling.

On Tuesday, we gave you the rundown of Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when three hulking American naval ships were greeted by five Iranian speedboats. U.S. officials said that the boats maneuvered aggressively, dropped two white boxes in the water, and issued threats over the radio. Just when the boats were getting too close for comfort, they said, and the Americans were preparing for a warning shot, the boats sped away.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released an edited video of the incident, which you can see here:

On the audio (mp3) of the radio communication, a voice slowly pronounces the words "I am coming to you," and then as the American tries to communicate, says, "You will explode after a few minutes."

But since then, the American version of the incident has undergone a revision. The radio threat, the Navy now admits, may not have come from the Iranian boats after all. The voice, a number of observers have pointed out, seems to come out of nowhere and doesn't have the expected engine noise in the background, and in fact, The Washington Post reports, the accent doesn't even sound Iranian.

The Iranians, meanwhile, have steadfastly insisted that nothing of this sort ever happened. To that effect, they released a video yesterday of a completely ordinary greeting between Iranian and naval vessels. But it's impossible to tell whether it's even the same incident. U.S. officials say that it's not.

So.... It remains unclear what happened really happened there and why. William Arkin of the Post's Early Warning blog suggests that Iran "wanted to send a not-so-subtle message to their Persian Gulf neighbors that they could disrupt the flow of oil and that any U.S.-Iranian confrontation would hurt the pocketbooks of the ruling sheiks."

The Bush administration took the ball and ran with it, playing up the "confrontation," though President Bush seemed to indicate an initial dearth of talking points. He regained his footing later, warning of "serious consequences" if it happened again. And if it does happen again, maybe it will all seem less strange.

Here's President Bush today when he was asked about Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz, where, according to U.S. officials, a small group of Iranian speedboats issued threats to American ships and then fled just as the Americans were about to open fire:

I'm not sure what happened to the talking points on this one, because all Bush could bring himself to say was that it was "a provocative act," and (after several more seconds of silence) "they should not have done it." Hardly what you'd expect given the show they put on last year.

It's been nearly a year since the Bush Administration mounted a public relations campaign accusing Iran of arming insurgents in Iraq. If that was a campaign to generate enough public support to go on the offensive against Iran, it failed. But relations between the two haven't exactly warmed since -- nor, it's safe to say, has the administration's trigger finger gotten any less itchy.

Which makes this worrying:

We're coming at you, the Iranian radio transmission warned. Your ships will explode in a couple of minutes.

The United States and Iran reached the verge of a military confrontation early Sunday after five Iranian patrol boats sped toward the USS Port Royal and two accompanying ships as they crossed the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. The Iranian vessels, manned by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, broke into two groups and "maneuvered aggressively" on both sides of the U.S. ships, coming as close as 500 yards, recounted Vice Adm. Kevin J. Cosgriff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.

After the radio transmission, two of the Iranian boats dropped "white box-like objects" into the water, Cosgriff said. The U.S. ships responded with evasive maneuvers, radioed warnings to the Iranians and sounded ships' whistles, while ordering increased readiness of their own vessels. After their messages were not heeded, the U.S. ships prepared to fire in self-defense, but the Iranians abruptly turned and sped north toward their territorial waters.

As the U.S. officials tell it, this was either an aborted attack (the little white boxes were mines) or a sort of mock attack (the boxes were just little boxes) meant to test how U.S. vessels react.

Meanwhile, the Iranians say that there were no aggressive maneuvers, no boxes, no threatening radio transmissions.

Perhaps most intriguing about the episode is that Pentagon officials say that the five speedboats belong to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Last year, the administration focused on the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force as the ones responsible for arming Iraqi insurgents -- and made quite an effort to argue that the Quds Force was necessarily acting with the authorization of the Iranian government. In October, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force. So maybe this is just another chapter in that back and forth. Or maybe it's something more.

Faced with the inconvenient assessment that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, GOP Senators are running an old game plan: create a commission that will treat the truth and a lie as equal possibilities. However, Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, is unequivocally standing by the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

The Washington Post reports that GOP Senators John Ensign (R-NV) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) want to create a commission on the NIE that will, inevitably, trash it. For some historical perspective on how frequently the right has gone after intelligence assessments that conflict with desired conservative policy preferences, read Ilan Goldenberg. His bottom line: "In all of these cases conservatives played with and disregarded intelligence to help make their cases for a particular policy. And in all of these cases the conservatives were wrong." But he might have added something else: in all of these cases the conservatives were successful, despite being, you know, wrong.

Meanwhile, others on the right see something more nefarious at work. Danielle Pletka of AEI smears the entire intelligence community to the Post without any evidence: "This NIE was presented with a clear intention to deceive..." Similarly, in The New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi doesn't bother addressing the new intelligence that prompted the Iran volte-face, and simply says the U.S. has lost "the will to stop Tehran" from doing something that Tehran isn't doing.

The intelligence community isn't backing down in the face of the right-wing pressure. "We certainly stand by the product," says DNI spokeswoman Vanee Vines. "It represents the consensus of intelligence community. That was clear when we released it. … We stand by it as comprehensive and accurate." But don't expect the braying from the right about appeasement and betrayal to cease.

Kevin Drum speculated earlier today that pressure from the Democratic-controlled Congress might have pushed Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, into releasing today's National Intelligence Estimate, which judges that Iran doesn't have an active nuclear weapons program. It's an assessment that's certainly in line with past practice: after all, the administration isn't in the habit of releasing much information at all, let alone data points that suggest Iran can't, you know, start World War Three. But in this case, it looks like McConnell took the initiative without help.

An aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, says that Rockefeller -- the obvious culprit in any Senatorial intelligence push -- didn't press McConnell to release the NIE's key judgments. Rockefeller's House counterpart, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), released a statement today saying that he wants to be "fully informed about the classified sources upon which this estimate is based" and that he will "review areas where certain agencies dissent." That sounds like a man in the dark about the NIE. At the risk of wild speculation, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's unlikely that their GOP colleagues didn't want the world to know about Iran's nuclear non-threat.

Perhaps other Senators or Congresscritters pushed McConnell. But so far it looks like this is a case of the intelligence community actually being out to set the record straight.

Hmm. Could it be that Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is trying to signal his opposition to a war with Iran?

This morning, the intelligence community released the key judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding "with high confidence" that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. Yet, just weeks ago, McConnell announced that the NIEs -- assessments of a given national-security or foreign-policy priority across all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies -- would no longer be available to the general public. The Iran NIE, McConnell said, would be no exception. Here's how AP intelligence reporter Pamela Hess reported McConnell's decision on November 13:

McConnell also said a new national intelligence estimate on Iran should be complete in about a month, but its key findings will not be released publicly. He says doing so could alert Iran to its intelligence vulnerabilities.

How quickly times change! Credit McConnell and the intelligence community for the public disclosure: after all, its previous estimate on Iran, completed in 2005, judged that Iran had an active nuclear-weapons program, so keeping the new NIE secret would have amounted to letting an inaccuracy stand. Indeed, that's how McConnell's deputy, Donald Kerr, described the motivation behind disclosure in a statement to reporters:

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Frontline does it again. Fresh after the documentary show's penetrating look at Dick Cheney's pet legal theories, it travels to Tehran to explore the slowly building crisis between the U.S. and Iran. In doing so, Frontline pulls off a real coup, presenting the first-ever televised interview with Mohammed Jafari, a Qods Force commander and deputy leader of Iran's national security council.

Jafari isn't a household name, but in U.S.-Iranian relations, he's a big deal. Earlier this year, the U.S. raided the Iranian consulate in Erbil in an attempt to capture him, but Jafari wasn't at the consulate during the raid. Frontline describes him as one of the architects of Iran's Iraq policy -- which, the U.S. alleges, includes providing weapons to anti-American insurgent and militia groups -- and had the raid succeeded, U.S.-Iranian relations could very well have reached a crisis point.

In the documentary, Jafari promises retaliation against any U.S. military strike on Iran:

You will not find a single instance in which a country has inflicted harm on us and we have not responded. So if the United States makes such a mistake, they should know that we will definitely respond. And we don't make idle threats.

He's joined in that sentiment by Hossein Shariatmadari, a mouthpiece for "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i:

As the Supreme Leader has said, if we're attacked we will threaten all American interests around the globe. The first step would be that all areas in Israel are in reach of our missiles, I mean there is not a single place in Israel outside the range of our missiles.

Showdown With Iran airs tonight on PBS.

Last week, Barnett Rubin of New York University sparked a controversy by accusing hardliners in Dick Cheney's office of giving right-leaning think tanks in Washington "instructions" to start a drumbeat for war with Iran. Among the think-tankers Rubin called out was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and Iran specialist, who wrote in this week's Newsweek that diplomacy with Iran and other "moderate tactics" are doomed to failure. I asked Gerecht for a response to Rubin's allegations, and he e-mails:

I like Rubin, but I have no idea of what he's talking about. (And I see that George Packer at The New Yorker seems to be similarly "informed" and similarly convinced of his sanity.) Newsweek contacted me. Fareed Zakaria was on vacation/book leave. They wanted to know whether I wanted to write about Iran. I said sure. Actually, I almost said "no" since I was in the midst of an international move and had no time. FYI: I don't know of a single instance of the VP's
office trying to encourage commentary from AEI staff. Not once. I suspect the VP's office knows that such forays would be highly unwise. The idea is offensive, and I think they know that, and would likely lead to considerable unpleasantness.

Imagine if Barack Obama won the presidency and his VP, Joe Biden, called you and George
Packer and suggested that you two write for them since all concerned were more or less on the same page. Even if you were in total agreement with Mr. Biden and wanted to advance "the cause," I suspect you would find such a suggestion presumptuous, to say the least. And on a side note, I wouldn't be so sure that the VP and his principals want to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. I've known a few folks from that office over the years, and I wouldn't say that confidently. The press commentary pitting the "wise" and "professional" State Department against the "reckless" and "bellicose" VP office is, to put it politely, hyperventilated. One of the good things that might come from a Democratic victory in 2008 is that center-left/left-wing journalists, i.e., the vast majority of journalists, might actually know somebody well enough in the government to make this conspiratorial reflex less acute.

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Barnett Rubin is the last person to set off wild speculation about war with Iran: the longtime Afghanistan expert is wonky, moderate and thoroughly analytical. But that's exactly what happened on Wednesday, when Rubin blogged that an anonymous, plugged-in friend told him that Dick Cheney's office had issued "instructions" to conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to start a drumbeat for attacking Iran. In order to determine precisely what he's alleging, and get a sense of its credibility, I spoke with Rubin, a senior fellow at NYU's Center on International Cooperation this morning.

Cheney's likely motivation for issuing such instructions to his think-tank allies would be to win an inter-administration battle over the future of Iran policy. Cheney, an advocate of confronting the Iranians militarily, faces opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where the primary concern is preventing an open-ended Iraq commitment from decimating military preparedness for additional crises. A new war is the last thing the chiefs want, and on this, they're backed by Defense Secretary Bob Gates. "It may be that the president hasn't decided yet," says Rubin.

On this reading, the real target of any coordinated campaign between the VP and right-wing D.C. think tanks on Iran isn't the Iranians themselves, or even general public opinion, but the Pentagon. Cheney needs to soften up his opposition inside the administration if Bush is to ultimately double down on a future conflict, something that a drumbeat of warnings about the Iranian threat can help accomplish. When asked if a third war seems surreal, given the depth of investment the U.S. has given Iraq and Afghanistan, Rubin replies, "I'm out of adjectives."

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The drumbeat against Iran from the administration has been constant this year -- reaching its highest pitch in February, when anonymous military briefers laid out the case to reporters. The Quds force, an elite military brigade, the administration line went, was channeling EFPs (explosively formed penetrators, a particularly dangerous type of IED) into Iraq to be used against U.S. soldiers.

