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The Iranians have never done any such thing — and for Bush to say so at a time of great tension between the two countries is bizarre at best.

So why did he say it? Was he actively trying to misrepresent the situation? Was it just a slip of the tongue? Or does he believe it, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary?

It seems unlikely that Bush would choose this particular venue to launch a disinformation campaign: His comment came midway through a softball interview with an obscure U.S.-funded Farsi-language radio station, on the occasion of Persian new year. And the Iranian audience knows best that what he said is untrue. Such a blatant distortion only strengthens the Iranian government’s position that Bush is a liar.

So did Bush just misspeak? The White House certainly suggested that yesterday, with a spokesman insisting that Bush had simply spoken in “shorthand,” combining Iranian threats against Israel with concerns about Iran’s nuclear program.

Smith is no unbiased observer. As the spokesperson for the so-called “EU-3” (Great Britain, France and Germany), he serves as the face of a group which has a considerable political investment in maintaining the notion of Iran as a non-compliant player in the diplomatic game that is Iran’s nuclear programme. The EU-3 has been attempting to walk the tight wire between a desire to moderate hardline US policies through placation, and their responsibility under international law to respect the provisions of the non-proliferation treaty. In doing so, the EU-3 has married itself to a policy that centres on Iran’s requirement to suspend unconditionally its uranium enrichment programme, since such a programme could be used in any nuclear weapons program.

(snip)

But a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.

Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon.

Even as he did that, however, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent. Bush went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush’s words indicates that, while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country.

Five years ago, he railed against the “grave and gathering danger” of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, only to suffer irreperable domestic political damage when it turned out that he had committed American blood and treasure to the overthrow of a dictator who had no WMDs. And now he has been embarrassed again: Just six weeks after he raised the specter of the Iranians wielding a nuclear weapon, and invoked “World War III,” America’s 16 intelligence agencies have concluded in a new National Intelligence Estimate, with “high confidence,” that the Iranians actually halted their nuclear weapons program…

(snip analysis–follow the link to read it)

When you add it all up, you have your answer: No one in their right mind would believe that attacking Iran now makes any sense at all.

But that doesn’t mean that Bush and Cheney won’t do it.

There were a lot of reasons why a pre-emptive strike into Iraq based on flimsy and bogus intelligence and far too few troops made no sense, yet they did it anyway, with trademark arrogance and ignorance.

Yet somehow we persist in believing the opposite. Just weeks ago, President Bush famously remarked, “I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

The WWIII mention got the most attention, but it was the last part of his comment that was the most startling to me.

(snip)

With U.S. forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and with a nuclear Pakistan on Iran’s southeastern border, the Islamist Republic is surrounded by nuclear-armed adversaries. When I visited Tehran several years ago, even moderate pro-West Iranians who could read a map supported development of their own nuclear deterrent. They scoffed at the idea that they should be prevented from doing so by the United States or anyone else, just as Americans would scoff at the idea that Russia should dictate the terms of our own security.

“What hypocrisy!” one friendly Iranian journalist remarked to me. I suspect the bellicose policies of the Bush administration have done little to dampen this point of view, and have done much to strengthen the hand of the religious radicals in charge.

With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing — or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd.

Stolberg continues: “Mr. Bush has repeatedly said the administration would not ‘tolerate’ a nuclear-armed Iran. But during a news conference on Wednesday, the president went further, saying of Iran: ‘If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.'”

He asserted that the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, was a member of the al-Quds Force of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Reuters news agency reported. U.S. commanders have accused al-Quds of funneling roadside bombs and other weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq.