The Art of Wingnuttery

On January 3, 2007, Eli Lake of the neoconservative New York Sun reported the following:

Iran is supporting both Sunni and Shiite terrorists in the Iraqi civil war, according to secret Iranian documents captured by Americans in Iraq.

The news that American forces had captured Iranians in Iraq was widely reported last month, but less well known is that the Iranians were carrying documents that offered Americans insight into Iranian activities in Iraq.

An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups."

This claim, if true, would be explosive. It would be the so-called "smoking gun," direct proof that Iran is working with insurgents to sow chaos in Iraq and attack American troops. Of course, it's also a very odd claim. After all, Sunni insurgents in Iraq are, in their own words, "fighting to liberate [Iraq] from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges." Why would Iran be arming its sworn enemies, people responsible for the deaths of countless Iraqi Shiites?

It's now been over a month and a half since the Sun published this claim, and, to my knowledge, no other major publication has reported anything similar. Nor for that matter has this claim been made by the Bush administration: not in the State of the Union, not in Bush's recent press conference, and not even in last week's now infamous anonymous military briefing. Indeed, the administration has chosen the intentionally vague term "extremist groups" to describe the recipients of these alleged Iranian arms shipments. When pressed, administration officials have mentioned only Shiite militias as possible beneficiaries of such aid.

In light of the scrutiny this issue has received over the last few weeks, I think it's probably fair to conclude that if the Bush administration had any solid evidence that Iran was supplying Sunni insurgents with weapons, we would have heard about it by now from someone other than an anonymous source to the New York Sun.

Which is why it's almost comical to see this paragraph in Mark Steyn's Sunday column in the Chicago Sun-Times:

According to a report by the New York Sun's Eli Lake last month, Iran is supporting Shia insurgents in Iraq and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. In other words, it's on both sides in the so-called civil war. How can this be? After all, as the other wise old foreign-policy "realists" of the Iraq Study Group assured us only in December, Iran has "an interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq.''

Au contraire, the ayatollahs have concluded they have a very clear interest in fomenting chaos in Iraq. They're in favor of Sunni killing Shia, and Shia killing Sunni, and if some vacationing Basque terrorists wanted to blow up the Spanish Cultural Center in Mosul, they'd be in favor of that, too. The Iranians don't care who kills whom as long as every night when Americans turn on the evening news there's smoke over Baghdad.

This is classic wingnuttery. You take the one data point that you like out of a sea of contradictory information, and you simply assert--with total disregard for the credibility of the source or the internal logic of the claim itself--that it is true. You then build your entire argument around it, being sure to include all sorts of breathless condemnations and demands for action. The column practically writes itself.

For all I know, Iran really is engaged in the counter-intuitive and seemingly self-defeating tactic of arming Sunni insurgents in Iraq. It's possible. But if the Bush administration itself is not making this claim and the only source for it is a month-old article in the New York Sun, the only reasonable course of action is to take that claim with an enormous grain of salt. But, as we all know, Mark Steyn is not a reasonable person. He's a propagandist and a Class A wingnut.