The complications of the case were brushed aside, but despite an organized media offensive by the administration, it was not a wholly successful campaign. But lately the case has been revived. And now McClatchy reports that Dick Cheney has been pushing for strikes against Iranian forces in Iraq. But don't worry -- Cheney says that the administration ought to wait for "hard new evidence":

Behind the scenes, however, the president's top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy....

Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

There is the expected divide within the administration on the question -- with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the other side. But a Cheney spokeswoman tells McClatchy "'the vice president is right where the president is' on Iran policy."

Note: The Los Angeles Times has an interesting companion to McClatchy's piece this morning, reporting on Bush's continued attempts to convince Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki that Iran is "not a force for good." From Maliki's perspective -- and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's -- things are obviously a lot more complicated.

This must have been the most controversial sentence in the entire NIE:

We assess Lebanese Hizbullah, which has conducted anti-US attacks outside the United States in the past, may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland over the next three years if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or to Iran.

Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, murdering 241 Americans, but hasn't pulled off an attack on the U.S. since. It's significant that the NIE says it won't attack the U.S. absent a sense of provocation, particularly over Iran. You can imagine the row that must have caused within the intelligence community.

Meet Mahtaub "Mattie" Hojjati. A well-connected government and business consultant Hojjati is about to embark on a new career: revolutionary provocateur. She has two missions: to hasten the overthrow of the Iranian regime, and to convince the American public to support her.

Under the byline of Mattie Fein -- her husband is Bruce Fein, the prominent Reagan-era Justice Department lawyer last seen calling for the impeachment of Dick Cheney -- Hojjati penned an op-ed in the Washington Times last week heralding the creation of a new think tank, known as the the Institute for Persian Studies, devoted to pushing the regime over the abyss. From her perspective, the nearly 30-year old Iranian Revolution is in a terminal phase. "The cue that most of the population is looking for is international support," she tells TPMmuckraker, "but right now, they're getting mixed signals."

Exile politics played a crucial role in getting the U.S. into the Iraq war. From the late 90s until the invasion of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi persuaded many in Washington that deposing Saddam Hussein and imposing a democratic regime in its place would be relatively cost-free. (The cooked WMD and terrorism propaganda didn't hurt, either.) While Hojatti balks at a U.S.-Iranian war -- something Chalabi embraced -- her project bears some similarity to prewar Iraq exile politics in D.C. She's not pushing any dubious intelligence. But she does want to "reeducate" the American public as to why "Iran is so critically important in a geopolitical sense, why they should care." Caring, in this sense, means supporting the overthrow of the Iranian theocracy -- with air strikes, if necessary, Hojjati says.

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Well, that didn't take long. Hours after Nick Burns told CNN that the administration has "irrefutable evidence" that Iran is arming the Taliban, Defense Secretary Bob Gates revised his June 4 remarks that the provenance of the Iranian weaponry is unclear. Here's Gates then:

There have been indications over the past few months of weapons coming in from Iran. We do not have any information about whether the government of Iran is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it's smuggling or exactly what's behind this, but there clearly is evidence that some weapons are coming into Afghanistan destined for the Taliban, but perhaps also for criminal elements involved in the drug trafficking coming from Iran.

“It’s pretty clear there is a fairly substantial flow of weapons (into Afghanistan),” he said. “I haven’t seen intelligence specifically to this effect, but I would say given the qualities we’re seeing, it’s difficult to believe it is associated with smuggling or the drug business or that it is taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government.”

So it's now "difficult to believe" that Tehran might not be involved in the weapons shipments, despite the absence of any particular intelligence on the question. Gates has been the most prominent dissonant voice on Iran -- and the Middle East more broadly -- in the Bush administration, yet here he is, inching closer toward the line that Burns unveiled to CNN. How long before he cites his own "irrefutable evidence?"

In a statement echoing February's claims that the Iranian government was arming Iraqi terrorist groups, Nicholas Burns, the State Department's influential undersecretary for political affairs, told CNN today that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is arming the Taliban as well:

"There's irrefutable evidence the Iranians are now doing this and it's a pattern of activity," U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told CNN.

