Iran and the Red Wagon

I'll post some funny posts soon. Right after I try to tie potential military action against Iran with a fable...

You may have heard the children's story, "The Red Wagon". Three royal guards with superhuman eyesight proclaimed no one could sneak something pass them without them noticing it. A young boy tries to trick them by pulling a pile of leaves on a red wagon. The guards inspect the pile, scoff, and proudly proclaim there's not a pinhead of anything in the wagon besides leaves.

The boy tries again, this time with a pile of wood in a red wagon. Then a pile of cloth, a pile of bricks, and so on. The guards inspect every fiber, every crevice, and are assured not a speck of dust has escaped their watchful eye. Finally, the boy goes to them and says, "I've tricked all of you. I've sneaked something past you every day and you never noticed." The guards are incredulous and demand to know what it was. The boy leads them to the courtyard, and a pile of red wagons.

What does this have to do with Iran? The administration has been telling us of Iran's involvement in Iraq for several months now. It seems like the worse Iraq gets, the more Iran gets blamed. Many people are rightfully suspicious of the Bush administration, and some expect them to concoct a story or blow-up a minor incident to justify military action against Iran.

But how do we know that Iran is actively trying to undermine the U.S. occupation in Iraq in the first place?

The Bush administration has repeatedly claimed that Iran was been assisting insurgents in Iraq. The press routinely repeats phrases like "proxy war"; commentators accept on face value that Iran is playing a large role in this conflict.

But when have we ever seen any proof that the Iranian government is actively assisting insurgents? Many skeptics have been focusing on the "leaves"--the manner in which the government may justify a war against Iran. Yet the "red wagon"--the idea that Iran is supporting the insurgents, is being ignored.

I feel like we have all jumped ahead to the conclusion without any hard evidence to justify it. Maybe it "makes sense" that Iran is assisting Iraqi insurgents. It "made sense" that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. It made a lot of sense, more sense than Iran actively fanning this conflict. Yet we found out later the administration reached the conclusion first, and considering that, how could they not distort the evidence to fit what they already know?

The results was that it became dependent on the war's critics to prove that WMDs didn't exist, when the administration never proved they existed in the first place.

I wonder if we are making the same cognitive error about the degree, if any, of Iran's involvement in Iraq.