Maybe the Bush Administration is only good at "lying" about its conduct of a war, suggests New York Times columnist Frank Rich in his Sunday editorial.

"Maybe the Bush White House can't conduct a war, but no one has ever impugned its ability to lie about its conduct of a war," Rich writes. "Now even that well-earned reputation for flawless fictionalizing is coming undone."

Rich adds, "Watching the administration try to get its story straight about Iran's role in Iraq last week was like watching third-graders try to sidestep blame for misbehaving while the substitute teacher was on a bathroom break. The team that once sold the country smoking guns in the shape of mushroom clouds has completely lost its mojo."

Noting that "timing is everything in propaganda, as in all showmanship," Rich believes that the president's "real aim is to provoke war with Iran, no matter how overstretched and ill-equipped our armed forces may be for that added burden."

"By this line of thinking, the run-up to the war in Iraq is now repeating itself exactly and Bush will seize any handy casus belli he can to ignite a conflagration in Iran," Rich writes, after summarizing how many times reports about Iran allegedly supplying Iraq with bombs have surfaced in the past, and showing how little has changed in the intelligence to warrant the latest "new White House disinformation campaign."

Excerpts from Rich's column:

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Surely these guys can do better than this. No sooner did unnamed military officials unveil their melodramatically secretive briefing in Baghdad last Sunday than Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blew the whole charade. Pace said he didn't know about the briefing and couldn't endorse its contention that the Iranian government's highest echelons were complicit in anti-American hostilities in Iraq. Public-relations pandemonium ensued as Tony Snow, the State Department and finally the president tried to revise the story line on the fly. Back when Karl Rove ruled, everyone read verbatim from the same script. Last week's frantic improvisations were vintage Scooter Libby, at best the ur-text for a future perjury trial.

Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.

In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that "U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles." Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called EFPs (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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NY TIMES SELECT SUBCRIBERS CAN ACCESS RICH'S COLUMN AT THIS LINK WHEN PUBLISHED ONLINE SOMETIME SATURDAY NIGHT