"If you see the Iranians arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank and, of course, arming Shia militants inside Iraq itself [sic]. It's very violent and very unproductive activity by the Iranian government."

And one that puts Tehran contrary to the U.N. Security Council, Burns said.

Burns's comments come a little more than a week after Defense Secretary Bob Gates said that it wasn't yet certain whether the presence of Iranian weaponry in Afghanistan indicated a concerted strategy on the part of the Iranian government. Now, apparently, the evidence has become "irrefutable."

If Iran is in fact aiding the Taliban, it's aiding an old enemy. In 2001, according to a presidential rival to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guard helped U.S.-backed Afghan fighters overthrow the Taliban. (U.S. intelligence officials have called the claim somewhat overblown.) The theory goes that now, Iran feels so threatened by U.S. forces on its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan that it will cast its lot in with whomever fights the Americans, despite old antipathies. It's known as "managed chaos." Muhammed Tahir, writing for the Jamestown Foundation, contends, "Iran has been increasing its operations in Afghanistan in an effort to gain influence with the contending insurgent factions and to hasten the departure of U.S. troops from the country."

It's a plausible enough theory, given that Iran remains surrounded by U.S. forces led by a bellicose administration, but it remains unclear what Burns's "irrefutable evidence" of Iranian strategy is, and how it represents an improvement over the evidence Gates possesses. Determining the ultimate provenance of Iranian weaponry is tricky. Last year, the Guardian reported that Iranian operatives were offering military support to Taliban-held areas in Afghanistan -- but most likely, those Iranians were Baluch seperatists fighting Tehran, rather than Iranian government agents. That's not to say that the Iranians aren't supplying the Taliban -- only that "irrefutable" evidence of who's arming who in Afghanistan is often more refutable than it might initially appear.

Finally, some clarity.

The New York Times provides the history of U.S. concern over Iran's role in Iraq, reporting that in July, 2005, the U.S. sent a diplomatic protest to Iran over the use of allegedly Iranian-made explosives (EFPs) being used against coalition troops in Iraq by Shiite groups.

Somehow these concerns culminated in the U.S. military's infamous, anonymous EFP press briefing in mid-February.

It was a long road. But let's focus in on one thing. It's always been a credible allegation that Iran would in some fashion be supplying its Shiite proxies in the civil war, but let's set that aside. That's not the allegation that the U.S. made in that briefing and immediately thereafter. Rather, the administration clearly made a choice to focus on the evidence that Iranian manufactured weapons were being used in Iraq and stay silent on the crucial detail of who they were being used by. The briefing referred to Iranian support of generic "extremists," without specifying Sunni or Shiite.

The reason for this choice was clear: the vast majority of U.S. casualties come at the hands of Sunni insurgents, not Shiite. But suddenly Iran was elevated to being the major enemy there. Soon senior State Department officials were claiming that Iran is "the most disruptive, negative force in the Middle East." Move over, Al Qaeda.

But it's clear from the Times' piece that there was never any ambiguity -- on the part of the U.S. military, at least -- as to whom Iran might be supplying with weapons.

And that briefing? It wasn't for the purpose of galvanizing public support for a war against Iran, no. It was merely a tactical decision:

...in Baghdad, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top American commander, approved plans to brief the news media on the E.F.P. issue — a reversal for military officials, who had been reluctant to highlight the effectiveness of the weapons for fear of encouraging their use.

“Our intelligence analysts advised our leaders that the historical Quds Force pattern is to pull back when their operations are exposed, so MNF-I leadership decided to expose their operations to save American lives,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief spokesman for Multinational Forces-Iraq, as the American-led command is known.

I guess we all just overreacted then?

Update: And while we're at it, it's worth mentioning again that the claim that Iran is the only possible supplier for EFPs in Iraq has been debunked.

Ever since Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) asked Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in a Senate committee hearing whether it was the view of the administration that it had the authority to invade Iran without provocation or congressional authorization, we've been watching to see if he got an answer.

