Playing the Same Tune?

Craziness just gets crazier. Again by way of War and Piece, this Knight Ridder bit, in its reporting on the spy scandal.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity, said the FBI also is investigating the same official's contacts with Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi and with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a controversial Iranian arms dealer. Chalabi was a source of much of the discredited pre-Iraq war intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida.

In June, U.S. intelligence officials said they had evidence that Chalabi's security chief had long been a paid agent of Iran's intelligence service and that Chalabi or an aide in his Iraqi National Congress had tipped the Iranians off that the United States had broken some Iranian communications codes. Chalabi has denied the charge.

The CIA has twice labeled Ghorbanifar, a figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, untrustworthy. Nevertheless, two Pentagon officials, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who worked on Iraq policy for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, met secretly with Ghorbanifar to discuss Iran.

Perhaps the reason for all of the recent Vietnam nostalgia is rooted in the fact that America has (and the occupied territories, as it were), it seems, to some extent, become a battleground upon which Iran and Israel fight for the upper hand. We are Vietnam. We're just so loaded on consumerism and gluttony we don't even realize it.

This is going to take some looking in to. To say the least. There will be many, many pieces in motion in the coming days, I suspect.