Well, he did, or he didn't -- it's not clear. In any case, Webb has gone ahead today and introduced legislation that would forbid the administration from using funds to invade Iran without congressional authorization.

Both Rice and one of Rice's deputies wrote Webb "lengthy letters" about whether the administration claimed the authority to invade Iran without Congress' say-so. But "neither could give me a clear response," Webb said today on the floor. Sen. Webb also had a private meeting with Rice two weeks ago, Webb's spokeswoman Jessica Smith told me, during which Iran was discussed. She wouldn't tell me its outcome, saying it was a "confidential meeting," but apparently Webb got all the answer he thought he was ever going to get.

"The situation that we now face," Webb said today, "is that the Administration repeatedly states that it seeks no war with Iran, at the same time it claims the authority to begin one, and at the same time it continues a military buildup in the region."

More from Webb's speech below....

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Two weeks ago, the Bush administration organized an intelligence briefing for journalists in Iraq to demonstrate that Iran was providing weapons to Iraqi insurgents. According to the anonymous briefers, the weapons -- particularly explosively formed penetrators or E.F.P.s -- were manufactured in Iran and provided to insurgents by the Quds Force -- a fact that meant direction for the operation was “coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”

Well. A raid in southern Iraq on Saturday seems to have complicated the case. There, The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.), troops "uncovered a makeshift factory used to construct advanced roadside bombs that the U.S. had thought were made only in Iran." The main feature of the find were several copper liners that are the main component of EFPs. But, The New York Times reports, "while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue."

Among those cloudy items were "cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran."

Possibly, the Times muses, "the parts were purchased on the open market" and then "the liners were then manufactured to the right size to cap the fittings."

But where were the liners made? The Army captain who led the raid doesn't know. From the Journal:

Capt. [Clayton] Combs said the copper caps were smooth and perfectly symmetrical, suggesting they had been made with a high degree of technical precision. He said he didn't know where the caps came from or whether they had been made in Iran. "That's the hard thing about this war," he said.

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee becomes the epicenter of a prospective war with Iran. That's because senior intelligence officials will deliver an annual assessment to Congress known as the Worldwide Threat briefing. Over the past several years, the Worldwide Threat has made for a few days' worth of news at most. Tomorrow's, however, will be more significant than usual: it will be a public forum for the intelligence community to either support or dissent from the Bush administration's increasing insistence that Iran is a greater threat to U.S. interests than al-Qaeda.

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"A senior Iranian government official" sat down with CNN's Christiane Amanpour yesterday, and calling the U.S. and Iran "natural allies," he laid out the case:

"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action -- war."

He confided that what he was telling me was not shared by all in the Iranian government, but it was endorsed so high up in the religious leadership that he felt confident spelling out the rationale....

I asked whether he meant Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself.

"Yes," he said....

He said the time is right for the United States and Iran to sit down and talk directly -- to say "we recognize each other." He said neither side has done this so far "because of the mentality on each side."

"Each of us is afraid of looking weak if we take the first step," he said. "We have this fear in common with America. Before contemplating recognition, each side feels it necessary to convince the other side that 'I am not weak.'"

Sure, there's that whole Hezbollah business, and Iran's nuclear program (which the official claimed was for peaceful purposes, and mainly as a kind of confidence booster for the country), but for both countries, the "major threat" is al Qaeda. The question is whether the administration, which has a talent for making enemies proliferate, will follow the simple arithmetic of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Of course, it's by no means the first time that Iran has made a diplomatic overture to the Bush administration. But since going through diplomatic channels didn't work so well then, this time Iran chose a more reliable route: CNN.

Note: Also don't miss the follow up to yesterday's Must Read. Maliki is still on the war path, doing everything he can to infuriate every Sunni in the country.

Zeyad at IraqSlogger reads the Iraqi press and finds word that U.S. forces took two more Iranians into custody.

The Iranians were apparently visiting SCIRI official and hardline Shiite cleric Jalaleddin al-Sagheer, who's also a prominent Iraqi member of parliament. No word as of yet from the U.S. as to the veracity of the report, but Iranians have been detained at SCIRI compounds in the past.